East Dallas Gentrification

The Dallas Morning-News' Rod Dreher makes no apologies for homogeneity or gentrification; he has no problem with hundreds of people - often poor families - being priced out of their old neighborhoods and being victims of the ghettoizing of smaller and smaller areas (and this constant concentration of poverty is nothing new; it's been going on ever since the founding of this city and many others). Notice that he frames the entire conflict as one of progress vs. nostalgia, one of the most intellectually and journalistically dishonest arguments I've read lately, but should we expect less from a writer who gets belligerently defensive when his subtle racism is questioned?

There goes the neighborhood, thinks Jim Schutze. Actually, the Dallas Observer's city politics columnist didn't just think it, he wrote it as the cover story in a recent issue of the alt-weekly. He was talking about the decline and fall of Old East Dallas, a former hippie haven that is being slowly taken over by people like, well ... me. "I am frightened," he writes:

East Dallas, once a funky, diverse refugee camp for people on the lam from the real Dallas and maybe real life, is now well on its way to becoming the one thing none of us ever wanted. A nice neighborhood. ... Like that's a good thing? In the old days we took pride in how crappy our part of town was. It took guts to live here. But that's all gone now.

Nostalgie de la boue, a French phrase that literally means "yearning for the mud," describes a sensibility given to romanticizing what is crude, lower, even degrading as somehow more authentic. Fine, dude, let your freak flag fly. But I've got little patience for this sort of thing.

Schutzism was alive and well in New York City in the Giuliani years. It came from the sort of liberals who loathed the mayor for cleaning up the porn theaters, forcing out the sex shops, and generally making Manhattan a place you might actually want to live. For that, he was routinely denounced as a fascist by the kind of leftie sentimentalists who thought there was something noble about decay and disintegration. Saner heads realized that you don't have to love Starbucks to prefer it to a porn parlor.

Comments

[doug]

What do porn theaters and sex shops have to do with the real problems of a city like crime and poverty? I'm tired of everyone forcing Judeo-Christian mores down the throats of the non-religious. I lived in Portland, OR for a few years, the city with the most sex shops per capita in the US, and it's an extremely pleasant place to live with low crime, attractive streets, and friendly people.