Introduction

In 2009, a 131-unit luxury apartment complex calling itself “CastleBraid” opened its doors in the heart of the once-neglected neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn. As the building’s website informs potential tenants, CastleBraid “isn’t just an apartment building”, but rather

a vision of a seamless interplay between the individual and the vibrant collective they’ve helped to create. In a world custom-built to enable the artist, you may finally be free to inhabit the role you’ve always known was yours to play. CastleBraid grows as you grow, reaching far beyond locality by allowing its well of creative energy to constantly regenerate and expand­ living proof of the unimaginable power of our collective aspirations (castlebraid.com).

Upon open, glowing media profiles heralded CastleBraid as a utopian arts commune bustling with boundary-pushing creatives. Not long after, neighbors of the shining new apartment complex hurled bricks through its windows and spray-painted an unequivocal message on the front sidewalk: “YOUR LUXURY IS OUR DISPLACEMENT”.

In this article, I explore how CastleBraid residents interpret these affronts and how they view their role in the gentrification of Bushwick. While developer-led artist residences have been described as a “Trojan horse” mobilized by real estate developers and urban planners to kick-start spatial reinvestment and lure “creative class” professionals (Evans 2003; Hackworth and Smith 2001; Stein 2019), empirical investigations into the actual occupants of such complexes are rare. How do CastleBraid residents mediate tensions between their membership status in a “vibrant collective” and accusations of actively contributing to neighborhood displacement?

Through in-depth interviews with current and former CastleBraid residents, I explore how this unique subgroup of gentrifiers views their neighborhood, their building, and their role in gentrification in order to unpack how processes of arts-based gentrification are interpreted, legitimated, and ultimately reproduced on the ground level. While analytic primacy is granted to the symbolic discursive strategies of individual gentrifiers, this should not be regarded as an effort to dig up tired debates about “supply-side” versus “demand-side” causal models of gentrification (Slater 2006). Rather, this paper contributes to a growing literature demonstrating how cultural and economic elements of gentrification are complementary and mutually constitutive (Horgan 2018; Wacquant et al. 2014). Drawing on the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, I argue that CastleBraid residents meaningfully account for gentrification through the practical logic of a particular group habitus that constitutes a collective identity and validates their presence in Bushwick.

This article complicates the “gentrification enthusiast” versus “gentrification opponent” dichotomy pervasive in existing scholarship on gentrifiers (Borén and Young 2017; Markusen 2006). Instead, I find that CastleBraid residents excuse and/or justify their role in gentrification through a shared cultural framework that enables them to resolve contradictions between their espoused values and accusations of contributing to inequality in Bushwick. These “gentrification accounts” sustain an outmoded artist-as-pioneer myth of neighborhood change that is reinforced through CastleBraid itself. Moreover, I claim that residents’ accounts can be read as a form of symbolic violence that ultimately obscures and naturalizes underlying patterns of spatial inequality through misrecognition and the denial of gentrifier privilege. Throughout this study, I show how a Bourdieusian theoretical lens facilitates insights into the micro-processes of arts-based gentrification that secure its reproduction in everyday life.

From artist-as-pioneer to artist-as-veneer

Though scholars have long noted the importance of art and cultural production in gentrification, the theorized role of the artist has shifted as gentrification itself has changed (Cameron and Coaffee 2005; Pratt 2018). While early instances of US gentrification were characterized as sporadic and “artist-driven”, contemporary gentrification is better understood as de facto neoliberal urban growth strategy initiated by real estate developers and local policymakers who utilize cultural infrastructure projects to steer capital reinvestment into formerly disadvantaged neighborhoods (Hackworth and Smith 2001; Stein 2019). In this section, I briefly review this shifting role of art and artists in the history of US gentrification.Footnote 1

Early gentrification in the US is typically characterized as relatively small-scale migrations of artists in the 1960s who were drawn to disadvantaged neighborhoods on political and aesthetic grounds (Ley 1996). Rejecting the perceived sterility of suburban living, the first gentrifiers flocked to inner-city slums that they perceived as “authentic” due to their “grittiness”, ethnic diversity, and a certain “dangerousness” suiting the self-image of a starving artist living on the edge (Caulfield 1989; Jager 2013; Ley 1996; Rose 2004; Zukin 2008). Once artist-pioneers establish “tame” bohemian zones, professionals in adjacent “creative” occupational sectors are said to “follow the hippies” (Ley 1996) into gentrifying neighborhoods, setting off a chain reaction of progressively more affluent in-migration.

