Episode 84: Transcript

Episode: 84: The Eldritch Horror of Gentrification

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and everything else. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:11] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of Victories Greater Than Death, a brand-new young adult space opera novel. 

Annalee: [00:00:20] In this episode, we'll be talking about gentrification, not just how gentrification changes our cities and changes our lives, but also what kinds of stories we tell about gentrification. How do we justify what we're doing, using science fiction and horror? But also, how does science fiction and horror kind of protest against the process of gentrification? And helping us wade through all of these difficult topics, we have Sam J. Miller, who is the award-winning author of Blackfish City. And his new novel The Blade Between is all about gentrification in his hometown of Hudson, New York.

[00:01:02] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion. 

Charlie Jane: [00:01:29] So, Annalee, tell me what is gentrification? 

Annalee: [00:01:32] So this is a really huge question and I did kind of a deep dive on it as we were preparing for this episode. And one of the best explanations that I found is from Stacey Sutton, who is a professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois in Chicago. And she did a TED talk a few years ago, where she just perfectly summed up what gentrification is, and this is what she said.

Stacey Sutton: [00:01:59] The term gentrification refers to processes by which higher income or higher status people relocate to or invest in low-income urban neighborhoods. These neighborhoods have historically been disinvested by both the public and private sector. And so as higher income people move to these areas, it's typically to capitalize on the low property values. In doing so they inflate property values, displace low-income people and fundamentally alter the culture and character of the neighborhood. 

Annalee: [00:02:41] So the thing that really struck me about her explanation, and then what she kind of goes on to say in the rest of this TED Talk, which we'll link to in the notes, is that the main problem is displacement. And the reason why I really liked the fact that she emphasized that is because I think we get caught up in a lot of discussions about gentrification that kind of end up being about aesthetics. People saying, “Well, I don't like seeing Starbucks because it's icky. And I'd rather have artisanal coffee, or I hate artisanal coffee, because… “ And then it ends up being about how a neighborhood looks, or how we feel about different kinds of stores and housing in the neighborhoods. 

[00:03:28] And what Professor Sutton says is that's not the issue. The issue is literally just the displacement forces people who live in a neighborhood to leave, to be displaced. And the other thing that I wanted to throw in there as like a sub-definition, is something that she talks about, which is called exclusionary displacement. So there's the normal kind of displacement, which is literally rich people move in and poor people have to physically leave. But then there's a whole bunch of people in many cities, including San Francisco, where we live, and New York and Chicago, which are two cities that have a lot of issues around gentrification, where there are people who are living in rent controlled houses, or they're living in low income housing, in neighborhoods that are gentrifying, so they don't have to leave, they're not going to actually be physically displaced, because they're going to continue to be able to afford it. But because of the fact that the entire neighborhood is changing around them, all their friends and family are being displaced, all their favorite stores are being displaced. They end up wanting to leave and choosing to leave anyway because the neighborhood is not their neighborhood anymore. 

[00:04:35] So that's called exclusionary displacement. And that's a kind of epi-phenomenon. 

[00:04:40] You were telling me about another definition that you heard from Jeff Chang, who's a music critic.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:46] Jeff Chang, the author of Who We Be, the Colorization of America. I was actually at a bookstore event a few years ago, where Jeff was saying that he wants us to stop saying the word gentrification and start kind of using the term resegregation instead, because he feels like that's really the phenomenon that's happening. And he made an amazing video, which we're gonna link to in the show notes. And here's just a clip from that.

Jeff Chang: [00:05:10] The San Francisco Bay Area, it's a place I’ve called home for half my life now. And some days, I feel like I don't even recognize it anymore. Lots of friends have been forced to move. Homelessness is worse than I've ever seen and making ends meet seems less and less possible for everyday working people. Like the Bay Area, America is resegregating, it’s becoming more separate, and more unequal. 

Charlie Jane: [00:05:33] So that was Jeff talking about basically how the Bay Area is changing, and how he doesn't recognize his neighborhood anymore. And how it doesn't feel like the place that he's been living for so long. And he uses the term resegregation in that clip, as well. It is to do with who the neighborhood is for and who feels comfortable in the neighborhood? And can you afford to buy groceries in the neighborhood where you live anymore? Or is it all high end kind of boutique grocery stores where a tube of toothpaste costs like $25? 

