Gentrification – Publicly Historians

Shelf Life Community Story Project, https://www.shelflifestories.com/. Created by Mayowa Aina, Jill Freidberg, Domonique Meeks, Inye Wokoma, Carina del Rosario, Henry Luke. Reviewed on March 4th, 2019 by Gabriel Cohen.

Introduction

The Shelf Life Community Story Project is a community driven website developed at the grassroots level to share the stories of Seattle’s Central District community. The Central District, commonly referred to as the ‘CD’ was undergoing a transformation as one of the core elements of the community, the local Red Apple grocery store was being shut down. At face value this may seem a common and natural development as neighborhoods change and grow throughout the years. However, the loss of the Red Apple had massive implications for the CD community. The store was a central location of the CD community – a place where people would work and shop, but also meet and socialize. The loss of this forum dealt a harsh blow to the community’s morale, and became a part of the ongoing process of gentrification that disrupts and displaces communities. Shelf Life is part of a community effort to ensure that the stories and experiences of this community don’t expire along with the Red Apple. The loss of the Red Apple, deemed so important to the character of the CD community means that the community itself is different.

Presentation

The website is easy to navigate, and is simple and aesthetically pleasing. The presence of a simple, clean interface and a layout emphasizing photography is undoubtedly inviting to visitors. There is minimal navigation necessary – the organization of the website requires only one to two different clicks or keystrokes to engage in its content, which is something that other public history projects should take note of and incorporate into their own sites. Aside from these photos there is simply a well designed cover photo and what appears to be their mission statement, “Amplifying community voices, learning from neighborhood stories, and interrupting narratives of erasure in Seattle’s Central District.” Their website reflects their mission through its simple and appealing design, but also provides the opportunity to learn more for those who are interested.

Audience

The website uses the voices of the community rather than their own to tell their story. Undoubtedly, this would be very appealing to the CD community and to other communities interested in finding a way to tell their story. Pages dedicated to sharing news of events and developments in the project also serve as an ongoing history of shelf life, and a resource for would-be community organizers that are looking for a place to begin on their own projects.

Content

The main content of Shelf Life are its oral histories accompanied by fantastic photography. The content is divided into specific pages that share the story of an individual from the community. These story pages require you to access each individually, but that is a great source of the site’s appeal. By hovering over a story page, visitors will see a caption that is just intriguing enough and just vague enough to encourage them to delve deeper and read that particular story. Once accessed, the story page consists of a photograph and a brief oral history of the individual’s relationship to the CD community. The voice of the interviewer is completely absent – all focus is on the individual being interviewed and their story. In this way, the organization of content of Shelf Life compliments the goal of the project designers: to give a voice to a community undergoing great change and in danger of irreversible and unwanted transformation.

Developers

The group that brought Shelf Life to us is a very diverse group. Their commonality is that they call the CD, Seattle or at Washington state home. The diversity of the Shelf Life development team is undoubtedly of great benefit. The team possesses individuals with different strengths, ranging from researching to storytelling to photography and even data analytics. More importantly, Shelf Life benefits from the input of people of vastly different life experiences. For a project that is all about finding an outlet for the voices of the CD community and incorporating historical context and visual storytelling methods in the process, this diversity of talent and experiences is critical.

Conclusion

Shelf Life isn’t overly ambitious. It seeks to do a very specific task and do it well: share the personal experiences of the CD community. The value of Shelf Life is in this simplicity. In the process of engaging in community driven storytelling, they accomplish their goals of granting longevity and relevance to communities undergoing change in the face of urban gentrification. Moreover, the experiences of the CD as it undergoes this transformation can serve as valuable historical information for communities that undergo similar experiences in the future. The type of personalized, visual storytelling Shelf Life shares is of great benefit to local communities, public and local historians and even as a memoir of communities fundamentally altered or lost to ubran development.

Change, it is the one constant in the story of human history. Nothing stays the same, attempting to fight change is an exercise in futility. To survive the change of time all things must adapt and adjust to a new paradigm. Failure to change means death, whether we are discussing dinosaurs or giant corporations. Sometimes change can be beneficial, things shift in a positive direction and people’s lives improve. Other times changes are not so good, life becomes more difficult or important knowledge is lost. One of the byproducts of change is gentrification. Some argue that gentrification is good because it revitalizes blighted neighborhoods; contrarily it’s a force of destruction of personal history and economically disadvantaged people. How can a historic neighborhood hold on to its history and benefit the people who currently live there?

San Antonio: The Historic West Side

Walking along the streets of the historic west side of San Antonio the surrounding history is palatable, however so is the destruction of that history. Land speculators are leaving lots empty in hopes of a big payday sometime in the future while razing older properties and replacing them with buildings that are more modern. This leads to the destruction of the community’s history and forces the people who live there to move due to rising rents and other economic hardships. The Esperanza Center has been pushing back against these speculators in an attempt to hold on to the history and culture of the neighborhood for the people that live there. Their approach is to acquire properties and restore them for new tenants or re-purpose them so that they will avoid being torn down. This is a good approach but the speculators impede the process by leaving lots empty lots or even worse, hampering the attempts to improve the neighborhood by placing fences on their properties in inconvenient places. Their approach is direct but requires large financial backing and cooperation from local politicians. This brings up another roadblock for the Center’s mission; the politicians are not invested in saving old buildings. The people in charge are going to take their directions from their political donors, and those donors want to make money developing the neighborhood. Current political climates favors the people who drive gentrification. There are opportunities to make money that do not include saving the history of old neighborhoods; revitalization in the name of progress is the fuel of gentrification. It is a tough uphill battle; however, the people of the Roxbury section of Boston tried a more radical approach.

“Faces of Dudley” mural in Boston. (Greg Cook)

Boston: Roxbury

Gentrification happens when the local people do not have direct control over their neighborhood. The blog Black Perspectives talks about the events in the Roxbury district of Boston, MA. During the 1980’s in Boston, a couple of men tried to stand up and improve their neighborhood by taking the neighborhood away from the city. Curtis Davis and Andrew Jones formed a group called The Greater Roxbury Incorporation Project (GRIP) with the goal being leaving Boston proper and forming a new incorporated city that the local people would control. Even though Boston was the idealistic center of the American Revolution, its city planners were not so forward thinking over the years. Boston became the most segregated city in the Northern US, making it very susceptible to the forces of gentrification. In forming a new city out of the old neighborhoods, the people could stop this process and revitalize the area for its residents. By spending resources on attracting economic opportunities that would not drive out the economically disadvantaged residents, the city would stop the process of gentrification. Ultimately, GRIP did not achieve its master goal of independence, however it did succeed it getting reforms into government that would eventually aid the area and make improvements to benefit the people there.

Two Paths, One Goal

The Esperanza Center and GRIP are just two examples of people trying to control the destinies of their local neighborhoods and deter the process of gentrification. I hope that they will succeed in protecting the history that the people in city hall easily neglect. It is easy to order a building toppled when it is just numbers on a budget sheet, but to the people who live there those building mean so much more. They are touchstones to loved ones who are no longer with them. Preserving the buildings is to preserve the memories of those who came before us and made us into what we are today.

Tag: Gentrification

A Review of the Shelf Life Community Story Project