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Development, Displacement, and Dining

ALISON HOPE ALKON, YUKI KATO, AND JOSHUA SBICCA

The sign was intended to be ironic, a joke even, but the community was not laughing. On one side, it read “ink! Coffee. Happily gentrifying the neighborhood since 2014.” The other proclaimed “Nothing says gentrification like being able to order a cortado.”

The neighborhood is Denver’s Five Points, long home, not always by choice, to nearly all of the city’s Black residents. In a history common to many Black communities across the United States, residents were prevented from living in other parts of the city through segregation, redlining, and racial covenants. The neighborhood became a vibrant cultural center, colloquially known as the “Harlem of the West,” where more than fifty jazz clubs hosted many of the early twentieth century’s most well-known performers (Dowlen n.d.). But Five Points is no longer a predominantly Black neighborhood, as gentrification has brought an influx of younger, whiter, and wealthier residents. Indeed, realtors and developers no longer refer to the area as Five Points at all, but as the River North Arts District or RiNo. These new residents patronize the area’s many new galleries, restaurants, breweries, and cafes like ink! Coffee.

The sign became a flash point for political organizing. Community members understood, sometimes viscerally, that gentrification doesn’t just mean cleaning up the neighborhood. It also means, in the words of community organizer Lisa Calderon, “pushing us out of our community.” Although most activists did not engage in property damage, someone spray painted “white coffee” across the building, unsubtly gesturing at the racialized nature of food’s place in urban “revitalization.” The coffee shop’s window was broken, and an unnamed skateboarder stole the offensive sign. These incidents, along with the ongoing protest, forced the business to close for several days. They did reopen, and maintain their storefront to this day, but the controversy cost them a valuable contract with University of Colorado Denver. Perhaps more important, it sparked broader organizing against gentrification, including one lifelong resident and activist’s successful campaign to replace the current city council member in 2019.

“New Orleans is not cosmopolitan. There’s no kale here.” With these words, reported in the New York Times in 2014, Dutch actress Tara Elders set off the social media controversy that became known as “kalegate” (Goodman 2014). The quote appeared in an article that followed some of the city’s new bohemian residents as they engaged with the city’s varied cultural scenes. A barrage of think pieces, tweets, and hashtags followed. Times-Picayune reporter Jarvis DeBerry opened his scathing response with a description of the iconic restaurant Dooky Chase’s Gumbo Z’herbs, traditionally served on Holy Thursday and consisting of no less than nine greens, kale included. He called for New Orleanians to email or tweet photos of the many places kale was available within the city, and hundreds responded. Johanna Gilligan, the director of Grow Dat Youth Farm, observed that “people are buying kale at [their farmers’] market with a new sense of pride.” The annual Big Easy Theater Awards were hosted by “Citizen Kale,” a local actor in a homemade kale suit. Local restaurants and farmers’ markets offered kalegate specials, and Eater, an online food magazine with a site for most major cities, constructed an interactive map showcasing restaurants where the green was available. In the words of Grist writer Heather Hansman (2014), “You can insult New Orleans … but if you talk bad about its greens, the locals get up in arms.”

Kalegate angered so many New Orleanians because it represented a pervasive sense that the power to define and represent the city lies not with its long-term residents, but with the newcomers. These newcomers, like many before them, romanticize a view of the city that celebrates a sense of magic and mysticism while eliding the legacies of colonialism, slavery and struggle, and of deluge and drowning, that continue to shape residents’ everyday lives (Cannon 2014). The exceptionalist narrative casts New Orleanians as wild spirits, too busy costuming and drinking to address social ills, leaving the city to sink, perhaps literally, into a sort of languid decline. Countering this romanticized view, local writers used kalegate to offer a glimpse into New Orleans’ complex histories and cultures, including struggles for civil rights, workers’ rights, and food justice, and to proclaim their own sense of place in a city they are struggling to define.

