What Is A Neighborhood? (Part 2)

This is the second part of a two part essay, the first part of which was published last week on March 17, 2022

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to be complicit in the ways in which my block is changing. I wasn’t an organizer when I first moved here. My critical consciousness was just sprouting. The changes I was seeing even back then felt inevitable. Outside of me. Everyone an individual player in an individual game. I didn’t see the ways in which we were a web, a system, a network. I didn’t see the ways in which one small decision I made, one small decision someone else made, and then someone else and then someone else… I didn’t see how those decisions were pulling taut a web that existed long before me. When a bunch of people in my racial or economic demographic move into a lower income immigrant neighborhood—a neighborhood that has already faced divestment historically in the form of redlining—we tend to patronize restaurants and businesses for whom we are the target demographic. Our presence means there are fewer and fewer long-term residents left in the neighborhood to shop at the local mom and pop grocery stores, the panadería, the kinds of places you won’t find in a travel guide’s food tour write-up. 

Real estate investors and landlords will see the changing demographics and start to force long-standing local businesses and long-term residents out of their spaces. They increase the rent. With more wealthy and/or white people come new businesses that are unaffordable to the existing community. With more wealthy and/or white people come more instances of cops being called on anyone not white and/or wealthy who looks, in the eyes of new residents and new business owners, like a threat. Each new addition to a neighborhood stretches and pulls on the existing neighborhood web. One person moving in, one business moving in, might not have a perceptible impact. But just like ants, it’s never only one. First it’s a slow trickle of change, then a damn bursting. In the last ten years, I entered this neighborhood as part of that slow trickle and am now witnessing the damn bust, the businesses my neighbors relied on are being pushed out, buildings are being demolished and new buildings, to serve a new demographic, are being erected in their place. 

Policies and people change a neighborhood in tandem. For as long as this neighborhood has been a neighborhood, it has been composed of immigrants. But not only immigrants. In the late 1800’s, there was a recently-freed Black man from Mississippi named George Washington Albright and his descendants homesteaded the area I live in over 100 years ago. Those same descendants helped look after the homes and businesses of local Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans who the United States later sent to internment camps during World War II. Not long before that, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation assigned portions of this neighborhood a red grade, meaning banks weren’t to loan to anyone inside the redline, thus divesting from non-white, predominately immigrant and low-income areas like ours. This is the part you know, if you know the work of my neighbors and collaborators Jimmy Recinos and Samanta Helou-Hernandez. 

What happens when a new neighborhood is born inside of, on top of, an existing neighborhood?

What happens when a neighborhood is actually two neighborhoods, the new tangled up in the old?

The community inside of my apartment complex is both separate and inseparable from the community outside of my apartment complex. Inside, we all know each other well. Outside, I am one of a few people from my building who has built relationships with my neighbors in other apartment complexes. I am, on the whole, a pretty curious person, very chatty, generally overly-interested in other peoples’ lives, and, let's be honest, a little lonely. I am also one of the only people in my building, if not the only person, who speaks any Spanish, the dominant language of the neighborhood around us. As such, I live my life between the interior of my apartment complex and the exterior of my block, serving as a sort of accidental ambassador, fielding complaints from everyone about the way the cars are parked, what that smell is and where it’s coming from, and whose dog pooped in the middle of the sidewalk. 

I wasn’t always an accidental ambassador. Before the pandemic, I mostly only knew neighbors outside my apartment complex by sight and maybe name. There wasn’t too much emotional intimacy between us because we all had jobs jobs jobs and our lives moved so fast fast fast. But when the country slowed down in March of 2020, many of the people on my block were, like those in my apartment complex, without work or were working from home. People I’d waved to or chatted with briefly a hundred times were suddenly lingering longer in the streets. Like me, they were exercising caution, not wanting to stray too far from the safety of home quarantine, but not wanting to stay trapped in the smallness of their apartments either. We started to live outside more. Outside with its open air and fewer worries about things like ventilation and exposure to the virus. Instead of just hearing the neighbors in the bungalow court next to us who spent every Sunday morning eating and drinking and blasting Ranchera music, I began to see them standing in front of their apartment complex, talking to other neighbors who were passing by. I began to linger in the street more as well, to talk with neighbors for extended periods, because I was no longer on my way to or from anywhere. I was just out, wandering, trying to stay sane while staying safe. 

I met Gilda this way, her two adorable small dogs tugging on their leash toward me and my dog one afternoon. We talked about the extended-stay motel around the corner that she used to manage decades prior. Later, I met her daughter Karen, and her daughter’s kids, who hang out on our street corner under big, beautiful trees that aren’t very common in other parts of the neighborhood. I started to ride bikes with Karen’s kids on the weekends. Help them with their homework. Their family will cook delicious meals on a grill on our street corner and I’ll eat with them. They once set up a ping pong table outside and called me to come over and we spent the night in competition, eating, drinking, and dancing to music between rounds of ping pong. The more time I spent in the street, the more neighbors I met.

