For Those Who Remain: Gentrification, Cultural Displacement, and Sense of Home
Gentrification of working class, urban neighborhoods is a process that uproots long-term residents and businesses and attracts wealthier populations that occupy and redefine the space. Even though cultural displacement has profound effects on the psychic and social worlds of people who live in these neighborhoods, this topic of gentrification is rarely addressed in the field of psychology. I discuss the impact of gentrification through the lens of attachment, where a space that was once a holding container for the self to develop transforms into an unfamiliar environment that is oppressive and exclusionary. In this environment, minority groups are restricted in the way they can move through the world to provide security for those in the dominant group. Difficulty mourning the loss of a neighborhood that was once home can result in melancholic states characterized by passivity, hopelessness, anger, lethargy, and self-loathing. I also explore how this topic of gentrification emerges in the therapeutic relationship, where the therapist is a transplant to the city, representing the gentrifier, and the client is a long-term resident of the Mission district, a historically Latinx neighborhood of San Francisco that is experiencing rapid gentrification.
This is my thesis for my master’s program in Counseling Psychology and Community Mental Health at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Thanks to Danni Biondini (my advisor), Dan Lin-Arlow (my spouse), my cohort, my supervisors, my friends, my clients, and my therapist for their support in this labor of love! Thanks to Rachel Bryant for facilitating a engaging discussion about building trauma-informed institutions and communities between Steven Henry, Rodney Brazier, and me at our Integrative Seminar presentation on 12/7/19.
In the Mission District of San Francisco, California, two worlds coexist. On Mission Street, taquerias blast out ranchera music amid the smell of grilled onions and meat, stores display rows of brightly colored piñatas and fragrant fruits in the open air, and elders sit around reading the newspaper and socializing with passersby. One block over on Valencia, you encounter high-end boutiques with lush tropical plants displayed in windows, craft chocolate shops with rustic wood and metal interiors, and new American restaurants with heated patios and parking spaces converted to extended seating. These trendy restaurants and coffee shops are encroaching into Mission Street, replacing long-time, Latinx-owned neighborhood strongholds that surrender in the war of attrition to rising rents. People from these two worlds cross paths at the store or on the BART train but don’t quite strike up a conversation or enter into each other’s relational worlds.
Gentrification is the process that results in the transformation of a low-income, working-class, urban neighborhood into middle-class residential and commercial use (Loretta, Slater, & Wyly, 2008). The Mission District of San Francisco, a historically Latinx neighborhood, has experienced rapid gentrification following the dot-com boom in the early 2000s due to its central location and access to public transit. Much of the media discourse is about physical displacement and the economic impact on working-class families, but those who can remain in the Mission are also deeply impacted by the cultural change around them. The city they grew up in no longer feels like home.
When I worked as a psychotherapist at a free clinic in the Mission District, many of my patients had lived in the neighborhood their entire lives and had seen their city rapidly change as the technology industry brought in wealth and a shift in demographics. Before I became a therapist, I was one of those newcomers who moved to San Francisco for a technology job. As I write from a coffee shop a block away from the clinic, I see mostly young professionals intently focusing on their Apple products. Outside, a Latina woman runs a fruit stand and a few people ask for spare change as techies zip past them on electric scooters or walk by, deeply engrossed in their iPhones. We may occupy the same space, but our lived experiences are worlds apart, rigidly separated along with class and racial lines. I notice the dissonance everywhere as these worlds approach each other but never quite meet.
Two Worlds Collide
As I entered into therapeutic relationships with patients who were impacted by gentrification, I found the transference and countertransfer- ence dynamics were different from the classic Oedipal roles commonly discussed in psychoanalysis. I wondered who I might be to my patients as someone who symbolized the gentrification that may have had an ongoing oppressive, often violent, effect on their lives. As an example, I will introduce a character called Mateo, a compilation of Latinx patients I saw for psychotherapy in the clinic. Mateo is a middle-aged man who was born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission District.
As I worked with Mateo, I noticed a creeping nervousness as we broached topics related to class identity. The first time he started speaking about gentrification and the old vs. new Mission, he stopped abruptly to ask me where I was from. I interpreted his question to mean “Are you a safe person to talk about this with?” “I’m from Texas,” I said matter-of- factly. “Oh, so you’re one of those transplants,” he chuckled in a way he does when he wants to say more but doesn’t feel like he should. I asked him about the chuckle, and he told a story about feeling embarrassed in high school when peers bullied him. I wondered if he was afraid that I would be offended and bully him, too, if he spoke truthfully about how he felt about our differences.
