On Gentrification, Group Living and Other Delights

An NPR report on gentrification made me think of the different circumstances in which I have witnessed it firsthand in my life.  As a rule, gentrification of a neighborhood impacted primarily on economically disadvantaged populations and people of color, as younger, upwardly-mobile couples (“Yuppies” in the vernacular of the day) began to move from the suburbs back into urban neighborhoods in search of cheap housing and shorter commute times.  The North Side of Pittsburgh in the 1970s was one example; in this case, the influx of well-to-do young couples impacting on ethnically diverse working and middle class families whose livelihoods and security had fallen away from them with the closing of plants and mills associated with the steel industry. As fallen-down houses were renovated and businesses designed to service the newer, upwardly mobile, predominantly “professional” population increased, so did the tax base - forcing families who had held out in the face of a rapidly changing economy to abandon the homes they had occupied for generations.

Another example was the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington D.C. in the 1980s.  I lived there for a couple of years in the latter part of that decade, in what was then the longest surviving cooperative group house in the area – “El Nido” or “The Nest”.  I came across the cooperative when I moved to D.C. after having completed an Undergraduate Degree in a rural Vermont university:  a flyer on a cluttered bulletin board in a popular alternative restaurant in the Dupont Circle area led to a phone call that got me an appointment to be interviewed during a dinner with the other residents of the group house.  Wanting to make a good impression, I took over the kitchen in the house of a friend where I was temporarily staying and whipped up a batch of Apple Brown Betty – richly infused with lots of brown sugar and butter.

El Nido was located on a side street of Mount Pleasant, one of a chain of three-story Queen Anne style row houses constructed during the early 1920s.  The elegant houses had deteriorated over the years when the flight to the suburbs took place and the neighborhood had been slowly taken over by black and other working class families who took advantage of the lowered rents and its close proximity to the service-related jobs linked to the functioning of the government.  There was also a thriving population of El Salvador immigrants, with dozens of small shops and groceries selling pupusas and other Salvadoran specialties.

My dinner interview went extremely well.  I immediately felt at home with the interesting mix of current residents of the cooperative: Dale - a free-lance carpenter; Giselle, also working as a carpenter and construction worker; Karen, a street activist, community organizer and Women’s Reproductive Health advocate;  Mary Kay had a small massage therapy business and Ken was a psychology professor at a local university (Mary Kay and Ken were a couple and were expecting a baby boy – Nathan - who would soon become the seventh member of the household).  At the time, I was working for a temp agency, doing things like office work and answering telephones for the Republican National Committee – eventually landing into a job as a creative writer for a small sales-promotion agency.  There were also two dogs and some cats.  Basic norms of the group house were shared dinners, with a rotating cooking and clean-up system; no meat in the house but perfectly acceptable to grill on the back porch, weather permitting; once-a-week work in a local food cooperative where bulk groceries were bought collectively; and shared general cleaning.  Each resident (or couple) had one of six bedrooms on the second and third stories of the house and one bedroom located in the basement (the basement apartment – acceptable but less desirable – was assigned to the newest occupant, but rotated out to an upper floor every six months.

When they later called back to say that I had been accepted into the co-op, they said it was my Apple Brown Betty that cinched it.

The group house was a great place to live.  Evening meals were a pleasure, with the possibility to enjoy a number of different cooking styles and everybody sharing any interesting tidbits from their day or things occurring in the world.  With the birth of Nathan to Mary Kay and Ken, all of us became part-time parents according to our desired level of participation, enjoying watching him grow.  I had a pair of congas at the time, and used to put him into a chest harness while I drummed.  We even had a bris for him at the dining room table! We shared holidays and organized house events, such as an “Evening of Beat Poetry” where we converted the downstairs into a candle-lit coffee house and invited friends to read poetry or perform with an instrument.  When the radio program “Prairie Home Companion” announced it was going off the air, I made an old fashioned floor radio out of cardboard to sit around and listen to the last show.

I even almost helped a baby to be born there.  Karen, the community activist, became pregnant and asked me to be support person to her, as she wanted to have the baby in the house.  I agreed, and on the night that her water broke, I paced the floors with her as she entered into a difficult and prolonged labor, occasionally supporting her from behind as she squatted.  A midwife from the neighborhood was in attendance and after too many hours of sweat and pain decided that we needed to go to the hospital.  Her daughter was delivered by cesarean.  Adding to the drama, two days after mother and daughter returned to El Nido her daughter Kali began to turn blue.  We had to rush her back to the hospital where they determined that the baby’s heart valve had failed to completely close and they had to perform open-heart surgery on the tiny infant.  In case you´re wondering (of course you are!), today Kali is a happy and healthy grown woman.

And now I come back to the theme of gentrification.  The El Nido cooperative eventually went the way of many houses in deteriorating urban neighborhoods.  Towards the end of the 1980s, young couples and prospecting real estate agents began to buy up houses on the street.  Although run-down over the years, some more than others, these elegant brownstone row houses still had great bones – architectural details such as high ceilings, arched windows, front porches and back yards.  Black and working class families that had lived there for years were obligated to sell out or move on.  El Nido had survived as an idealistic group living experiment for close to 20 years, since the early 70s with numerous occupants coming and going.  But gentrification came.  Only not exactly in the way of other houses in the neighborhood.

Shortly after I moved out, I heard that the three women – Giselle, Karen and Mary Kay – pooled their resources and bought El Nido.  They spent about a year fixing it up and ended up selling it for a tidy profit.  By this time, most of the other houses on the street had been converted.  In D.C. years later, I took the opportunity to drive by, and the neighborhood - once alive with children on the street and black and latino families or young working class hippies sitting out on the front porch steps listening to music or having a beer at all hours – was freshly painted, quiet, clean and ordered and, at three o’clock in the afternoon, empty.

I guess the people who live there now are happy.