‘Mexicans love red’ and other gentrification myths: Displacements and contestations in the gentrification of Pilsen,Chicago,USA

Abstract

Chinese

This article uses experiences from a decade-long community-based research project in the Pilsen neighbourhood of Chicago, a Mexican-American neighbourhood whose residents are both experiencing and resisting gentrification, to show how displacements and contestations evolve in conversation with each other in an iterative process we could call ‘actually existing’ gentrifications. I analyse a series of ‘moments’ in 13 years of research in Pilsen to illustrate the constantly shifting terrain of gentrification politics, covering not just housing affordability, but the nature of identity, democracy and belonging. As communities develop resistance strategies to gentrification, so too do city planners, policy makers and developers adapt to these community strategies to reframe their vision of the community. In highlighting both the success of community resistance in mitigating some of the worst effects of gentrification and the co-optation of some of these same strategies in the reframing of gentrification, my goal is to show that gentrification is rarely ever done or complete but is continuously enacted and resisted, challenging the idea that gentrification is somehow inevitable.

Keywords

built environment community displacement/gentrification neighbourhood planning

Introduction

In a commentary on the crises in gentrification research, Davidson (2011) has argued that there is an outstanding question of how to think about the status of gentrified neighbourhoods. Gentrification is a long, drawn out process which entails a series of displacements and resistance strategies that shape how it takes place in particular urban neighbourhoods. The focus in the gentrification research on finding the next frontier, deciding what is or what is not gentrification or developing a new terminology of gentrification leaves the status of neighbourhoods experiencing gentrification depoliticised, lending an air of inevitability to the process (Davidson, 2011). My goal here is to follow Davidson’s call to politicise the process, to open up the black box of how gentrification is rolled out in one urban neighbourhood, unpacking the urban policies and developer strategies as well as the community contestations that result in an uneven landscape of gentrification. I do this to highlight that gentrification is an iterative process, a constantly evolving struggle between developers and community members in which resistance is crucial, even if success is partial. As communities develop resistance strategies to gentrification, so do city planners, policy makers and developers adapt to these community strategies to reframe their vision of the community in an iterative process we could call ‘actually existing’ gentrifications (via Brenner and Theodore, 2002).

I draw upon 13 years of research in the Pilsen neighbourhood of Chicago to illustrate the ways in which gentrification and resistance operate in relationship to each other. Pilsen is a Mexican and Mexican-American enclave on Chicago’s near southwest side, not far from the downtown ‘Loop’. Pilsen has long been a port of entry community for immigrants to the city, historically for Czech and Bohemian immigrants (hence the name Pilsen after the Czech city of Plzen), with an influx of Mexican immigrants since the 1950s. It has been battling redevelopment plans from the city and developers since the 1960s (Betancur, 2005) and has been experiencing gentrification since the 1990s. Since 2004, I have conducted community-based research with the Pilsen Alliance, a social justice organisation dedicated to developing grassroots leadership around the issues of affordable housing, quality public education, government accountability and environmental justice. The experiences I share here are the result of this long-term collaboration and serve to show how gentrification occurs over an extended period of time in ways that are both incremental and fast, quotidian and monumental. While Pilsen is visibly different from the neighbourhood I first encountered in the summer of 2004, it is not as changed as one might expect given the intensity with which Pilsen has been targeted by speculative capital, predominantly from outside of the neighbourhood and, increasingly, from outside Chicago.

As recent gentrification research has demonstrated, the displacements caused by gentrification go far beyond physical displacement from a neighbourhood. Much of the experience of displacement from gentrification is about the loss of culture (de Oliver, 2016), public space (Langegger, 2016; Rahder and McLean, 2013), cultural capital and social networks (Manzo et al., 2008; Shaw and Hagemans, 2015), job opportunities (Curran, 2004, 2007) and commercial landscapes (Anguelovski, 2015; Rankin and McLean, 2015) and the ability to participate in neighbourhood processes (Davidson, 2008; Fraser, 2004; Hyra, 2015; Martin, 2007).

Yet, the ability of working-class residents to remain in the neighbourhood at all is at least in part because activism works. Resistance to gentrification and displacement is necessary to ensure a right to the city. Contesting gentrification is possible, and the need for it is constant (see for example Betancur, 2005). The success of community resistance in mitigating some of the worst effects of gentrification should not be used as an excuse to accept gentrification as an unalloyed good or to present resistance as unnecessary and obsolete. Using the longitudinal experience from the Pilsen case study, I show that gentrification is constituted by a series of processes that are constantly shifting and contested. The experience of the neighbourhood goes beyond a simple choice of gentrified or not, displaced or not. The fight against gentrification is a continuation of historic struggles for housing rights, environmental justice and political inclusion that prioritise the experience of people over the way a place looks. My purpose then is to explore how resistance strategies can help to shape the extent to which and the way in which gentrification occurs, and how developers and the city adapt to these strategies to create actually existing geographies of gentrification.

