Confronting the Violence of Gentrification in Your Hometown

What does it mean to mourn a place that no longer exists? This was the question that haunted me when I made the decision to move back to Newark after years of being away.

At the time, I wasn’t sure what to make of my decision. Originally it felt like a consolation prize—I had been living in Florida, but the death of my father the previous year had me reconsidering many things, including my dreams. I had dreams of living in New York City, of being a real writer in the big city. But the rent was too damn high. Even with roommates, I wasn’t sure that I could swing it. So I settled on Newark, because I knew it; because I remembered it from childhood.

The physical building I grew up in, the place where I spent a large part of my childhood, was a place I never returned to after I moved away. After I moved back to Newark, I noticed the downtown area shifting, both in ways I could recognize and in ways I was unfamiliar with. I wanted to understand how this gentrification could seem like growth to some, though it also meant the violent displacement of a culture. But before I could do that, I needed to understand how I myself defined “home.”

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Growing up, I thought of my hometown as a concrete jungle. I was obsessed with Harriet the Spy and chronicled my neighborhood like she did, carrying around composition notebooks in which I noted bus routes, familiar characters, everything that made my home special. But I lost these notebooks years later, during future moves that took me farther and farther away from the neighborhood I grew up in.

When I left my hometown in the summer of 2009, I wasn’t thinking about the idea of home or whether I’d ever want or be able to return. I was thinking about how I was being thrust into the world after years of comfortably living in the bubble of my town, my neighborhood.

I had lived there for my entire childhood; had memorized the routes I needed to get around. I counted the blocks that encompassed my world during my early years: the bodega with my favorite snacks, always restocked after school, the houses that lined the route I took to catch the bus home after school let out, even the tree with the winding skinny tree in the front yard where I had my first kiss with an ex-boyfriend or the park down the street from my middle school that I spent summer afternoons with friends, eating popsicles, because they had the best swings. There were memories of kisses and arguments and bonding with my friends that gave me a comfort that I didn’t know I was looking for. There was a time that I could have closed my eyes and navigated this route on memory alone. I was in love with the familiarity of it. No matter how much I moved around that town in those years, the normalcy this route gave me meant that I could have some continuity in my life.

I was aware that the place I grew up in was “the hood,” but that never stopped me from feeling its history, its power. There was the stigma of wanting to be separate from that. From early on, my love for writing and for books marked me as “gifted,” though I wasn’t sure that I saw it that way. I didn’t have the words to vocalize the ways that this separation of me from “them” was rooted in anti-Blackness, or how it was part of a system that would uphold the violence we would later see in displacement.

For many of us, gentrification means we have to give up the idea of returning to our roots. 

I moved at the end of my freshman year of high school because my mother wanted me to go to a better school. Though we stayed in New Jersey, we left the town where I grew up for a sleepy suburb closer to the middle of the state. The new suburb I lived in was small, insular. Most of my new classmates had all grown up together. No one wanted to be the new kid if they could help it. Once I graduated, I continued to move around. My college years were spent on campus, at the edge of the state, where neighborhoods stretched out over farmland and we went to sleep in the peaceful quiet of forests and walking trails, the kind of quiet that was impossible to come by in a city.

When I graduated, I could only think about leaving, so I did: I moved to Florida, where the warm weather still didn’t give me the answers on where my life was headed or where exactly I belonged like I was hoping for. While I was living there, my father died. The suddenness of it and the complicated feelings that came with it made me reevaluate my own life and my career, as well as where I wanted to settle and put down roots.

It took eight months for me to gather the courage (and figure out the financial necessities) to move back to New Jersey. I missed the smell of the city, the bustle, and busyness of it. But most of all, I think I was craving the comfort of my hometown from my childhood and early adolescence.

Though I had originally wanted to move to New York to be a writer, returning to Newark after all of those years didn’t feel like a failure so much as a homecoming. I resolved that I could also be a writer in the place where I grew up. One weekend in February, my mother packed a small U-Haul to make the drive to my new life. Moving back to Newark, after all these years.

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Moving back to Newark after so long has been a surreal experience because I have had to mourn places that once were, but are no longer. I am no longer living in my hometown, but downtown. Amongst the shops and businesses and landmarks from my earlier years is a city in transition. Buildings are being bought and remodeled and integrated with distinct markers of what residents have come to know as both a death and a new beginning for a neighborhood. But the question is: A new beginning for whom?

The dictionary defines gentrification as “the process of renovating and improving a house or district so that it conforms to middle-class taste.” What this definition doesn’t touch on is the emotional and cultural violence carried out by gentrification. When we remove spaces that don’t fit a whitewashed, classist idea of what spaces “should” look like, we ignore their history—all the reasons they were created and shaped in the first place. We erase the meaning of neighborhoods that have remained standing even after riots, police brutality, lack of community resources for the residents that already exist there.

I wanted to be happy about my return after being away for so long. But I had failed to prepare myself for the ways that I had changed in that time, and what that would mean for me “returning home.” Many of the places that I remember from my childhood no longer exist in the same physical form I recall. Some of these places have changed names, been updated; the elementary school that I went to goes by a different name, and the teachers I remember who encouraged me have now retired or moved out of the district. I wasn’t sure how to process this loss, or how to name it. It wasn’t mourning, not as it had been after my father’s passing, but it still weighed on me.

The processing of this loss required me to think about the city’s changes and what that meant for Newark’s overall legacy. For gentrification also pushes out that which makes a neighborhood what it is: the history and spirit of its community. For so many of us who go into the world to experience what it has to offer, the gentrification of our homes means that we have to give up the idea of returning to our roots. We also lose the chance to take what we’ve learned in other places and give back to our original communities. We can only watch as they morph into something unrecognizable; as the communities that raised us are erased, little by little, until we no longer remember how they used to be.

Gentrification pushes out that which makes a neighborhood what it is: the history and spirit of its community.

At its core, the true harm of gentrification is how it turns native, long-term residents into transplants in their own communities. It changes the physical places beyond the point of recognition, transforming them into something shiny and new while erasing the character, the history that made them special.

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Still, many of our communities remain resilient. We continue to do what we can, in the spaces we can save and those we cannot, to preserve their importance. We can make sure that residents are present in these new spaces.

Sometimes fighting against gentrification and its harms results in the physical preservation of a space that evolves organically, rather than being morphed into another Starbucks or luxury apartment building for commuters. At other times, it might mean preserving our memories in the pages of photo albums and the treasured mementos we carry with us to the new spaces we call home.

How can our art forms, our creative spaces, the spaces where we feel safe and part of our community continue to thrive in changing landscapes? In answering the question of whether it’s possible to create room for new residents while not displacing long-time residents, it’s necessary to confront our own feelings on gentrification and what defines “home.” Perhaps it’s not only the physical buildings or the way they appear or if they are familiar, but rather the feeling of community and comfort in the face of adversity. As gentrification persists, so will our desire to fight back on behalf of our families and homes and communities—to preserve as much of our history as we can, and make homes of what we can save and carry with us.

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