How Gentrification Deters Community Cohesion and Causes New Forms of Segregation

Author: Andrew Deener

Dissertation School: University of California, Los Angeles

Pages: 33

Publication Date: 01/2005

Availability:
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Access Number: 5008

Abstract:

Venice is a multi-class, multicultural, and politically contested neighborhood on the Los Angeles coastline. Prior to the more current gentrifying trends, the neighborhood had the persisting status as an inexpensive, run-down, and gritty area, attractive to immigrants, African Americans, politicos, bikers, beatniks, and artists who sought out cheap rents in proximity to the Pacific Ocean. Lawrence Lipton (1959), a celebrated beat writer, went as far as to call it the "Slum by the Sea" in his romantic ethnographic account of the beatnik community, Holy Barbarians. Aside from this beatnik tradition of the 1950s, Venice became a political and artistic haven in the 1960s and 1970s, further distinguishing itself in historical specificity from other Los Angeles beach towns like Manhattan Beach and Santa Monica.

For purposes of this article, Abbot Kinney Boulevard—called West Washington Boulevard prior to 1989—is a "strategic research site" (Merton, 1987) for examining the impact of neighborhood changes upon the processes of social inclusion. At different points during the 1900s, this central neighborhood artery maintained residences, warehouses, a community center for African-American teens, racially integrating food stores and soda shops, and other small-scale neighborhood commerce. As Jane Jacobs (1961) might suggest, this street for most of its history preserved a diversity of uses and thus attracted a diversity of people.

Up until the 1980s, Venice was not divided into labeled neighborhood planning subsections, but the area that eventually became known as "Oakwood" sustained a significant relationship to West Washington Boulevard. The street was the border for residential integration/segregation in the neighborhood such that one street south of West Washington Boulevard refused African-American homeownership and residency. In fact, Oakwood was originally the only area in the neighborhood where African Americans were permitted to live and own homes. Early in Venice's history, neighborhood founder and developer, Abbot Kinney, hired several African-American men to work for him, allowing them and their families housing within this particular section of the neighborhood. By the late 1940s, real estate agents began inviting Black families to purchase homes in larger numbers, eventually provoking most Whites with the financial means to move away. In the early 1970s, 15 federally subsidized housing complexes were constructed within this 1-mile radius zone, attracting more low-income Black and Latino residents, and further cementing Oakwood's identity as a low-income, multicultural milieu by the beach.

As the rent gap increased throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s between Venice and surrounding neighborhoods—such as Santa Monica, Marina Del Rey, and Culver City—a middle-class gentry seeped into the neighborhood looking to purchase homes at a comparatively reasonable price. At the same time, locals began witnessing the gradual accumulation of independent businesses upon West Washington Boulevard, gaining momentum by the end of the 1980s with the rise of new boutiques, hair salons, home-design stores, trendy restaurants, antique furniture stores, architecture studios, and art galleries. By the late 1990s, the street had developed a thematic focus, organized around independently produced positional goods aimed at a certain class of clientele. People began to understand the function of the street in a more systematic way, as a retail location with specific types of stores attractive to specific types of customers. How and why did Abbot Kinney Boulevard transform from an economically and culturally inclusive realm of social activity into an exclusive sphere of interaction?

The invasion/succession model, used by Chicago School sociologists, helps to clarify the outcome of neighborhood change (Park, Burgess, McKenzie, 1924; Zorbaugh, 1929; Park, 1952; Suttles; 1968; Kornblum, 1974; Anderson, 1990), but it tells us little about how local actors work to produce these changes and how and why consequences unfold for certain populations. That a neighborhood "public space" can come to signify a barrier between populations demonstrates the complexity of community inclusion among a culturally and economically diverse range of local inhabitants. Such as border imposes insider and outsider status by symbolically accentuating certain characteristics of the neighborhood while masking others. As Zukin (1995: 7) suggests, "The look and feel of cities reflect decisions about what—and who—should be visible and what should not, on concepts of order and disorder, and on uses of aesthetic power." On Abbot Kinney Boulevard, the sense of community inclusion, that is, which neighborhood residents should remain visible in this central public space, has transformed.

It is important to understand how and why this transformation happened, and furthermore, whether or not local actors producing these changes aimed to exclude particular segments of the population or whether or not these outcomes are unintended consequences. Enforced exclusion occurs when people organize for the explicit purpose of preventing access to given spaces of interaction. Authors such as Jackson (1985), Massey and Denton (1993), Gregory (1998), and Halle et al (2003) all report evidence for enforced exclusion, in which individuals act intentionally to create institutional barrieres (or fail to enforce legal frameworks such as the lack of enforcement of the 1968 Fair Housing Act), leading to the sustenance of residential integration/segregation across racial lines.

However, shopping streets in the current urban milieu, like Abbot Kinney Boulevard, are public places in that actors cannot categorically enforce exclusion from the scene. Instead, these spaces become neighborhood borders that control social integration by facilitating "unequal access" to the "resources" and "opportunities" on the street (Lamont and Molnar, 2002, p. 168). As Jacobs (1961: 256) notes, a neighborhood border can in fact "exert an active influence" over its surroundings. Although multiple neighborhood groups formerly accessed this social space, the transformation of the aesthetic and economic characteristics of Abbot Kinney Boulevard, and the production and publicity of this new definition, normalizes the nature of social activity upon the street, and tends toward the exclusion of lower-income Oakwood residents.

This article, based on 3 years of participant, observational, interview, and historical research about the Venice neighborhood, explains how and why neighborhood transformation produces and maintains social exclusion. To this end, this essay is broken up into three sections. The first examines how local actors produce the current retail identity of Abbot Kinney Boulevard, transforming it from a space of mixed utility into one organized around a particular form of retail activity. The second part demonstrates how this identity is regularly reproduced, thus maintaining a symbolic border between Oakwood and Abbot Kinney Boulevard. The final section explores how this order normalizes the social exclusion of low-income residents and overshadows Venice's historic multi-class identity.

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