Displacements

Displacement was central to Ruth Glass’ (1964) original definition of gentrification, in which she cites displacement as the primary effect of gentrification, noting, ‘Once this process of “gentrification” starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed’. But this same definition shows that displacement need not only be about physical displacement, but also the social character of the neighbourhood.

While the debate over the degree to which gentrification causes physical displacement will no doubt continue (e.g. Freeman et al., 2016; Newman and Wyly, 2006; Slater, 2006; see Florida, 2015 for a quick review), this change in social character is what we notice most about gentrification, whether we are casual observers or experts in the field. The fight over the numbers of displaced residents distracts from this larger issue and ignores a fundamental question, one of social justice – how many people can be displaced before it becomes a problem (Davidson, 2008)? Who has the right to stay put (Newman and Wyly, 2006)?

As Davidson (2009: 225–226) observes, the current discussion of displacement has become an increasingly abstracted empirical battleground that has lost touch with the meaning of displacement; we therefore need ‘to reassert the place in displacement’ (emphasis in original) and engage with the question of how place making activities are changed/destroyed and commodified by gentrification. Davidson (2008) offers indirect economic displacement (mounting affordability pressures), community displacement (the ability to define local politics) and neighbourhood resource displacement (the changing orientation of neighbourhood services) as under-researched forms of displacement that accomplish out-of-place-ness for long-term residents without necessarily accomplishing physical displacement.

Shaw and Hagemans (2015) detail the ways in which these more everyday displacements affect low-income residents in a neighbourhood in Melbourne. They find that the loss of meeting places, neighbours and familiar services like shops, plus the nature of local social governance, is profoundly disruptive, leading to a loss of sense of place without any means with which to find a new one. They find this dislocation to be just as distressing as physical relocation, profoundly affecting residents’ sense of safety and belonging, even in a local context in which their housing affordability was secure. This particularly affects those most dependent on local services such as senior citizens, women with children and other caretakers and recent immigrants.

In focusing on the more everyday, we can see that it is not just the big new development that causes displacement, but a series of more seemingly minor occurrences: the closure of a local shop, community agency or neighbourhood school; the replacement of these things with visible markers of gentrification, like a Whole Foods, as in the example of Jamaica Plain, Boston, which led Latinx residents to express feelings of displacement and alienation, creating a new landscape of environmental injustice (Anguelovski, 2015). Langegger (2016) details the ways in which other overlooked spaces like streets, alleys and pavements, and unsexy policies like parking and alcohol licensing, accomplish the community displacement of long-term Latinx residents by allowing gentrifiers to reproduce their cultural norms in public place.

This transformation of the neighbourhood landscape is often presented as beneficial for all residents. A Philadelphia Federal Reserve (Ding et al., 2015) study finds, for example, that the credit scores of low-income residents in gentrifying neighbourhoods are higher. NYU’s Furman Center (Dastrup et al., 2015) study on the effects of neighbourhood change on public housing residents found that residents of public housing surrounded by high-income neighbours experienced better schools, lower crime and higher incomes. But, of course, to experience these benefits one has to be able to stay in place. These beneficial effects show the need for guaranteed affordable housing and serve just as much to argue for increasing the supply of subsidised housing as to celebrate the benefits of gentrification. The degree to which these benefits accrue to long-term residents will vary by neighbourhood.

While public housing residents in the NYU study appreciated the benefits, they also felt a profound sense of anxiety, loss and alienation as well as an exponential increase in their daily expenses (Navarro, 2015). The Philadelphia study (Ding et al., 2015) finds that those who are most vulnerable to displacement end up in much poorer neighbourhoods. While these studies find benefits, they also acknowledge the way in which gentrification contributes to gaps in income inequality and the uneven development of the urban landscape. Cortright and Mahmoudi (2014), among others, argue that it is concentrated poverty rather than gentrification that is the real problem facing cities, but of course these are two sides of the same coin (Florida, 2015). What came before gentrification is actively devalued; the neighbourhoods are presented as broken, in need of fixing by an influx of the middle class (Anguelovski, 2015). This ignores the socially embedded community found in many low-income neighbourhoods. Manzo et al.’s (2008) work with public housing residents facing displacement found a strong sense of belonging among residents, leading to active practices of mutual assistance and material exchange that were part of a larger sense of security. Rather than celebrate these neighbourhoods, their displacement is normalised, with the previous history of a neighbourhood providing merely a ‘ready-made aesthetic’ (Davidson and Lees, 2005).

