I read a news story “Cleanup of Rio’s slums drives out the poorest,” perhaps the newspapers in Rio call the neighborhood where the working class lives “slums,” here in San Diego, they are simply called neighborhoods. And, that the “mixed blessing” Juliana Barbassa of the Associated Press writes about, is it not the pushing-out of the working class poor and the importation of those with greater amounts of social capital, and more access to credit, we here in San Diego have come to know as the gentrification that takes place with redevelopment?

   As with the working class neighborhoods in Rio, the neighborhoods and barrios of South East (and central and western) San Diego were once filled with areas in which the people in San Diego making less than thirty thousand dollars a year could actually afford to live and raise a family. Where do they go, when the people a city council man once told me were the “right kind of people” and “the people I want in my district” displace them? Do these ‘right kind of people’ work for that same small amounts of money, this almost unlivable wage frequently paid to people living without connections to power or authority? But, then again, in my view of things the “right kind of people” are all the people who are already living here, those who have less than me just as equal in my eye as those who have more than me. 

   It seems to me, that for our behaviors and efforts to truly be “redevelopment” or “revitalization” the pre-development populations must share in the uplifting of the area targeted to such redeveloment and revitalization. We cannot afford to continue to allow our city planners and redevelopment agencies to simply cut-away those who are the pre-development working families out of our neighborhoods. What? As if we are cutting away some offending social infection or economic deformity, NO. We have seen the results of such developmental ‘surgery,’ the increases of density, increase levels of hardships and homelessness seemingly suffered at greater and greater rates by these least able to protect themselves and their families from being displaced. We must stop the fragmenting effects of piecemeal revitalization. By our focuses only upon the most profitable aspects of redevelopment efforts we are doing little more than deflecting the attributes of the social conditions in which the problems of poverty first manifest. If we allow those with power and authority to push-off the poor and working class – we are doing little more than increasing the classest malady of income disparities and poverty. Effective revitalization includes all aspects of the redevelopment area, the human as well as the property and land values. With effective revitalization the children are well as the incentives paid to developers and investors. I believe we can do better.

Gregory Morales
San Diego