Gentrification

A friend of mine is in the hospital. I ignored a persistent cough and decided to visit her.  I elected to park my car and use mass transit to get to and from the hospital to avoid the traffic and nightmare of driving around for a rare $12.00 parking spot.  Upon leaving the hospital in the early evening, I returned downtown to discover that finding the bus which had delivered me downtown to bring me back to my car would prove to slightly easier than finding an honest man at pickpocket convention.
          The bus routes in my city have recently been changed supposedly for the better, and no one seemed to know ANYTHING about the routes which have been in place for two months now. I asked a driver who knew nothing, a bus system employee who knew less and the final person I spoke to was a large black woman in a bad wig who only said: "Chiiild...I don't know nothing about the bus routes" as the words "Metro Administrative Officers" served  as an ironic backdrop over her right shoulder.  I walked through downtown on what was once the bus route and saw abandoned bus shelters and bus signs.
       I finally got to where I knew a bus would be when I entered an area of Houston's second ward which used to be old Chinatown. The new residents elected to call this enclave "Ea-do" to indicate that it's "east" of "downtown".  Maybe they thought they were paying homage to either London's Soho in Westminster or it's namesake in NewYork city. Hipsters are known more for their sad need to belong than for any degree of originality.
        This section 10 years ago was warehouses, empty lots and shotgun houses. Seeing opportunity, our realtors bought as much as they could, slapped up shoddy town-homes as quickly as they could and sold them for five times what surrounding properties cost. The  result was a spike in property taxes which forced long time residents to vacate because they couldn't afford to pay taxes on homes they'd owned for generations. Funny. Groups of people can be relegated to living in certain parts of a city because of real estate prices, but when those who did the initial relegation change their minds those living on that land must simply pick up and go to the next sport designated for the poor. It's basically what the U.S. Government did to the Indians and what became the state of Oklahoma.

      I walked past a vacant lot which had been a known brothel five years ago until they built town homes next to it. Strangely enough the new residents rather than trying to figure out why they'd purchased property next to a whore-house simply called the cops and harassed their "neighbors" until they eventually moved.
       I glanced over at gate that a moderately handicapped man could scale with ease and atop a tiny aluminum post slightly above my head saw a cheap security camera the size of a man's wallet. I chuckled as it caught my eye and nearly blinded me with an impossibly bright red light affixed next to its tiny lens,  I gave a toothy grin and extended my middle finger and continued walking until I heard an effeminate male voice in the darkness utter a pathetically sarcastic "thank you."  I laughed and said "I love you too pal, have a good night." How miserable is your existence if you've nothing better to do at night but watch your security camera in the dark on a Tuesday night?
      I followed the ghost bus route further until I saw what looked like a warehouse for all intents and purposes from the outside which had been converted to a bar with  and gated outdoor section. I scanned the crowd inside as well as those outside who seemed to be playing some sport with a net which could have been either badminton or volleyball (it was truly of NO consequence to me) and was saddened not to have seen a single face with any pigment. There were no blacks, no Latinos and there might have been one Asian girlfriend but she was the exception.
      The exterior was gated off the same way the town-homes a block away had been. This neighborhood until seven years ago had been black and Hispanic but now new "urban" dwellers who wanted it said they lived in the city but wished to do so without having do deal with the aforementioned put up gates to insure that they wouldn't have to.  The zoo simply wouldn't be as fun an outing without cages to protect you from the animals would it.

         I trudged along pristine sidewalks that were ignored when I and people named Fuentes and Rodriguez begged for them to be resurfaced. I walked past ugly, quickly constructed buildings whose sole purpose was to drive up property taxes and was nearly blinded by the street lamps. I couldn't help but wonder where the hell were these lights when I and neighbors  asked the city for them? Ironically black rock group Living Colour's song "Open Letter to a Landlord"  (which is about a slumlord who ignores the plight of his tenants and eventually burns the building to the ground to rebuild and sell for a profit) came on my ipod.  Irony in two senses. Living Colour initially couldn't get a record deal (until discovered by Mick Jagger) because no record execs were willing to listen to a black rock group and secondly because I found myself walking across a landscape that while familiar was seeming more alien and less inviting than it had ever been when it was what many would consider a "rough" neighborhood.

       Do I have a problem with people investing in urban neighborhoods? No I have no problem with people engaging in commerce as it makes the world go round. Do I object to people building homes and living where ever they choose? Not at all.  I am however bothered by the fact that if I built a house on the same piece of land that  it would have no effect on the value of that property.  I would welcome any man or woman as my neighbor if he or she were a decent human being.  Do I take issue with my city raising my property taxes simply because non minorities choose to become my neighbors, but LOWERING my taxes when more persons of color like myself move in? You're damned right I do. A society which tells me I'm "equal" should treat me the same way it would treat anyone else rather than using buzz worlds and phrases when I choose to live in a certain area or if someone wants me out.

        Near the end of my walk I can see my car. Three buses heading in the opposite direction passed me during my evening stroll, but as my car is in site as is the bus stop where I would have disembarked, the bus for which I was initially waiting finally passed me by.  I uttered a loud epithet before approaching my car but as I did I thought about my friend Dave who lived a few blocks away. He'd told me how some bottom feeding real estate lowlife had knocked on his door and offered to give him cash for his home. The problem is he only offered him 1/4 of the homes value. Had he sold, it would have gotten a fresh coat of paint and simply have been sold to some hipster douche-bag who would have boasted about his new place "in the city" but only after getting the latest in burglar alarms and maybe a tiny security cam atop a slender aluminum pole.