I live in an “It City.”
Until recently, though, it would be hard to tell in my neighborhood. It’s a working class subdivision of nondescript brick ranch houses built in the 1950s, far from its glory days when celebrities lived in the area. We moved here because it was affordable and midway between our jobs, and stayed because it’s quiet and diverse. As a same-sex couple we wanted to avoid a monocultural neighborhood because we wanted to make sure there was no critical mass of people who could band together to make our lives difficult.
Almost twenty years later the house is almost paid for and the neighborhood looks the same as when we moved in. Some of our neighbors have changed, either through death or moving away, but the street has its old familiarity, a favorite diner is just down the street, and though I don’t talk with the neighbors every day, we keep in touch whenever a dog goes wandering or the city does some maintenance work.
But change is coming. This is one of the last areas that hasn’t been hit by the sudden popularity of the rest of the city. Housing here is still affordable, but it’s rising very quickly. In the past two years my home’s worth has almost doubled.
And this is the dilemma of the socially-aware homeowner in neighborhoods like mine. On the one hand, it’s good to know that my house will finance a good chunk of my retirement. When we took out a mortgage, we bought far less than the bank authorized because we wanted to make sure our lives would be stable even if one of us lost a job. We found a good-sized house for us, our four dogs and two cats, and to get that we settled into a decidedly not-hot neighborhood. While the rest of the city was seeing property values rise, we were hoping just to break even if we ever decided to sell.
Now new developments are going in all around, with the shabby mall marked for redevelopment into a large mixed-use project, a hospital being remodeled for office space, and various small businesses being bought up by big-name developers hoping to benefit in a few years from the sudden interest in this area.
We’re getting our share of hipster projects, too — a renovated bowling alley/music venue/bar, a brewery/performance space, and some smaller projects that can take advantage of the relatively low price of commercial properties.
So our community is on the upswing after a couple of decades of decline dating back to the neighborhood being sliced up by a new interstate. It’s good to see residents feeling optimistic about the future for a change.
But many of my neighbors will be hit hard. Rents doubled in the past two years, so many people in our area who had been renting here for decades are now gone. As the retirees who’d bought homes here in the 1960s and 70s begin dying off, those homes are being sold to investors with no connection to the area, and who want nothing more than the maximum rent the traffic can bear. This is gutting our stability, with more and more people here over the short term because they won’t be able to pay this kind of rent over the long haul.
Seniors who’d been able to retire to this area because of its affordable housing are now worried about where they’ll end up, as are people with disabilities and minimum wage workers. One of the things I’ve always liked about my town is that anyone could live here: rich, poor, new arrivals and established families, whatever experience anyone could bring, there was a place here for that. It was impossible to spend more than half an hour at a grocery store without hearing multiple languages being spoken.
So even though I’ll financially benefit from these changes, my town is slipping away and many of my neighbors will lose their homes and their sense of place because of these “improvements.”