Martin Reiner: About the terrible gentrification of the Bronx in Brno I. Literary reportage from the Czech Pain series
From Bratislavská comes a strong middle-aged blonde with a professionally fitted bust; this is exactly how a lady from a reality show in a Russian movie would look. The apartment on the second floor is almost empty, but in good condition.
“A woman lived here alone with a boy, gypsies, but a decent one,” as the real estate lady, “a white skunk,” spares no effort.
I will confirm the interest, but I will say that I still have to consult at home. The lady understands, a few days later I will reduce the price by one hundred and fifty thousand and my wife and I will leave for Šumava. My broker is tasked with handling the contract and other formalities. At the same time, he is thorough enough that an identical apartment appears in the same building, which is three hundred thousand cheaper. And whoever is selling it is obviously in a hurry. The deal is therefore certain – and I can start gentrifying the Bronx of Brno.
Fox, carp, heroin, murals
As a little boy, I used to go to see my great-grandfather Cyril in Marxova Street. Today, that street is called Spolková and two-thirds of it is completely new. My ancestor’s house still stands, it has just lost its antique charm; the interesting facade fell victim to a “thrifty” repair.
The cycle of literary reports by domestic writers of Czech Pains is created in cooperation with the Association of Writers. Illustrator of the Year 2019 Nikola Logosová takes care of the visual accompaniment. |
Directly opposite is a gaping hole, on which more than a hundred years of history lies today. At the end of the 19th century, the Brno Social Democracy was founded here with the charismatic leader Josef Hybeš, and in the next two decades, it basically appeared to humanize the “spontaneous capitalism” of its time. Later there used to be the Lípa cinema, then the Starlet dance school hall, and after the revolution the place became famous for the Harlem rock club. After him came the THC club with an iconic stuffed fox on the ground floor, a carp in a dirty aquarium and Roman Holý, who played in the local “cinema” The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It smelled like weed.
Today it is the last undeveloped lot in the street, but only for a while.
In the 1990s, Spolková was “occupied” for some time by Olas, who distributed heroin in the neighborhood, thereby devastating the community rumungro teenagers. Later, the drug trade in the Bronx was taken over by the Vietnamese. And today, Spolková is solidly gentrified with apartment buildings that look a lot better than my great-grandfather’s house.
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New barracks are also growing on Francouzská, at the end of which the famous Brno “textilka” still resides; here, for a change, my mother graduated in 1961. Grandma used to train between the wars at the French school in Sokol.
I myself have been more or less at home in the Bronx in Brno for thirteen years – and I don’t walk the streets with my eyes closed. However, I decided to write about local gentrification only after reading Bára Bažantová’s article The art of gentrification on the example of Cejlo from Brno published on the Artalk.cz server. And certainly not only because it also talks about me.
Coincidentally, I am behind the project City Gallery, the result of which are twelve large-scale paintings on the gable walls of local houses. They were painted by leading Czech artists with the help of the Malujeme dinas studio. And Bára Bažantová believes that those paintings will attract millionaires to the Bronx, who will settle here, and their reckless desire for soy lattes will trigger an avalanche, at the end of which we will see an exodus of “locals” accompanied by a cancerous growth of hipster cafes and a dizzying increase in rent.
It happened in Berlin’s Kreuzberg, so it will also happen in Brno’s Bronx.
When Bára Bažantová writes “local residents”, she means Roma, which seems like a rather arbitrary denial of reality.
In 2006, according to the Interactive Map of Socially Excluded Localities, three to five thousand Roma lived in the Bronx in Brno, making up 40 to 50 percent of the local population. Today’s numbers of Roma residents are not available, the map of socially excluded localities from 2015 does not go into such details, it is only certain that the number of Roma here has significantly decreased in the meantime.
And even the Roma community itself is not as uniform as it may appear to members of the majority, who “put their lives on the line” once in a while by tram.
A local Roma woman makes a humorous comment when I evaluate the local education situation in an interview with a young reporter: “Yes, it’s good here. Here’s ours and yours, you know, you can’t choose. There is always an A and a B. My boy went to A, but I had him put in B, because in A there are Olas, you know, the Gypsies.”
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The triad of “our-your-Olas” clearly supported the diversity of the Bronx’s population and, at the same time, the importance of diversification among individuals. One of the keys to dividing the Roma, which they themselves use, is their origin (at the top of the symbolic hierarchy are the old settlers, the Moravian Roma, and the Olaš and Slovak Roma at the bottom) or, for example, the current address, when it is true that “the better” live towards the city center , towards Husovice “the worse”.
And by the way, if one of the characteristic features of gentrification is the displacement of the original population, then it must be said that the most massive outflow of Roma from the neighborhood occurred during the “soft eviction” long before the Bronx began to be “ruled by developers” and from the concept gentrification became a seasonal hit.
Stealth gentrification
The idea that developers are building “palaces for cream” in the Bronx in the middle of a real ghetto is absurd. Their current activity is the completion of stages that began about fifteen years ago.
First, between 2008 and 2015, the so-called Integrated City Development Plan was implemented, when no new houses were built, but many old ones were renovated. The whole thing cost around 400 million crowns, and in order for the city to obtain money from the European Union, which was almost half of this amount, it was not enough to say “we will repair the barracks”. It was necessary to proclaim (and at least partially demonstrate) an effort to improve the living conditions of the residents of a socially excluded locality.
