Let Me Give You Innovation: Gentrification, Louisville, and The Search For Motivation

Kaitlyn Soligan Owens

 My mother's parents began their married life in the Irish projects - the public development housing - of Mission Hill, Boston, situated in the shadow of Mission Church, formally known, but never called, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The public housing development that gave my large, sprawling, Boston Irish Catholic family their start in life was adjacent to the neighborhood of Roxbury, where a segregated public development housed Black families, and to the neighborhood of Jamaica Plain, where I lived while pursuing my MA. JP was, at that moment during which it housed me, a family neighborhood on the rise, a usually energizing mix of immigrant families and queer families looking for affordable places to belong, but with its proximity to campuses and present if wildly unreliable public transportation, we were in an uneasy moment in a city with overwhelming wealth and overwhelming wealth stratification, all of us eyeing the occasional new business and reading the tea leaves in our rent hikes for signs of our and our neighborhood's future. I lived half a mile from where my grandparents had their first home, where in the shadow of that church now sits a T.G.I.Friday's, and one-bedroom apartments rent for a thousand dollars a month or more.

Today, more than one in three residents of Roxbury live below the poverty line. The national average is 13 percent. 

My business partner and I lived together in the Columbia Heights area bordering U Street in Washington, D.C., in Harlem off of Frederick Douglass Boulevard, and now in Louisville, Kentucky, where, since the direct actions that took place this summer, gentrification has been a hot topic - hot enough to the touch that the sign activists brought to a Mayoral ribbon-cutting ceremony in the ever-developing Portland neighborhood actually read, "Fire, Fire, Gentrifier." That action followed reporting that linked Breonna Taylor's murder to the city's zeal for development, raising the possibility that the twenty-six year old first responder was caught up in forces directly linked to efforts to change a neighborhood, however illegally.

Shelby Park, the neighborhood in which my partner and I landed and have built our business, sits at a more complicated place and time: development in process, the slow and seemingly inexorable march of time and progress having been met, astonishingly, with both attention and real resistance. After being settled by German immigrants, Jewish families played a role in its growth and development. By the 1950s, it was a majority African-American neighborhood, surrounded on all sides by rapidly developing and increasingly more white neighborhoods; Shelby Park directly borders Germantown. This is likely why it is so strangely gerrymandered. Shelby Park's zip code is 40203, the same as a part of the Russell Neighborhood in the West End, with whom the neighborhood shares a Metro Council representative. It is also a historically redlined neighborhood, one where residents were deliberately denied the opportunity to buy homes, leaving them renters, forever owing and never owning.

Like my grandparents first home in Mission Hill, Shelby Park sits in the shadow of a church, a right-wing evangelical tentacle of an enormous financial octopus. Sojourn Church is a sibling, half-sibling, and cousin once to twice removed to both for-profit and non-profit endeavors across the region, including my bar’s neighbors, Access Ventures, which counts among its founders a one-time Sojourn minister, and which in turn distributes funding to endeavors like Scarlet’s Bakery, which used to have a location across the street from our bar and whose non-profit, tax-exempt status stems from its mission to help “abused and exploited women,” and from its growth from a non-profit called Scarlet Hope that was founded to “share the hope and love of Christ with women in the adult entertainment industry,” and which is, I will reiterate, a business committed to “saving” women with religious ties which chose to call itself “Scarlet’s Bakery,” and which – again – received funding from, and whose building was owned by, the aforementioned Access Ventures, which also provided funding for various other small businesses around the city, from NuLu to Germantown to Middletown. 

When Sojourn moved into the neighborhood they were met with strong skepticism by residents, as well as by the passionate members of the Shelby Park Neighborhood Association, which is the single most invested, involved neighborhood association I have ever personally come into contact with in my decade spanning six different towns and cities prior to my arrival in Louisville.  Sojourn is both a product of its roots and its branches. Sojourn members have frequented and, in one instance, even married in our bar, utterly unphased by the morning after pills we give away for free and the gender-neutral signs we use for the bathrooms. The church itself is born of a Southern Baptist tradition, has a reputation for being anti-choice, and is admittedly homophobic. A LEO article from 2008 notes, “Gays are free to come to Sojourn, but only after they acknowledge that they need to be saved from the sinfulness of being gay.”

We call the thing we build a house upon a foundation, giving a unified name to the force that upholds the structure, but a foundation is not a singular thing. A house's foundation in any neighborhood, from the redline-produced Russell to the white-flight generated Middletown, is made of bricks, or stone, or even lumber, but most commonly of concrete; meanwhile, concrete itself is made of gravel, or rock, or sand, and water and cement; cement is comprised of—among other things—iron, aluminum, and silicon.