These displacements do not go uncontested. Neighbourhood activists continue to press their own claims for place and discourse about the neighbourhood (e.g. Anguelovski, 2015) that reveal other ways of ‘knowing their place’ and sustaining community (Pearsall, 2012; Rahder and McLean, 2013). While these contestations are rarely able to undo gentrification, they are crucial to preventing the wholesale displacement of entire neighbourhoods. The following moments from a decade of struggle in Pilsen highlight the interplay between the quotidian displacements and commodifications of place and activists’ attempts to alter them.

Pilsen

Pilsen is one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Chicago, with buildings that survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Long a port of entry community, Pilsen was the first majority Latinx community in the city of Chicago, with primarily Mexicans moving to the area when urban renewal and highway construction displaced them from surrounding communities in the 1960s (Betancur and Kim, 2016). To this day, Pilsen’s defining feature is its Mexican-ness. According to Betancur and Kim (2016), once the neighbourhood experienced this influx of Mexican immigrants, it was considered an area of ‘slum and blight’, and saw a rise in slumlordism, redlining and disinvestment. Pilsen residents remember the prevalence of signs that read ‘No dogs or Mexicans’ in businesses around Chicago when Mexican immigrants arrived in the 1950s and 1960s. They remember that banks would not give mortgages in Pilsen (Webber, 2003). The uniqueness of modern day Pilsen is very much the result of the ways in which racism articulated with other relations to make place (Pulido et al., 1996).

Part of the attraction of Pilsen for these immigrants was the availability of work. Pilsen has a strong industrial character, with the Pilsen Industrial Corridor along the Chicago River serving as the southern boundary of the neighbourhood. The industries in Pilsen served as a source both of jobs and of the pollution that still affects the neighbourhood. The Fisk power plant, a coal burning power plant opened in 1903 that closed in 2012, was second on the list of top environmental justice offenders disproportionately affecting people of colour in a report on coal plants by the NAACP (NAACP, Indigenous Environmental Network and LVEJO, 2012). A metal smelter is a significant contributor to lead contamination in the area, including at a neighbourhood high school (Hawthorne, 2015).

Despite these negative elements to the physical landscape in Pilsen, the area has long been targeted for development and gentrification under consecutive urban administrations that have been unabashedly pro-development (Betancur, 2005; Betancur and Kim, 2016; Wilson et al., 2004) The neighbourhood is close to the Chicago ‘Loop’, the city’s central business district, and lies just south of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and the University Village development, a market-rate housing and retail complex. The neighbourhood is accessible by major highways, as well as by public transit. Given the gentrification of other similar neighbourhoods, it is now the frontier of profitability (Smith, 1996).

Pilsen has been offered in the literature as a model of a gentrifying urban neighbourhood, in terms of both resistance and accommodation. Wilson et al. (2004) cite Pilsen’s strong Mexican identity as a powerful tool in the ‘save community’ discourse at play in the fight against gentrification in Pilsen. Its Mexican-ness helped give it the reputation of a ‘ready-to-rumble neighbourhood’ (Wilson et al., 2004: 1184) where developers feared that virulent street tactics, such as harassment of gentrifiers, would make development projects risky. Other neighbourhoods were gentrified before Pilsen because they were perceived as places in which it was easier to do business. This strong Mexican identity is visible in murals and the commercial landscape, as well as literally on the street, where bronze Aztec sun calendars are embedded in the pavements (Figure 1) as a neighbourhood branding strategy (which many residents consider disrespectful since people are walking on them). This ethnic identity is celebrated even as the gentrification of the neighbourhood has served to both physically and culturally displace Mexican-Americans from the area.

Figure 1.

Aztec calendar embedded in the pavement.