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The crucial moment, however, was that the city decided at the same time to release funds from the sale of municipal apartments, because it did not have enough funds for their maintenance. In just one year, only the Brno-střed district in the given location got rid of 584 apartments! And since we live in capitalism, those who had the means and knew how to deal with the housing crowd – real estate agents – took the chance.
Through the original inhabitants, they bought apartments in bulk and their users, a high percentage of whom were actually local Roma, moved to cooperative apartments in housing estates or to Husovice and other localities, whose character is not very different from the Bronx in Brno.
Considering the ratio of the prices at which the apartments were bought and at which they were subsequently sold, there was still something noticeable for the original tenants, so their willingness to pack their bags and move to a block of flats with running hot water, central heating and plaster, which holding on to the wall, was considerable.
In the house on Körnerova Street, where I bought an apartment, seven or eight gangs changed hands in just two years. At the end of the short process, I was the second oldest in the entire house. Which points to a rather important gentrification circumstance: for almost fifteen years now, the Bronx has been inhabited mainly by young people who do not suffer from prejudices and welcome the opportunity to live ten minutes from Náměstí Svobody, i.e. the very center of Brno, at a lower price than elsewhere. They graduated here and want to settle in Brno. They come here for work, some start families.
Brno is a university city, and students were subletting in the Brno Bronx already in the wild nineties. But the new residents, who have invested in property in the locality and intend to live in the purchased apartments, bring a new quality here.
A social worker, a Roma woman, describes it in her own words: “Well, it’s a point of view, but if Gadžovský families move there, it’s good for the locality. First of all, they might notice that Roma are cool, that they can’t be lumped together, and they’ll spread the word, and that’s what I need. So that those people will learn about the Roma, as they really are.’
A bit of theory
The very concept gentrification it was perhaps first used by Ruth Glass in 1964 when she described the transformations of the working-class districts of London. The term is derived from the word aristocracy, which denoted aristocratic landowners in the countryside; gentrification then referred to the (supposed) movement of more prosperous social strata from the countryside to decaying urban centers.
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In the United States, this process was widely publicized and was seen as an entirely positive phenomenon. Later it turned out that it was an illusion and that the welcome movement took place almost exclusively within the boundaries of the urban agglomeration itself.
As will be shown more than once, gentrification remains a very “fluid” concept, so even funders often resort to stating that it describes “something that happened in large urban areas hundreds of years ago and that is repeated regularly”.
Some urban sociologists speak of a “specific format of revitalization,” i.e., renewal, which anti-gentrification campaigners call a politically motivated euphemism that attempts to pass off a repulsive cause in a more acceptable guise.
British geographer Chris Hamnett defines gentrification as “the spatial manifestation of a society’s shift from an industrial to a post-industrial economy characterized by financial and creative services, taking into account the reflection of this economy in the structure of the population, in the stratification of work and in the nature of the real estate market”. Which is factually indisputable to ptydepe, which takes away the emotional content of things and communicates a little cocooned that it is a “completely natural process”.
But emotions play a role when dealing with the concept gentrification one role.
“Gentrification bullshit. Let the ghetto be!”
Someone sprayed this suggestive inscription on an advertising banner promoting the new housing complex Pekárenský dvůr rising at the end of Bratislavská Street. I don’t think he fundamentally expands our knowledge of gentrification, but the definition sui generis it undoubtedly is.
I wonder who could have taken the job…
He probably wasn’t an aging white straight man. After all, he keeps his fingers crossed for developers and, by extension, for everyone who pours concrete over cities and builds his six-cylinder in the place where daisies laughed at man in the spring. He probably wasn’t a neo-Marxist, a sunbather who fights for equal opportunities for everyone and thinks about how to abolish the ghetto. So who?!
Martin Reiner is a writer, owner of the publishing house Druhé město and organizer of cultural and social events. He wrote a number of books of poetry and prose; his most successful title is Poet. A novel about Ivan Blatné (Torst 2014), which became the Book of the Year in the Magnesia Litera Awards and the LN Book of the Year and also won the Josef Škvorecký Prize. Currently, as an opposition representative in Brno-střed, Martin Reiner is also involved in the project of the Moravian Jewish Museum Mehrin, which will include the Holocaust Documentation Center in Moravia. |
I’d wager that the author was someone who simply wants the Bronx to remain as it is today, at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century; pleasantly gentrified long ago.
It is not gentrification as gentrification.
Due to lack of space, we cannot compare the “gentrification” processes that have taken place or are taking place in Hamburg’s Sankt Pauli district, London’s Hackney Wick, New York’s High Line, Prague’s Karlín, Colombia’s Medellin, Marseille’s Le Panier, or the port districts of Barcelona and Helsinki. We can only say that they differed in many, often crucial, details. And I didn’t mention Berlin, which is a real gentrification laboratory.
German urban sociologist Andrej Holm and his colleagues have identified six types and forms in this city alone: pioneering gentrification, studentification, controlled fine gentrification, typical gentrification, new-build gentrification, and even supergentrification, where high-net-worth gentrifiers crowd out the middle-income.
Each of these forms has its own specific manifestations.
What concrete forms gentrification takes in the Bronx of Brno, we will discuss in the second part of this text next week…