The Five Senses of Gentrification

Embodied experiences of changing neighborhood landscapes

A little over a year ago, my neighbors and I were having a small outdoor party in the driveway between two residential buildings on our block. Everyone brought a dish to share, and the party’s host, who has lived in that apartment building her entire life, rolled out her party speaker. This is the same speaker we have relied on for years. It flashes different colored lights while it plays cumbia, merengue, reggaeton or whatever other genres of music its owner chooses. The neighborhood kids often dance to the music from this speaker, and the speaker usually draws the attention of surrounding neighbors who, upon hearing its music, understand the sound as a signal to come say hello in this shared space. Even our local UPS delivery driver attended this particular party, confusing all the kids who are used to only seeing him in his work uniform. It was truly a party by and for the neighborhood. Or at least for the old neighborhood. 

On this particular Saturday, at 6:45PM, the cops rolled through. When I walked up to their car to ask them what they wanted with us, they told me they had received a noise complaint. I looked down at my wrist where a watch would be if I wore watches, then looked around at the trees alight with sunshine, alluding to the absurdity of a noise complaint on a Saturday before the sun had even set. I asked them who had called in the complaint, and they said it was anonymous, that even they were surprised to get this particular complaint at this particular time. I paused and looked up toward the window of a newly renovated apartment building behind their vehicle—a white stucco exterior that used to be pink, a brown wooden fence where there used to be none. In the window was a young white woman surveying the scene. When she made eye contact with me, she quickly ducked behind her kitchen table. Question answered. 

Illustration for Making a Neighborhood by Trenyce Tong

We have watched this neighborhood change drastically over the course of the last eleven years since 2012, and as those changes have begun to accelerate, I have tried to trace not just the shuttered businesses and displaced residents, but the shifts to the sensory environment. Now, I wonder: what does gentrification look, smell, taste, feel, and sound like? What are the larger implications that accompany these sensory shifts? I want to understand with my whole body, not just with my mind, how increased development and an influx of affluence in this neighborhood shapes peoples’ everyday lived experiences of their home. 

A neighborhood can change without any particular population being served or harmed: buildings can be repainted in a different color, a taco stand on one corner can decide to relocate to a different corner, residents can move into or out of the neighborhood based on their own desires, not market forces. But when the changes are designed to cater to a higher income bracket and a different racial or ethnic group, or when change fully takes choice out of the hands of those experiencing it, that is when change becomes less neutral and begins to reshape the neighborhood in disservice of working class residents, primarily residents of color, who lose access to the goods, services, and communities they’ve always known. 

The wave of change that comes with gentrification is one anyone can witness by just looking around. What does gentrification look like? The visual aesthetics, the “look” of gentrification, starts with the buildings. Sometimes, long-standing buildings are simply given a fresh coat of usually white or gray paint and a wooden fence with horizontal planks (a.k.a gentri-fences). Other times, buildings are either torn down or remodeled, all the decorative architectural flourishes that captured an historic style are removed in favor of harsh lines, square or rectangular shapes, and a kind of structural rigidity and simplicity that erases anything particularly distinguishable about a building. These newly constructed or newly renovated gentri-buildings live on the same lots once inhabited by lower income residents. They share the block with older buildings that still retain the old neighborhood’s character. In East Hollywood, the historic aesthetic comprises primarily bungalow courtyards, colorful duplexes with decorative iron fences, and single-family craftsmans partially overtaken by sprawling plant-life. 

Many of you are probably very familiar with the kinds of homogenous gentri-buildings I am describing. They are not only  all over our neighborhood in East Hollywood, but in many other parts of Los Angeles, as well as in my hometown of Denver, and a few other cities across the country. The presence of the same aesthetic style across cities creates the sense that every place is the same place. These shiny “new” cheaply made minimalist interiors and exteriors (once referred to in an Atlantic article as “The HGTV-ification of Everything”) homogenize our cities, erasing local character. Homogeneity. Sameness. Minimalist sterility.

Illustration for Making a Neighborhood by Trenyce Tong

These gentri-buildings are not common in areas that have always been wealthy. They are present almost exclusively in neighborhoods that were historically disinvested, formerly redlined, neighborhoods ripe for or already experiencing gentrification. The outcome of developers’ aesthetic choices, then, is not entirely an erasure of what was, but a partial erasure, paired with some still-remaining historical styles and designs common to whatever neighborhood is being gentrified. 

