The Morning News needs your support
The Morning News needs your support. Please join us as a Sustaining Member!
Often, when developers come to neighborhoods of color with the intent of buying up property so they can flip it to white people, they aren't particularly subtle about their intentions.
Most developers, though, have the good sense to not name a luxury building they're bankrolling after the very class of people they're hoping to replace current residents with. Not so for Chicago's Villa Capital Properties, which is behind a new office and retail project that was forced to change its name last week because it was literally called "The Gentry." (Dictionary defitinion: A person in good social standing.)
The Gentry is opening in Pilsen, long a welcoming point of entry in Chicago for Mexican immigrants, and ground zero for witnessing creeping gentrification in the city. As the neighborhood gets whiter and whiter, gentrification infects every issue in the neighborhood: yuppie coffee shops are vandalized, new walk and bike trails are regarded with suspicion, and buildings are forced to change their names.
The latest in the chopped cheese media saga: A Manhattan Whole Foods is now selling an $8 version of the $4 Harlem sandwich, which has now been thoroughly and variously investigated and "discovered" with varying degrees of success by white reporters from First We Feast, Business Insider, and the Times.
FWF, Complex Magazine's food site, was easily the most successful:
In Pittsburgh, police were able to identify a young man vandalizing cars in South Side, a historic neighborhood characterized by disputes between European immigrants and the current population of students and yuppies, by his man bun.
Residents of color in Seattle's historic black Central Area attack local businesses with "karmic infraction" notices—though when a kombucha shop and weed dispensary are the symbols of gentrification, it puts the battle in a different context.
