How the Recession Made Me a Gentrifier in My Home Town

In a recent episode of HBO’s Girls, Hannah, the character played by show creator Lena Dunham, has a late night phone chat with her sorta-boyfriend during a pilgrimage to her hometown of East Lansing, Michigan. The most notable thing about her trip isn’t that she’d just had sex with another dude, but that said dude had a giant apartment. "Why doesn't everyone who's struggling in New York move back here and start the revolution?” she muses. “It’s like we're slaves to this place that doesn't even really want us."

Hannah, like every New Yorker, is alternately obsessed with and crushed by real estate. Craigslist ads for luxury apartments with laughable rents really do amount to the city giving young, broke people the finger.

But to me, this throwaway line is less funny than heartbreaking. I grew up in New York. When I tell new friends I was a kid in Park Slope and a teen in Greenwich Village, people assume I’m rich. When I tell them I live in Harlem, the most famous black neighborhood in the country, they look at my white skin and label me the worst kind of gentrifier.

Only a decade ago, that last assumption would have been right. The rules of gentrification used to be simple: There were the yuppies, and there were the working-class heroes. While the artists, bankers, graphic designers, or doctors regarded the neighborhood as a blank slate, the working class and poor people got pushed farther to the margins. But for middle-class kids coming of age in the worst recession since the Great Depression, the dynamic is far more complicated. Downwardly mobile Millennials—especially the ones who are natives of increasingly expensive cities like New York or D.C. or San Francisco—are rewriting the rules of gentrification.

When these natives rent apartments in low-income neighborhoods because they're priced out of their childhood ones, are they the gentrifiers? Or are they victims of gentrification? Am I a gentrifier of Harlem if it's one of the few New York neighborhoods I can afford? It's not as if I can move back to my old stomping grounds, now populated by six- and seven-figure earners. Yet in my current location, I'm still pushing out even lower-income residents.

Young city natives who were raised middle class and are now struggling financially have upper-middle class tastes but working-class or poverty-level incomes. When I moved back home from Chicago in 2010, I had a contingent position as a public radio producer and my husband worked at Trader Joe’s. We could afford a cup of nice coffee and the occasional cut of grass-fed meat, but we couldn’t afford an apartment in Fort Greene or Carroll Gardens. So we moved to Harlem to a $1500 one-bedroom. A year and a half later, in seemingly direct response, enterprising storeowners are serving salted caramel lattes and selling dry-aged picanha around the corner from us, ignoring the huge chunk of Harlem residents living in subsidized housing and making new residents like us look like jerks.

Emily Douglas, writing in the L.A. Review of Books last week, asserted that for young professionals new to New York, choosing where to live is a political choice. She wrote of a peer who paid more than she could really afford to live in an already-gentrified neighborhood, so she wouldn't be contributing to the displacement of low-income, black, and Latino New Yorkers.