Josh Hughes
On Wednesday, April 25, Western hosted an array of Earth Day related events. The Associated Students Outback Farm hosted a fruit tree planting, a DIY Make & Take eco-friendly product workshop occurred in Red Square and the Viking Union held a clothing swap.
However, the main event of the day was a talk by Majora Carter, an urban revitalization strategy consultant, who’s known for her TED Talk.
Carter is responsible for various green-infrastructure projects, namely throughout her place of birth, South Bronx. Her talk at Western focused on issues of community based poverty and the ways in which urban development can positively impact low income areas.
Titled “Home(Town) Security”, Carter’s talk brought up ideas of talent retention, self-gentrification and “poverty level economic maintenance”.
She opened with a parallel between low income communities and Google, suggesting that neighborhoods might be able to adopt the tech giant’s corporate culture that “ensures loyalty from their teams.”
In this, Carter means that companies like Google make sure that their employees stay loyal, stay happy, and stay producing quality work. In what she calls low status communities, places where “the school’s are poorer, the health statistics are not so great and inequality is assumed,” this idea of brand loyalty doesn’t hold. Instead, she says, those that are smart enough to get out of these low status communities go seek a quality life elsewhere.
“People acknowledge issues within their communities, but they want to get away from them and live in places that meet their aspirations of what a good life is,” said Carter. “If I wanted to leave and pursue my film career that I wanted, no one would’ve blamed me.”
Her idea is that individual success leaves a poor community as quick as it can. However, her talk was dedicated to showing that there are ways to keep that talent in, and create healthy, vibrant communities along the way.
Carter herself took this initiative in 2006 by helping create the Hunts Point Riverside Park in South Bronx. After getting a small grant, Carter and a large group of volunteers created a pristine park in a community that didn’t have anything like it. The park itself ended up winning the Rudy Bruner Award for Excellence in Urban Environment, beating out Millennium Park in Chicago.
The importance of Hunts Point, according to Carter, is that it’s a social gathering area that residents of the Bronx would normally have to travel elsewhere to find. Instead of getting outside contractors and organizations to “urbanize” the neighborhood, Carter and her team worked from inside the community, enlisting local volunteers and community members who wanted to better their neighborhood.
This lead into Carter’s discussion of neighborhood preservation, and the idea that people mistake a culture for that culture’s poverty.
“Is poverty a cultural attribute? Something worth preserving?” read a slide on her Powerpoint. “I’m sure all of our ancestors wanted us to be rich,” she responded.
Carter went on to explain that she’d done extensive research and given surveys to community members in South Bronx about what they wanted to see in their neighborhoods and what they didn’t. Most people responded that they didn’t want health clinics, pharmacies, dog poop, litter and homeless shelters, but that they did want coffee shops, family restaurants and nice parks.
This segued into the central argument of the talk— the two different ways in which neighborhoods economically develop. The first is through gentrification, which occurs when outsiders see potential market value in an economically unstable area. As we all know, this oftentimes leads to displacement of the local community and culture.
The second way that communities can develop, according to Carter, is through “poverty level economic maintenance,” where poverty becomes concentrated because of the patchwork solutions to making it a livable place. In this she means that the “markers” of poverty, such as fast food restaurants and highly-subsidized housing actually promote the growth of poverty itself.
“When you continue to concentrate poverty with all these markers, you also increase all of the problems associated with it,” she said.
This oftentimes leads to gentrification as well, because these continued poverty markers make people want to leave their homes and communities.
“Gentrification starts when we tell all those families that success is measured by how far away you get from it,” she said. “We open the floodgates for other people to come in and then say now this is a good place to be.”
Carter concluded by going back to her own community work in the Bronx.
With her organization Sustainable South Bronx, Carter and her team decided to become developers themselves. They created Birch Coffee, a coffee shop with the highest quality coffee imaginable, all from within the Bronx community.
“We’re reclaiming the blackest beverage on the planet,” she said, before dropping the term “self-gentrification.”
“Because black people like nice things too,” she said.
Carter’s overarching message was to showcase the ways that communities can break against the “talent retention” that so regularly makes smart individuals leave the low-income neighborhoods that raised them. Her talk was a not a call against gentrification, but a call to reclaim culture and community based neighborhoods by working from the inside out.