Feature

By Mandy Q. Racer

“The problem is
not as simple as the
upper-incomes
versus the
lower-incomes.
It’s a problem of
one culture taking
over another.”

Keith Boykin is a Harvard Law graduate and former Special Assistant to President Clinton — at that time, the highest-ranking openly gay person in the Clinton administration. His words split open the issue of gentrification, and exposed the conflicted center of what is usually touted as positive change.
      Gentrification is loosely defined as the arrival of a new, wealthier population in a poor neighborhood — which they then rehabilitate. The newcomers purchase and renovate existing homes, raising property values in the process.
      Babs De Lay, a Utah real estate agent with twenty years in the business, points to Capitol Hill as an example. During the 1960s, she said, the Avenues were rundown hangouts for hippies and the Victorian homes were often torn down. With the development of the Historical Society and preservation groups, the houses were protected.
      The Capitol Hill area didn’t benefit from these changes, and was soon filled with “lots of rentals and lots of run-down properties.” However, De Lay said that people were surprised and “took notice” when a gay restaurant owner bought a home in Capitol Hill; they soon followed suit. “Gay people tend to move into neighborhoods that are gentrifying and changing,” she said. They will purchase and redo the homes, “generally with good taste,” resell and therefore drive up the property values.
      Sounds fabulous, yes? It depends on whom you ask. Filmmakers Linda Goode Bryant and Laura Poitras produced and directed the PBS Point of View documentary “Flag Wars.” The film follows four years of conflict as experienced by a Columbus, Ohio neighborhood undergoing gay-driven gentrification at the expense of the older, black population.
      Film critic Tobias Peterson sums up the conflict: “One by one, black families move out to make way for gay whites, who then renovate the houses and drive up property taxes — making it even harder for African Americans to remain.” The film ends with the stark image of prospective white buyers perusing a vacant home, picking through the possessions of the previous owner, Linda Mitchell, who had refused to sell and had fought the courts and real estate agents until her death.
      Boykin, a black gay male, experienced this process first hand. He moved into Washington D.C.’s multicultural Logan Circle in 1994, “when property values were affordable and it wasn’t unusual to find a prostitute on the street late at night.” Thanks to gentrification, over the next five or six years, Logan Circle’s colorful ethnicity was steadily bled out to white. Dupont Circle, the heavily gay and extremely expensive area to the west of Logan Circle, carried too hefty a price tag for most homebuyers, so white gay men purchased property in Logan Circle, making the area unaffordable for its previous residents.
      The complexities of gay-driven gentrification require that one not discount its positive effects — especially that of a neighborhood’s beautification. A straight escrow officer who has been in real estate for 15 years (and who asked that his name not be printed here), commented on the possible stereotyping of gay men as great renovators and decorators: “We can talk in these general terms; we can talk these urban legends, but are there gay and lesbian people who trash their houses? Yes.”
      However, a large majority of gay male couples do renovate their homes. Their difference from other homebuyers? Children. The escrow officer said that gay male couples are termed DINKs: “Dual Income, No Kids.” He conceded the fact that some gay men have children, but, speaking of those who don’t, he said, “Kids trash houses. Kids are very, very expensive. If you live in an adult house [a home with no children] and you fix something, it stays fixed.” With a sardonic look, he drew the point home: “They’re men.” The financial math leaves little to the imagination.
      De Lay would agree. “Generally, men have better jobs. Yeah, we still lose, whether we’re gay or straight.”
      It begins to make sense that gay, white men are at the forefront of this movement. Generally speaking, this group represents the wealthiest members of the gay community. The benefits they bring to these run-down neighborhoods — growth, beautification, value — are oftentimes desperately needed. A community that undergoes gentrification attracts new restaurants, coffee shops and jobs, and experiences an increase in productivity and creativity.
      “Technology and Tolerance: the Importance of Diversity to High-Technology Growth,” a study carried out by Richard Florida and Gary Gates, asserts that the existence of gays within a metropolitan area “signal[s] a diverse and progressive environment that fosters the creativity and innovation necessary for success in high-tech industry. Gays are frequently cited as harbingers of redevelopment and gentrification in distressed urban neighborhoods.”
