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| Humboldt Park on display in this 2008 film |
For
The Onion last week gave us an account of a woman who lives in the Humboldt
Park neighborhood who thinks that the recent efforts toward gentrification have
made the neighborhood too expensive for her to live in.
OR,
AS THE parody attempts to portray it, the neighborhood is, “too safe for her family
to afford.”
It
seems that this account is mocking of those people who criticize
gentrification. Because who in their right mind would up upset about the safety
of a neighborhood? Or would deliberately search for a more violent place to
live in order to save money?
Which
may well make the people who came up with this particular account as much a
part of the larger problem as anyone else. They’re definitely part of the
solution!
Because
the issue with gentrification that causes so many people to be resentful of the
concept is that it comes across as officials willing to upgrade a neighborhood
in search of a higher economic demographic – which often comes across as a more
Anglo-oriented ethnic class of people.
AS
THOUGH NO one wants to be bothered to make a neighborhood better for its
current residents if those people happen to be a little too dark complexioned
for the tastes of the kind of people who make their money from real estate
development.
In
the real Humboldt Park, that is the prevailing attitude that is going about.
Humboldt
Park is a northwest side neighborhood that back in the mid-to-late 1960s became
the center of a Puerto Rican community for Chicago. Many of them moved from
places like Lincoln Park when that neighborhood began its upscale trend.
There
are those current neighborhood residents who wonder if the fact that many
upper-scale, somewhat monied, residents have moved in during recent years means
that history is trying to repeat itself.
SO
THE ONION finds humor in quoting a woman saying she now feels safe when she
walks to the grocery store. Which is a bad, bad thing for her.
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| If gentrification were to take full effect, would this icon disappear? |
I
did find some absurdity in the name that the parody account gave to this
mythical woman – it most definitely is not anything with origins in Puerto Rico
or Latin America.
Because
if anyone were really going to be complaining about the gentrification trend,
it would be someone of those ethnic origins. Who may have to wonder where they’re
now headed.
Perhaps
Jefferson Park? Could it be that someday, the Puerto Ricans will be chased out
of Humboldt Park and wind up living in those neighborhoods that ring around O’Hare
International Airport?
WILL
FUTURE GENERATIONS of Chicago residents complaining about airport noise and the
idea of jet fuel dumped on their homes express themselves in Spanish-accented
English?
Let’s
not forget that this particular ethnic tension was partially behind the outcry
earlier this year that chased the Riot Fest event from Humboldt Park!
Not
that this tension is unique to Humboldt Park. The whole concept of
gentrification bothers those who feel like they’re only permitted to live in
neighborhoods that are decrepit – usually due to age and neglect and the idea
that they’re not worth maintaining anymore because of the demographic of the
current residents.
At
least until someone figures out a way to get someone else to overpay for the
concept of living in places that have always had a certain advantage throughout
the years – proximity, aided by mass transportation, to downtown Chicago!
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