Donuts and Displacement

I had the experience of walking around Wicker Park in Chicago last spring.  Once rated the 4^th hippest hipster neighborhood in the country, Wicker Park contains the requisite overpriced coffee shops, used book stores, local brew-houses, and boutique donut shops.  Yet there was just enough of that distinct urban edge to make it adventurous and not completely “sold out”.  Urban graffiti/artwork, relentless hustle, and a few half-smoked joints littering the ground made Wicker Park seem comfortably dangerous and unpredictable – enough to energize but not paralyze.

I noticed one thing though, walking around, trying on Levi’s, then eating at a delicious Mexican restaurant; everyone else there looked like myself.  For being so ‘urban’ and ‘progressive’, Wicker Park housed mostly college educated young professionals who want close access to the city but can’t afford to live directly downtown.  Next best? Find an up and coming neighborhood with a cultural tradition inherited from bohemian artists and immigrant families, then slowly start to escalate the price of real estate, slowly pushing them out while boasting about “reclaiming” urban areas.

I’m torn.  I like eating my fancy donuts.  I love exquisitely prepared Mexican cuisine.  And I find the environment of hipster coffee shops more appealing than a generic Starbucks (or worse, Dunkin Donuts).  After all, don’t these things become a fixture of the urban fabric? Shouldn’t we be celebrating that this neighborhood still has a specific culture and sense of place?  I think the answer is yes, but not unconditionally.

Sometimes, I think the cost is too high, since it comes at the expense of the marginalized lower socioeconomic class.  At the risk of sounding melodramatic, this reclamation is the modern urban trail of tears.  Maybe the panacea to the problem of inequality in urban development isn’t one that can be solved by architecture.  Maybe people that move in have just as much of a right to that part of the city as anyone else.  To some extent, everyone is prone to the invisible hand of the real-estate market.  But as I sit and drink my cold-brew coffee, I wonder if we as a society have paid a little too much.