A Neighborhood That Never Changes by Japonica Brown-Saracino

Author:Japonica Brown-Saracino [Brown-Saracino, Japonica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology, Urban, Science, Earth Sciences, Geography
ISBN: 9780226076645
Google: hu3-j23Q760C
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010-01-15T05:34:43+00:00

This same status or sense of privilege may encourage preservationists’ engagement in certain professions. As table 9 details, the most popular field among preservationists in my sample is the public and voluntary sector, although a high proportion work in the arts and writing and own small businesses, such as a Dresden printing press and a Provincetown affordable-housing firm.14 Among gentrifiers who do not adopt the preservation orientation, the most popular fields are education and research (half in this category are retired professors), followed closely by such private-sector fields as marketing and finance.

While social preservationists and other gentrifiers are nearly equally likely to be members of the “creative class” (Florida 2002), they cluster in distinct creative occupations,15 suggesting that this class of workers may possess divergent orientations to place and social difference. Most striking is the relatively high proportion of social preservationists who work in the public/ voluntary sector as social workers, government employees, and health care providers (22.9% vs. 6.9% of other gentrifiers) and the relatively low proportion who work in the private sector as marketers and property managers (5.7% vs. 17.24% of other gentrifiers). This suggests that broad categories such as the creative class color over more subtle occupational differences that may share a relation with ideology. Indeed, there are few formidable occupational differences among gentrifiers: most are members of professions that are associated with the professional-managerial class and that minimally require a bachelor’s degree.

However, my interviews and observations suggest that these seemingly small occupational differences between preservationists and other gentrifiers may have important ideological effects and, in turn, that ideology may affect gentrifiers’ occupational choices.16 Attending to social preservationists’ reflections on the relation between work and ideology provides a window into a dimension of their lives not yet explored and, secondly, warns us against presuming—as many gentrification scholars have—that there is a unidirectional relation between demographic characteristics and ideology, that certain demographic traits produce the frontier and salvation ideology.17

Those social preservationists whose occupations lead them to work with individuals or groups at risk of displacement often draw from their work experiences to articulate trepidation about the process. For instance, when a Provincetown French teacher expressed concern about old-timers’ displacement, she provided examples from her work: “That’s the other thing that’s changed tremendously is the number of students: the enrollment. The enrollment has really dwindled.” Her awareness of Portuguese students’ displacement, cultivated through her work, consequently drew her attention to the plight of the town’s elderly: “Of course, me being a teacher, I’m more protective of the kids. But ... I really want our old people to stay here. It’s such a special thing to have access to the old people too. The young and the old in so many communities are so disconnected. This is an ideal village in that way, that we still have an intact family. I definitely want the old people to stay here. It would be very sad [if they weren’t able to].” Similarly, an Argyle man who works as a child advocate on Chicago’s South Side transferred concern for his clients to concern for Argyle residents.

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