The Gentrifier's Dilemma: Narrative Strategies and Self–Justifications of Incoming Residents in Bedford–Stuyvesant,Brooklyn

This paper examines how gentrifiers negotiate tensions between the narratives of liberal progressivism they espouse and their role in neighborhood change. Through in–depth interviews with recent residents in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn, this paper identifies patterns in rhetorical strategies and narrative techniques employed by interviewees to manage points of conflict. It finds that gentrifiers express ambivalence and feelings of guilt surrounding their presence in the neighborhood and that they manage this ambivalence through three main strategies: (1) reframing the outcomes of gentrification in positive terms, (2) distinguishing their behaviors and attitudes from the stereotypical “bad” gentrifier, and (3) displacing their responsibility for the process of gentrification onto another group of actors, such as the government or real estate developers. These results provide a framework for understanding how individuals justify their complicity in other processes which they see as morally questionable, such as unethical consumerism.