Many folks see dog parks, cupcakes, bike lanes, and coffee shops as markers for gentrifying neighborhoods. Once these places begin appearing, many longtime residents think: “there goes the neighborhood.”
Oakhurst Dog Park.
It is a safe bet that few Decatur, Ga., residents know Cotis Weaver and Atef Mansour. Despite their relative anonymity, both men occupy important places in the city’s land use history. In 2003 Weaver and a handful of residents in the city’s Oakhurst neighborhood fired the first shot in Decatur’s 21st century gentrification wars when they sued the city over a proposed rezoning and subdivision. Mansour, in 2005 and 2006, made headlines when he demolished a 1,450-square-foot one-story Lamont Drive home on the city’s north side and began building a 5,000-square-foot two-story replacement. Both cases illustrate one role race plays in Decatur’s hot real estate market and the different outcomes of opposition to new development. Continue reading
I’m a troll, so say residents of Decatur, Georgia’s Oakhurst neighborhood.
Why? Because I spoke and wrote on taboo topics: gentrification and racism in their neighborhood while I lived there.
Whether folks see the redevelopment taking place in Oakhurst as destructive gentrification or beneficial neighborhood upgrading, most people on both sides agree that the neighborhood is changing, taxes are rising, and residents are being displaced. If you’re on the neighborhood conservation and social justice side of the table, it’s bad. If you’re on the other side and a property rights defender or work in the real estate/construction business, it’s good. The commentary from both sides may be found in local blogs, community listservs, and in testimony before the city commission.
Some slides from the paper, “From Urban Homesteading to Mazeway Disintegration: Gentrification in Decatur.”
Diversity, displacement, and gentrification were hot topics in Decatur’s newly rebranded Oakhurst neighborhood a generation ago. Then they weren’t.
An urban homesteading property featured in an Atlanta newspaper shortly after rehabilitation (upper left) and the same home in 2012 (lower right).
Oakhurst teardown, February 2014. It is a tangible metaphor for the mazeway disintegration that is underway among residents caught in a cycle of serial forced displacement.
© 2014 D.S. Rotenstein
October 2013 wasn’t the first time the Decatur, Ga., City Commission heard pleas from residents of the gentrifying Oakhurst neighborhood to halt the disintegration of their community. In February 2003 another group of Oakhurst residents asked the City Commission to “have their backs.”
Daulton House, Decatur, Ga., 2011. Photo by author originally published by Patch.
Over the past few years Decatur, Ga., builder Clay Chapman has erected a solid reputation as a designer and builder of baronial brick manses. One of his 2011 projects was built in Decatur’s MAK Historic District. It drew fire from the city’s historic preservation commission and local residents for being out of scale and character with the more modest neighboring historic homes built a century earlier. Continue reading
Gentrification is global. Decatur, Ga., resident Ted Baumann compares and contrasts gentrification and the politics of race and class in his adopted Georgia city and in a post-Apartheid South African suburb in a new two-part National Council on Public History post. From the History@Work post, “Race, politics, and property: Two cases of gentrification”:
My experience in Decatur has been different – especially the absence of any organised resistance in the low-income community to domination by gentrifiers and real estate interests – but remains eerily similar in some ways. Many of those who drove the exclusionary MID agenda in Muizenberg considered themselves socially and politically progressive, just as many Decatur gentrifiers do, and reacted with anger at suggestions of racism. As in Decatur, vicious personal attacks and slander were directed at me and other “treasonous” property owners who sided with the refugee/renter population. And as in Decatur, it was largely impossible to raise issues of equity and social justice with people who reduce all social relationships to impersonal market transactions, regardless of their effects. Continue reading
I think gentrification has made the neighborhood less of a neighborhood — Oakhurst resident, April 2012.
Last week the National Council on Public History released a post on its History@Work site previewing clips from the rough cut of my documentary video, Oakhurst: An Oral History of Gentrification. In its Facebook update announcing the post, the organization noted: “This is what gentrification looks like.”
[Ed. Note: This was originally published in September 2012.]
My wife and I went to sleep one night in 2011 and awoke in a Twilight Zone episode. Back in 2007, anti-preservation activists settled for yard signs, rude emails, and disappearing blogs. Today residents in Decatur, Georgia’s Oakhurst neighborhood who oppose historic preservation and who defend destructive gentrification in their neighborhood anonymously use Twitter and other social media sites to settle scores with folks with whom they disagree. They create and post vulgar and defamatory animated videos that offend their more sensible neighbors and demean their entire community.
Screen capture from one of the fake Twitter accounts. The hyperlink originally pointed to the site xtranormal.com where four offensive animated videos had been created and posted by the individual calling him/herself @OakhurstVillain.
As of this writing, Twitter has suspended three “fake” accounts (the status of a fourth is undetermined); complaints have been filed against others and remedial action by Twitter may be pending against them. Sure, people — myself included — use Twitter for mischief sometimes. Parody accounts and other legal uses abound. But there is a bright line between innocent, albeit boisterous, posting and harassment and defamation. The people in Decatur behind these accounts have crossed that threshold.
Oakhurst does not fit any colloquial or technical definition of “food desert” — “L.T.”, August 4, 2012
L.T. is a 30-something software professional who describes himself as an “amateur economist” in his Twitter profile. He wrote several comments on this blog reacting to a June 2012 post on Oakhurst’s food desert. He strongly objected to my description of his neighborhood as a “food desert.”[1]
After several comments on the blog and private emails, L.T. admitted, “I had never heard of a food desert before you posted about it. I’m just a guy who can read and do math.”[2] This post responds to L.T.’s assertion that Oakhurst’s hip bars and eateries and an overpriced boutique market preclude his neighborhood from being described as a “food desert.”