Traditionally, gentrification meant upper middle class people (or often trust fund hipsters) from outside an urban area moving into a rundown neighborhood resulting in rising prices and improved housing. But lately it seems as if gentrification has become a social justice slur meaning "white people".
Case in point, this rather strange article opening.
A chasidic resident of Williamsburg with a growing family, Shmiel Stern decided to leave the Brooklyn neighborhood where he had grown up.
But the Sterns didn’t go far in their hunt for more space for their six children — they moved several blocks south, to Bedford-Stuyvesant, and a larger apartment. That was six years ago. Stern, 38, said his family was the first Jewish family on his block, which at the time had “one shul and no mikveh.”
... the ultra-Orthodox push into Bed-Stuy is part of the gentrification trend that is spreading all over the city.
The "gentrification" part refers to gentry. By no stretch of the imagination is a hassidic freelance writer from Williamsburg, "gentry". Or anything resembling it.
Steve Lipman is describing a Brooklyn resident moving from one neighborhood to another as "gentrification". And it's rather unclear why. Neither Williamsburg nor Bed-Sty are especially appealing. And it's more likely that Stern is fleeing hipster gentrification in Williamsburg and looking for affordable housing in Bed-Sty.
And... rather crucially... there were plenty of Jews living in Bed-Sty, as the article later casually mentions.
On a stroll around Bed-Stuy you cross paths with a cross-section of black and whites, Latinos and Asians. The streets are lined with churches and mosques and well-kept brownstones. In fact, many of the neighborhood’s old synagogues were converted into churches,
...so why are Jews moving into a neighborhood they lived in somehow doing something wrong?
So what is it that makes Mr. Stern, gentry? What makes Orthodox Jews, who have been consistently living in Brooklyn for generations, gentrifiers? The seeming answer is that they're white.
Chasidim from Brooklyn, in search of more and larger dwellings, have in recent years decamped to Jersey City, Staten Island and Rockland County. Tensions with neighbors have sometimes followed. (Just last week, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the school board of the Rockland town of East Ramapo, which is dominated by Orthodox Jews, charging that the at-large voting system for electing board members “disenfranchises minority voters” who are largely black and Hispanic.)
It's unclear what the lefty Jihad in Ramapo has to do with Bed-Sty. But in a way it's apparent. It's illustrative of the lefty premise that the "Chasidim" are clashing with some minorities. Therefore they're gentrifiers. They aren't the same Hassidim or the same areas. But it doesn't really matter.
Gentrification is no longer a class term, but a racial one. And that's revealing.
Between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, the neighborhood’s white population increased from 2.4 percent to 15 percent, while the black population shrank from 75 percent to 60 percent. Bed-Stuy is also attracting a growing number of Hispanics, many from the Dominican Republic.
Most of the whites moving to Bed-Stuy are Satmar chasidim, said author Kay Hymowitz, an expert on Brooklyn neighborhoods.
Again, this is a racial shift. Conflating that with gentrification is revealing.
The irony of Jews returning to Bed-Stuy (their exodus was spurred by black migration from the South in a “white-flight” pattern that played out in many neighborhoods, and the destruction of homes to make way for public housing) is not lost on historians. In a city defined by flux and ever-shifting demographics, “this is a continuing story,” said Jeffrey Gurock, professor of American Jewish history at Yeshiva University. As is happening just 14 miles to the north in Harlem, Jews are “returning to a neighborhood that was once theirs.”
Then, what one might ask, is the problem?