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[0:03] Aaron Michael Ray: What's up, honorary Newfoundlanders? Welcome back to our fourth episode of Conversation from Away, a new podcast to encourage dialogue over social issues and topics that we don't speak on enough and are willing to get uncomfortable as a means to learn and grow together. My name is Aaron Michael Ray, and thank you for joining us for this episode.

[0:23] Aaron Michael Ray: So, as usual, we have some Come From Away Tour family members join us in each episode. So, with that being said, please welcome Marika Aubrey, Chamblee Ferguson, and Isaac Alderson. So, would you all like to introduce yourselves and tell us what you do with the show?

[0:43] Marika Aubrey: I'm Marika Aubrey, and I play Bev and others.

[0:46] Chamblee Ferguson: Hi, I'm Chamblee Ferguson. I play Nick and others in the show.

[0:51] Isaac Alderson: Hi, I'm Isaac Alderson. I am one of the musicians. I play various wind instruments, including whistles, Illen pipes, which is the Irish bagpipe, and Irish flute. And I just sit on the side and play music during the show.

[1:06] Aaron Michael Ray: Okay, I'm just gonna first off say that you don't just sit on the side, okay? Isaac's being very humble, but he plays about 40 million instruments in the show, and he does all of them exceptionally well. So thank you, Isaac. We are also thrilled to welcome our two special guest panelists, Samuel Stein and Monxo Lopez. Samuel Stein is an urban geographer who is a housing policy analyst for the Community Service Society of New York. He focuses on the politics of urban planning and emphasizes housing, labor, and real estate, and gentrification in New York City. Sam is also a published author of his own book, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. And we also have Monxo Lopez, a South Bronx-based activist and political scientist, board member of the Mott Haven Port Morris Community Land Trust in the South Bronx and the Cooper Square Company Land Trust in New York City's Lower East Side.

He is a Mellon Foundation curatorial fellow in the Museum of the City of New York. And with all these amazing credentials, he has both brewed and drank his own beer for the past 25 years. I mean, that alone is very impressive to me. So thank you both so much for joining us today.

[2:27] Aaron Michael Ray: On this week's episode, we will discuss housing discrimination and gentrification. And I'm really looking forward to talking about this with you all because if you're like me, you may not have known enough about this topic. So, you know, being on tour, you come across many different neighborhoods. And because you're an outsider, you don't always know the history of these neighborhoods or where they're going, but when it comes to gentrification, what does that word even mean? And I wanted to kick off this conversation with the definition of the word. There are two definitions that I found of gentrification. Thank you, Google. The first definition says the process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, typically displacing current inhabitants in the process.

And the other definition of gentrification is the process of making someone or something more refined, polite, or respectable. So when I look at this, I'm thinking, okay, wait, I'm confused because, you know, if we're talking about gentrification, it has a lot of weight to that word. And so I want to ask you all, feel free, whoever wants to answer. I'll start by saying this. Does this mean gentrification is a good thing? And if gentrification pushes people of a certain economic class out for wealthier people to move in, why is it also defined as making something more refined, polite, or respectable?

[4:10] Samuel Stein: I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind is the phrase that the victors write history. Right? So, in that case, perhaps it's the victors of the gentrification wars or battles or struggles that wrote that second definition. Whereas the first one is a little bit more reflective of both who benefits from the process and who it costs their home, their livelihood, their community.

[4:35] Monxo Lopez: Yeah, I also think that the question itself is a little bit tricky because I believe it's natural, only too natural for people to inquire about these topics. At the same time, the question somehow leads to these, oh, there are two sides to each issue, you know? And yeah, there are good things, but they're bad things, and I am like, no, for me it's settled. I think that when you listen to the famous Spike Lee rant of two or three years ago, that someone came and just tried to itemize the good aspects of gentrification, I think that he gave a very excellent retort to that. The bad things so much outweighed the so-called good things that, you know, even asking how you frame the question is important. Let me put it that way.

[5:40] Aaron Michael Ray: Okay, okay. So, well then, let me also ask this. What laws even allow this to happen in the first place? Like what policies are in our government that make this possible?

