The Cost of Low-Hanging Fruit?

Through a case study of a community orchard in an affordable housing neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, we examine how the involvement of an outside nonprofit organization can transform the very notion—and composition—of community. We illustrate how the internal structures and day-to-day practices of a nonprofit privileged participation by more affluent individuals from outside the neighborhood, and ultimately subsumed a grassroots initiative, transforming it in ways that reinforced dominant power relations and created a whiter space within a diverse, low-income neighborhood. We conclude by drawing attention to the growing reflexive awareness of these issues by staff, and to their subsequent commitment to making programmatic changes that have mitigated the momentum generated by nonprofits’ funding requirements and the energy of eager outside volunteers.

“You Can’t Evict Community Power”

How can gentrification spur collaborations between new food justice organizations and long-standing residents? This chapter explores this question through an analysis of the partnership and eventual merging of Phat Beets Produce and the Self-Help Hunger Program in North Oakland, California. In 2014, Phat Beets saw a local realtor point to its community garden and farmers’ market in an advertisement video designed to draw new residents to their gentrifying neighborhood. This drove them to resist the upscaling of their food justice work and deepen their alliances with long-term community-based organizations. This collaboration has transformed both organizations and created a strong alliance, but it is not enough to resist the structural forces that drive gentrification.

The Urban Agriculture Fix

When urban agriculture becomes a sustainability initiative with institutional backing, it can drive green gentrification even when its advocates are well intentioned and concerned about the possible exclusion of urban farmers and residents. This chapter explores these tensions through the notion of an urban agriculture fix, which I apply to a case in Denver, Colorado. Urban farmers accessed land more easily after the Great Recession and as a result were a force for displacement and at risk of displacement as the city adopted sustainable food system plans, the housing market recovered, and green gentrification spread. This case suggests the importance of explaining how political economy and culture combine to drive neighborhood disinvestment and economic marginalization, which can compel the entrance of urban agriculture due to its perceived low cost and potential high return for local residents. Yet, while urban agriculture may provide some short-term benefits, it may ultimately be entangled in some of the long-term harms of green gentrification.

Diverse Politics, Difficult Contradictions

In the San Francisco Bay Area, during the last nine years advocates have made major inroads in shifting local policies and approaches to urban agriculture. At the same time, the city’s landscape has undergone massive transformation. In this chapter, based on personal experiences as leaders in urban agriculture in the Bay Area and as researchers on the (transformational) politics of food systems, we propose that the justice-driven components of urban agriculture movements are subject to the influence of broader changes in political-economic context, and that urban agriculture is easily absorbed into existing neoliberal and pro-development political trajectories and projects. In this chapter, through the case of the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance, we analyze the movement’s composition, its genesis over time, and how the movement has confronted the tensions and limitations of neoliberal urbanization.

The Taste of Gentrification

Food and taste have become symbols of neighborhood transformation and powerful tools of urban renewal. Building on Bourdieu’s notion of taste as social distinction, we argue that food distinguishes places, giving some neighborhoods character and value, while stigmatizing others as food deserts. Although new and reclaimed food spaces seem to transform gentrifying neighborhoods and attract newcomers, food insecurity remains a significant concern among long-term residents, who resent recent changes and feel displaced. This chapter relies on qualitative reviews of restaurants in two rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods of San Diego to show how tastes become ways for newcomers and long-term residents to relate to each other, reflecting broader socio-spatial processes associated with class, race, and ethnicity.

Introduction

From upscale restaurants to community gardens, food often reflects shifts in taste that are emblematic of gentrification. The prestige that food retail and urban agriculture can lend to a neighborhood helps to increase property values, fostering the displacement of long-term residents while shifting local culture to create new inclusions and exclusions. And yet, many activists who oppose this dynamic have found food both a powerful symbol and an important tool through which to fight against it at scales ranging from individual consumption to state and national policy. The book argues that food and gentrification are deeply entangled, and that examining food retail and food practices is critical to understanding urban development. A series of case studies, from super-gentrifying cities like New York, to oft-neglected places like Oklahoma City, show that while gentrification always has its own local flavor, there are many commonalities. In the context of displacement, food reflects power struggles between differently situated class and ethnoracial groups. Through the lens of food, we can see that who has a right to the gentrifying city is not just about housing, but also includes the everyday practices of living, working and eating in the places we call home.

No Se Vende

Culture has been a central organizing force in Chicago’s Puerto Rican diaspora since the 1960s, when community activists came together to make demands of government institutions on issues like affordable housing and police reform. In Humboldt Park on Paseo Boricua—the cultural capital of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the Midwest—some community activists and longtime residents are seeing connections between the colonization of Puerto Rico, gentrification, and foodways, and are countering it with initiatives to claim their food culture, security, and sovereignty. Similar to the agricultural movements that are growing in Puerto Rico, food could be an important lever for Chicago’s diaspora community in the political fight for survival and decolonization.

Savior Entrepreneurs and Demon Developers

This chapter considers the emergence of Durham, North Carolina as a “foodie” city. In particular, it focuses on the emergence of gourmet restaurants and bars as drivers of urban redevelopment in the downtown and adjacent Central Park neighborhood. The case study of Liberty Warehouse illustrates how “demon developers” come into conflict with “savior entrepreneurs” over the future of the Central Park neighborhood and its “soul.” The chapter seeks to complicate the simple categories of saviors and demons, by showing the complex roles each play in the development process and any ensuing gentrification. The savior narrative often underplays the role of this group in sparking displacement while overstating the corporatization impact of the developers. Finally, the chapter explores the tensions faced by the savior group, who daily confront the dissonance of their high social status and democratic values.

Making Sense of “Local Food,” Urban Revitalization, and Gentrification in Oklahoma City

This chapter examines the linkages between urban revitalization in Oklahoma City and Oklahoma’s statewide local food movement, focusing on three phases: a period of emergence, led by the Oklahoma Food Cooperative; an innovative “hybrid cooperative”; a period of expansion, in which a number of local food-related firms and organizations proliferated, particularly in and around Oklahoma City, which was undergoing a period of intensive downtown redevelopment and gentrification; and a more static, defensive period characterized by business closures and the saturation of a niche market. This account demonstrates how the meanings associated with “local food” shifted as the movement aligned itself with actors associated with Oklahoma City’s revitalization efforts, drawing “local food” away from an early emphasis on balancing economic, ecological, and justice concerns in favor of capturing premium prices for more fetishized foods.

A Conflicted Conclusion

We have used a food intersections approach to explore the ways that gentrification is enacted and contested. Food and gentrification are certainly linked in the popular imagination; media coverage of gentrification often references food businesses like coffee shops, hip takes on working-class or ethnic cuisines, and urban farms as symbolic of a neighborhood’s new up-and-coming status. And materially, these food spaces are often the first to open in a gentrifying neighborhood, making more visible the presence of whiter and wealthier residents who may have begun trickling in, and signaling to other would-be new residents that this space deserves their attention. At the same time, any strategic effort to address gentrification through food activism must begin by better anticipating the unintended consequences of alternative food systems and social entrepreneurial endeavors. This insight builds on critical food scholarship that encourages well-meaning food activists, particularly white ones, to be aware of macro-level social and economic processes of racism and economic exploitation that imbue them with privileges while constraining the lives of low-income people and people of color. We offer some tentative thoughts on strategies to address food and gentrification at micro-, meso-, and macro-scales, from individual actions to national policies.