Making the Familiar Unknown Again — When Improvement... Isn’t
This is a post by Amanda Rancourt, who is a member of the RECOVER Project Team.
When I first started working on Recover, we stepped into five inner city neighbourhoods that were considered distressed. Not fashionably so, like the artfully torn new jeans that old timers scoff at, but like the old timers’ jeans, threadbare from hard work and struggle, held together with patches. Patches stitched in to maintain the status quo, while also serving to highlight where the rub points are.
These neighbourhoods were filled with social service agencies, and also filled with the problems that the social services arose to address. When a decision was made to add a cluster of safe injection sites within these neighbourhoods (and nowhere else in the city), the residents cried out strongly enough that Recover, an approach to urban wellness, was born.
We came in to learn what the communities knew, what they wanted, and how we could work together to improve these neighbourhoods and the wellbeing of the residents - all residents, those with and without houses.
“Please, I want to be able to walk in my neighbourhood without stepping over needles and feces, but please don’t gentrify me out of my home, or business.”
Something that kept cropping up in these discussions with residents was the fear of gentrification. “Please, I want to be able to walk in my neighbourhood without stepping over needles and feces, but please don't gentrify me out of my home, or business.”
I am aware of the dark side of gentrification, but I still found myself shaking my head in bemusement - this is one of the only spaces where property values rising is spoken of as a negative. Isn't that the battle cry of the NIMBYs? "You must think of our property values!" And yet, sitting with folks who are living on the razors edge, an increase in property values could mean losing their home.
I was reminded of this again recently, as two of these neighbourhoods are scheduled for a process called neighbourhood renewal. Neighbourhood renewal is a city infrastructure improvement program for older neighbourhoods, where sidewalks, roads, street lights and other public infrastructure are upgraded in one big sweep - with some property tax implications.
I’ve always thought of this program as a great thing - and I still do. In the grand scheme of city building, renewal is necessary, though it can be painful for some. But now I find myself so much more aware of the costs of these improvements on not just the most vulnerable (homeless), but those who live nearest them. The residents, tenants and businesses who will not be able to afford the increase in property taxes, and the potential for increased competition as the infrastructure improvements make the area more desirable.
Where is that line in society where growth and improvement becomes a barrier (and why does it only seem to appear at the lowest levels of the economic scale)?