The Golden Dream (30 page)

The back-to-the-city movement has already had disruptive side effects, because as the middle-class young move back into the urban core, the poor—who were originally forced in—are now being forced out. Not long ago, the
New York Times
reported the cases of two Washington, D.C., neighbors who had never met and yet whose fates were closely linked. One was a twenty-eight-year-old
white architect named Robert Corcoran, and the other was a poor black woman named Beatrice Poindexter, who lived just down the street. Mr. Corcoran, repelled by what he called the “sterility” of suburban living, had bought a run-down house on a mostly black street in Washington's Adams-Morgan section, not far from downtown. He had paid very little for his house, but had the wherewithal to undertake an elaborate plan for its renovation and restoration. All at once, the street became “hot” real estate property, and Miss Poindexter was being evicted from her $84.50 a month apartment because a real estate developer wanted to convert the whole row of houses on her street into “town houses” to sell for $70,000 and up. Miss Poindexter had no idea where she was going to go.

This “resettlement of urban America,” as the sociologists call it, is of course an ironic reversal of the blockbusting that turned many cities black in recent years. In Washington, for example, the 1970 census showed the city to be 71 percent black. In mid-1977, however, the Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies reported that the city had begun to gain white population again, and that most of these newcomers were young, and college-educated, and from the middle and upper middle class. Suddenly, this is a process that is being repeated in many cities—in the South End of Boston, the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, and Queens Village in Philadelphia.

On the one hand, the well-to-do young newcomers are a blessing to the old cities. By rehabilitating once-fine houses, they are reviving decayed neighborhoods. Run-down tenements are being sand-blasted and gutted, fitted with skylights, new plumbing, and air conditioning. Run-down areas become both prettier and safer, and they attract new businesses—all of which help a city's often sagging tax base. But then there is the inexorable consequence. Like displaced war refugees, thousands of the poor are pushed elsewhere, often deeper into the poorer black or Puerto Rican ghettos. Already a torrent of eviction notices is falling on the residents of Adams-Morgan, and the area is now nearly one-third white. It is getting whiter by the day.

Though Beatrice Poindexter does not know Robert Corcoran, she bitterly resents what is happening to her old neighborhood. She refers to the man who gave her a two-week eviction notice as a greedy “speculator,” and it does not help that the particular developer who bought her building happens to be Jewish. Blacks have long distrusted Jews, and regarded them as their natural enemies.
The developer, Jeffrey N. Cohen, sees things somewhat differently and says: “We are not speculators—we are investors and developers.” He insists that he does not buy and then sell houses to run up their prices, a tactic known in real estate circles as “flipping.” Instead, he renovates houses in order to deliver a “quality product,” and gain a good but not excessive profit for himself. Like many developers, he blames the woes of people like Miss Poindexter on the city government, which encourages the middle class to come to—and stay in—town, without making any provision for the poor who are supplanted. “I say the developer has the moral responsibility to pay for an evicted tenant's moving,” says Mr. Cohen, “but he should not have to subsidize them to stay in the area—which is what most of them seem to expect us to do.”

It is, meanwhile, another irony that one of the aspects of the street which Mr. Corcoran particular likes is its “racial diversity”—though he admits that this pleasant diversity will soon disappear as more people like him move into Adams-Morgan. And as more people like Mr. Corcoran move in, it will not only be poor rental tenants who will be displaced. A number of black property owners in the Adams-Morgan area are nervous—but for economic, not racial, reasons. One of these is Robert Corcoran's next-door neighbor, Ernest Gordon, a fifty-four-year-old black man who is a clerk at the Pentagon. Mr. Gordon gets along well with Mr. Corcoran—in fact, the two men are quite friendly—but Mr. Gordon is unhappy with what's happening to his block. The reason is that his property taxes have nearly doubled in the last two years, since Adams-Morgan all at once became chic. The fact that his house has also soared in value does not impress Mr. Gordon, for the simple reason that he has no wish to sell and move. “Where would I go at age fifty-four?” he asks. Still, he may be forced to go—somewhere—if the day comes when he can no longer afford to pay his taxes.

A number of community advocates have been searching for means to allow at least some city residents to buy their houses—cooperatively, perhaps—before prices climb out of reach in neighborhoods like Adams-Morgan. Margarita Suarez, head of Adelante, a Hispanic group in Washington, said before a hearing of the Civil Rights Commission not long ago: “The only way to stay in a community is if you own some of the land, because then you can control what happens on it.” Thus far, however, no way has been found to accomplish this “only way.” Others are more cynical about
the situation. Paul Tauber, a businessman who recently opened—and then sold at a considerable profit—a tavern that caters to the well-heeled newcomers to Adams-Morgan, says that the displacement of the poor by the better off is just “part of city life.” When it happens, it happens. When change occurs, he says, “Someone has to suffer, someone has to lose,” adding that the city, in not making adequate provision for the displaced, “was not reacting to the reality of what is required.” What the reality of what is required
is
, Mr. Tauber does not say.

One requirement that seems obvious is that the cities cannot survive if they are abandoned to the poor. One reality is that city, state, and federal governments have failed so abysmally and systematically in helping the poor that both the middle class and the poor have despaired of this sort of salvation's ever coming from any government at all. Another reality is that government cannot afford to intrude itself into the redevelopment of inner-city life, nor can it afford to leave matters to the realtors and developers with whom government politicians have worked so profitably hand-under-the-table-in-hand.

