Gentrifucktuption & the LOE

[alice wellintown]

Beginning in the early 1980s, residence and community groups organized and
put considerable pressure on developers, policy makers, and city and state
officials to prevent gentrification of the LES. Several of these
organizations became developers themselves and launched numerous innovative
projects designed to prevent some of the obvious negatives of
gentrification, mainly displacement and homelessness. Other groups
maintained a more confrontational, and at times combative, course of
action, culminating in the squatting at Tompkins Square Park, where
homeless and squatter occupants refused to surrender the area to what they
considered a conspiracy of the city and its landlords against underclass
and working class poor residents. For a decade or more the LES was the
model, the crucible, the epicenter, of resistance to gentrification and the
global city. However, at the close of the century the battle, the
resistance, the activism, waned, and gentrification, inexorable, if not
inevitable, transformed the LES into yet another gentrified extension of
affluent Manhattan.

            The failure to resist gentrification was part of a larger
failure of city activism generally. This may have been caused by what some
theorists contend is a radical change in city life. In the last five
decades city neighborhoods have become “spaces of flow” as opposed to
social places. In the age of globalization, community and social activists
are easily outmaneuvered and overpowered by larger and more fluid forces of
development.  What sustained the conflict on the LES and gave the weaker
social and community forces a fighting chance, was the political forces at
play. The LES movement against



 gentrification was able to generate considerable power, at least for a
time, because, as Tip O’Niel said, “All politics is local.” By mobilizing a
good percentage of the LES residents against the developers and exploiting
the local political machinery and managing to take over and redevelop
abandoned housing buildings, grassroots organizations managed to prevent
the city’s developers and publicly sanctioned and sponsored gentrification
and, at the same time, offer a few community designed alternatives to the
gentrification option. Ultimately, however, community designed alternatives
to gentrification failed to preserve the traditional LES community.
Failure, in part, at least, may be attributed to the larger spatial
transformations of the city itself, but the causes of such a dynamic
movement’s failure to reshape city policy is still not clear. Looking at
the movement itself and considering its diversity one might be tempted to
argue that factions and in-fighting, between and among those that advanced
a practical approach and those who advocated a militant one, weakened the
movement and led, ultimately, to failure. It’s certainly true that the
members of the various factions spent nearly as much time and energy
fighting each other as fighting the “yuppies” and the city’s developers and
landlords. Be that as it may, factions and in-fighting are endemic to urban
activism, if not activism generally,  and there are some advantages to
political divisions in any movement.

            The causes of the movement’s failure are many, but one
important cause is the use of state policies to stimulate destructive short
term economic development projects or “primitive globalization” (Sites
137). Another is that the community movement’s goal shifted to, “Save the
LES” or  “defend the  neighborhood as is,”  against gentrification and any
other form of transformation. This shift, hobbled the creative and
innovative response that gave vitality and growth to the earlier community
response.
and so on.....
Works Cited

Abu-Lughod, Janet L., ed. *From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle
for New York’s Lower East Side, *Cambridge Mass.: Blackwell, 1994.

Brooker, Peter. *Modernity And Metropolis: Writing, Film and urban
Formations. *New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Diner, Shandler, Wenger. ed. *Remembering the Lower East Side: American
Jewish Reflections. *Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Mele, Christopher. *Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate and
Resistance in New York City. *Minneapolis: University of  Minnesota Press,
2000.

Schulman, Sarah. *My American History. Lesbian and Gay life During the
Reagan / Bush Years, *London: Cassell, 1995.

Sites, William. *Remaking New York: Primitive Globalization and the
Politics of Urban Community. *Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2003.
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