Annalee: [00:06:06] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:06:06] Or something. And it's just there are a lot of other factors that go into this besides just like, are you able to afford your rent? And obviously with rent control, some people can, but it's more complicated than that. 

[00:06:19] And one point that I wanted to kind of make really quickly is that I feel like this sometimes gets subsumed into the question of housing shortages. The fact that like, a lot of these cities actually have a shortage of housing. But this is not a problem that can be just addressed by building a lot more housing, especially if the housing is all aimed at the professional upper income class, because that will just worsen the problem of people, long standing residents, not being able to continue to live in their own neighborhood because it's changed around them. 

Annalee: [00:06:45] Yeah, I mean, a lot of what Jeff Chang is talking about is exclusionary displacement. The people who stay in the neighborhood feeling like, it's just not their place anymore, which is really a heartbreaking feeling. 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:01] How does gentrification relate to storytelling and how can we tell stories that help us to cope with gentrification? 

Annalee: [00:07:07] So the thing that is interesting about this is, obviously we're going to talk about science fiction and fantasy and horror about gentrification, so obvious stories about gentrification. But also in sort of social science writing about gentrification, storytelling comes up a lot. And I found a fantastic article by Rachel Brahinsky, who's a professor, actually someone I used to work with when I worked at The San Francisco Bay Guardian. And then she went on and got fancy and got a job as a professor and writes about—

Charlie Jane: [00:07:39] I love the Bay Guardian.

Annalee: [00:07:40] I know that was a great—

Charlie Jane: [00:07:41] I miss that paper.

Annalee: [00:07:42] A great place to start my career. And Rachel was one of the really cool people there. So she has an article that came out last year in a journal called Economy and Space. And it's specifically an article about the stories that we tell about gentrifying spaces. And so she looks at things like mass media, but also real estate documents, like how do real estate agents tell stories to make gentrification happen? And one of the things she says is that a metaphor that comes up again and again, is that low income neighborhoods that are being targeted for development, are referred to as the frontier. 

[00:08:30] And there's all this literature calling for basically white outsiders to come in and be pioneers who will colonize these frontiers, which are, of course, just like the frontier in the United States, they are not unoccupied land. These are places that people live, it's not a frontier, it's actually a city. 

Charlie Jane: [00:08:50] So this is literally Manifest Destiny, is what you're saying. 

Annalee: [00:08:52] Yes, they're using the language of Manifest Destiny to talk about neighborhoods. And I have a really great quote from this article about this housing complex in San Francisco that Charlie Jane and I are kind of obsessed with. And, Charlie, do you want to read this quote? 

Charlie Jane: [00:09:09] Sure. “The NEMA luxury housing complex has claimed the explicit role of quote, ‘lifestyle pioneer,’ unquote in its advertising materials. This sales pitch came in a gush of high-tech and high-rise living that places the nouveau riche high above the city's poorest. The NEMA tower presides over a city block where houseless people struggle to survive as police target them for voter approved ‘quality of life crimes,’ which include sitting down on the sidewalk when one is exhausted. Although it is the homeless who brave the elements, they are not also known as quote, ‘lifestyle pioneers,’ unquote. 

[00:09:48] And I actually had a friend who lived in that building for a while and she said it was super weird. Like when she would run into her neighbors in the elevator, it was just always really uncomfortable interactions. 

Annalee: [00:09:57] Yeah, so this is a building, it is called the NEMA housing complex, N-E-M-A. I have no idea what that stands for. It's right across the street from the Twitter building in San Francisco's downtown. And as Rachel says in this piece, it's also an area where a lot of houseless people are on the street, and particularly before the pandemic. And in San Francisco, there is a law against sitting on the street. And you can bet that it's not used against tired hipsters who are just taking a break and drinking their coffee. It's explicitly a, it's illegal to be houseless, law. Or if you are houseless, you may never sit down anywhere. And so that's exactly what's happening outside this NEMA housing complex. So there's all these white pioneers, these rich Twitter workers and other high tech workers crossing the street literally walking over the bodies of people who are often very, very sick and can't actually move very well. 

