I originally wrote this for KCET Departures

Chief among the themes emerging from the recent suite of KCET Departures is that communities change. While national imaginings of Los Angeles still depict it as a flat non-place poor in history, the local voices Departures has amplified in Venice, Chinatown and Richland Farms offer alternate, first person testimonies to crowded, sometimes tumultuous cycles of birth, rebirth and transformation. Departures interviewees like Jatuan Valentine & Navalette Bailey from Oakwood lend much-needed human texture to often impersonal-seeming shifts in real estate and demographics, the tidal flows of commercial money in and out of our zip codes.

But a specter haunts many of these stories, a guilty creature called "gentrification" who - in the telling at least - leeches their richness and complexity before reducing them to simple undifferentiated parables of loss and greed. Indeed, the vast majority of conversations about gentrification in this country are a literal kind of ghost story, ritualized tales where stylized embodiments of demographic good and evil play out their appointed roles in predetermined scripts. These dramas always begin in the hardscrabble idyll of monolithic, once-upon-a-time 'hoods, lurch through zero-sum economic warfare where white gain goes hand-in-hand with colored/working-class loss and invariably end in bohemian elegy, pale-faced victors compelled by guilt to speak for the dead, the erased, the evicted. In such a vision, the unique texture of, say Oakwood, is lost. Before Oakwood could become the site of "gentrification" many say it is today, it transited through other stages not typically part of the standard white/non-white two-step, phases where black middle class and black working class people faced off in their own internecine and often inconclusive encounters.

Those other, interstitial stories are rarely told because our image of immigrants, people of color or the poor often admit only the most stereotypical or easily communicated details. Take the key player in every gentrification narrative, the hipster. He is rarely the figure evoked by African American novelist Colson Whitehead in a recollection of gentrification days across the country in Brooklyn:

I used to live in Fort Greene, and whenever I visit my old neighborhood, I am tormented by the same absurd thought: I should have bought that crack house when I had the chance. Never mind that I was broke--this line of thinking is a natural member of that gang of peculiar New York regrets. Regrets about places you loved but had to leave, places you coveted but could never pay the admission price, places that were surrounded by invisible barbed wire before you were born. Regrets about quaint little crack houses with southern-exposure gardens, owner duplex, needs TLC. [full story]

The hipsters of most gentrification fantasies - whether set against the backdrop of Whitehead's Brooklyn or our own Chinatown - are always white newcomers, real estate-minded vampires coming to feed on the flesh of authentic communities. We rarely imagine the possibility of a Whitehead: colored, middle-class hipsters carrying both universal dreams of cheap rents and their own peculiar set of ambivalences on slouched shoulders as they navigate neighborhoods on the cusp of change.

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