The Reluctant Gentrifier: 6 Ways to Reduce Harm in Your New Neighborhood

Photo by Kaysha on Unsplash

Congratulations. You’re taking advantage of cheaper rent by moving into a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. 

Here’s a list of things you’re benefiting from:

• Decades of racist mortgage lending and appraisal practices which kept rent and property values artificially low.

• Urban renewal policies which bulldozed Black homes to build the stadium, parks, and shopping centers — you know, amenities! 

• High population density, mixed use zoning and mass transit—in short, a reasonably priced, walkable community. These are in demand and it’s what drew you from the suburbs, or the Midwest to this exact neighborhood. 

Yes, you’re part of the problem. But it’s also all you can afford at the moment. Housing costs are skyrocketing. The U.S. median home price rose 63% from $258,000 to $420,000 in the past five years — and it’s much, much higher in your new city. You’re already spending over a third of your income on rent. Plus, you like this new neighborhood. It’s yours now.

You’re a reluctant gentrifier, actively causing harm but also feeling kinda bad about it. Short of going back to the Midwest or to an overpriced apartment in a different part of town…here are six things you can do to be a better community member now.

“White transplants are now flocking to inner cities where mass transit and walkable communities are suddenly desirable and profitable again.”

1. Support Black and Brown owned businesses, as much as possible.

Support Black and Brown owned businesses. If you only frequent white-owned chains and establishments, you’re engaging in harmful gentrifier behavior. If you mostly shop online from brands that aren’t part of your local community, you’re hurting your neighborhood – not helping it thrive. If you mostly Instacart groceries and household items from big box stores that are rolling back DEI policies, the same applies.

Try patronizing small businesses instead - especially ones that support the community. Like the Chinese restaurant that’s been here for decades when other businesses went cashless or pulled out entirely. Try the pupusería that also sells beer, wine and laundry detergent. Buy your coffee at the cafe with the sliding scale that does food redistribution to the local homeless community. Get your bread and pasteles from the local panadería; your meat from the halal butcher; and your jerk chicken from the Caribbean carry-out up the street. 

Learn shop owners' names and ask about their family members. Remember, they don’t exist just to serve you. So, drop the entitlement and work a little harder at becoming someone’s favorite customer. You don’t actually need flawless customer service; you need to be a regular somewhere.

Note: This isn’t an all or nothing strategy. I get that you’ll occasionally need to grab an item from the closest big box store, for convenience. However, if you only buy from white-owned businesses and large white-owned chains that have demonstrated time and time again that they do not care about marginalized people, you are actively harming your community. You have choices to make as a consumer; try to make better ones.

We all have responsibilities as community members. You chose to live here – and part of living here means doing your part. 

iStock

2. Use public transit, frequently.

Here’s the funny thing about public transportation: when the primary users are Black and Brown working class residents, mass transit is often stereotyped as unsafe, undesirable and only for “poor people”. It gets a bad rap. It is frequently underfunded and poorly maintained by municipal governments. Lets be honest; helping Black and Brown families commute to work, medical appointments, and the grocery store is not their priority – and never has been. 

But a funny thing happens at the leading edge of a rapidly gentrifying city. City governments will reverse course on decades of neglect so fast you’ll get whiplash. Don’t be shocked; they’re racist, not totally inept. 

After all, wealthy transplants don’t just want luxury condos and brownstones—they want bike lanes, greenbelts, and walking trails. They want buses, bus shelters, light rail and metro—safe, clean and on schedule—no single tracking. They want traffic calming measures and walkable streets. And cities want their transplants to be happy and pay taxes, while attracting big-name companies to the area. 

And ultimately that is the goal of urban renewal and gentrification: to entice white families back from the suburbs — where they fled during white flight in the 1950s and 60s. White transplants are now flocking to inner cities where mass transit and walkable communities are suddenly desirable and profitable again.

No, you can’t escape the fact that you’re a gentrifier; part of the wave of comparatively wealthy newcomers forcing older and lower income Black and Brown residents out of the neighborhoods they’ve occupied for decades. And you can’t completely erase the harm you’re causing. But for the love of god, use public transportation. 