[00:10:59] And so this is part, again, of this storytelling, the story cycle about what it means to gentrify. It's not portrayed as come in and kick people out, it's portrayed as you're a lifestyle pioneer, you're doing something brave and exciting. And the best thing that we can do, I think, as storytellers, and we're going to talk more about this, is develop new stories about this process. And I think there's a lot of science fiction writers working on this. 

[00:11:29] But one of the things that Rachel says is that we also have to look at our cities themselves for counter narratives, and she calls attention to street art. And she says that, you know, you see these incredible forms of protest going up on walls all over the Bay Area. There's a ton of street art around a lot of the camps where people are living, people who don't have houses, who are basically forced to gather together in places where they're going to be allowed to pitch their tents. And there's one of these campsites in Oakland where the people who live there have made all this beautiful art about home, and what it means to be home. 

[00:12:11] And I think that's just such an interesting way of thinking about storytelling. And it hadn't occurred to me until reading Rachel's work that, in fact, a lot of urban street art is about home and what it means to be home, and whose home is it. Whose signs get to be on the walls? What language are those signs, and those are all signals to us about who owns the place and who belongs in the place. It's not even about who owns it, it's who belongs here. 

Charlie Jane: [00:12:39] So yeah, I love the idea of combating storytelling with storytelling and trying to sort of solve a narrative disorder by telling better stories and creating new images. And I love seeing that street art. It always makes me happy when I see artwork that shows that the city kind of still has a life and a soul. 

[00:12:57] But so what are some other ways that we're dealing with this? How are activists and just ordinary citizens stepping up to support the houseless and support longtime residents and kind of fight against gentrification and displacement? 

Annalee: [00:13:09] Yeah, I think this goes back to something that Stacey Sutton has talked about in her work. And she is very interested in the idea, again, of displacement and how do you prevent displacement. And so she suggests that cities, city governments, state governments, even, engage in revitalization projects in neighborhoods that are explicitly aimed at not making them too expensive for the current residents. So that it's not… the problem is not revitalizing, right. The problem is not making a neighborhood nicer, or improving the plumbing, or cleaning up the community pool or building a new school. The problem is, is displacement. So if there is revitalization happening in a neighborhood, there needs to be some way to prevent that revitalization from pushing the current people who live there out and it needs to be fair, right? It can't be a situation where you say like, oh, well, we're tearing down a bunch of low-income housing, and we're putting in condos, and everyone who lived in the low income housing has an opportunity to bid first on those condos. And that's a trick that a lot of gentrification developers do. And so it has to be affordable, too.

Charlie Jane: [00:14:23] Yeah, so basically, what we're talking about is breaking this false dichotomy between letting a neighborhood just kind of slowly rot versus turning it into an upscale neighborhood. 

Annalee: [00:14:36] Yeah, you know, it's either the frontier or it's garbage, right? And, actually it turns out that it's just a neighborhood that needs revitalization. And that needs to support its current residents while also welcoming in new residents. 

Charlie Jane: [00:14:50] Yeah. And so the default assumption is that the people who are living there are not really contributing, or not really part of making it a better neighborhood. And that the only value that you can bring is by importing new residents. 

Annalee: [00:15:02] Yeah, that's right, those exciting pioneers. And the people who were there… I mean, the thing about the Manifest Destiny narrative that you brought up earlier is that that myth is based on the idea that you as a pioneer are entering a virgin land, right? A totally unoccupied space. And that's exactly what these kinds of stories suggest. Is that when you go and gentrify a part of the city, there's literally no one there who is living there or contributing. 

Charlie Jane: [00:15:35] Or there are people who are just slowly making it worse, but we can counteract their malign influence. 

[00:15:42] So obviously, we're obsessed with science fiction. What are some ways that science fiction is addressing this urban crisis? 

Annalee: [00:15:48] I think this is a big topic in science fiction right now. It's really interesting. So there's obviously N.K. Jemisin’s novel, The City We Became, which is the first in a trilogy. 

Charlie Jane: [00:15:59] I love that book.

Annalee: [00:15:59] Yeah, and we've talked about it, I think, multiple times on this podcast now. And it's about New York City as being gentrified by a cosmic force, that is kind of a chthonic, evil fungus thing. And then the other thing that's interesting me is that there is a new reboot of the Candyman franchise. The movie Candyman, which came out back in the ‘90s, which is also explicitly about gentrification in Chicago. 

