In a practical sense, this book takes a broad approach to a complex topic. The forthcoming chapters examine a wide range of food enterprises, including grocery stores, restaurants, community gardens, farmers’ markets, and non-profit organizations, as well as developers and city officials. Working from these multiple and situated perspectives allows us to highlight the myriad and sometimes contradictory ways that food and gentrification intersect. This volume also attends to both cities that have become synonymous with gentrification and smaller cities that are usually left out of the conversation but are nonetheless experiencing these dynamics. Relatedly, we feature a diverse set of contributors, including graduate students, professors, and community activists, who share deep and embedded knowledges of the changing places we call home.
What Does Food Bring to Gentrification Scholarship?
Gentrification is commonly understood and studied as an economic and residential phenomenon, with a focus on the displacement of long-term residents as a neighborhood experiences demographic, housing, and commercial transitions. Prominent urban theorists argue that gentrification must be understood fundamentally as a structural process of capitalist urbanization (Harvey 2000; Heynen et al. 2007; Smith 2008 [1982]), in which capital expands through the (re)production of urban space, as guided by city and regional policy (Hackworth and Smith 2001; Smith 2008 [1982]). Gentrification is also a racialized process, predicated on the previous divestment from the urban core that characterized segregation and redlining (Lees, Slater, and Wyly 2008; Shaw 2007).
Gentrification transforms a neighborhood in many ways. Crime rates decrease, real estate markets expand, infrastructure improves, and new businesses and amenities become available. While some long-term residents can benefit from these changes, displacement limits the extent to which they can take advantage of these positive outcomes. Displacement follows the racialized contours of development as low-income communities of color are increasingly subject to police scrutiny at the behest of new residents (Ospina 2015; Shaw 2015) and are pushed out of their homes, at best resettling in less expensive areas and at worst becoming homeless (Applied Survey Research 2015; Slater 2006). But to focus strictly on the residential and commercial realities of this process would be to miss the significant social and cultural dimensions of displacement (Hyra 2008; Ocejo 2011; Zukin 1987, 2009).
In the public eye, the most notable signs of gentrification are changes in amenities and infrastructure, including artisanal coffee shops, brunch-serving cafes, and farm-to-table restaurants. As the vignettes that begin this chapter indicate, food retail and foodways have become flash points signifying whose food matters. For long-term residents, these changes are not simply economic transitions; they signify the loss of their way of life and sense of local ownership. Because food is such a mundane yet vitally multifaceted part of our everyday lives, it can bring together structural and cultural approaches to the processes, consequences, and trajectories of gentrification that are intimately linked in the popular imagination.
Gentrification manifests differently in each urban context, with varying outcomes on its scale, pace, and process (Billingham 2015; Brown-Saracino 2009; Hyra 2008). So, our research uses a comparative approach (Brown-Saracino 2016), employing what Lees (2000) calls the “geography of gentrification” to illuminate differences and similarities across place. As the public awareness of gentrification grows, community activists described in parts III and IV of this volume have begun to engage in organizing efforts to push back against forces that exacerbate historical ethnoracial and class inequalities. In this context, examining how place-specific foodways are valorized, transformed, or lost in the process of promoting and resisting gentrification critically engages with the cultural geography of locality: What is local, who are the locals, and who gets to define these terms? All of which is to say that food offers a means to freshly explore the inherent heterogeneity of gentrification.
Gentrification is now spreading well beyond the major urban centers in North America, occurring in former industrial and mid-size cities. Chapters in this edited volume present cases from many regions of the United States and Canada, including cities typically ignored by gentrification studies such as Durham, Oklahoma City, and Cleveland. Some cities in this volume are post-disaster cities (natural or economic), such as New Orleans and Denver, experiencing gentrification in the context of neoliberal rebuilding and restructuring. That said, by one estimate four of our case cities (Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Diego) are among the top seven cities that account for half of all gentrification nationally (Richardson, Mitchell, and Franco 2019). Comparing this range of cases reveals local differences, especially when it comes to gentrification’s effect on food security and food sovereignty, while also underscoring similarities in terms of power and resource disparities. Taken together, these chapters exhibit how the politics of place, as well as existing sociocultural institutions, shape the ability to promote and fight gentrification.
Gentrification occurs as a dynamic process rather than as a singular event. The classic “rent gap” model points to the economic rationale that promotes investment to maximize the profit potential of undervalued land (Smith 1979). Policymaking and private investment trends among growth coalitions in the city encourage and justify reinvestment (Logan and Molotch 1987), providing the “institutional scaffolding” for gentrification (Zukin 2016). In contrast to structural explanations, cultural approaches to gentrification examine how the tastes of newcomers encourage and shape investment into formerly underserved neighborhoods. Early gentrifiers are attracted to low-rent areas not only for economic reasons, but also for what they collectively perceive as the authentic cultural significance of these places (Hyra 2017; Ley 2003; Mele 1996). While authenticity is, of course, socially constructed and socially differentiated, new residents tend to attach its heightened significance to dive bars, ethnic markets, or corner stores, regarding them as gritty places with a history (Brown-Saracino 2010; Lloyd 2005).
But newcomers do not just assimilate to the existing community. Some consumption spaces may present themselves as being too authentic and not safe for the newcomers (Grazian 2003), prompting them to develop or redefine the spaces that suit their taste and sensibilities. Boutiquing gentrifiers can displace locally owned businesses that low-income residents have relied on (Zukin 2009), creating what Lloyd (2005) calls a “neo-bohemia” that selectively celebrates the memory of the place. Because food is so intimately connected to culture and place (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2014; DeSoucey 2016; Winsome 1993), many food businesses, such as bars, butcher shops, or distilleries, drive the rearticulation of a community’s identity (Ocejo 2017). For example, the San Diego restaurant Barrio Dogg profiled in chapter 1 draws on the neighborhood’s Latinx history by featuring gourmet, all-beef, “Tijuana-style” hot dogs at a counter built from a low-rider Chevy. But as is common to businesses that attempt to reconstruct authentic visions of a food or place in upscale settings, this restaurant is often perceived by long-term residents as catering to new ones and even tourists, simultaneously gentrifying the neighborhood and the food itself (Gotham 2015; Helm 2017; Ho 2014). chapters 2 and 9 also speak to these dynamics in Durham, North Carolina and Vancouver, Canada. In each case, restaurateurs brand their businesses as “of the community” through their menus and public relations work, but these efforts replicate structural inequalities as newcomers with resources and privileges end up dominating local social change efforts. That said, there are activists in other places that resist newcomers’ vision of the long-term community’s cultural foodscape by actively asserting a collective