[5:52] Samuel Stein: I am surprised that I ended up reading almost all of The Color of Law, and I think that the author makes a really, really good case that these are very old dynamics in our country. I think that the author makes a very good case, a very European case, very politically heavy case, that these black-white identities, the dynamics of segregation were actually in many cases brought forth, like given birth by the state, by political powers, you know, that narrated them as such into laws, like what he calls de jure segregation. And so I think that that kind of history is extremely important as a frame to really understand what we are going through now. I think that's central because even in terms of the politics of liberation, like sometimes people and communities might assume, like, why is this happening to me?

You know, and it's like, no, no, no, no, no. Don't take it personal, you know, be enraged by it and push back, but there's nothing wrong with you. This has been going on for a long time, and so that's very, very important so people don't, you know, get down on the whole situation.

[7:24] Samuel Stein: Yeah, and I think we can talk about which laws in particular kind of enabled some of the dynamics, but we can also think about what laws aren't there. Like we don't have a right to housing. We don't have what some philosophers call the right to the city, which is the ability to sort of shape your place because you contributed to it. Instead, we have political processes that alienate a lot of residents from choices about what's going to be made where and who's gonna be able to live where. So, within that context of not having those political rights, Rothstein talks mostly about two sets of laws in the early to mid-20th century that made segregation not just sort of a commonplace aspect of urban life, but really the law of the land.

Specifically, those have to do with redlining or the rules that the government enforces around which mortgages they will support and which they will not, and in which areas they will encourage home ownership and in which they will encourage disinvestment. And while there's a number of factors having to do with how old the buildings are and how urban versus suburban they are, more than anything else, it was race that was the determinant of which areas got investment and which areas got disinvestment.

[8:46] Samuel Stein: And then the other set of policies that we talk about a lot is urban renewal, which is the sets of policies that cleared out low-income neighborhoods from cities and often dispersed the populations rather than giving them space in what was built in those areas afterwards, whether that was public housing or in many cases private housing or even just a highway. So that one-two punch of redlining followed by urban renewal really concretized segregation and made it seem like it was either natural or the way people just wanted to live, rather than I would argue the combination of market forces, as in the way people wanted to make money off of housing, and policy that was kind of reinforcing that by legislating essentially or regulating segregation.

[9:38] Samuel Stein: And also I find it so depressing and perverse that so many of these projects that build spatial segregation, like they came dressed as good projects. In the 1860s is the Homestead Act, and it's like free land, and you're like, yeah, land should be free. Where is the land coming from? Who is excluded from that? And then you have also later on you have the housing act of the 1930s, and it's like, yeah, the government is supporting these mortgages, insuring them, and so it's part of the New Deal, and you're like, hell yeah!

[10:27] Samuel Stein: And then who is excluded from that?

[10:30] Samuel Stein: The GIB, oh yeah, all these people came from defeating the Nazis and the Japanese and the Axis, and so yeah, they deserve support. Who again, who is excluded?

[10:43] Samuel Stein: And so over and over and over and over, you see how some people always the same, get black people, because it's like one of the things that he writes about, get excluded from these guris and from these protections that actually accrue wealth and really increase the fundamental inequality in which the country was established.

[11:12] Marika Aubrey: Yeah, and oh I wanted to start off by saying we have so in research for you know doing research for this episode and really getting into this topic, Isaac has recommended an amazing book called The Color of Law.

[11:28] Marika Aubrey: Um, and it is written by Richard Rothstein, and we've been basing a lot of our research on this book. So for those of you watching out there, if you ever hear us talking about this book or when we're talking about the book and referencing The Color of Law, that's what we are getting at.

[11:46] Aaron Michael Ray: Hey Honor and Newfoundlanders, thank you for listening. We're gonna take a really quick break and then we'll be right back.

[12:03] Chamblee Ferguson: When it came to gentrification in general, like sometimes it's projected as a good thing. And I think that there are probably fair arguments to say that, you know, for people who are within the neighborhood might think it's a good thing if it doesn't affect them or if it doesn't displace them, but then at the same time, it's still bringing people in to also bring other people out, in a sense.

[12:35] Chamblee Ferguson: And so I think it's something that I we kind of talked about when planning for this is that while we were on tour, you know, we see we're in so many cities all the time when we're on tour, and there are some cities that are safer than others. Um, and something that was kind of pointed out to me.