      Salt Lake’s own mayor, Ross C. “Rocky” Anderson, cites Florida’s writing and he, too, acknowledges the gay community’s value. In his June 16 speech to the Downtown Merchants Association, he said, “The communities that are economically thriving and that enjoy the greatest economic sustainability are those that are welcoming and hospitable to all people — people of all faiths, all races, different sexual orientations and all economic situations.”
      One can’t discount the gains reaped by gay-driven gentrification: they are exemplified in the beauty of the Marmalade District as well as that of the Ninth and Ninth area. And what of these so-called gayborhoods? In terms of the gay community, isn’t their presence — and, for those who can afford it, the experience of living within them — invaluable?
      Felipe Pacheco loves owning a home on his “happy little street,” which is located just west of Liberty Park. “There are actually two older gay couples on my street and both their yards are just immaculate,” he said, laughing. In all, Pacheco’s immediate neighborhood houses two couples, three single men, and the new offices of the gay-owned Rainbow Realty. All are gay men, and all but Pacheco, who is Hispanic, are white. “I never thought of that,” Pacheco mused.
      Pacheco purchased his home in October of 2002 and since then, he has entirely gutted and redone the main floor. “The house, when I bought it, was in really rough shape. I ripped everything out: the carpet, the bathroom; I ripped out sinks, flooring. I basically had a shell and I just put it all back together.” Pacheco performed the renovations himself at the cost of about $4,000. The work was more than worth it: “My value has probably gone up about $20,000,” he said, noting the fact that he “got a good deal” on the house to begin with.
      Sugarhouse is known for its liberal neighborhoods. “That was one of the main reasons why I moved to Sugarhouse: It’s a gay mecca,” Pacheco said. He refused to move into a “cookie cutter” neighborhood where “you really can’t express yourself with your home.” De Lay often fields this same request — gay and lesbian prospective homebuyers frequently ask about listings in gay neighborhoods. “You just want to be around your own kind,” De Lay said.
      Not surprisingly, this desire has remained constant throughout gay history. Ben Williams, cofounder of the Utah Stonewall Historical Society, remembers fondly the experience of living in “gay ghettos” 20 or more years ago. “The Salt Lake City Gay ghetto in the 1970s to late 1980s was from the lower Avenues to about 500 South, 200 East to about 700 East.” Within these boundaries, Williams said, “bookstores, health clinics, food stores, newspapers were geared for the Queer community and no one gave a rat’s ass what hets might think.”
      The term ghetto is as explosive as the word queer, if not more so, given its 400-year history. The Oxford English Dictionary cites its first usage in 1611 and its meaning as: “The quarter in a city, chiefly in Italy, to which the Jews were restricted.” This denotation has been firmly affixed to the word throughout its history — notoriously so in 1940, when the Germans issued a decree establishing a ghetto in Warsaw, Poland.
      According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The decree required all Jewish residents of Warsaw to move into a designated area …The ghetto was enclosed by a wall that was over ten feet high, topped with barbed wire.” Jews were allowed out of the ghetto only when being deported to the Treblinka extermination camp.
      These chilling images are woven inextricably throughout the term, which now also means, as De Lay said, “Poverty stricken. Blighted.” She is fully opposed to the use of the word, and prefers instead the much lighter gayborhood. “Ghetto has such a negative connotation,” De Lay said. “We have gay neighborhoods here; they’re certainly not blighted. Ninth and Ninth is not blighted. Capitol Hill is not blighted. I think it’s more common to hear the word gayborhood than ghetto.”
      “[If you were to] see a ghetto in New York City, and then you were to come back to Salt Lake and say, ‘Show me a ghetto,’ you couldn’t. There’s nothing like it. We don’t have streets full of trash. We don’t have tagging [gang graffiti] on virtually every single house and every single doorstep. We don’t have streets and streets of abandoned housing that are crack houses. We have tiny areas like that but not ghettos — so I don’t like that term,” De Lay said, stubbing out her cigarette definitively.