Candyman Clip: [00:16:28] The urban legend is, if you say his name five times while looking in the mirror, he appears in the reflection and kills you.

Who would do that?

Annalee: [00:16:37] Highly recommend that people check out the original movie, which is super creepy and really beautiful and involves kind of one of the early fantasies of destroying a Karen with Black history. So that's a cool narrative for us right now. 

[00:16:55] What are some ones that you're thinking about? 

Charlie Jane: [00:16:55] Well, so you know, we talked before we started about, Sorry to Bother You, which is part of, there was a wave of movies that came out that summer that were about Oakland, specifically and about gentrification and formation in Oakland. It came out around the same time as Blindspotting that movie starring Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal that was all about gentrification and displacement in Oakland. It felt like those homes were in kind of a dialogue with each other. And obviously, Sorry to Bother You is much more fantastical and much more creepy. And it's kind of, look at like this dude trying to join the professional class and kind of move up in a city that's changing around him. And what it means to sort of be part of the professional class in a city that's gentrifying. 

Annalee: [00:17:36] And then isn't there a scene at the end of Black Panther where basically, T’Challa has come to Oakland, and he's building schools, right? He's building a school for STEM or something? 

Charlie Jane: [00:17:50] Yeah, I think the sort of general implication that we get of Black Panther is that he's going to come to Oakland, and he's going to kind of help to improve the city, but not by displacing the current residents. But instead by like, helping to lift up the people who are living there now, and that this is sort of this hopeful moment of, after all this isolationism on the part of the Wakandans, they are now going to start taking a more active role in the world. And they're gonna start in Oakland, which is where, obviously Killmonger the Michael B. Jordan character was living before he went off to Wakanda.

Annalee: [00:18:19] And also the home of the Black Panther Party. So it’s kind of an origin story or an alternate origin story for Black Panther? Yeah, I love that and I think that that's kind of a call back to this idea of revitalization without gentrification.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:36] For sure.

Annalee: [00:18:35] That you can improve a neighborhood and improve the prospects for the people who live there, but without displacement. And I think that's actually a good segue to talking to our guest, Sam J. Miller, who is very interested both personally and as a writer in the process of gentrification.

[00:18:54] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops. 

Annalee: [00:18:57] Hey, we have another podcast recommendation for you today. 

Charlie Jane: [00:19:01] It's called the Kottke Ride Home, hosted by Jackson Bird. 

Annalee: [00:19:04] In just 15 minutes, the Kottke Ride Home keeps you updated on the coolest stuff that happens in the world each weekday, so weekends, forget it. But on the weekdays, you’re set.

Charlie Jane: [00:19:14] Kottke.org is one of the longest running blogs online and the podcast Kottke Ride Home features the latest scientific discoveries, exciting art, little known histories, life hacks, and more. 

Annalee: [00:19:27] I remember reading Kottke.org back in web 1.0. So this is like—

Charlie Jane: [00:19:32] Even web 0.5. 

Annalee: [00:19:34] Yeah, exactly. Web 2.5. So this is legit stuff. Recent shows have  featured why we high five, the etymology of the word robot, and how machine learning is helping us figure out what whales are saying to each other. 

Charlie Jane: [00:19:47] The host of the show is Jackson Bird, who is an author, TED speaker, YouTuber and pub quiz host who has his finger on the pulse of the most fascinating stories of the day.

Annalee: [00:19:59] The Kottke Ride Home is an antidote to depressing headlines with lots of smart stuff in podcast form. 

Charlie Jane: [00:20:05] Search your podcast app of choice for Ride Home and subscribe to the Kottke Ride Home.

Annalee: [00:20:19] So we have got Sam J. Miller with us. Thanks for joining us, Sam. 

Sam: [00:20:22] Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here. Really big fan. 

Annalee: [00:20:26] Yeah, fandom is mutual. So let's start just by talking a little bit about gentrification in kind of genre in general. I'm wondering if you have any hypotheses about why it's become a big topic lately. Charlie and I have been talking about how N.K. Jemisin has a new series about gentrification. Candyman is being rebooted again. Sorry to Bother You blew all of our minds. What's going on? Why is there this new moment? 