[12:57] Chamblee Ferguson: I remember at one point was we were getting to one city, and I just remember one of our people, one of the people on our team were saying that, you know, oh, you know, like this place is, you know, the theater is right next to this coffee shop or whatever, and they say, you know, this is it's been recently gentrified, like everything looks really great, it's super nice, and it was so projected as a good thing, and it I guess what I want to ask, and I what I want to ask is is it actually a good thing?

[13:32] Chamblee Ferguson: Like, is there you know, like it for the people involved and for the people who are moving into certain neighborhoods, or is it just complete, or do we just have it backwards?

[13:43] Monxo Lopez: We do have an unfortunate tendency to equate safety with whiteness. Um, I'm sure I also live in the South Bronx. Um, and I've been here since 2005.

[13:56] Monxo Lopez: Yeah, great. Um, and I've heard so many times, especially when I first moved in here, a lot of people said to me, mainly white friends of friends said to me, you know, oh I hear it's getting better up there. And uh, you know, um, or you know, or don't worry, like it'll be better in ten years, you know, and that's something that I always kind of have bristled at because I've always been fine here.

[14:24] Monxo Lopez: Uh, you know, and I know it there's a history in this area of a lot of violence related to drugs, poverty, all that stuff. Um, but you know, that goes back quite a few decades, and I think that most people aren't judging it based on how it is currently.

[14:43] Monxo Lopez: Um anyway, but yeah, I just wanted to comment, you know, on as to what Aaron said. Like there is this feeling that seems pretty ubiquitous here, at least in white America, that you know, white equals safe.

[14:58] Monxo Lopez: And so, you know, if there's a Starbucks, oh that probably means that oh you're fine, there's a Starbucks, you know, or there's like, you know, fancy shops and restaurants, and therefore like it's okay to be here.

[15:07] Monxo Lopez: To be honest, as you know, when I before going on tour, like, you know, I have I looked at our schedule and our route, and you know, the first thing I think of while traveling while black is just okay, if I'm going to the city, you know, like what where am I where do I really feel safe, and where do I just need to like, you know, keep my head up and make sure I'm checking my surroundings and that kind of thing.

[15:35] Monxo Lopez: And I think a lot of people in our company, because there aren't as many people of color involved, don't have to think about that as much.

[15:45] Monxo Lopez: Um, and I know that it's also very different for women. I know that that is a whole other conversation that I know that I can't even have a say in in any way, but at the same time, you know, when you are a person of color and you're going into some of these neighborhoods, or if you're getting an Airbnb in some of these cities that are kind of nicer or whatever that means, then there have absolutely been times where I've been in buildings that I'm renting an Airbnb out, you know, while we're in these certain cities on tour, and there have been a lot of times where someone has asked me, you know, do you live here?

[16:24] Monxo Lopez: And whether they've seen me, you know, five times or that was the first time they've seen me. Like, are you sure you live here? Like, who are you renting from and all of this stuff?

[16:34] Monxo Lopez: And that's that's the kind of thing that I kind of have to prepare for. But Marika, I actually wanted to ask you, because you are reporting live from Australia.

[16:45] Monxo Lopez: Um I wanted to ask you, you know, being an Australian and then coming to America, like, how was your experience of because you do when you live in New York, you live in Harlem.

[16:58] Marika Aubrey: Yeah, I'm a Harlem girl now.

[16:59] Marika Aubrey: Yeah, and I'm curious to know just what your experience has been like, you know, from moving to Australia to Harlem and just living in Harlem.

[17:09] Marika Aubrey: Well, I immigrated over a few years ago, and of course, I'm a very privileged white chick who had no clue of the, you know, I knew the basic history of Harlem and I was thrilled to live there.

[17:21] Marika Aubrey: And we bought an apartment in a beautiful pre-war building and got an opportunity to buy into that place, and we were so thrilled because, like a lot of artists and creatives or people who have freelancers, you always look for that part of town that you can afford.

[17:36] Marika Aubrey: Um, and I am mortified now to think that I did I am what part of the problem. I had no, it didn't occur to me to think who I was buying my apartment from, what the building history might be, what the you know what the ramifications of people like me moving into that part of the world is and you know up until very recently I would have heard the word gentrification and thought yeah that means juice bars come in and that's kind of great for the neighborhood isn't it and it's been a great learning curve to realize as I'm sure so many people are hopefully now that gentrification is not usually a positive thing and that there needs to be a lot more sensitivity and awareness and education from people like me.

[18:20] Aaron Michael Ray: Would you label yourself as a gentrifier?