It was the end of our session time, but I continued to engage in small talk with him about local changes because I felt guilty about being someone who represented “the problem” and wanted to show that I was someone who understood. Over the next few sessions, I noticed myself letting the time go over, sometimes up to 30 minutes after we were supposed to end. I also started bending over backward to accommodate him when he regularly missed our sessions due to work. He was on call at his job, so when his work conflicted with therapy sessions, he always chose to work and get paid. I would then try to reschedule our sessions for the weekend so he wouldn’t have to miss therapy. Sometimes he would forget about our sessions altogether, and when I called, he would apologize profusely. Eventually, I found myself coming in every other weekend just to meet with him. I was trying to compensate for something; perhaps if I gave more I could absolve myself of guilt around being a gentrifier.
One day he told me that he tries to not be “too mean” to transplants when he’s in session with me because I’m a transplant and he doesn’t want to hurt my feelings. This might have been the perfect opportunity to help him express his anger towards me in our relationship since I seemed to represent the oppressor. But I was pulled to ally myself with him in an attempt to show that I’m not one of those gentrifiers. That I get it. This shut down the space between us that could allow for his aggression to emerge and eased my anxiety about facing his anger. Rather than making space for him to feel his resentment towards me, I positioned myself on his side of things to diffuse his aggression. I sense this aggression was then acted out unconsciously through the missed sessions and rescheduling.
I found myself, in my work with Mateo, in a complex field of splitting between good and bad, victim and aggressor, oppressed and oppressor. At times I felt offended and angry when he spoke about the women he was dating in objectifying ways. But, it was easy for me to stay grounded, curious, and focused on his process. However, when it came to class dynamics, I feared taking on the role of the oppressor in the transference and tried in various ways to avoid working within that transference by not setting proper boundaries, shutting down the space between us for him to speak, and being eager to show that I was an ally.
In reflecting on my working relationship with Mateo, I had to contend with parts of myself that I disavowed and split off. Because of the high cost of rent in San Francisco, Mateo was still living with his parents and could- n’t afford to move out. The guilt I felt from having class privilege and being able to live on my own, when people like Mateo could not, became an extension of the guilt I experienced leaving my family of origin and home behind to pursue a more independent life. Here was another crucial difference between us that laid bare the broader sociopolitical systems we both existed in. Abstract sociopolitical issues are challenging to contend with, and splitting is difficult to move out of when acknowledging such differences in personal, intergenerational, and structural dynamics.
Neighborhood as Attachment Object
A neighborhood can be thought of as an attachment object outside of the family of origin that can be used as a secure base to explore the world and develop a sense of self. According to attachment theory, children form and maintain relationships with caregivers who provide protection and security in times of need (Bowlby, 1982). The caregiver is internalized as an attachment object that gives children a blueprint for how to see themselves and what to expect from other people (Winnicott, 1965). Securely attached children seek their caregivers when they are distressed and use them as a secure base from which to explore and master the world, whereas insecurely attached children are unable to use their caregivers as a support system when they experience distress (Bowlby, 1988). The concept of attachment can be extended to the relationship between individuals and the sociopolitical context in which they live. A nurturing and inclusive environment can be a secure base for a community, whereas a hostile and exclusive environment can threaten the ability of a community to develop and thrive (Davis, 2007).
Through their caregivers’ accurate understanding of their internal experience, children learn to think about what they are experiencing and eventually learn to reflect on what others are experiencing through a process called mentalization (Bateman & Fonagy, 2013). Social systems can mentalize people in the dominant, non-marginalized group, making them feel seen and understood by the world around them and providing a good enough holding environment in which to thrive. Marginalized groups, however, are often depicted by society and media in ways that are rigid and stereotyped. For instance, educational and criminal justice systems are quick to punish and criminalize Black and Latinx boys for acting out rather than see them as children who need support (Vaughans & Harris, 2016). Because secure attachments are protective factors against trauma and mental health challenges, living in an environment that is threatening or hostile can leave marginalized communities vulnerable to trauma caused by stressful events.