 Upon entering the neighborhood, the Sojourn Church briefly encouraged its congregants to buy in wholeheartedly and purchase homes in Shelby Park. One Sojourn member was quoted in Louisville Future at the time as identifying the neighborhood as having “petty crime and other issues,” saying, “It’s a hard thing to ask a young family to do this … to move into an iffy neighborhood. But we’ve been given everything in Christ and have nothing to lose. That can only happen with someone who believes they’ve been given everything.” The article claimed this wasn’t gentrification, intended to push poor families out, with the same member saying, “‘It’s about revitalization; getting to know neighbors. Serving neighbors,’ he said. ‘We seek to be an improving force, not that we’re just ‘moving in.’”

Despite their protestations, the clear push by a white evangelical church that began in the East End to move into a low-to-moderate income neighborhood that at least some of them held in fairly obvious disdain was correctly identified by residents as gentrification, and when it was identified loudly and often enough, the church quietly gave up its more deliberate efforts to plant residents in the community.

Still, as the Highlands became unlivably expensive for the average Louisvillian and the Paristown development had a 6-room shotgun listing for upwards of $150,000 in the blocks just past Germantown, Shelby Park felt the pinch. The church met its match from 2016 to 2017; around then or shortly after, discussion began on the construction of Logan Street Market, a massive development project that paid lip service to, and received significant tax breaks to address, the need for more groceries in the neighborhood; this promised development drew more developers, particularly flippers eager to turn over once-vacant properties. When my friends bought a shotgun in the neighborhood a few years ago, they discovered the developers had failed to obtain the proper construction permits, leaving them unable, for months, to make crucial repairs. They had also stuffed all of the old, likely asbestos-ridden insulation into a crawl space.

Cheryl Strayed once said that change starts at the level of a gesture; so, too, does resistance. We found a willingness to resist the inexorable march of progress towards the preferred aesthetic and its purveyors in Shelby Park, where our landlords knew us to be, in summation, blatantly gay abortion-pushing communists with no money, and took us in anyway. Our landlords work around the corner from us; they hire people like them, people who do a good job and take their work personally, and they keep their money in the neighborhood whenever possible – our floors were purchased from, and laid by, a flooring company we can see from out our front windows, which has served the neighborhood for decades. My partner and I cherish this neighborhood. It gave us our chance; its people gave us their trust. Without our neighbors, we don’t have a business. The city is not paving the way for the vision this neighborhood holds for itself; it’s not fast-tracking licenses, changing zoning, responding to calls for innovation. What we want to build here, we have to build together. Whatever ground we want to hold; we have to stand on.

Our business is built on the same foundation as our lives, which is built on the same foundation as our reality; my partner and I have benefitted enormously from white privilege, which is to say, more brutally, that we have benefitted from the racism others have suffered from, that the zero-sum games capitalism plays have left some for us by denying it to others. While there are consequences for our beliefs and politics, we can hold them and real space simultaneously; we have access and a seat at many tables. We do not currently have the power to unmake our privilege, but we can decide what to do with it. Our asses are going to get called to account like everyone else; for everything we’ve ever built or done, there will be a reckoning. When we put it all out on the table, we can only hope not to be ashamed. Like life, capitalism runs like a river we sometimes feel swept away by, drops us somewhere and leaves us looking around in amazement, wondering how we arrived. Not letting it have what it wants means swimming like hell sometimes against the current, and being white and straight means having the option of being comfortably carried while all around you other folx have only varying and lessening degrees of choice, often held against the question of their own survival.

Gentrification, racing around breaking things with energetic abandon, reacts like a cartoon bird to an unseen window when it meets an obstacle – when it meets the aforementioned resistance –  falling from the sky and landing, limbs askew, with little dizzy signs over its head, seeing stars. Even the accomplished, polished gentrification of NuLu looked absurd when it ran into those families and activists in the street, those neat lists of demands and grades left in its store windows up and down the block, those mirrors that showed it for the grasping, needy, relentlessly consuming maw that it is, and gentrification and people responsible for enabling it stood on the streets they had been so sure they owned just a minute ago, stunned by the notion that every single thing they laid eyes on didn’t necessarily belong or answer to them. You heard it in the heated words from the business owners offended that their motivations could even be called into question, that anyone had the right to ask them to so much as explain themselves, and you saw that same stunned, dizzy look on our Mayor’s face when that banner unfurled behind him, when the neat foundations beneath his feet started to break down in real time into their composite pieces, the greedy sand of racism and capitalism swallowing him whole until he was waist-deep in things he’d thought himself above, looking up at the people who knew better, finally fleeing like the emperor with no clothes, the good-liberal and good-white-man and trying-so-hard ensemble falling behind him as he ran like the outfit it was, something he has the privilege to take on and off, to wear or not wear, down by the feet of the peasants he felt should be a little more grateful that he chose to get dressed in the morning at all.