Sam: [00:20:58] Oh, I have so many hypotheses. I mean, I think that one important thing to think about that often is overlooked in terms of thinking about gentrification and horror, is it actually has really deep roots. Like we often think of gentrification as this contemporary issue. But the reality is, many of horror’s most sort of venerable tropes are really about displacing people of color, and the sort of violence that ensues.

[00:21:24] So you think about the problematic Indian burial ground story, or the haunted house where an Indian massacre happened, you think about The Shining, you think about Pet Sematary, these are all sort of problematic, Western framings of history where violence that happened in the past, is being revisited upon “innocent” quote, unquote, people who, they just moved into this house, they didn't kill anybody. But they're benefiting from a system that displaced and killed so many people. 

[00:21:55] And so I think it's always been there. And I think it's an exciting moment where horror especially, but genre in general, is sort of exploring what's happening in cities around the world when it comes to neighborhoods transforming. 

Annalee: [00:22:09] Why do you think that the Lovecraftian strand of cosmic horror is part of this? Because I feel like there's a lot of chthonic moments happening both in your work and other people's work. 

Sam: [00:22:22] Yeah, I think that unfortunately, white supremacy is really like an Elder God, capitalism is like a shambling, Lovecraftian monster of just… You know, it’s a very great metaphor for a huge, massive, seemingly unstoppable evil that destroys all this stuff. And I think we're seeing a great moment where a lot of creators of color and lots of creators are sort of taking the reins of Lovecraft’s racism and misogyny and horrible approach in general, and sort of reinterpreting that to fit a worldview that rightfully sees displacement of people of color as a bad thing and rising rents displacing longtime residents as a problem. 

[00:23:07] So yeah, I think that shambling cosmic horror monsters are a great way to talk about what's really the problem when we talk about gentrification and late capitalism. 

Annalee: [00:23:18] Yeah, because they're kind of systemic in a way. They're like systemic monsters as opposed to like, just the one-off bad apple monster down the street.

Sam: [00:23:25] Exactly. So many tentacles, so big. So beyond our scope, as puny humans. 

Charlie Jane: [00:23:32] Yeah. And part of what I loved about The City We Became is how it's sort of attacking infrastructure. You have at one point, one of the big bridges in New York is kind of overcome with this goopy white nastiness, and it's just like—

Annalee: [00:23:43] Fungus.

Charlie Jane: [00:23:44] Fungus. Yeah. It feels like there is this kind of… it’s infrastructural. That\ these are monsters that are in the infrastructure. 

Annalee: [00:23:52] But it's also like in The Blade Between, which I want to talk about now, like, it's also an infection. You use a lot of metaphors of infection. I wonder if you could just talk in general about how gentrification is kind of almost a character in The Blade Between? 

Sam: [00:24:08] Sure, sure. So the sort of backstory on The Blade Between is that the town where I grew up, Hudson, in upstate New York, when I was growing up was a really depressed poor small town. And in the past couple of decades has really been reinvented as this sort of haven for wealthier New Yorkers and artists who can't afford Brooklyn rents anymore. And folks who are sort of buying up cheap property and suddenly rents are skyrocketing. People I grew up with are being displaced, and I would go home, and I would be really angry about it. 

[00:24:38] I've spent 15 years working as a community organizer in New York City. So I'm, I've worked on gentrification for a really long time and sort of looked at what are the laws and policies that need to change to stop displacement. And that's a really hard fight that is playing out in a lot of places. And so being in Hudson and sort of hating this town so much and getting out of it as soon as I could, because it was so homophobic and there was no opportunity, but so I hated it. But also I loved it. And I felt really a lot of ownership of it and pride in it and complicated feelings about watching it transform. And so while I had always sort of thought of gentrification as not my story to tell as something that predominantly impacts working class communities of color, what was happening in my hometown was like something that I could, I sort of stood on both sides of. I'm a queer artist. So when I come home, I am going to all the queer cultural event stuff that the locals often view with a lot of suspicion. 