Mateo’s attachment strategies developed in the context of his early caregiver relationships. Mateo described his father as critical and abusive and his mother as passive and submissive. The social environment outside of his family of origin was experienced as scary and antagonistic, causing him to develop threat responses of hypervigilance and avoidance to cope. The neighborhood, including his family, was impacted by systemic oppression that affected the education system, employment opportunities, and resources available to the community. Street violence and gang activity were frequent, and Mateo felt fearful and on edge when he walked down the street. He found safety by joining a gang as a young adult, but he never really felt kinship or belonging with the gang. Joining was a search for a secure base from which to feel safe enough to be in the world. Throughout his childhood and adulthood, Mateo found relief by disengaging emotionally, avoiding social interactions, isolating himself in his room, and using drugs. His insecure attachments in both relational and social spheres left him without a secure base to turn to when he experienced painful emotions.
Although home can represent a spectrum of experiences ranging from security to hostility, acceptance to rejection, and safety to danger, home also represents familiarity. Children learn how to cope with challenges, get their needs met, and be in the world based on their experiences of home. In a hero’s journey, leaving home on one’s own volition can be associated with separation-individuation and the search for self and authenticity (Seiden, 2009). When one’s experience in their family of origin is traumatic, like Mateo’s, leaving home can be an act of empowerment that leads to the ability to gain control of one’s life. In my opinion, gentrifica- tion got in the way of normative adult development when Mateo was left with no options to launch out of his parents’ home. The narrative of his development ran counter to the dominant narrative that a man should have his own place and provide for his family and instead created in him a sense of inadequacy, humiliation, and impotence that he was “not a man.”
A good enough holding environment outside of the family, in terms of a social safety net and an accepting culture, might have helped Mateo acquire his own place to live, establish some distance from his family of origin, and work on the developmental tasks of adulthood. “I never had to struggle the same way some other people I know have. I never learned how to make a budget or find a place to live because I could always live at home. I never had to grow up, so I’m behind on a lot of things,” he said when he felt overwhelmed by all the steps he might have to take to leave his family and find his own place to live. When he got angry enough with his father to want to leave, he would talk his way out of it by concluding that he was “cursed.” Embarking on his own path could also represent overcoming his father and leaving his community behind, which also engendered feelings of fear and guilt.
Cultural Displacement and Loss of Home
The process of gentrification is transforming a majority Latinx low-income neighborhood into an environment that reflects the dominant cultural norms of White, middle-class spaces and institutions. The new dominant group, which wields economic and ideological power, increasingly occupies and sometimes violently displaces low-income people of color from their streets, community institutions, and homes. The planning process of gentrification involves the intentional building of commercial and living spaces that attract wealthier populations who then redefine the space based on Whiteness (Mirabal, 2009). Gentrification is “a form of colonization that will eventually generate a racially segregated neighborhood once the process is complete” (Miller & Josephs, 2009, p. 111). Many Latinx people in the Mission see the closure of Latinx businesses as “symbols of a larger cultural erasure and communal exclusion” (Mirabal, 2009, pp. 23).
Cultural change from rapid gentrification can represent the loss of the neighborhood as an attachment object, which is similar to the cultural dislocation experienced by immigrants who relocate to a new country or indigenous peoples who experience colonization by an occupying force. Culture is a system of meaning-making that ties individuals to a collective. Culture can give individuals a shared structure for thinking about the world and form the basis for interaction, relatedness, and mutual recognition (Dajani, 2018). About gentrification, the term “cultural displacement” was first used by Zukin (2010) to mean “when the norms, behaviors, and values of the new resident cohort dominate and prevail over the tastes and preferences of long-term residents” (as cited by Hyra, 2014, p. 1754). The concept of cultural displacement is similar to that of cultural dislocation in that they both involve transitions between different cultures, but cultural displacement happens within the same geographical location.
