Your Favorite Coffee Shop is Killing People
How the impact of gentrification and a world-wide pandemic have led to the mass displacement of poor individuals. And how residents are using mutual aid to combat it.
Beacon, New York.
Trendy cafés. New and improved roads. Older apartments and apartment complexes become renovated. Rent increases. Art galleries. Expensive cars and car services. All of these may appear as necessary repairs to perhaps struggling cities and towns. After all, repairing the pothole that has been around since the parting of the Red Sea seems like something that should have been done long ago. But it wasn’t.
Laura, a four-year resident of Beacon, New York, wakes up nearly every morning to head down Main Street, rain or shine. She walks up a few worn-out concrete steps to a bright red door with “321” in black letters with keys in her hand and ready to start the day. Except for one thing:
This city is not what she knew it to be.
Saturday, February 20, 2021, I made my bi-weekly visit to Binnacle Books, the store in which Laura works. While we had not yet been on a first-name basis, she had come to know me for my taste in books, immediately pulling a copy of Critical Essays on James Baldwin off of the back shelves to hand to me. One of Beacon’s main appeals to its frequent visitors was just this — the relationships that one made with members of the community.
Laura grew up about twenty minutes away from Beacon and saw it right to move to the growing town. It seemed to be the best option for her; it was easy to commute down to the city, the culture of Beacon was so unique because it is a city surrounded by nature and history, and it was blossoming into a newfound hotspot. Apartments were towering over the Mom and Pop shops that embraced the worn sidewalks of a historic city that sold out its residents. In an exploration of Beacon and its dramatic change in the wake of rapid gentrification, the New York Times revealed that, in order to clear space for more apartments, the city had sold what used to be “a deli and three adjacent homes” (Dilawar).
“Gentrification has most definitely taken place here,” regarded Laura when reflecting on how her city has changed. The apartments — erected in 2017, the same year that Laura had moved to Beacon — were only the beginning of the new wave of gentrification. “The rate at which it has changed during the last nine months of the pandemic, however, has been staggering.”
Her emphasis on the last word of her statement told me everything that I had needed to know.
A time in which renters were begging for moratoriums as more and more were laid off of their jobs and filing for unemployment, the residents of Beacon, New York, had seen their city continue to gentrify.
Apartments continued to be constructed as people were struggling as to where to find their next meal. “Boujee” stores, boutiques, and expensive restaurants opened that would seem pricey even to those resting comfortably in the middle class. New healthy dining options and unique clothing stores may seem like an exciting new addition to an otherwise thriving city. But longtime residents are often pushed out of their communities due to the expenses that a new quality of living will bring (UrbanDisplacementProject). Especially during a pandemic, these residents are removed from the benefits that the better-off may receive while having their life at risk. Beacon is not the only city being impacted in the Hudson Valley, however. Cities such as Newburgh are experiencing similar damaging effects of gentrifications. Some believe that it is happening in Poughkeepsie as well.
In more populated cities such as Brooklyn — a gentrification poster child — you may even see people take the streets with the rallying cry: My people used to live here. Buyer, buyer, gentrifier!
Residents of Beacon have taken matters into their own hands during these troubling times. Right by the stairs of Binnacle Books rests a food pantry, one of about five in the city. Seeing the benefits that mutual aid has on those in need, people drop off non-perishable items in the food pantry for those in need to take when necessary.
When asked about the amount of these mutual aid food pantries in Beacon, Laura came to a realization as she placed a bookmark on top of the book that I had purchased.
“If anything, all of these pantries show how much need there is.” She began to reflect more on the mutual aid that her store has taken part in, such as a community fridge for perishable items. “There’s one thing that people have to understand: Mutual aid doesn’t ‘combat’ or ‘put a stop’ to gentrification. Instead, gentrification impacts the amount of people that need mutual aid.”
With winter storm after winter storm hitting the Hudson Valley, halting the ability for those in need of mutual aid to receive any, one must begin to question: How can we improve our cities without the displacement of the impoverished?
References:
Cortright, Joe. “Everything That Causes Gentrification, from A to Z.” City Observatory, 15 Apr.
2019, cityobservatory.org/everything-that-causes-gentrification-from-a-to-z/.
Dilawar, Arvind. “New York City Transplants and a River Town’s Natives Fight for Its Soul.”
The New York Times, The New York Times, 1 Mar. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/nyregion/beacon-new-york-gentrification.html.
“Gentrification Explained.” YouTube, UrbanDisplacementProject, 20 Nov. 2017,
“Gentrification.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster,
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gentrification.
Olito, Frank. “7 Signs Your Neighborhood Is Gentrifying.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 4