This strategy was then co-opted as Pilsen became a desirable ethnoscape, in which a recodified and sanitised version of ‘Latinoness’ is used to attract development (Anderson and Sternberg, 2013; Sternberg and Anderson, 2014). The ethnic claim to space that was previously a strategy of resistance to gentrification (see Wilson et al., 2004) has been adapted by pro-gentrification forces who now incorporate a celebration of Mexican culture into the selling of both individual developments and the neighbourhood at large. These gentrification efforts seek to redefine the Mexican experience as one of a successful climb to the middle class, so that those who seek to preserve the working-class experience of struggle written into the landscape of Pilsen are backwards, not Mexican but ‘ghetto’, embracing the culture of poverty. Members of the Pilsen Alliance were referred to as ‘poverty pimps’ by a supporter of the local alderman (email correspondence, November 2015). This practice is not only discursive; it is enacted on the landscape, removing the ability of the working class to remain in the neighbourhood through zoning changes and other urban policies that remove the housing stock and industrial employment that have sustained Pilsen as a Mexican-American enclave. Gentrifying the immigrant city requires rewriting the history of the city and fundamentally remaking the urban landscape to enforce a postindustrial family and labour structure (Nast, 2002) that recognises culture only as something to consume. The commodification of the ethnic enclave ignores the history of racism and economic struggle that forged the unique identity of that place. Now, Pilsen’s success as an ethnic enclave has led to displacement in multiple forms. Between 2000 and 2010, Pilsen lost 19% of its population, with Latinxs constituting the majority of those leaving the neighbourhood as more white households move in (CMAP, 2015). Household size is declining (CMAP, 2015) indicating a replacement of larger Latinx families with singles or couples without children. But to simplify the experience of change to these numbers misses the complexity of what is happening in the everyday.

Methods

I started working in Pilsen in 2004 as part of a community-based service learning class with the Pilsen Alliance, a grassroots organisation founded in 1998 in response to fears of gentrification resulting from the expansion of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) just north of Pilsen and the declaration of a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district. While Pilsen has a strong tradition of community organising, with many effective organisations serving the neighbourhood, the Pilsen Alliance is the group most focused on contesting gentrification. The partnership began as the Pilsen Alliance was looking for a way to quantify how gentrification was happening in Pilsen. In this undergraduate class, students collected data about area buildings to document changes in building conditions, sales prices, property taxes and zoning (Curran and Hague, 2006; Curran et al., 2013; Hague et al., 2008). I developed the assessment tool with the staff of the Pilsen Alliance. The findings from the building inventory revealed specific ways in which Pilsen was being targeted for development, namely zoning. This discovery led to a series of community meetings and workshops about planning tools such as a zoning in which I was a participant observer, presenting both the facts of our research as well as potential strategies to counter gentrification. I soon came to participate in strategic planning for the Pilsen Alliance, a relationship that has continued through leadership changes at the organisation. My interactions with the residents of Pilsen occurred within this context.

My conversations with Pilsen residents have most often been informal and unstructured. They occurred during community meetings, strategy sessions and impromptu meetings on the street. When I first started work in Pilsen, there was some resistance to the fact that I am white and do not speak Spanish. I do not live in Pilsen. Long-term residents did not want a white academic teaching them about their neighbourhood. I had to win them over with my actions, by showing up consistently over time and matching my research to community needs rather than imposing my agenda on them (bonding, as a baseball fan, over the Chicago White Sox 2005 World Series win also helped). I became a resource for the Pilsen Alliance, rather than just an outside ‘expert’ telling them what to do. Over time, I became a fixture at community meetings whether I was presenting or not. In this role as participant observer, I collected field notes that inform and shape this research. I have conducted multiple interviews with key organisers with the Pilsen Alliance. This interaction was most intensive from 2004 to 2006, during which time I went to dozens of community meetings and smaller strategy sessions. The Great Recession cooled speculation in the area, and organising around gentrification was less intensive during those years. My engagement increased again around 2012 and peaks as specific developments or policies come to the fore.

I have also conducted a discourse analysis on the representation of Pilsen in the English language press, specifically the two major daily newspapers, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, as well as the Chicago Reader, a free weekly, and DNAinfo online, which all actively engage in the social construction of the idea of Pilsen and shape the popular debate about the gentrification of the neighbourhood, as well as policy documents from planning organisations in Chicago (CMAP, Metropolitan Planning Council) to compare the popular and policy narratives with the experiences of those living in Pilsen and my experience working there. These sources were chosen because they were popularising ideas about Pilsen and gentrification in powerful enough ways that the Pilsen Alliance felt compelled to respond and adapt their strategies accordingly. This analysis was most intensive in 2004–2006, when I collected every article that mentioned Pilsen in the paper sources mentioned above, and has continued in relationship to particular development projects, events or policy developments since.