The table runs an entire West Oakland city block, and seats 500. This diverse group of diners has been brought together by the People’s Kitchen Collective (PKC), a trio of activist-artist-storyteller-chefs who create “accessible, healthy and loving food spaces … not only to fill our stomachs, but also nourish our souls, feed our minds, and fuel a movement” (People’s Kitchen Collective n.d.). The meal was the final installment of a four-part series: From the FARM to the KITCHEN to the TABLE to the STREETS! A critique of the farm-to-table movement which, according to PKC, too often ignores the contributions of people of color, these meals centered on the recipes and stories of diverse communities. STREETS was a public meal and protest piece designed to celebrate shared resilience in the face of rapid gentrification and displacement. According to the Collective:

This is a reclaiming of the commons, of the streets that are rapidly being disconnected from their history through gentrification. Here, we will eat publicly at the intersection of food, art, and justice. We also meet at the intersection of Yuri Kochiyama and Malcolm X’s birthdays, and at 28th St. and Magnolia St., the site of [Black Panther] Lil Bobby Hutton’s murder by the Police 50 years ago … We deliberately create and take up space, while focusing on building health and connection. In the face of a gentrifying Oakland, this is how we feed a revolution.

The community began the meal with locally gathered yerba buena and rosehip tea offered by Café Ohlone, which features and promotes local indigenous foodways. The Collective then offered Japanese pickles to represent the community uprooted from the neighborhood during World War II. The main course of pulled chicken, beans, corn bread, and collard greens paid homage to both the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast for School Children program, which began in this neighborhood and which the PKC often cites as an inspiration, as well as to the neighborhood’s Black history more generally. The day was warm and so was the atmosphere, filled with hugs and handshakes in a sort of extended family reunion. During the meal, diners shared music, poetry, and conversation centered around the question “what does your neighborhood need?” Collective co-founder Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik read a letter written on behalf of Donald Foster, a longtime journalist and community activist who is being evicted from the street where the event took place, and urged attendees to support him.

Figure I.1. STREETS! was a free community meal for 500 people provided by the People’s Kitchen Collective in celebration of resilience amidst gentrification in West Oakland. Photo by Sana Javeri Kadri.

Jocelyn Jackson, another co-founder, describes West Oakland as “the perfect place to speak to gentrification. On the blocks we’re setting tables, people are being displaced. Even if transition is happening, it’s important to claim the space as home.”

Taken together, these stories reveal the complex entanglements between food and gentrification that this volume seeks to unpack. The furor over ink! Coffee speaks to the role of food retail in upscaling communities. The trendy coffee shop, restaurant, or grocery store in the long divested neighborhood is often viewed as a harbinger of things to come. In the words of spoken word poet Bobby LeFebre, who read his powerful poem “Denver, Where Have You Gone” at ink! Coffee, protests:

Remember that food desert, Denver?/

The one on the block overrun with liquor stores/

There’s a Whole Foods there now/

Remember that affordable rent, Denver?/

The one that comfortably accommodated a family of five/

There’s a $500,000 loft there now, Denver/

By juxtaposing changes in the food landscape with increasing housing prices, LeFebre suggests a link between dining and dispossession. Our goal in this volume is to unpack this link, illuminating the variety of ways that food businesses and food activists can drive, augment, and contest gentrification.

In today’s food-focused popular culture, cafes like ink! Coffee and upscale grocery stores like Whole Foods, are essential to how neighborhoods brand themselves as hip, creative places. To investors, these businesses indicate that an area is ripe for redevelopment. According to Stan Humphries, chief economist for the real estate online marketplace Zillow, “The entry of a coffee shop into a location provides a signaling function to other types of investors … that this neighborhood has now arrived and is open for business in a way that it was not before” (quoted in Kohli 2015). In this sense, food retail serves to shape the larger built environment; hip coffee shops are imbued with a cultural capital that translates into economic capital in the form of rising land values. Perhaps the problem with ink! Coffee’s sign was not only that it was obnoxious, but that it was true in a way that reaches beyond the shop owners’ presumed intentions. Coffee shops really can gentrify a neighborhood, or at least they can play a material and symbolic role. The first half of this volume examines the role of food spaces—restaurants, grocery stores, and alternative food initiatives like urban farms and gardens—in drawing new investors and residents into a neighborhood.

Figure I.2. ink! Coffee in Five Points tagged after community outrage over gentrification sign. Photo by Lindsey Bartlett.