This mashup of gentri-buildings and historic architecture, according to Anastasia Baginski and Chris Malcolm in their essay “Gentrification and the Aesthetics of Displacement,” allows the gentrifying neighborhood to become “trendy,” the historic neighborhood and its ethnic roots a commodity to be experienced or consumed by new residents from the perceived “safety” of homogenous, predictable, bland gentri-homes. They write: “It is perhaps not hard to see that gentrification functions aesthetically, commodifying architectural styles and fashion, as well as racial and ethnic identity. It does so, for example, through the sharp-lined building facade, the third-wave coffee shop, the hipster, the wood-paneled fence, and the availability of a multi-ethnic food culture.” The old neighborhood, with its remaining historical architectural features and lingering legacy restaurants serving a variety of “ethnic” foods at reasonable prices, becomes the selling point for those looking to invest or live in homes that are themselves aesthetically distinct from the rest of the neighborhood. And even if new residents do want to take advantage of the unique architecture of the old neighborhood, they often renovate the homes they’ve purchased in order to live out their own personal aesthetic dreams while still allowing themselves to imagine that they are part of the community they’re displacing. 

Changing visual aesthetics aren’t the only sensory cues that signal a change in the neighborhood. When I moved to the Virgil Village area of East Hollywood in 2012, it was unimaginable that someone might call the cops for a noise complaint. Every day, the neighborhood was filled with the sounds of regionally specific music, whether it was my immediate neighbors playing ranchera music every Sunday morning while they drank beers in their courtyard, or Chicano rap coming from the party further down the street where young kids would host impromptu kickbacks on Friday nights. 

Music did not exclusively define the sonic landscape of this place, though. There was also the woman yelling to sell tamales on weekends, the tinny song of the ice cream truck, the sound of kids screaming as they raced their bikes up and down the sidewalks after school, and the laughter of families walking to or from somewhere else in the neighborhood in the evenings. If the look of gentrification takes the form of presence (the imposition of bland and homogenous buildings), then the sound of gentrification takes the form of absence (the increasing absence of sonic signs of life). 

Of course a gentrified neighborhood isn’t completely silent. There is the occasional cacophony of a group of 20-somethings laughing from the patio of some new restaurant, the incessant construction of new luxury properties, and the sharp intrusion of a very loud man taking an important business meeting on his AirPods while he paces up and down the sidewalk, yelling as if at no one in front of everyone else’s homes. But I have never seen the police called in to disrupt these sounds. They only seem to come through at the request of new residents whose desire to control their environment, paired with their fearless relationship with law enforcement, equates to a silencing of any noise deemed out of bounds by people with no relationship to the cultures, traditions, or people of the neighborhood they moved into. As Xochitl Gonzalez writes in “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?,” “The people complaining clearly thought they were trying to enforce a sonic landscape that they deemed superior, but what they were really doing was using shame to exert control.”

As these neighborhoods continue to become quieter in very specific ways, and as renovations or new construction continue to add gentri-buildings to the landscape, the neighborhood becomes more predictable, less full of the unknown for those unfamiliar with the sounds, tastes, smells, and habits of the neighborhood as it existed pre-gentrification. 

Jeremiah Moss explains in an interview about his work on gentrification that newcomers to gentrifying neighborhoods find comfort in the familiar and the predictable. He observes, “when you take the risk out of the city, you attract the risk-averse. What does a city become when it fills up with risk-averse minds?” 

His interviewer, Robin Grearson, responds: “Gentrification creates psychological safety for one type of consumer.” Meanwhile, existing neighbors who have “tolerated risk” associated with disinvested areas—which are largely unserviced by city governments (lack of street lamps, lack of bathrooms or trash cans, lack of infrastructural repair)—become those truly at risk, as they are more likely to have police called on them, more likely to lose their homes to eviction or foreclosure, and more likely to lose access to affordable and culturally relevant businesses and resources that are being priced out of the neighborhood. 

Neighborhoods that “improve” due to gentrification may do so in a manner that serves everyone living there—new sidewalks, more trees, more streetlights, cleaner streets—but how long can existing residents remain in a landscape that becomes rapidly unaffordable and alienating to them? 