Displacements and contestations in Pilsen

Defining Mexican-ness

While the number of Mexicans has declined since 2000, the most heated debates around gentrification have focused on who or what is or is not Mexican. Visual representations of Mexican-ness celebrate the diversity of the neighbourhood even as the culture of the place is transformed by gentrification. The ability to shape the narrative about what Mexican-ness means helps to determine who the neighbourhood is for; debates over ethnic identity came to dominate more substantive questions about affordability and the right of working-class residents to stay put.

One of the best examples of this was the way a development, Chantico Lofts, was sold to the neighbourhood in 2005. Originally planned as Timber Loft Condominiums, the developer renamed the project after criticisms that the development did not fit into the existing community. While critics were referring to the density and affordability of the project, the developer took this criticism to mean that the project was not ‘Mexican’ enough and thus renamed it Chantico Lofts after the Aztec goddess of hearth and home. At a community meeting in February 2005, neighbourhood residents were also assured that the developer would help to rehabilitate a mural of the Virgin of Guadalupe across the street from the development. Additional concessions were made to the ethnic character of the neighbourhood: the windows, originally planned to be black, would now be red because ‘Mexicans love red’ (according to the developer’s lawyer); an Aztec pattern, also in red, would be painted along the upper level of the building (Figure 2); and finally, an Aztec-themed mural would be prominent in the lobby. Those present at the meeting at which these changes were announced, well over 100 residents, were frustrated that the developers and the alderman continued to misunderstand the community’s desire for the development to fit in with the neighbourhood as an architectural concern rather than a social justice issue.

Figure 2.

Aztec pattern on Chantico Lofts. Part of the word manufacturing is visible on the brick, alluding to the building’s and the neighbourhood’s history.

This over-simplified version of Pilsen’s Mexican-ness ignored the very real social and economic problems with the project. The most obvious of these was the cost of the condominiums in Chantico Lofts and the effect these higher prices would have on surrounding property values and property taxes. Affordability was used as a selling point for the development, a response to the successful community opposition to previous large-scale developments. Eleven of the 42 units were designated as affordable to residents making less than US$52,000, the median income for Chicago at the time (Belisomo and Hester, 2005). Pilsen, however, had a median income of around US$27,000. The condos, with sale prices ranging from US$150,000 to US$385,000, were far out of reach for the average Pilsen resident. The type of housing was also inappropriate for existing Pilsen residents, with seven one-bedroom and only four two-bedroom units designated as affordable, suitable perhaps to a single professional, but not the extended families typical in Pilsen.

The Chantico Lofts project threatened not just the housing market in Pilsen, but potentially the job market. While the structure was empty at the time of conversion, the project was converting what had been an industrial site, the Lerner Box Company, into relatively high-priced condominiums. Due to an anomaly in the Chicago zoning map, the Lerner site was on land zoned for residential use even though it had been operated as a light industrial site since the 1950s. The developer would thus be able to convert the site to residential use with no community input. The only reason there was any public process in relationship to this project was that the developer was requesting a zoning change to allow for higher density development, from an RT-4 to RM-5 zoning designation. The effect of this kind of high-income and high-density residential development on the job structure in Pilsen was a primary concern of the Pilsen Alliance. As a working-class neighbourhood from its beginnings, Pilsen has always relied on the factories in the neighbourhood to provide employment for its residents. While that employment has fallen off as a result of the widespread deindustrialisation of Chicago, it remains an important economic sector in Pilsen. Even properties in Pilsen’s Planned Manufacturing District (PMD) are now considered vulnerable to residential rezoning.

The argument in favour of the condos did not fundamentally address affordability and employment concerns but rather fell back on ethnicity. At the June 2005 City Council Committee on Zoning meeting at which the zoning change requested by the developer was approved, Pilsen’s pro-development alderman, Danny Solis, made his argument this way:

One of the key reasons [I support the project] is that 90% of the units have been sold to people who are from the community or who had left the community and most of them are Hispanic … I think it is a no brainer and I support it wholeheartedly. (Lo Verde Reporting Service, 2005)

No data was ever provided to support this claim. (At the community meeting in February 2005, one young Latina, speaking in favour of the project as someone who had been born in Pilsen and wanted to move back, turned out to be an employee of the developer).

The idea of a solid, immigrant, industrial working-class community was treated by the Committee as at best quaint, and at worst delusional and reactionary, with one alderman accusing the Pilsen Alliance of wanting to rewrite the constitution. Rather, the committee argued for a market-orientated approach to urban planning that recognised community opposition only as an ‘interesting exercise in democracy’. One councillor told those assembled by the Pilsen Alliance to protest the project, ‘We dictate the rules. We write the rules and you don’t answer me. We tell you’ (Lo Verde Reporting Service, 2005).