When people find themselves in a new culture, their sense of self is reflected back to them in ways that are unrecognizable, confusing, and alienating (Dajani, 2018). This disorientation can be seen as a loss of an attachment object — for example, the familiarity of home where one could turn to and be recognized. In the case of Mateo, the way he learned to move through the world now leaves him alienated from forming new connections and relationships. “People automatically see me as a bad guy. I always have to go out of my way to show people that I’m not bad. They say, ‘Mateo, you just look so mean, and I’m surprised that you’re actually a nice guy,’” he told me one day. I wondered aloud if it might have something to do with his race. “No, I don’t think it’s that,” he said as he suddenly perked up. “I think that it’s because of the way I walk and the way I act. Back in the day, you had to walk down the street looking mean and tough so that no one would mess with you. You could get jumped for any reason. Now, the city is different. It’s safer, and you don’t have to watch out in the same way as before, but I’m just used to being like this. And people think it’s threatening.” Mateo developed ways of moving through the world that looked tough so he could protect himself. Now that the neighborhood has changed, the ways he learned to keep safe do not fit with the new environment. Newcomers perceive him as an outsider and a threat, even though he has lived in the Mission his entire life.
Racism becomes repressed, hidden, and disavowed in predominantly liberal cities like San Francisco, often taking the form of color-blindness, microaggressions, denial, and systemic injustices that serve to hold oppressed groups back while elevating the privileged group. Acts of oppression are often based on dominant narratives that determine what are acceptable vs. unacceptable bodies and behaviors, and these standards are mostly communicated unconsciously (Leighton, 2018). Butler (1997) says that identities are constructed through the interplay of performance (gestures, movements, speech) and reactions from the greater society that reward or punish that performance in overt and covert ways. For Black bodies, there is a “tectonic pressure, embedded in every aspect of White institutions” to simulate White bodies in White spaces because proximity to Whiteness is safety (Sherrell, 2018, pp. 148). It is often up to people of color to change their behaviors so that White people can feel more secure and comfortable. Gentrification leads to real loss in the culture of a community. For example, ethnic enclaves, once a refuge where oppressed groups could express full-bodied and joyful humanity amongst members of their community, no longer provide the safety and secure base that they once did.
With the neighborhood rapidly gentrifying, Mateo is experiencing a sense of cultural displacement that leaves him feeling unsettled, invaded, as if he doesn’t belong in his own hometown. “No one cared about the Mission until these rich White folks moved in. Now they are beautifying Dolores Park and making it more safe by adding all these street lights, but I know it’s not for people like me. I walk around this town, and people look at me like I don’t belong. They cross the street and look the other way. It makes me angry and resentful. They are the ones that don’t belong. I’ve been here the whole time. Why do I need to change to make them feel safe?” he said to me one day. Experiencing the old feeling that he was in constant danger made him resent the old Mission, but the injustice he feels that things are safer and better now for other people makes him resent the new Mission. He feels stuck, marginalized, and melancholic, not sure where to go or what to do, unable to invest in staying or leaving.
The Role of Therapy
A “rejecting mother society” describes a form of oppression and exclusion from the newcomers in the neighborhood that provides little security to help individuals and communities grieve the loss of home, leaving them “in an environment embedded with trauma … much like a traumatized individual who must remain in the control of [their] traumatizer” (Davis, 2007, p. 186). Eng and Han (2000) discuss melancholia as an everyday experience for racial minority groups (specifically Asian Americans), where assimilation into the dominant culture involves a splitting off of racial parts of self, accompanied by exclusion from the dominant group, which makes assimilation ultimately unattainable. Hatred towards the lost object can be redirected to the self through a process of identification, where melancholia is characterized by self-loathing and ambivalence towards the culture of origin or lost homeland (Dajani, 2018).
Feeling trapped in his parents’ home and hopeless about the future, Mateo found temporary relief from his pain through drug use and dissociation. He thought that there was something wrong with him that needed to be fixed so that he could fit in. He spent a lot of money on clothes to increase his perceived status so that people would treat him with more respect. He simultaneously sought out relationsips while protecting himself against attachment loss and abandonment. He tried to change his personality and the way he looked to be more attractive to women, to the point that he lost his sense of self when in relationship with someone he really liked. He also went through periods of isolating and rejecting others so that he could avoid the fear of potential rejection, himself. A pattern of isolation, feelings of worthlessness, and substance use resulted in periods of recurrent depression and suicidal ideation.
Feeling small and incapable, Mateo thought he could feel better by trying to get women to have sex with him. He spoke about pursuing women as if they were objects he could acquire to boost his self-esteem. “The women here won’t talk to a guy like me,” he said referring to newcomers in the Mission. “Why would they when they can get with some guy who has money?” Because Mateo felt powerless and displaced in the shifting culture around him, he asserted his power by objectifying those who had less social power than he did, namely working-class women of color. His perception of other people as disposable and interchangeable mirrored the way the dominant society treated him and his community.
