This photo symbolizes my personal experience with gentrification. This photo was taken at my favorite coffee shop in east Austin, an area of Austin that’s rapidly being gentrified. On the left you can see the modern coffee shop, juxtaposed with the apartments on the right. As far as that area’s concerned, those apartments are nothing special. Directly across the street, behind the trees in this photo, is an apartment complex that’s some of the most beautiful architectural work I’ve ever seen. It’s incredibly modern, and rent is incredibly high. While this particular apartment complex took over a lot that formerly harbored a warehouse, many of the like in the area have been erected in place of less fashionable apartments, displacing a lot of people who’d been there for generations.
My experience with gentrification in New York is a lot more apparent than in Austin. I live in East Harlem, an area of New York City that sees gentrification occur every day. A Whole Foods is opening up here in January. Uber expanded the $5 Uber Pool during commute-times to go up to 125th street. My first week on the block, a neighbor told me about how he just moved into the building next to mine because his rent in his old apartment went up $350/month and he could no longer pay it. I live in an area where gentrification is hurting people — it’s tearing about many of the aspects of daily life that they’ve come to define themselves by. I hate that my presence as an outsider in this community adds to the gentrification, but I hope that by gaining an understanding of what gentrification does to communities through this lens, I’ll be able to work to combat the negative consequences of gentrification.