[00:25:32] Yeah, I think that the idea of an infection of evil, or at least a supern— I mean, honestly, the supernatural in The Blade Between is what I think of as the good guys, right? It's, it's sort of like the ghosts that are keeping the town together. It's like, what would happen if gentrification came to the town with a secret, right, the Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, The Wicker Man, would the new arrivals be exempt from the lottery? Would they have to enter twice? Like this is my attempt to sort of like, interrogate that trope of the supernatural that protects this place. Is it vulnerable? What could destroy it? And how would it respond to attempts to destroy it? 

Charlie Jane: [00:26:15] I love that so much. 

Annalee: [00:26:16] Yeah, it's kind of… it has the Crimson Peak feeling of it's a haunted place. But it turns out that the haunting is actually not the problem.

Sam: [00:26:26] Totally.

Annalee: [00:26:26] The problem is the people who live there. 

Sam: [00:26:28] Totally. And one of my one of my favorite recent horror movies is The Babadook. And I think that what blew my mind about that was, usually we think of monsters as things to be destroyed, right? This horror, that must be exorcised. And what is amazing about that is there's no getting rid of trauma. There's no erasing grief, right? You have to make your peace with that. And so this idea that monsters, the solution isn't to destroy a monster, it's to compromise with it. That’s sort of like spoiler alert for the ending of The Blade Between. It's not about can we destroy this foe? It's like, what is the future where the new arrivals and the longtime residents can build a city that they're all proud of and where there's space for everyone? 

Annalee: [00:27:15] Yeah, we were talking in the first half of the episode about how activists who are working on gentrification are trying to figure that out. How do you revitalize the neighborhood, but then not price out the residents. love that idea of the longtime residents, or the history of the area, being represented as something supernatural that you kind of have to live with. 

[00:27:42] So I feel like in The Blade Between but also in some of your other work, too, that there's this kind of, there's a dimension of personal trauma that's connected to this really big political and economic trauma. I wonder if you could talk about that. Why is gentrification personal as well as political and economic and small, but also huge? 

Sam: [00:28:05] Yeah, it's a great question. And I think that one of the things, like, I work for this organization called Picture the Homeless which was founded and is led by homeless folks. And I got to work alongside so many amazing folks who had been displaced, who couldn't afford New York City rents, for a number of reasons. And I think that often we don't think of… Gentrification is talked about in such abstract terms, and especially for folks who are sort of like, I don't want to say the perpetrators of gentrification, but the people who are moving in who are of a new demographic, who are wealthier, who are who are driving rents up, don't get it. They don't see the trauma, they don't know who used to live in their apartment, or what happened to get them out of the apartment, right?

Charlie Jane: [00:28:46] Right.

Sam: [00:28:47] And so trying to tell those stories of, actually be having your family be displaced in the middle of the winter, when you have kids in school and suddenly you have to go into a shelter. That is a form of violence that is completely legal, and state sanctioned, and unspeakably traumatic. That, if you haven't experienced it, many people don't know that that's a thing that happens to 1000s of people every day. So those are the stories that I want to tell because I want people to get that it's not just like, oh, the rents are going up. Oh, people have to move. 

Annalee: [00:29:17] Yeah, one of the things that gets tangled up with gentrification is this idea that we hate the new kinds of stores that are coming in. And it seems like that's not really the point. The point isn't an aesthetic one. 

Sam: [00:29:34] Yeah, the aesthetics are easy to focus on. There's a lot of resentment of the hip and the new, but it's really these are all sort of like smoke screens for the real issue, which is that somebody is profiting from rents rising and people being pushed out. And that's the horror. That's the real horror that I think a lot of creators are finding ways to tell stories of which is super exciting. I mean, I love N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became. Candyman is possibly my favorite horror movie of all time.

Annalee: [00:30:02] Same, oh my gosh.

Sam: [00:30:03] Certainly the scariest. And I think that—

Charlie Jane: [00:30:05] We need to watch that. 

Sam: [00:30:06] Oh my Lord. I’m here for it.

Annalee: [00:30:07] No, I—yeah.

Sam: [00:30:09] I’m always here to see that. So the idea of that being told through the lens of gentrification. I went to Chicago to work with some community organizers out there who are amazing. And some of them had were folks who had lived in Cabrini Green and I went to the site of the demolished, the fields where those towers used to stand and talked to people who have been displaced from those towers. And it was with a promise of one-to-one replacement, like everyone who lost a home would get a home. And of course, none of them, very few of them did, and the ones who did ended up in a buildings surrounded by really rich racists who were terrible neighbors to them. 