Neighborhoods, throughout history, have always had an uncanny ability to care for themselves. Even the most egregious-looking block in Harlem has its sense of neighborhood. But when, under the guise of slum clearance or better housing, these old neighborhoods have been razed and replaced with government housing projects, the results have been, without exception, disastrous. On the other hand, old neighborhoods have been, and can be, revived by individuals in the neighborhoods themselves. Salvation of the cities can be accomplished through personal involvement—people in neighborhoods being encouraged to work
for
their neighborhoods. City politicians must realize that only the middle and upper classes—not the poor—can rebuild cities, but they can do so only if the terms are made attractive to them, if they are not penalized for upgrading neighborhoods through increased taxes, and if they are convinced that the money they spend will allow them to live a life free of terror. Encouraging the rich to come back to the city, and not penalizing poorer property owners like Mr. Gordon by doubling his taxes in two years' time because he happens to live on a street that is taking on an air of swank, should not result in the displacement of the poor. Instead, such neighborhood renewal should create more jobs for the poor, which would give them more money to live wherever they chose—in the suburbs, for example.
Though there are doubtless some who would say that this approach to urban renewal would never work, it must be conceded that it has never been tried on any sort of consistent basis. And meanwhile, in neighborhoods like Adams-Morgan, the rich and the poor, the white and the black, circle each other like suspicious dogs, sniffing and snarling at one another.

Elsewhere, this sort of thing happens: In the Mount Adams section of Cincinnati, a number of people have bought old houses and expensively renovated them. The neighborhood has not “gone rich” in any sense, but less affluent neighbors have caught the newcomers' spirit and have added decorative touches, such as window boxes, to their houses, and all at once, a formerly dowdy neighborhood has taken on an air of turn-of-the-century graciousness. One Mount Adams man, who is not rich, owns an empty lot next to his house which he operates as a small parking lot, and from which he derives a small income. Recently the city raised his taxes on the lot, offering as an explanation: “A nice house could be built there.” Now the owner of the lot is forced to raise his parking rates, and this neither helps the garage-less, less well off neighbors who use his lot, nor does much to build good feeling in the neighborhood. “If cities would leave neighborhoods alone,” he says, “neighborhoods would get along just fine.” Which makes more than a little sense.

One wonders what the next generation—Mr. Corcoran's children, say, if he has children—of the affluent in-city people will do. Will city life lose its luster for them, will rising taxes push them outward to some unnamed suburb of the future? Will neighborhoods like Adams-Morgan and Mount Adams in time become slums again—the rich and the poor shifting backward and forward against each other as inexorably as the tides of Lake Erie? After all, once upon a time Adams-Morgan was a good address. Then it deteriorated. Now it has become fashionable again. Are American life and American living always to be engaged in this seesaw interaction? Some city planners believe so. “The traditional approach in America is that we use up places, and then move on,” says Harvey S. Perloff, dean of architecture and urban planning at the University of California at Los Angeles. When Adams-Morgan is “used up,” the likes of Robert Corcoran will find another address.

Of course, if the direst predictions about future shortages of fuel and energy come true, the suburbs will be in even deeper trouble. There will be no gasoline for the automobiles that propelled the
rush to the suburbs in the first place, and are still the suburbs' lifeline. There will be no gas for the power mowers that manicure suburban lawns, to say nothing of fuel for heating swimming pools. But meanwhile the suburbs continue to expand and proliferate. At latest count there were more than twenty thousand suburban communities in the United States, and the number grows daily. It has been estimated that the suburban population in the last fifteen years has accounted for 75 percent of the nation's growth. The suburbs are emerging as our newest majority. As Samuel Kaplan, director of the New York City Educational Construction Fund says: “The quintessence of America is now suburbia. It is in suburbia that most of the nation's growth is occurring—in population, in jobs, and in power. After growing from a nation of farms to a nation of cities, it is clear from all signs that America has become a nation of suburbs.”

To be able to “move on” is a luxury that is still not affordable by everyone. It is a truism to say that the rich have always had it better than the poor, and that the haves—at every level of society and at every stage of history—have had more mobility than the have-nots, whether the move is by camel caravan or air-conditioned limousine. It is also true that the American rich are often bored, often restless. It seems certain that the restless privileged of America will never be content to be settled in one place for very long, and will always be pushing outward or inward—into the bustling cities one moment, out to the wooded hills the next, searching for something of the past with one hand and something of the future with another, in pursuit of some suburbia of the mind, chasing the dream of the good life, the
perfect
life, that must exist, or be made to exist, on some patch of real estate or another. Hooked into the dream of the “upwardly mobile”—a term we Americans invented—is the certainty that whatever inconveniences life may present us at the moment, wherever we may be, this, too, shall pass. To help it pass, we move on. To a new house in, we hope, a better neighborhood.

Index

ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals),
96
,
97

Adams, John Quincy,
45

Adams-Morgan section of Washington, D.C.,
200–203

Adelante,
201

age of suburbanites, average,
197

Ailey, Alvin,
143

alcohol, availibility of:

in Hudson, Ohio,
34

in Salt Lake City, Utah,
22–23

Ali, Muhammad,
5

Allen, Ivan,
81

Allen O'Neill Drive, Darien, Conn.,
103–104

Alta Club, Salt Lake City, Utah,
27

Amberley Village, Ohio,
51

American Bar Association,
76

American Psychiatric Association,
188

American Yacht Club,
80–81
,
117
,
120
,
173

Anderson, James Bonbright,
35

Anderson, William P.,
149

Annenberg, Walter H.,
134
,
139

Anti-Defamation League, Southern Council,
72
,
76

anti-Semitism,
78–82

in Atlanta clubs,
68–73

See also
Jews, acceptance of

Apawamis Golf Club,
78
,
120
,
173

Archbold, John,
127

Ardmore, Pa.,
134

Ardsley Club,
129

Arizona Ballet,
15

Arizona Republic
,
15

Arizona State University,
13
,
15

art museums, as means of social entry,
177