[18:23] Marika Aubrey: I guess I am I guess yeah.

[18:26] Marika Aubrey: If as a white person wishing to live in a community that is predominantly black or of color is it limiting yourself and is it limiting our society to say like oh well I shouldn't be here because I'm a white person you know and I would say the same for you know for a black person seeking to live in a white community in a white suburb like we shouldn't feel that we are not allowed to live in these places.

[18:49] Marika Aubrey: The question is what do we do once we're there um somebody might have a different opinion to that I would love to hear any opinion to help like what is the answer to that like how do we come into commun because I I love my neighborhood I love I love all the small businesses there.

[19:09] Marika Aubrey: I feel very engaged but I am aware that not everyone would feel that way about me buying into that building would they and and so how what is the answer to that?

[19:23] Monxo Lopez: I think that there's a lot there. There's a lot to be said about all this. I mean there there's a kind of reducto ad absurdum anti-gentrification where we end up in this like extreme segregation.

[19:34] Monxo Lopez: Um, there was an onion parody from a year or two ago about like a couple moves into all white neighborhood to make sure they don't gentrify any other place, and like if you personalize it too much, you're just gonna kind of reinforce the pre-existing condition.

[19:51] Monxo Lopez: So that I think that's one thing. Another thing is this question of is it good, is it bad? The thing that's good and bad here, or that the thing that's bad here is that the housing costs go up tremendously, right?

[20:04] Monxo Lopez: And that's because housing is a commodity under capitalism that is traded in order to make more money. If you take that away, if you if you find ways to decommodify housing, there's a lot more flexibility in terms of you know, people being able to move and not have such a direct impact on their neighbors' ability to live there as well.

[20:25] Monxo Lopez: Um, and when we talk about you know safety, and when we talk about juice bars or whatever else, like people want nice things in their neighborhoods.

[20:33] Monxo Lopez: If it just met the juice bar, I think a lot of people would be fine with it.

[20:39] Monxo Lopez: Um especially but given that like a lot of the people displaced by gentrification have cultures that have a lot of juice in them, like it's not like juice is this thing that only rich white people like.

[20:50] Samuel Stein: So the thing is the ability to get the kind of community that you want to live in without having that thing suddenly being translated into rising housing costs, which then is translated into displacement. That's the mechanism that's the problem that needs to be stopped. And so, you know, are you a gentrifier? Are you not a gentrifier? Worth thinking about, but much more important is what you do afterward, which I think is what Isaac was saying about, you know, well, you're here now, right? So to me, that has much more to do with organizing with your neighbors to make sure that nobody is displaced than it does, you know, overthinking the dynamics of what do I, as one person moving to one place mean for this bigger picture.

[21:35] Monxo Lopez: Well, Sam, that's a really good question that I wanted to kind of pose to you is that what on the other side of that, people that are in a kind of a limbo or in a possibility of being removed or displaced out of a community, what recourse does a person have if they're being pressured by a landlord to move out? Are there things that they can do? Are there other places they can get help on how to kind of fight that displacement?

[22:05] Samuel Stein: Yeah, and Monxo might have more thoughts on this too. One, it's crazy to say this, but the answer entirely depends on where you live, because most of the answer to that is going to be city by city and state by state, because we don't really have a strong set of federal protections around anti-eviction, around anti-displacement. And so if you live in New York City, you know, you might have a right to a tenant lawyer depending on where you live and how much money you make. If you make below a certain threshold, you can get access to what we call the right to counsel. You have certain rights as a tenant that you wouldn't have if you live just a little bit further north in some of the suburbs or in other parts of the country.

You might be rent stabilized, which gives you additional protections. But all of this is sort of conditional. What we should have is a universal right to housing that protects everybody everywhere. But instead we have this kind of piecemeal city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood thing. But ultimately you're gonna need to organize with your neighbors. You're gonna have to knock on doors and build a community of solidarity that will fight along with you because it's very hard to stay in place when your landlord wants to kick you out if you're just sort of one isolated individual.

[23:22] Monxo Lopez: Mantro do you want to add anything?