As early as the 1970s however, gentrification was increasingly driven not just by individual artists, but also by urban policymakers and real estate developers actively facilitating arts-based revitalization projects to lure capital back into deindustrializing urban centers (Cameron and Coaffee 2005; Hackworth and Smith 2001; Stein 2019). During this second period, particularly in New York City, arts communities were “a key correlate of residential gentrification, serving to smooth the flow of capital into neighborhoods like SoHo, Tribeca, and the Lower East Side” (Hackworth and Smith 2001, p. 467). Sharon Zukin’s (1989) Loft Living provides a canonical example of arts-based gentrification during this era. Zukin shows how the local state actively promoted “loft living” for artists in SoHo in the 1970s through arts patronage, rezoning procedures, tax abatements, and historic preservation efforts. Thus, as Zukin puts it, art became commodified by developers and policymakers in an effort to “sell the social and cultural values of the 1960s to middle-class consumers of the seventies and eighties” (1989, p. 60).

By the 1990s, gentrification was characterized by an even stronger interventionist role by local government who, in concert with private real estate developers, embraced arts promotion as an explicit instrument of urban revitalization and place-marketing. As Mathews (2010) writes, this era, which continues to the present, is distinguished by “widespread recognition by the state, private investors, and corporate developers of the regenerative potential of the arts, drawn from the experiences of cities which underwent earlier waves of gentrification” (p. 667). In an influential article, Hackworth and Smith (2001) dub this period “third wave gentrification” and tell the story of “DUMBO”—a New York neighborhood concocted by real estate developer David Walentas—to illustrate its key features. While Walentas worked to secure zoning concessions from state officials, he simultaneously mobilized artist housing as a redevelopment strategy, offering rent concessions to artists willing to relocate to DUMBO (Hackworth and Smith 2001; Madden 2014). Through Walentas’ strategic installment of a creative community, he was able to garner state support and redevelopment approval despite local community resistance. Eventually the artists themselves were “forced out by doubled or tripled lease rates” (Wyly and Hammel 1999, p. 19) once their utility had expired.

Contradictions of contemporary arts-based gentrification

Taken together, this scholarship suggests that while individual artists were once the “colonising arm” (Ley 2003, p. 2533) for middle class professionals, cultural infrastructure investments now represent “an effective ‘Trojan horse’ by which structural economic adjustment policies and funding have been diverted into arts-led regeneration” (Evans 2003, p. 426). This reversal reflects broader changes in US urban political economies, as cities facing deindustrialization and capital flight came to rely increasingly on real estate as the primary circuit of capital accumulation (Harvey 1989a; Stein 2019). In the postindustrial knowledge economy, urban planners deploy cultural infrastructure projects to encourage tourism, attract investment, and increase their overall competitive edge (Markusen and Gadwa 2010; Pacewicz 2016). The immense popularity of Richard Florida’s “creative class” thesis led a generation of local policymakers to embrace arts-based gentrification in the hopes of satiating the consumptive tastes of so-called “creative” professionals. And though Florida’s thesis has been the subject of substantial criticism (Borén and Young 2013; Markusen 2006; Peck 2005), it continues to successfully convince urban planners that “yuppies like artists, so cities should promote arts-based gentrification as a means to attract both” (Stein 2019, p. 69).

Yet the new role for art in processes of gentrification engenders major contradictions for both producers and consumers of the gentrifying neighborhood. For developers and planners, arts-based gentrification projects spearheaded by the “real estate state” (Stein 2019) risk appearing crassly inauthentic, static, and “Disneyfied” (Harvey 2013). As Jamie Peck (2005) writes, developers face a constant danger that “faux-funky attractions might lapse into their own kind of ‘generica’” (p. 745), becoming vulnerable to rejection by gentrifiers.