Catch the bus to meet up with friends, or pay your metro fare – not everyone can afford to, but you can – and take the free circulator. Yes, you could drive, but consider this. When people who look like me asked for fully funded mass transit, city governments across the U.S. said no. But you’re different. You have social and political capital that many of us will never have—could never dream of. Use your privilege for good and take the fucking bus.

Photo by Hilo Carré on Unsplash

3. Engage in activism, imperfectly.

Stop leaving activism for low-income Black and Brown folks with the least means and least support. Your days of free riding while Black and Brown activists fight for your rights and everyone else’s are over. It’s time to grow up, find a cause and stick with it. 

It’s time to engage in activism, imperfectly. 

Don’t just choose causes that personally benefit you, like protected bike lanes, when Black mothers have been fighting for years for safer intersections while city officials did nothing.

I bring this up because bike lane advocacy seems to be a crowd favorite among gentrifiers — not child hunger; not harm reduction for substance users; not court watch; not safer intersections and certainly not anything else that could benefit the entire community. Nope. 

Don’t just push for bike lanes, when only 2% of people killed in motor vehicle crashes are cyclists and 18% are pedestrians.

Don’t just push for bike lanes when “Black pedestrians are twice as likely to be struck and killed while walking than white pedestrians, while Native people are more than three times as likely to be fatally hit,” according to Smart Growth America. That would be, I don’t know, a bit self-serving – as if you only care about issues that personally affect you. That’s classic gentrifier behavior. Don’t be that person. 

Choose a cause that supports more marginalized people within your community. Ultimately, caring about vulnerable groups is in your best interest (See curb cut effect) – I promise you. Not sure where to start? Google your city and “mutual aid group”.

For example, did you know in many cities, as historically Black neighborhoods rapidly gentrify, Black seniors have had their homes seized over as little as a few hundred dollars in unpaid property taxes? Did you know you’re partly to blame? 

Gentrification rapidly increases property values, leading to a spike in property taxes — higher than some older residents on fixed incomes are able to pay. Cities respond by initiating a tax lien sale, worth the amount of the debt, and selling the debt at auction to the highest bidder. It could be an $80 unpaid water bill — doesn’t matter. The buyer then has the right to foreclose on the property. Imagine losing your home worth hundreds of thousands because of a debt worth hundreds or less.

Property tax foreclosures are a tremendous injustice that overwhelmingly impact older, low-income and disabled adults. Mortgage-free homeowners are also at risk. No mortgage means no property taxes in escrow (set aside). Cash strapped cities must salivate at the thought of a Black grandmother in a paid off home. Even better if she’s sick with cancer, or dementia. 

Just remember, your city has always benefited from the oppression of its most marginalized residents — that includes Black Americans who were segregated in low income neighborhoods during Jim Crow only to have their homes seized decades later — after the hood was rebranded as a walkable community for white Americans and well-to-do people of color. You’re benefiting too. Even if you’re a Black transplant. If you can afford to live here while longtime residents no longer can, you are gentrifying the neighborhood. 

It’s time to give back. 

Wait, what’s that? You don’t care about elderly Black homeowners since your complex is charging you $2,500/month for a 1 bdr the size of a studio? I’m sorry your landlord is a private equity firm — but, guess what? There are many ways you can be a better community member. Choose one — especially if you don’t personally benefit from it. 

There are so many ways to push back against the harmful effects of gentrification even as you contribute to them. Yes, it’s a morally gray area I know. But you live in the U.S. – you can handle the contradictions. Your activism will never be pure and neither will your politics. Do the least amount of harm.

Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash

4. Don't make noise complaints 

You could’ve moved somewhere with an HOA, tree lined streets and cookie cutter houses. You didn’t. You moved to a historically Black neighborhood in a large city, known for street festivals and its sidewalk ballet of vendors, shop owners, and buskers. This is a city; it’s going to be noisy. This is not the suburbs — and you calling the police on your neighbors for playing music at 2 a.m. is an act of violence. Stop putting lives at risk because you don’t like Afrobeats. Stop calling the police on the unhoused man at the corner who screams at nothing from time to time. Get a pair of noise cancelling headphones instead. Or move back to the Midwest.

Oh, but you have a baby. Oh, okay. As if Black mothers don’t? No one is forcing you — the person with means who can relocate with relative ease — to live here. City life is not going to grind to a halt for you and that sense of entitlement is alarming. Find a good white noise machine for their crib and be happy you can afford one.