Democracy in action

The Pilsen Alliance’s grassroots activism has focused on building community capacity and leadership skills to demonstrate the extent of community resistance to gentrification. One tool has been the ballot box. The Pilsen Alliance has used ballot referendums to challenge the way the neighbourhood is changing and demand more transparency to the process. The results show community resistance to the way gentrification is happening in Pilsen. But gentrification is not a democratic process.

Gentrification need not always come in the form of the big new development. Overwhelmingly, the gentrification of Pilsen has taken place through smaller-scale conversions that have taken place because of Chicago’s zoning code. Pilsen is over-zoned, meaning that much of the neighbourhood is zoned for multi-unit residences with a higher floor to area ratio (FAR) than the current usage of the neighbourhood. Many of the buildings with this RT-4 zoning designation are at a much lower density than that zoning designation allows. The building inventory conducted by our service learning class showed 300 single family homes zoned RT-4. This mismatch between zoning and actual use means that developers can buy a single family home, demolish it and rebuild three- to four-story condominiums or rental units in its place, all without any community or city zoning board approval (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

The mismatch between longstanding housing stock and what the zoning code allows.

This mismatch between zoning and actual land usage has resulted in a large number of teardowns in Pilsen, so much so that the entire neighbourhood of Pilsen was declared one of the seven most endangered sites in Chicago by Preservation Chicago in 2006. In a rather romantic rendering that captures the vitality and diversity of street life, Preservation Chicago (www.chicagopreservation.org) described Pilsen this way:

Taking a stroll down any street attests to the viability of a neighbourhood that must be preserved, in its entirety, at all costs. The simple act of turning a corner can reveal a mural exploding from the side of a building … In a neighbourhood starved for green space, the street becomes a ball field and chairs hastily borrowed from the kitchen table instantly transform the pavement into a welcoming front porch … what would be an ordinary pavement sale in any other Chicago neighbourhood, in Pilsen becomes an outdoor Bazaar. Pushcarts selling ices and other delectable Mexican treats ply the streets … and a constant chorus of children’s voices underscores it all.

This illustrates that far more than buildings can be lost when teardowns occur. The experience of teardowns in Pilsen is in keeping with a Chicago-wide study which found that smaller, older frame buildings with less lot coverage had a higher probability of being demolished in gentrifying neighbourhoods (Weber et al., 2006). The same study finds that there is also an ethnic dimension to the geography of teardowns, with neighbourhoods which experienced a decline in the share of Hispanic residents between 1990 and 2000 being clear candidates for demolition, a finding the authors link with the displacement of Hispanics through condominium conversion.

The extent of teardowns and condominium conversions affects the residents of Pilsen not just in increasing rents and property values; it affects the social reproduction of the working-class family. It is architectural expulsion. For generations, the housing stock of Pilsen helped to stabilise immigrant working-class families by providing opportunities for both secure housing tenure and income. An affordable single family home allowed extended families to live together and thus save money on housing while strengthening family ties and social networks. The large stock of two-flat houses in the area allowed certain families to perhaps make it to the middle class by securing an income through rental of the home’s second unit. These homeowners then also helped to ensure a supply of affordable rental housing, with long-term Pilsen homeowners often renting at very affordable rates because they remember what it is like to be a young family struggling. The removal of this housing stock then removes the opportunity for stability and affordability in this historic port of entry neighbourhood.

The feedback from community meetings at which I was a participant observer, in which strategies such as community land trusts, historic preservation districts and property tax caps were discussed, resulted in a downzoning referendum. The Pilsen Alliance collected 550 signatures in order to put a referendum on the March 2006 ballot. The referendum read, ‘Shall the Alderman of the 25th Ward and the City Council downzone Pilsen from RT-4 to RS-3, to slow down gentrification?’. The referendum passed with 75% of the vote, a clear indication that teardowns, luxury condo construction and the gentrification that result are a major concern for Pilsen residents. Zoning is only a very blunt tool in the fight against gentrification. It does not insure the affordability of housing, but it does try to dampen the speculative pressure on real estate prices in neighbourhoods which are zoned for a higher density than current usage.