      Williams sticks to his guns: “The ghetto concept in the 1980s had a political meaning: safety in numbers and all that. In Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, they capture the meaning when he says that the gay urban community protects homosexuals from the heteros of suburbia. The same people who had a problem with ghetto usually felt the same [about] queer. Empowerment [means] taking words and reshaping them to define ourselves.”
      “To build community,” Williams continued, “it was necessary to gather together. I personally think people my age feel something is lost, almost like being isolated again now [that] there’s such a dispersal back into the great hetero masses.”
      Have these so-called gay ghettos become a thing of the past? Is Pacheco’s neighborhood an anomaly? Can we band together again, as we have in the past, to create these gayborhoods? And, more importantly, should we?
      De Lay calls this movement “a great ideal,” but not one that is at all feasible. “There is a huge segment of gays out there that have no wealth and still want to be homeowners and they are buying property wherever they can afford it. So if they’re not turning places into gayborhoods, they’re just desperately seeking affordable property. It’s the largest purchase of your life and you’re going to get the best deal in the best neighborhood that you can.”
      For the same reasons, De Lay also writes off as fantasy the tactic of moving a large group of gays into a conservative neighborhood in order to sway that district’s politics to the left: “You’re not going to see a bunch of gays moving to Pepperwood, which is a Republican, upper-class stronghold. It’s not gonna happen. You’ll never see that happen. It’s a wonderful ideal, though,” she said again.
      According to De Lay, the most crucial gayborhood has yet to be created: assisted living centers. “The one thing in housing we’re really not thinking about right now is housing for elder gays. I’m turning 50 this year. I’m thinking about it.” De Lay drives a point home that affects each and every one of us: “I know that when I live to be 85, I don’t want to be in assisted living with all weird straight people. I want to be there with gay people.”
      A Salt Lake real estate agent (who asked to remain anonymous) has experienced first hand the reality behind the too-simplified model of gay gentrification. Since he and his partner purchased a home in downtown Salt Lake two years ago, they have funneled $15,000 into its renovation. However, the neighborhood is in such bad shape they worry that they will not see a return on the restorations when they sell their home in the future. “We can’t put a penny more into it. We would’ve renovated the second floor, but we’re not going to get it back.” Their neighborhood is full of rentals that house drug dealers and pimps. “There was a prostitution ring bust on my street a week ago today,” he said, exasperated.
      These men are not the only gay homeowners in the area, but these homes are spread further apart than those in Pacheco’s neighborhood. The agent and his partner have noticed gay flags flying on a couple of homes a block away and he said, “If you see a gay flag, it’s typically the most beautiful house on the block.” Salt Lake homeowners, whether gay or straight, face a major roadblock because, he said, 50 percent of homes in Salt Lake are rentals. “The turnaround, the progression … is slower than I had hoped for,” because the surrounding homeowners and apartment owners aren’t selling.
      “In any major city I’ve ever visited, there is a real impact of the GLBT community on the neighborhoods/districts they claim,” he said. “But here in Salt Lake, because of poor planning and zoning, the number of apartment buildings and duplexes changes the character and direct ownership in the neighborhood — therefore creating this half owner-occupied, half rental situation which deters the self-interest for progress on any given street.” He is insistent, however, upon his belief that change can be wrought with patience and through residents’ willingness to get involved and keep the police informed about any and all suspicious activity.
      “In neighborhood after neighborhood across the country, white gay urban pioneers are taking back the cities after decades of decline and blight,” Boykin writes. “Aided by access to capital not available to many of the long-time rental residents in the communities, many of the newcomers are quickly changing the neighborhoods for better and for worse.”
      As De Lay said, “In the next five years you will see gentrification of Rose Park.” Rose Park, with its (as De Lay termed them) “ratty rental neighborhoods,” could use the face-lift — but at what price to the current residents? How does one ethically conduct a cost-benefit analysis when the numbers being crunched are human beings?