A range of scholarship has surveyed the strategies that planners and developers deploy to nurture artists and the creative class while attempting to ward off the “bland homogeneity” (Harvey 2013, p. 92) of commodification that threatens to encroach on notions of authenticity (Evans 2003; Harvey 2013; Peck 2005; Zukin and Braslow 2011). But we know comparatively less about how the actual occupants of these “faux funky” spaces perceive gentrification and their own role therein. Do residents of luxury artist complexes still view themselves as “pioneers” carving out alternative authentic spaces in gritty and diverse neighborhoods based on a distinct set of aesthetic and political dispositions? Are occupants cognizant of their strategic position as a “Trojan horse” for economic redevelopment? How do residents reconcile that fact that the well-known consequences of gentrification—commodification, rising rents, and racial displacement—inevitably erode the very qualities that supposedly made their neighborhoods initially desirable?

Researchers interrogating these questions tend to place gentrifiers into ideal-typical categories according to their attitudes on gentrification and/or willingness to preserve local character (Brown-Saracino 2010; Schlichtman et al. 2017).Footnote 2 Regarding artist-gentrifiers in particular, Markusen (2006) writes they are typically “caricatured as inner-city diversity enthusiasts: iconic of but indistinguishable from the rest of the creative class…or as unwitting, individualized dupes of barely disguised neoliberal efforts to reshape cities locked in competition with each other and abandoning progressive and inclusive agendas” (p. 1935–1936). Yet it is not clear into which category residents of luxury artist residences fall, nor how they resolve the contradictions inherent in arts-based gentrification. Moreover, as Borén and Young (2013, 2017), Markusen (2006), and McLean (2014) all argue, the “enthusiast/opponent” gentrifier binary does little to “unpack what is going on within ‘actually existing creative urban policy’ as it is produced, contested, and reformulated in locally-contingent conditions around the globe” (Borén and Young 2017, p. 25). In the following section, I outline how the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu can help transcend the enthusiast/opponent dichotomy to more clearly see how the contradictions between art and gentrification are negotiated by occupants of developer-led artist housing.

Bringing Habitus Back In

Given Bourdieu’s career-long fascination with the relationship between culture and economy, it is unsurprising that gentrification scholars have turned to his theoretical corpus when analyzing the contradictory position of gentrifiers. Most often, scholars employ Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and cultural capital to characterize gentrifiers’ taste and consumptive practices (Riely 2020; Slater 2006). Work in this area tends to construct gentrifiers as icons of a particular social class—relatively low in economic capital but high in cultural capital—who (re)produce spatial patterns of inequality by seeking out and transforming gentrifying neighborhoods in line with their preferences (Bridge 2001, 2006; Ley 2003).

For instance, Ley (2003) argues that the artist-gentrifier habitus is ardently anti-bourgeois, disdainful of market systems, and protective of socially diverse spaces. Bridge (2001), on the other hand, argues that the gentrifier habitus comprises a rational, self-conscious investment strategy and exertion of power for middle classes who cannot afford to live in more expensive urban neighborhoods. These authors rightfully recognize Bourdieusian insights as useful for untangling the complex relationships between art, culture, and urban political economy. But their narrow deployments of habitus and cultural capital ultimately amount to an enthusiast/opponent typology of gentrifiers’ lifestyle preferences corresponding to their economic class, status position, and/or timing of neighborhood arrival.

A renewed engagement with Bourdieu’s theory of practical action, however, can be used to expand our understanding of gentrifiers by closely dissecting the spontaneous accounts of gentrification that they provide. Bourdieu was clear that habitus is not the conscious or mechanical deference to a set of “rules” based on personal values. In contrast, Bourdieu defines habitus as “systems of durable, transposable dispositions…principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends” (Bourdieu 1990, p. 53). The principles of the habitus are flexibly applied in practice, guiding perception and action in everyday life while oriented towards particular social contexts.Footnote 3