The alderman (who was elected with 51% of the vote) made his opposition to the referendum clear, announcing even before its passage that he would not enact it, claiming that people did not know for what they were voting. The discourse surrounding the downzoning referendum cast anti-gentrification forces as anti-progress, with one respected planning organisation, the Metropolitan Planning Council, posting an article about the referendum titled ‘Revitalization or downzoning in Pilsen?’, as though those were the only two choices. The author admonishes, ‘Residents in neighbourhoods fortunate enough to attract new development, like Pilsen, are faced with tradeoffs’. She then goes on to celebrate democracy even as she encourages ignoring its results, arguing, ‘Genuine public participation, carefully weighing all the options, and making sure new development will provide the greatest benefits to the community as a whole – that’s really all the people of Pilsen are asking for’ (Hodge, 2006).

While unsuccessful in achieving its short-term goal of an actual rezoning, the referendum demonstrated the strength of the Pilsen Alliance’s organising and the widespread concern about gentrification in the neighbourhood. It educated residents about the role of public policy and to some degree empowered them to participate in the process. As one Pilsen Alliance member told me after a series of workshops, our work together would make me fluent in Spanish and them fluent in zoning.

These building by building contestations over zoning remain an important battleground in the fight over gentrification (see Figure 4) (LaTrace, 2015). At a community meeting in August 2015, one topic of conversation was the proposed zoning change for a previously industrial building to become an 11-story residential building. Developers are required to send notice of the requested change to residents within 250 feet of the development. One resident brought that notice with her. It was copied for the rest of the meeting’s participants; those who lived within that area are now on the lookout for their notices to arrive, and opposition to the change is being organised. The struggle continues and is not yet fully won or lost.

Figure 4.

Sign posted requesting zoning change from manufacturing to mixed use, including residential.

On being a pillar of the community

A sense of belonging for immigrant residents has been hard won in Pilsen and has been one of the first casualties of the gentrification process. That sense of belonging, and indeed of entitlement to place, comes much more easily for gentrifiers. The ways in which the claim to space has been used as a tool to delegitimise the long-time Mexican residents of Pilsen is illustrated in one of the most visible changes to the landscape in Pilsen recently, the redevelopment of Thalia Hall.

Thalia Hall is a historic building on Pilsen’s main commercial street, constructed in 1892 and housing a performance space, bar and restaurant. It was redeveloped (after a number of previously failed attempts) by a club owner with successful businesses in other gentrified neighbourhoods. The Pilsen Alliance attempted outreach to the developer, asking for things like the hiring of local residents and occasional use of the space for community events. The hope was to mediate some of the negative effects that could potentially come from this development.

The way in which Thalia Hall, which houses the bar/restaurant Dusek’s, portrays itself illustrates why this attempt at engagement was not especially fruitful. Rather than work with the existing community, Thalia Hall sells itself as a continuation of a previous community, hailing its connections to the Bavarian community of the late 19th century rather than the Mexican community of today. Dusek’s, offering ‘board and beer’, takes its name from a previous iteration of the space as a Bavarian community hall and bar and the original founder of Thalia Hall, John Dusek, and announces itself, in a rather antagonistic way, as ‘re-established, 2013’ (Figure 5), erasing what came in between. Further explication on the window of Thalia Hall reads:

Thalia Hall was founded by John Dusek at the turn of the century as a neighbourhood establishment. Dusek was a family man, a tavern owner, and a facilitator of the arts. He was a visionary and the founding father of Thalia Hall. His hope for the corner of 18th and Allport was to build a public hall for the community. In 1892 his dream became reality. A multipurpose property that would offer commercial storefronts, residential housing, and a public hall for the community. It was inside this ground floor corner unit where he chose to operate his family tavern. It truly was the center for the community he’d imagined. We humbly seek to re-establish this turn of the century meeting place. We pay homage to Mr. Dusek restoring the same neighbourhood spirit to our corner ordinary where his family tavern once lived and breathed.

Figure 5.

Dusek’s, re-established, 2013.

This romaticised vision of the space ignores the lack of engagement with the community that surrounds Thalia Hall, catering instead to patrons who come from outside the neighbourhood, and ignoring the history of racism and exclusion that has made Pilsen a tight-knit community of immigrants in a variety of iterations.

The following story highlights the distance between how gentrifiers see Pilsen and how community activists hope to forge new relationships. In the spring of 2014, I took my students on a walking tour of Pilsen with the then-executive director of the Pilsen Alliance. Across the street from Thalia Hall, the director saw someone he knew and crossed the street to shake his hand. That person turned out to be an owner of Thalia Hall, who came over to talk to the class. The first thing he said to us was, ‘I thought you were here to beat me up’. While I suppose this could be interpreted as an attempt at humour, I think it reveals a profound discomfort with the identity of an outsider who understands they are engaging in ‘pioneering’ activity that may not be welcomed by long-term residents. The assumption that community members will be hostile is born from one’s own assumption that the neighbourhood is a hostile place that needs to be fixed.