Kalegate represents the processes through which changing foodscapes and foodways have become symbols of gentrification. The New York Times coverage was not really about food; the sole comment about kale is buried several paragraphs in. And yet it was kale that became a flash point for debates about gentrification, and who gets to speak, publicly and privately, for and about a city. Kale has become symbolic of gentrification, of the foodways of new residents, and in this case, of their unwillingness to recognize and engage with anything but a superficial version of their city’s long-standing, vibrant culture. Deriding the perceived absence of kale casts the city as removed from mainstream dining trends, and more broadly, from the everyday concerns of those who occupy privileged social locations. In response, New Orleanians mocked the cultural cluelessness of many recent transplants and asserted their own longstanding senses of place. Food is implicated not only in controversies about who gets to (or has to) live where, but about how and by whom a city is defined. The changing foodways that push and accompany gentrification are a theme that runs throughout many of the chapters in this volume, from the high-end taco shops in San Diego’s Barrio Logan (chapter 1) to the “reinvention” of working-class cuisine in Vancouver’s long-impoverished Downtown Eastside (chapter 9). Black feminist writer Mikki Kendall (2014) calls this “food gentrification,” and worries that this will put “traditional meals out of reach of those who created the recipes” (see also Ho 2014). But our concerns in this volume go beyond food access. Here we link the symbolic gentrification of foods to increased property values, rising rents, and dispossession and displacement.

Because food has become such a strong symbol of gentrification, as well as a marker of a neighborhood’s “readiness” for redevelopment, food justice activists like the People’s Kitchen Collective deploy food as a lens through which to resist the dispossession of their communities (Crouch 2012; Markham 2014; Massey 2017). Sometimes, activists’ goals are limited to maintaining access to their own urban gardens (Glowa 2017). Other times, they seek to safeguard the ability of long-term inhabitants to claim their right to the city, whether for growing food, eating, or just gathering. The chapters in the second half of this volume tell of the struggles of long-term residents and newcomers, sometimes in conflict with one another and other times working together, who attempt to influence cities that increasingly orient themselves toward developers, wealthy industries, and foreign investment. Some, like the immigrant gardeners in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant and East New York neighborhoods (chapter 11) and Cleveland’s Black urban gardeners (chapter 13), draw on long-standing and deeply held practices of food production and community organizing. Or, in the case of Chicago’s Puerto Rican diaspora, culturally significant commercial food zones like East Humboldt Park’s Paseo Boricua become frontline struggles for food sovereignty and to stop gentrification (chapter 12). Others, such as Oakland’s Phat Beets Produce (chapter 10), use food as a sort of gastrodiplomacy (Chapple-Sokol 2013) intended to foster positive interactions between new and long-term residents. Sometimes, a long-term community-based organization, such as Los Angeles’ Community Services Unlimited, can organize the resources necessary to buy land, ensuring their constituents’ abilities to continue to grow and distribute food in their gentrifying neighborhood, but remain concerned about the signals their new food retail can send (chapter 14). None of these efforts have yet succeeded in stemming the tides of revitalization and displacement, but they have developed creative ways to incorporate food into this struggle.

The central claim of this volume is that food is an important lens through which to understand the process of gentrification. Exploring food offers a visceral opportunity to move beyond the scholarly focus on residential growth and displacement to understand how urban development affects the economic, cultural, and ecological dimensions of place. This book also extends conversations about urban agriculture, race, and food justice by examining them in the context of urban development, which has often been an underlying but unacknowledged theme in critical food studies. Last, this volume brings together theories of the production of urban space, which view gentrification as a structural process fostered by urban growth machines comprised of developers and city officials, together with those that analyze culture and consumption through taste, foodways, and cultural capital. These perspectives are often in tension with one another, but the diverse array of theoretical and methodological approaches present in this volume allow us to better understand how social structure orients but does not determine lived experiences on the ground.

In a practical sense, this book takes a broad approach to a complex topic. The forthcoming chapters examine a wide range of food enterprises, including grocery stores, restaurants, community gardens, farmers’ markets, and non-profit organizations, as well as developers and city officials. Working from these multiple and situated perspectives allows us to highlight the myriad and sometimes contradictory ways that food and gentrification intersect. This volume also attends to both cities that have become synonymous with gentrification and smaller cities that are usually left out of the conversation but are nonetheless experiencing these dynamics. Relatedly, we feature a diverse set of contributors, including graduate students, professors, and community activists, who share deep and embedded knowledges of the changing places we call home.