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Letters |
Dear Editor, I have worked in housing for seven years and have appreciated Shelterforce for the in-depth articles about issues close to my heart. I have watched neighborhood by neighborhood in my town – Asheville, North Carolina – become gentrified with a growing influx of wealthy individuals and so I read, with interest, the article, “Beyond Gentrification: Tools for Equitable Development,” by Kalima Rose in your May/June 2001 issue. Although I was overall in agreement with the article’s assessment of the patterns of gentrification, I was horrified to read the following sentence: “New residents are interested in urban and cultural amenities: artists, young professionals, gay and lesbian households and other cultural niches are often highly represented.” As an activist and a lesbian I was disturbed to see that my community was being referred to as a cultural niche and as one indicator of gentrification in a community. If any other group of people, be they Asian, African-American, or Deaf, was put into a category and a sentence like that people would be horrified and the editor surely would have caught it. June was Gay Pride month and the Village Voice recently printed an article about the large numbers of economically poor and homeless people who are gay, lesbian, bi and transgendered – but who are invisible in our world. The stereotype is that, when we aren’t pathetic and lonely perverts, we are wealthy intellectuals with great taste and wit. This is a very narrow box that does not represent the whole. What the article, in that one sentence, suggested to me was that gays and lesbians do not hail from poor communities, but are merely outsiders who come into a community to exploit it. This discounts the vast numbers of hard working and very poor lesbians and gays and further divides people from people. I hope that Shelterforce considers the impact just one sentence can have on a community. Thank you, Elisabeth Bocklet Asheville, NC Kalima Rose responds: I appreciate what Ms. Bocklet rightly pointed out—that the oversimplification of community dynamics distorted what I intended to say. My apologies for characterizing a complex process in a simplistic way that was insensitive to the diversity of these communities. Nonetheless, disinvested communities do sometimes provide an opportunity for gay and lesbian community building based on shared culture. The results often embody many aspects of equitable development. However, the challenge remains the same: How can former residents be stabilized so that they can also stay to enjoy the communities that are their historic and cultural centers? |
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