This theme played out in a much more direct and hostile conversation online when a food truck street fest in front of Thalia Hall was announced in April 2015 on DNA Info (Lulay, 2015). A long-term resident active in the community commented that she was upset to have to find out about an event on her block online rather than in any official form and was concerned about the parking issues, traffic and noise the event would bring to the neighbourhood. This unleashed a torrent of vitriolic replies:

The new people who invested in homes and businesses helped build Pilsen. It was largely a filthy, litter-strewn, gang-infested neighbourhood and now it’s much nicer. You and your family probably had little to do with the improvement

I forgot how much narrow-minded morons hate change. Hope her sharpies are all set to go. I’m sure she’s a pillar of the community [this refers to the vandalizing of a local upscale coffee shop with anti-gentrification graffiti in January, 2015 which was then repeated in October, 2015].

The long-term resident replied:

We are longtime homeowners. You know nothing about the many families who have fought for the community against gangs and intimidation. The question is, what have YOU done? I only hear hatred … And yes, I am a pillar of my community. Thank you for that.

While clearly all the more ugly because it was conducted online and anonymously (the long-term resident originally identified herself by name, which has since been changed online; those criticising her did not), this is a snapshot of the larger debate over gentrification. The unwarranted hostility directed at a long-term resident because of a comment about the notification process shows how gentrification attempts to silence dissent and marginalise those who do not conform to the new norms of the neighbourhood. Gentrification is a claim to space. This event showcased the easy sense of ownership that gentrifiers bring to a neighbourhood that has been contested space for decades, with no awareness of those struggles and the history of the people who fought them.

Conclusion

Too often, the debate about gentrification is oversimplified to the questions of whether something does or does not count as gentrification, whether displacement is the result and if, therefore, gentrification is good or bad. I contend that gentrification is not a yes or no question, but rather a continuing and contested process. Together, these experiences of the process of gentrification in Pilsen show the complicated and contested ways in which actually existing gentrification is enacted on the landscape. It is a more nuanced picture of how neighbourhood change happens than the overly simplified arguments over whether gentrification does or does not cause displacement (see Ding et al., 2015). The experience of Pilsen shows that there is physical displacement, as shown in the population data, and that the many who remain also experience displacements even as they continue to contest them. Gentrification and displacement are not either/or propositions. Pilsen has experienced gentrification, but the gentrification has not been unabated. Development in Pilsen continues, but no developer would come into Pilsen without a plan for at least some measure of affordability and acknowledgement of the area’s Latinx heritage; these are direct responses to decades of neighbourhood activism. No new development goes uncontested. Pilsen’s reputation for organising and activism is alive and well.

In this way, Pilsen can serve as a model for other gentrifying communities. Resistance is painstaking work, but it does have an effect. Door knocking, community meetings, ballot referendums, media coverage and electoral politics can all be marshalled as tools to demonstrate what a democratic vision for the neighbourhood looks like. While these strategies cannot completely forestall gentrification, they can help to draw attention to substantive issues like zoning, affordability, transparency and democratic process that serves to educate long-term residents and gentrifiers alike. Community activists in Pilsen have created other ways of knowing their place, maintaining social commitments and spatial attachments that have allowed them to remain in place and sustain community (Rahder and McLean, 2013), at least for now. In so doing, they have shown how undemocratic the process to accomplish gentrification has been.

Far from being inevitable, gentrification is an iterative process resulting from decisions made by urban planners, policy makers, developers and community members. They are all engaged in a continuing conversation (with varying degrees of civility) about the future of the city and who the city is for. Gentrification is a claim to space in neighbourhoods that have experienced disinvestment, neglect, discrimination and environmental injustice. It rarely goes uncontested. These contestations change the process so that some of the most negative consequences may be mitigated or delayed. This does not change the fact that the whole point of gentrification is to replace existing populations with higher-income uses and users, so that for gentrification to occur displacements must also occur. As I have shown here through the experience of Pilsen, these displacements are many, but they are not complete.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Euan Hague, Heidi Nast, Victoria Romero and everyone at the Pilsen Alliance, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This work was supported in part by grants from the Steans Center for Community-Based Service Learning and the Center for Latino Research at DePaul University. Any mistakes are my own.

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