When people move from one culture to another, they adjust through a process of acculturation, taking in and integrating aspects of the new culture with their culture of origin (Ainslie, Tummala-Narra, Harlem, Barbanel, & Ruth, 2013). In trying to fit in, they lose parts of themselves. In trying to hold onto their culture of origin, they stand out from other people in the new culture (Akhtar, 2014). I wondered if going to therapy and participating in a recovery program were attempts for Mateo to assimilate into a new culture and disavow his culture of origin. I noticed him code-switching, shifting between selves when he spoke to me, which was different when he talked about the people in his life. He spoke to me in great detail about his internal experience with no accent or slang. When he spoke about something he said to a family member one day, he repeated what he said in a thick Spanish accent with a more colloquial, familial style. Sometimes he’d use slang or a reference, stop, look at me, and then ask me if I knew what he meant. Usually, I didn’t know and asked him to explain it to me. By not knowing his references, I was disclosing that we came from very different cultural backgrounds. By explaining it to me, he was inviting me more into his colloquial world, and I was able to gain more of an understanding of him and his culture. Through therapy, he was learning new ways of thinking and relating to his internal experiences in order to do something different from what he was used to doing based on his experiences in his family. If therapy is representative of a new culture and way of seeing the world, what culture does therapy assimilate the patient into?
I engaged with Mateo’s statements about women, social dynamics, and violence from my positionality as a woman of color. Sometimes he would ask me what I thought of a particular romantic or sexual interaction with a woman. In these cases, he seemed to be inviting me into a relational exchange based on my positionality as a woman with a subjective experience that was different from his own. I generally didn’t answer directly and invited him to reflect on his feelings and experiences so that he could come to his own conclusions. When I had a strong reaction, however, I’m sure that I communicated it unconsciously, and he could sense that reaction. Sometimes he labeled his thoughts and behaviors as objectifying or misogynistic. If I were a man, he may not have been able to reflect on his experience in the same way. I represented the gentrifier, someone who moved to San Francisco and had class and educational privilege. He could see me as all bad or all good, but, through the therapeutic relationship, we were getting to know each other’s complex social and cultural worlds.
Conclusions
People make sense of the world through their attachment relationships with both their caregivers and the broader social context they live in. When there is rapid cultural change due to the process of gentrification, long-term residents of a neighborhood can feel disoriented and baffled by the world around them. Gentrification can be experienced as an attachment loss, when a cultural context that had previously contained the self through shared perspective and mutual recognition is no longer there. Oppression is inherently embedded in the process of gentrification because it transitions spaces for low-income communities of color to spaces that accommodate White, middle-class sensibilities. Marginalized groups are often not fully recognized in White spaces and are restricted in how they can move through the world to provide security for those in the dominant group. The experience of oppression can make it difficult to mourn the attachment loss and invest in new attachment objects. Depressive states are common experiences in people impacted by gentrification, especially if they’ve internalized a rejecting dominant culture’s gaze towards themselves and regard their struggles as personal failings rather than negative operations of power that serve to maintain systems of oppression and privilege.
When an individual’s behavior is decontextualized from the social setting, the behavior can be mistaken as merely a matter of personality or pathology. When trauma and melancholia are passed down inter- generationally, it can start to look like a culture (Menakem, 2017). I hope we can depathologize melancholia as a failure of mourning and instead frame melancholia as a natural consequence of living in an oppressive society. In fact, persisting in a state of melancholia may be reframed as an act of resistance against assimilating into an unjust dominant culture — a resistance that allows people from marginalized groups to maintain their sense of identity and dignity, as painful as it is.
A big part of finding refuge and empowerment in the face of gentrification involves claiming space to be in a supportive community. Mateo’s spiritual home was his recovery community, which provided him with unwavering support while also allowing him to see that people are whole, flawed, and worthy of love. I believe that therapy helps in forming connections between our past and present selves, contextualizing our experience with what is being reproduced socially, and building a new type of relationship. But that is only part of the work. People in marginalized groups need spaces where they can speak freely, be recognized, and be fully embodied in their joy, anger, and sadness to reclaim themselves and their history outside of the gaze of the dominant social group. They are already experts in that work, and that is not a space for psychotherapy.
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