Before the pandemic, I used to see my neighbor Sal sitting outside at a small card table under the shade of a big tree, and eventually we started saying hello. It turned out we were both teachers, so we talked shop often. The more we sat outside and talked, the more other neighbors would come up to him to chat, the more people I began to know. During the early pandemic, when I made that spreadsheet where neighbors could list the things they had to share and the things they needed, I sent it to Sal so that we could connect all our apartment complexes in case of emergency. After that, Sal introduced me to his friend Louie who was also raised on this block and who I’d recognized from my early days here, and the three of us have since become a squad, bonded primarily through our shared love of dad jokes, 90’s music, cooking, and the occasional fast food feast. One night, feeling disheartened, I walked home from a pretty terrible second date and I saw Sal and Louie standing in front of my building talking. My heart filled with relief seeing their familiar faces. They could tell I was down, so to cheer me up, they made a plan for the three of us to taste-test every hot chicken sandwich we could find in the city, and the next day we drove to four different food establishments, returned to my courtyard, and ate so much hot chicken we thought we might explode. 

The more neighbors I got to know, the more decades old gossip I got to hear, which is how I learned about the way things used to be and how everyone felt about the way things are now. The three-dimensional neighborly intimacy that I’d built with the neighbors inside my apartment complex was now a level of intimacy I had with the whole street. 

Over the course of ten years—first slowly and then all at once—this block became my home. 

What does it mean to have a home?

To actually live where you live?

I can’t walk ten feet in this neighborhood without running into someone I love. On Sundays I drink beer with the men in the courtyard next to mine and sometimes they ask me for help with bureaucratic paperwork and always they make fun of my Spanish and often they ask me questions for which I have no answers, but it’s funny and it’s easy and it feels like family. I never go hungry because I am always being fed and if I am not being fed it is because I am the one doing the feeding. 

Many years ago, some unhoused folks started making their homes on the block as well, but they came and went as the city violently stripped them of their belongings and forced them to move along to nowhere in particular. But recently, for the last several months, the same few people have lived in tents on the street. I see them every day and we talk about what they need and the other neighbors and I give what we’re able to. Sometimes we trade cooking tips or I’ll bring them a pot of chili or they’ll cook me some squash. When the city comes to take their things, I make sure they have new tents the same day. They are our neighbors and we are their neighbors. Everyone on this block falls asleep and wakes up and sees the same piece of sky and walks the same busted up sidewalks and yes, sometimes it is hard to maintain personal boundaries in a community like this. Sometimes we are too much in each others’ business. Sometimes we just want to walk through our streets and not talk to another person on the way. We navigate those discomforts as best we can. 

What is a neighborhood?

For my whole life I thought a neighborhood was a place on a map. A place with a name given to it by its residents, but most likely given to it by a real estate developer. Some neighborhoods go by multiple names depending on who you ask. Sometimes you move to a neighborhood because of its price or its proximity to your job or your family, sometimes because of its culture and a shared language. Sometimes you move to a neighborhood because it is a status symbol and you think where you live tells other people something about you, and you know what? You’re not wrong.

There is a difference, though, between living in a neighborhood and being a neighborhood. Living in a neighborhood gives you the chance to opt in or out of the community of people around you. Being a neighborhood means recognizing that your life and your choices are bound up with the lives and choices of people around you. Being a neighborhood means understanding that there were people here before you and there will be people here after you but what you grow while you are here will last and last and last even if the city or the developers try to take what you’ve made away.

Last month, the first neighbor I ever met on this block came home to visit. The neighbor who gave me the rundown, the information, the history I needed to understand the neighborhood I’d found myself in. His older brother still lives nearby. His kid was in the backseat and I could not comprehend how quickly that kid had gone from non-existent to nearly eight years old in the decade that I’d now known this neighbor. I asked him how he was doing and he said things were going well, that he was putting out music, that he’d made a music video with one of the guys who used to live in my complex several years ago. He proudly showed me his forearm, filled with a brand new tattoo, a tattoo of our block. 

“There’s the stop sign!” I yelled!

“And the corner apartments,” he said.

“And power lines and the school!” I kept yelling. I couldn’t believe the accuracy.

There also, in the middle of the tattooed version of our street, was a squad car and a cop, gun drawn, not too dissimilar from a scene I came upon just a month later when I was trying to park my car on the block and some cops had a neighborhood kid in handcuffs on the corner before they eventually let him ride off on his bike into the night.

Same as it ever was. Same as it’s always been.

“This is my hood,” he said. 

“This is your hood,” I said.

And not a single person can tell him something different. 

(read part one)