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The process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, typically displacing current inhabitants in the process.

Gentrification is important in the context of RENT because it leads to homelessness. Where do people of that area go? Where can they find security?

Image below shows the gentrification in process in the East Village:

Gentrification in the Lower East Side NYC

Gentrification of St. Mark’s Place

St. Mark's Place is considered a main cultural street for the East Village. In her 400-year history of St. Mark's Place (St. Marks Is Dead), Ada Calhoun called the street "like superglue for fragmented identities" and wrote that "the street is not for people who have chosen their lives ... [it] is for the wanderer, the undecided, the lonely, and the promiscuous."

BENNY: “This is Calcutta. Bohemia is dead.”

Calcutta (now known as Kolkata) is a city in India, which is the third populous city in India. In 1985, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi dubbed Kolkata a "dying city" in light of its socio-political woes. Benny is basically saying: “Not only does your dreamworld not exist, but it's actually hell. Let it go, the dream is dead."

From "New York City Called ‘Calcutta of the West’” (1988, Buffalo News):

New York has become "a Calcutta of the West," gripped by poverty and homelessness that threaten the city financially as well as morally, Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore said. Bishop Moore called it a "moral obscenity" that so many people are homeless in a city of such wealth. “The homeless grew by 25 percent last year," Bishop Moore said, putting their number at 100,000. "I haven't heard the mayor getting out there and saying this is our major problem in the city and we've got to do something about it." The bishop said New York has an army of beggars and homeless people that has grown while city landlords hold as many as 60,000 apartments vacant, slowly emptying their buildings to replace them with high-rent high-rises.

Homelessness

• Causes
  • “It could be two missed paychecks and their family [not being in the picture] away from being [on the street].” - Luke (Invisible People)
• Self-medicating
  • Why do homeless people do drugs? It’s a very stressful situation with a lot of stimulants and never enough privacy or quiet. Everyone has a different way to cope. Not everyone has a home where you can lock a door. Someone might take a stimulant to stay awake and protect themselves or take a depressant to go to sleep and finally have quiet.
• For more: Invisible People and Soft White Underbelly

Squatters/Squatting

• Squatting is the action of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied area of land or a building, usually residential, that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have lawful permission to use. The United Nations estimated in 2003 that there were one billion slum residents and squatters globally.
• NOTES ON NEW YORK: Squatting in the East Village
• The Urban Lens: Ash Thayer’s Poignant Photographs of ‘90s Lower East Side Squatters”
• Take a Rare Look at New York’s Squat Communities in the 1990s

Shanty Towns/Tent Cities

Pop-up  squatter villages. People who were evicted from their homes would set up tents underneath or along highways for temporary (or sometimes permanent) shelter.

Tompkins Square Park Riot

Tompkins Square Park, in the East Village and Alphabet City, became a meeting place, or sometimes home to (as described by 80s journalists) “homeless people, drug pushers, squatters, and punks.”

Considering it was a park, the community wanted to reclaim it as a safe place for kids to play, but the Tompkins Park residents had deep roots established there.

The park was open 24 hours, but to get Tompkins Park residents out, the New York City Parks Department adopted a 1 a.m. curfew for the park, as recommended by Manhattan Community Board 3.

On July 31, a protest rally against the curfew saw several clashes between protesters and police, it lasted for several days and received national media attention.

Inside the Infamous NYC Riot That Got 6 Cops Indicted | Source Material

Transportation Inequity

• Access to the New York subway is scarce in the East Village. This brings up the discussion of transportation inequity NATIONALLY. Modern segregation has to do with access to transportation for low-income people. Why are homeless people seen more often in cities than in suburbs? Because people who live in suburbs (usually white and affluent people) refuse to build public transportation access in their neighborhoods (bus stations, subway stations, etc.). The result is that you need a car to get into the suburbs, which is a privilege that not everyone has. This is modern segregation. The goal is to keep the suburbs white and rich.
• Transportation Inequity in the United States: A Historical Overview
• For Low-Income People of Color in NYC, Segregation is a Regional Problem (Scarsdale is 84 percent white. And not by accident.)

Notice the limited accessibility to blue “M” icons (metro stations) within the borders of the East Village.