Cold Light

I deleted a tweet that I regretted yesterday.

If you come visit me, I will take
you to admire this. I will probably
not take you to OTR, because it's
a pricey place to hang out.

The New York Times ran an article this week about things to do in Cincinnati, which has been doing the rounds of all the local Twitter accounts. The article includes many local things I love, namely Red Bikes, the Purple People Bridge, the Roebling Bridge, and Cincinnati Shakespeare, so I wanted to share it. However, it also refers to Over the Rhine (OTR) as "the gentrifying district" with no other comment except to enthuse about all the fun things one can do there.

Factually, that's true. Not only is OTR gentrifying with lots of new (expensive) stuff popping up all the time, but if you keep walking north, you can practically see the line where the money runs out. I haven't been here for most of this process, but goodness knows I was in Austin long enough to see how many folks, usually people of color, had to push back against being priced out by developers from the neighborhoods where their families had lived for generations. A community with its own social cohesion and culture being scattered to the four winds by the "drive 'til you qualify" mentality is not exactly worth celebrating, no matter how many hip bars spring up where children used to play.

Last month, the Austin Statesman ran an online advertisement blatantly glorifying gentrification, which was pulled and replaced with an apology after the social media uproar engulfed them. I don't know if anyone in Cincinnati has made similar complaints about this NYT article. Maybe because they're not a local paper, maybe those who would complain have better things to do than reprimand every touristy column that gushes about OTR, maybe I just haven't seen them yet. I don't know. I tweeted the article with a comment that though the recs were solid, there was no need to be so happy about gentrification.

And then about 18 hours later I realized what a stupid thing that was to say and took it down. If praising--or even just being totes cool with--gentrification is a bad idea, then it doesn't matter how good the recommendations are. I don't know what OTR was like 10 years ago, but I do know that real people used to live and work and play there and now they don't. Outsiders may not have wanted to spend time there, and some bad things probably happened there. You know what? That's true of almost everywhere.

I don't have a solution to this web of issues. But if my way of entering the world is with words, then I have a responsibility to be careful with them, even in a casual tweet about a city I'm growing to love. And sometimes, as now, my responsibility is to shut up and listen to people who know more about this than I do, people who've been hurt and displaced and disconnected by an influx of "cool" into what used to be their home.

One might ask, "what took you so long?" and one would be correct. It takes me way too long, always, to remember that there are other people whose experience of the world has been dramatically different from my own.