Don’t call the police on Black residents for existing. They have every right to be here. You’re the newcomer. 

“Just remember, your city has always benefited from the oppression of its most marginalized residents...you’re benefiting too.”

5. Stop spinning racist narratives about your community, immediately. 

Don’t do it on Nextdoor, Facebook or Reddit. Don’t do it when you meet up with friends for drinks. 

In truth, property crime rates have been dropping over the past decade in your city; but you love telling and retelling the story of the time your friend’s car was broken into (after they left valuables in full display on the backseat). You like feeling that your neighborhood is gritty and dangerous — and your suburban friends are the perfect audience as you weave tales about dangerous thugs in sheisties. They’re scared of Black people and you play into their fears. 

Let’s face it: you’re scared too.

Meanwhile, longtime Black and Brown residents are the actual targets of most crime in your city—not you. And they aren’t on Nextdoor tapping into racist narratives about dangerous Black people. Even though they weathered the decades when this neighborhood was over-policed and under-protected, and when violent crime was at an all-time high (in the early 1990s). They dealt with shootings, murder, rape and robbery—back when police openly did not give a fuck about Black victims. They dealt with actual hardship without resorting to racist narratives — but here you are: self proclaimed expert on the inherent criminality of Black people after your friend’s car windows were smashed once. Interesting. 

Why the difference? Well, most Black residents have lived here a lot longer. They know recent spikes in violent crime — like the kind we witnessed in 2020 and 2021 — were tied to social factors like easing of lockdown restrictions, unemployment and school closures. Or they don’t know and they’re just not racist. 

Maybe you should log off Nextdoor and unpack your antiblackness instead. You sound exactly like Target, which in 2023 blamed store closures in four states on theft and the “deteriorating state of America’s cities.” The shopping centers they leased from had a different story, pointing out the failure of the “big box playbook” and the retailer’s decision to lease smaller spaces — often in the same cities. Interesting. So Target chose to tap into a racist narrative, rather than admit a faulty business strategy. 

But theft does occur in cities! And car break-ins! And violent crime! You’ll never convince me otherwise. 

Of course it does. It also occurs in your small Midwestern town that has shockingly high rates of property crime, violent crime, opioid addiction compared to the national average — and a meth problem. The difference is your hometown is mostly white. So you see underlying factors, like out-of-school youth, high unemployment and poverty that need to be addressed, and you don’t log on to an app to talk about the inherent criminality of small town white people. Or how dangerous the Midwest is. You also know that if you go missing back home, it will most likely be at the hands of your partner — not the unhoused man down the street. The same is true here in the city. Most crime occurs between people of the same race. 

Property crime, like car break-ins, is inconvenient for sure and can make you feel unsafe. And it would undoubtedly occur less in neighborhoods with more surveillance, CCTV, ring doorbell cameras, and parked police cruisers. Those neighborhoods have apartments for rent and commercial spaces for lease. Have you considered moving? 

6. Watch out for Black and Brown elders 

Watch out for Black and Brown elders. Their neighborhood is eroding around them. They have fewer places to go, to sit in public, and to be in community. 

Are you taking advantage of low rents and good eats in Chinatown? Have you considered donating to local nonprofits that feed low-income seniors and help them enroll in public benefits, or pay past-due utility bills.

In 2024, one in five people experiencing homelessness was 55 and older. and nearly half (46%) were unsheltered. That means, in your new neighborhood you will come face-to-face with older adults living on the street and in places not meant for human habitation. You could look the other way, or you could become better informed about what resources exist in your community.

Instead of calling the cops on the unhoused man in front of your apartment, call 211. They can put you in touch with community and faith based organizations that can help. And some 211s track real-time information like available shelter beds in your city. This nonemergency hotline, that exists across the U.S. and Canada, can also help low-income adults get free rideshares to medical appointments or the grocery store through their Ride United program (not available in every city).

Finally, in almost every city, community-based organizations, like Aging and Disability Resource Centers (ADRCs), and health and human services, like Adult Protective Services (APS), may also be able to help. You don’t have to become a social worker to give back to your community — you just need to do a little research. That will empower you to do more than avoid eye contact the next time you walk past someone in need.

And save this information for yourself. You have an amazing fully remote job — we get it — but rent is high and layoffs are common. Good luck.