Like the process of gentrification itself, disruption runs a line through clean and messy efforts. Capitalism obscures; it always offers a way to blame the beneficiary of a system they didn’t create over the oppressive system itself. By disrupting the Mayor’s efforts at the Montgomery apartments in Portland at the very tipping point, protesters placed blame where it was not only accurate, but effective: at the feet of a man who had made significant decisions to change things and was capable of making different and truly effective decisions if he so chose. By the time the NuLu action occurred, many business owners were located in buildings inherited many times over, with no real understanding of the violent means by which they’d become available for their dreams to take root. It is significant that throughout the NuLu actions, the names and individual beliefs of business owners, some of whom were people of color and immigrants, became widely known, but I never heard Gil Holland’s name invoked once. The architecture is a lot easier to see than the architect.

The gentrification alarm bells ring regularly in the Shelby Park neighborhood. Following the articles around Sojourn Church, in June of 2019, two months before our bar opened, an article ran in Louisville Magazine titled, “Shelby Park Real Estate Is ‘On Fire.’ Is That a Good Thing?” It found that home prices had risen by 67 percent, that the white population had risen by 40 percent, though Black families still made up 54 percent of the overall neighborhood, and that businesses were coming in droves. Given the circumstances, everything has changed. Few folks are building, and many are closing. But it would be a mistake to get complacent; this is only a pause.

The last article I can find on the topic came from the Courier-Journal in February. “Are Black residents being pushed out of the historically diverse Shelby Park neighborhood?” it asked, and like every article on the neighborhood, the conclusion seemed to be: it’s complicated. For the first time in decades, white residents of Shelby Park now outnumber Black residents, but not residents of color. It appears from the census data that Shelby Park lost some 300 Black residents, after holding nearly identically steady in numbers for the prior four years; numbers of white residents dropped off in 2017 but rose in 2018 to match 2016’s numbers. Did 300 Black residents really leave Shelby Park in a year? Did 100 white residents move out in 2017, only to be replaced by 150 white residents in 2018? Why has Shelby Park’s slow, halting development, often driven by folks from the neighborhood, received so much attention, when NuLu’s had previously received so little? Is it because NuLu was a warning bell, or because the amount of money that poured into it silenced dissent?

What’s certain is that previously vacant, renovated houses were more likely to be bought by white families looking for an affordable place to live than by Black families, who too often don’t have the capital to buy. It’s certain that the neighborhood association is committed to making houses available for Black families and families of color at the most affordable rates possible, trying to allow the neighborhood to develop, while preventing it from gentrifying. It’s certain that money attracts money, business attracts business, and food and beverage change a neighborhood. While food and beverage only line the outskirts – Red Top, Logan Street Market, the upcoming Atrium, Toasty’s Tavern, and Trouble Bar all occupy just 4 blocks on two streets, back-to-back in close proximity, and Six Forks sits on the other side of Shelby Park, bookending the neighborhood in and bordering Old Louisville – they’re walkable from anywhere, making the neighborhood attractive to more buyers, to more business, to more dreams, and to all of their attendant motivations.

Gentrification is a process, but processes don’t occur in a vacuum. Gentrification doesn’t do things; people do things. Capitalism doesn’t unilaterally make decisions that change a neighborhood, a city, a life; people make decisions, hands up in helpless deference to the gods that they serve, as though there’s no way to change the fate of the occupants of the homes we build on these foundations we’ve discussed. But a house can’t make a thief or a liar or a late-stage capitalist squeezing every penny of labor out of suffering workers of you. You have to decide who you want to be and what you can live with. Even when we don’t have great choices, we still have to make a choice. Change isn’t inherently good or bad, but the real, lived consequences changes have on people often are. 

NuLu is a cautionary tale, a visible result of the worst possible structures built on our messy and unjust concrete foundation. A community was deliberately dismantled out of existence, colonized and re-made into the city’s notion of a more pleasing image. The injustice can be addressed, but never unmade. Preventing it from happening anywhere else requires gumming up the gears, resisting, pushing back at the behemoth of progress at every step. It requires that real people be critical enough to say no to an opportunity that benefits them while harming others even when it means the death of dream, because their dream can’t be more important than someone else’s reality. It means seeing our existing structures with clarity and our neighbors with compassion; it means taking the time to understand that calling the police on a homeless Black man who won’t stop bothering people outside your business might mean his death at their hands, and that calling the police to get a drunk girl out of your bartender’s hair might realistically end in her sexual assault. It means that while these big structures are designed to make us feel helpless, to allow us to throw up our hands and look away at how hard it all is to fix, we are, in fact, the first, the last, and the only line of defense for ourselves, our neighbors, and our communities. It means if we want things to be good or to stay good, we have to fight.