Knauss a Genius on Gentrification

Dan:

Just read your artists and yuppies and gentrification article ("Gentrification: Artists and Yuppies Working Together," July 2002). I can only say “brilliant, you’re a genius,” and not only because I’ve been trying to get the same thing across here in San Francisco and Oakland for more than a few years. Good work.

An example, if you’d like, from Sept, 2001:

For anyone to say that white artists move to edgy urban areas only because the rents are cheaper shows a degree of economic reductionism that may even drive a University of Chicago right-wing economist nuts. For artists to be “innocent,” they need to be limited entirely by their economic means; for the vast majority of white artists in the San Francisco and Oakland areas, this is not true.

I need only point out that the increasing number of artists who are “fed up” with the high cost of living in the Bay Area DO NOT go homeless: THEY MOVE. This response alone testifies to the degree of actual choice most white artists in America have and the largely cultural and social motivations for occupying gentrifying areas. I will go a bit further to say that a sizeable proportion of white American artists (and their innumerable hangers-on) revel in their roles as hip “pioneers” living in “dangerous” areas. Their gentrifying behavior is self-conscious and obvious. There is also this pathetic, undying hope among most of these artists that the neighborhood they move into will adopt them and consider them part of The Community; that “the locals who have been here forever” recognize or even care about the difference between a young white painter and a young white web page designer. This is what is called “the narcissism of little differences.”

To Latinos in the Mission or blacks in West Oakland, I fear that these oh-so-important distinctions we whites hold among each other are largely meaningless, while they are tremendously significant to landlords. In the US, artists are not considered among the truly disadvantaged.

I think one of the many problems here is that it is difficult for many formally educated people (like me) to admit to themselves that white artists are the cause of much gentrification because the artists we are talking about are most likely friends of ours. It’s easy to demonize the obviously guilty real estate moguls and rich yuppies, but many of us were probably pretty close to becoming the white bohemian that now exists as the first step towards gentrification, or maybe we even already have been. It is hard for us to admit the extent of our own (and our friends’) culpability. We must, however, face facts.

Again: one is responsible for the predictable consequences of their actions. Artists know about gentrification and they cause it. It’s just that simple. I’m not saying banish all artists to Idaho (although that may not be the worst idea), I’m just saying–as we oft do here in the States–wake up and smell the coffee!

Justin Horner, Oakland, CA
(received by email)