[00:30:09] So yeah, the idea of Candyman being revisited through the lens of what the oppression of working class African American communities looks like in 2021 versus 1993 is… I'm so excited about it. 

Annalee: [00:30:59] Yeah. Are there any other stories that you feel like you're kind of picking up on in your work or that you're kind of arguing against in your work? 

Sam: [00:31:10] I think there's definitely a big piece of the interrogation of the problematic narratives that I mentioned. Of the legacy of colonial violence and Manifest Destiny as sort of not a separate thing from gentrification, right, it is the same thing. It is, this should be ours. We shall take it. 

[00:31:32] So I do love interrogating those. One of my favorite young adult writers is Lilliam Rivera and her work deals with gentrification a lot. Yeah, I think there's a lot of really cool stuff happening that is exciting. 

Annalee: [00:31:45] Okay, so we've been talking a lot about ways that you've engaged in direct action to help people who are dealing with gentrification. How do you see stories playing a role in changing how we deal with our cities, how we deal with revitalization, all these questions? 

Sam: [00:32:02] I really feel like storytelling is super is a super important piece of activism and organizing. Having spent many, many years doing this sort of stuffing envelopes, making phone calls, meeting with elected officials who are full of shit. Going out to do outreach to people who are being directly impacted, to come to meetings, to plan protests, all that stuff. I think that all of that is a factor of social change, but that politicians only make the change the majority of their constituents are comfortable with, right? They're not going to do something because it's the right thing, right? If they're getting money from real estate developers, as most electeds are in most American cities, they're going to be very hesitant to do anything that's going to tamper with the power of real estate to make money. 

[00:32:46] So the only thing that will make them do the right thing isn't that it's the right thing. It's that a lot of people are telling them to, and a lot of people get it. And the more we can tell the story of gentrification as it really is, and displacement, and the idea that people have power, people can do something about it. If storytelling can change the narrative and get people to really understand the problem, then I think we can really start to see social activism successfully push politicians and other decision makers to do the right thing. 

[00:33:16] Because right now, most people who are newcomers to a neighborhood, who are wealthier than the historical residents, often they don't want to think about it. They don't get it. They want to see it in terms of us versus them, or they're mad at me about something I didn't do, or any number of narratives that aren't like, we have a shared interest. Like, I'm paying too much money in rent, the person who was here before couldn't, and that's why they're gone. But if we come together, and everyone realizes that it's not about homeless people as the wretched of the earth, but rather as tenants who couldn't afford to pay rent anymore, and we have common interests, and we need to come together and fight for change, that's when we can start to see things happen. 

[00:33:58] So I keep telling myself that that's the power of storytelling. And that's why it's worth doing with time that one could otherwise be spentannoying electeds and tweeting at jerks and going to meetings and going to protests and all the other stuff. 

Charlie Jane: [00:34:13] Here in San Francisco, a big factor in kind of keeping affordable housing out is these sort of neighborhood associations and these kind of people who view like preserving the character of the neighborhood or keeping the neighborhood safe and whatever. There's all these coded terms that people use, how do you unpack the stories that are being used by these NIMBY groups? And how do you counteract that? What kind of storytelling do you use to counteract that? 

Sam: [00:34:37] One of the things that I love so much about The City We Became is how much space is given to the opposing viewpoint, which is something that I have a hard time with. Like, I don't want to give space to the jerks, to the people who are advancing the things that I hold reprehensible, but that book sort of invokes those to deconstruct them. I've been to those meetings. I've been to meetings with neighborhood associations who are trying to block a shelter, for example, because they’re worried about crime. And I think that it's important to go to those meetings and tell those people the truth, but also, they are not going to change their mind. They're not who I want to spend my time talking to. I want to spend my time talking to everybody else who hasn't decided that their self-interest depends upon other people not getting housing. Right? 

[00:35:23] So yeah, I think, as with social activism in general, like, if I'm trying to fight against climate change, I'm not going to spend my time talking to the people who think that climate change isn't real. I'm going to spend my time talking to the people who aren't sure what to think about climate change. Or think, have narratives in their head, but haven't made up their mind already. So in general, I think it's important to know what those folks are doing and to understand their arguments so as to deconstruct them, but also like, they're not my audience. They're competing with us for control of the narrative. And so the more we can deconstruct their narrative, the better. 