Moss similarly comments on the idea of improvement when his interviewer asks, “The word pioneer is often used with gentrification. A quote in your book is: ‘People refer to youth moving into gentrifying neighborhoods as pioneers who make neighborhoods livable.’ Livable for whom?” 

Moss responds: “Livable for whom. That’s what I find myself repeating a lot. Because people will say, well, isn’t it nicer now; isn’t it safer now; isn’t it – whatever now? And I’ll say, well, for whom? Who is it for? The trees that they’re planting on the median. Who are the trees for? Trees are nice. People can all agree, trees are good... But who are they for? And what is their purpose? So we have to think critically about this stuff. A lot of people don’t want to think critically about it. They just want to enjoy the trees and they want to enjoy the increased sense of comfort and access. Because now they feel they have access to neighborhoods that they didn’t have access to before, because they were afraid to go there.” (See also Samanta Helou Hernandez asking this question about our very own neighborhood trees in her previously published photo essay). 

Look and sound aren’t the only senses through which we can trace gentrification. Taste, feel, and smell also shape the environment in new ways. When I recently polled a few people with the question “what does gentrification smell like?” I received a number of responses that pointed to scents commonly associated with new residents like the perfume Santal 33, the casual burning of sage or palo santo (materials used in some Indigenous cultures for specific medicinal and ritual purposes, increasingly used by non-indigenous people without any cultural context), coffee, and bagels. Just as with sound, though, what I notice most about the smell of my changing neighborhood is an absence of scents that used to dominate the space. The old corner spot used to grill chickens before it was displaced, and their grills generated a cloud of smoke that, if walked through, clung to one’s clothes for hours. Street vendors at the nearby swap meet who grill meat and veggies for the whole neighborhood have faced increased harassment and illegally placed No Vending signs, which encourages them to take the delicious smell of carne asada and elote elsewhere. Panaderías that baked pan dulce fresh every morning have had to relocate or shutter their doors due to rising commercial rents, their sweet smell absent from the air around us. 

Illustration for Making a Neighborhood by Trenyce Tong

In lieu of carne asada smoke and the scent of fresh pan dulce, new restaurants are offering not only a different set of smells, but a distinctly different set of tastes, all at a much higher price point. Expensive ramen, bagels, craft beer and hard cider, natural wine, and generic “American” food have replaced many of the long-running local offerings of more affordable Guatemalan tamales, Salvadoran pupusas, Mexican tortas, and other foods from Mexico and Central America.

Illustration for Making a Neighborhood by Trenyce Tong

And while a few of these treasured legacy establishments remain, navigating the packed sidewalks on the walk to or from these local spots presents a challenge. Lines around the block at trendy restaurants compete with even more crowds at pop-ups and events that spill over into the street outside of hip bars and wine shops. More than once, I have watched abuelitas trying to push their carts full of laundry or groceries through hordes of raw denim-wearing outsiders with tuluminati hats who cannot seem to comprehend that the sidewalk on which they stand exists to service people other than them. Their blank stares or complete lack of acknowledgement when someone is trying to pass by them without stepping into the street perfectly captures the “feeling” of gentrification: that all of this newness, good or bad, beautiful or boring, will quickly, willfully, crowd out the people, cultures, and histories that made this neighborhood such a desirable place for investors, restaurateurs, and upwardly mobile transplants to begin with. 

Illustration for Making a Neighborhood by Trenyce Tong

It is one thing to wrap our heads around the complex ecosystem of racist policies, profit-driven development, and all the residents, investors, and business owners who contribute to gentrifying neighborhoods. But sometimes I fear that people are more interested in discoursing about who and what is or isn’t a gentrifier than they are in actually learning about how and why these systems function. But if those who are used to just thinking about gentrification can begin to trace it through their bodies instead of their brains, perhaps the harm this particular form of “change” causes will feel more tangible, more real, and more like the actual violent process of erasure, displacement, and forceful homogenization it actually is. 

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PLEASE NOTE: Artwork for this article was supported in part by Quien Es Tu Vecindario, a local 501(c)3 in the neighborhood, through a grant from the L.A. County Department of Arts and Culture as part of Creative Recovery L.A., an initiative funded by the American Rescue Plan.