[23:24] Monxo Lopez: No, I'm in total agreement with you. There is a haphazard kind of structure in New York City to defend people that are facing these situations. I'm pretty familiar with the one here in New York. What I will say is that almost everywhere that I've been on this earth, there are people willing to stand up with you, and there are people that are already raising hell and creating trouble. So I think that it's a matter of finding who those people are, of understanding what are the important issues in those communities because sometimes housing is always an issue, but there are communities like here in the South Bronx, for example, that the immigration issue is a big one. So find those activists, meet with your neighbors, and you're gonna find the emotional and eventually you're gonna find the political support that you need.

[23:26] Monxo Lopez: And so it's a matter of really coming with respect. I think also that, as Sam was saying, like listen, here in the South Bronx, as Isaac probably knows, there are a bunch of juice bars and juice places, juice joints, and these are owned by Central American people, people from Mexico. When you go to Mexico City to Sudán Mexico, you're gonna see that there. And fortunately, we've gotten that transplanted here. And so Mexicans love juice as much as white people and as much as I do. And so that's, you know, and the same thing with coffee. I'm like, I am Puerto Rican, I'm pretty aristocratic in my coffee taste. And so don't tell me that coffee is coming here to town because what are you drinking, iced coffee?

Like, you know, so it's also about not erasing what already is there. I think that the discussion about gentrification and about segregation is rightly anchored in those wounds that do exist and that do kind of perpetuate. But I think it's really important also to underline the assets that communities have, the wealth that communities possess. You know, maybe we're not financially wealthy, but there are other wealth and resources that we have, and we need to identify those because it's an asymmetrical fight. Developers have friends because they have money, and activists have friends because we're cheaper and cooler and, you know, handsomer and prettier. So I think that you use whatever you can grab to really push back, and that's really, really, really central because I think that we do know the story of the wounds and the destruction that these policies have gotten.

At times we don't pay enough attention to the fact that we are still here, that we're still drinking coffee and brewing beer, and that makes us strong and should fill us with pride that we're still around.

[25:33] Samuel Stein: You know, that then opens up the discussion about gentrification into how much is race related and how much is a socioeconomic divide or imbalance and what is the overlap of those two things.

[26:16] Monxo Lopez: Yes, well let me tell you something. When I moved here to the South Bronx, my wife and I, we bought this row house, and we were gentrifiers. We were among the first people that paid three figures for a building here, and our neighbors were making fun of us, you know, because you're a fool, like how much? And so I think that shows at least my personal experience that yes, race is involved, it's obvious, but it's not the whole story. You can be Puerto Rican in a Puerto Rican neighborhood. And so there are other things like my educational level, the privilege that I had or my family had of having certain savings, you know. And so you need to just, I don't like, you know, it's like I hate when people feel guilty, and so it's guilt that moves them.

But that's what happened with me. So if it was that guilt that I felt that I knew that I was a gentrifier here, even if non-white, I could pass as a non-gentrifier, that really propelled me to do something, and to leverage the little privilege that I had to put it in the service of other people that aren't as privileged as I am. And so I think that people should understand their racial aspects to it, but that doesn't exhaust the explanations or the motivations to act, you know.

[29:06] Monxo Lopez: Mantra, I'm really glad that you said that. You know, it's not just, you know, white people. I think especially as a black person, I immediately, I think before we were even gonna have this conversation today, I automatically would just assume, you know, that like every gentrifier was someone who's white because if you're moving a group of people out and in the neighborhoods that I know that have been gentrified, in some cases, that is what has happened where mostly white people come in to move. You know, I'm thinking of like the South End in Boston. I lived in Boston for six and a half years, so I'm very familiar with the neighborhoods there. And you know, when I think of like the South End, which is this new, you know, like up and coming gay neighborhood, even, you know, of course I've gone out in the South End, and of course I've, you know, been to a lot of, you know, like the queer bars there and I've loved it.

But then when I realized that it used to be a different type of neighborhood where my people were mostly there, I all of a sudden have this guilt of like, am I a part of the problem? Am I, you know, is this something, am I contributing to this? So I'm glad that you talked about, you know, how gentrifiers aren't always just white, and it can truly be an array of people.

[30:34] Aaron Michael Ray: Hey honorary Newfoundlanders. Thank you for tuning in to part one of episode four of Conversation from Away. Now, this episode was a little bit longer than we anticipated, but that's okay because part two is coming your way very shortly. A portion of our ad revenue for this episode is going to the South Bronx Unite as well as the Community Service Society of New York. Please tune in to our next episode, and we'll see you then.