Annalee: [00:35:58] What's like the ultimate anti-Manifest Destiny story, or trope. If we were to have like, the two pills, like there's the Manifest Destiny pill, and then the other pill that you can take, what is the story at the core of that other pill? Sorry, to use the pill metaphor, but I was just—

Sam: [00:36:15] It is the tool that we have, right?

Annalee: [00:36:17] It’s the narrative we have.

Sam: [00:36:17] Yes, exactly. This is this is gonna sound really weird, but one of my favorite anti-gentrification narratives is The Goonies, right? Because it's about the evil developers want to destroy the neighborhood and create something for them. And they don't care who gets hurt in the process, but because he people who are directly impacted by the problem come together and fight back, they win, right? So the counter-narrative to Manifest Destiny is people have the power. The people who think of themselves as the disempowered that are directly impacted, the marginalized, whatever, can come together and really change the game. 

[00:36:57] You know, I'm not gonna say that The Goonies is the perfect anti-gentrification movie, but that's a narrative that a lot of people can get. That, if you are trying to fight a problem by yourself… At the beginning everyone's resigned themselves to the imminent destruction of everything they love and by the end they're like, oh, no, we got this. All us oddballs can come together and do some cool shit and win. 

Annalee: [00:37:23] I love that. 

Charlie Jane: [00:37:24] That's amazing. 

Annalee: [00:37:25] It’s just like Boots Riley says, he says they've got helicopters, but we've got hella people. 

Sam: [00:37:30] Exactly. Exactly, I love that.

Boots Riley: [00:37:33] We got hella people they got helicopters. They got the bombs and we got the we got the we got the beat.

Annalee: [00:37:39] So Sam, where can people find you online or in bookstores?

Sam: [00:37:42] I’m in all the places. My website is SamJMiller.com. I'm on Twitter at @sentencebender. I'm on Instagram at @Sam.J.Miller. And my new novel The Blade Between is available from fine upstanding indie bookstores and evil corporate behemoths everywhere. You should go with the former not the latter.

[00:38:05] And it's out there. 

Annalee: [00:38:05] Awesome. It's such a good book, too. I highly recommend it. It's just such a—it really grabbed me. It was just so… it's exciting. It's like The Goonies but a little bit more scary. 

Sam: [00:38:18] A little bit queerer. A little bit sexier. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna try to—

Annalee: [00:38:22] Definitely more queer than The Goonies. I mean, who knows what was going on in The Goonies. 

Sam: [00:38:25] I mean Josh Brolin.

Annalee: [00:38:26] What they grew up to be…

Sam: [00:38:26] Josh Brolin is fine as hell.

Charlie Jane: [00:38:31] Oh, God.

Annalee: [00:38:33] I love the idea of The Goonies as like a queer kid story. Like they all grew up to be gay.

Sam: [00:38:37] Totally.

Annalee: [00:38:38] I'm sure.

Sam: [00:38:38] Totally. 

Annalee: [00:38:40] Yeah. 

Sam: [00:38:40] Yay. 

Annalee: [00:38:41] Okay. Well, thank you so much for joining us. 

Sam: [00:38:43] Thank you. I love you all. 

Charlie Jane: [00:38:43] Thank you.

Sam: [00:38:45] Thank you.

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Annalee: [00:38:50] Thank you for listening to another episode of Our Opinions Are Correct. We love you. If you would like to support the pod, you can become a patron on Patreon. We’re on Patreon as Our Opinions Are Correct. You can also follow us on Twitter at @OOACpod. And of course, you already know that this podcast can be found everywhere where delicious podcasts are served up with side of fries or a side of broccoli.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:18] Nom nom nom nom nom nom nom. 

Annalee: [00:39:23] It really helps if you leave a review of our podcast on Apple Podcasts, it helps people find it. And if you would like to become a, I don't know, space-going collective organism, we really recommend that you subscribe and that you become a patron. 

[00:39:43] Thank you to our amazing producer Veronica Simonetti and thank you to Chris Palmer for the music. And we will be back in your ears in a week.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:51] Bye!

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