For Bourdieu, the contradictions of ordinary logic are not mere quirks in human cognition. Rather, they are fundamental components of his broader theory of class power articulated through symbolic violence. Bourdieu argues that symbolic violence is class domination that is constantly misrecognized, a “learned ignorance” (ibid., p. 102) deeply inscribed in the habitus which disguises the relations of power that make the reproduction of social inequality possible. The classic example of symbolic violence frequently offered by Bourdieu is found in the field of education. Bourdieu argues that schooling presents itself as neutral and meritocratic in a way that legitimizes its biases and tendency to reproduce class hierarchies (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Burawoy 2019). As Michael Burawoy (2019) explains, for Bourdieu “schooling secures the active participation of students and teachers in the pursuit of credentials, while obscuring the reproduction of class domination that is the effect of such participation” (p. 97). Teachers and students buy into the education system’s myth of meritocracy while the recognition of education as a class stratification system risks undermining its legitimacy, threatening to “give the game away”.

Thus, symbolic violence conceals economic, egoistic, or private interests via recourse to a collectively legitimate cultural-symbolic order. In the process, exploitation and dominance is granted an ideological justification that is reinforced through institutions, rituals, and customs. Within the individual habitus, these principles of division are naturalized and taken for granted, underlying cognitive heuristics that motivate perception and spontaneous judgment.

Though social actors acquire a “practical mastery of classification”, Bourdieu argues they are ill-equipped to reflect upon it or articulate what governs their practice (Bourdieu 1984, p. 472). Instead, when pressed, individuals present their behavior “in the misrecognizable guise of the values recognized by the group” (Bourdieu 1990, pp. 108–109). Bourdieu calls these “secondary officializing strategies”, and critiques ethnomethodological studies for taking them at face value, producing a mere “account of accounts” (Bourdieu 1984, p. 483, 1990, p. 91). Instead, Bourdieu argues it is the job of social researchers to shed light on symbolic violence by critically interrogating the relationship between the system of preferences embodied in the habitus and the corresponding social conditions in which those preferences are enabled and reproduced.

Through close engagement with Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, misrecognition, and symbolic violence, I outline a description of gentrifier meaning-making that moves beyond a stylized typology of gentrifier habitus. I argue that gentrifiers living in luxury, developer-led artist residences account for gentrification through a flexible, shared symbolic code which secures their neighborhood presence and collective identity while simultaneously obscuring their role in gentrification’s negative social and cultural externalities. Crucially, this process draws on and preserves an anachronistic myth of artist-led gentrification that, incredibly, endures well into the “third wave” (Hackworth and Smith 2001).

Data and methods

To probe the perceptions and experiences of gentrifiers in luxury artist housing, I conducted in-depth interviews with fourteen current and ex-residents of CastleBraid, a luxury apartment complex designed for artists in Bushwick, Brooklyn. As one of the first upscale apartment buildings erected in Bushwick, CastleBraid has generated significant local media attention and controversy, and its notoriety as a symbol of Bushwick’s gentrification makes it an ideal site to investigate the contradictions of arts-based gentrification outlined in the preceding sections. Inspired by Brown­-Saracino’s questionnaire in A Neighborhood That Never Changes (2010), my interview schedule was designed to better understand residents’ motivations to move to Bushwick, how they see their neighborhood, the aspects they like and dislike, and their perceptions of gentrification and own role therein (Appendix A).

Interviews were conducted between 2015 and 2016, lasting about an hour on average and taking place either in the resident's apartment, office, or at a coffee shop. Nine of the interviewees identify as male, five as female. Additionally, nine interviewees are current residents, five are ex-residents, and all are current renters. All but two respondents currently reside in Bushwick, and all but one currently reside in Brooklyn. Respondents range in age from 26 to 40 years old, and most are single and childless (though two married individuals and two parents were interviewed). Respondents work primarily in “creative class” professions such as web development and media, and many respondents pursued personal artistic projects non-professionally. Most of the interviewees identify as white (12), though I spoke with one Hispanic man and one Asian woman. Finally, three respondents are immigrants who moved to New York from South Korea, France, and Australia. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed for qualitative analysis. Before reporting interview findings, a brief history of both Bushwick’s gentrification and CastleBraid’s construction is presented.

Case presentation

Bushwick: the forgotten neighborhood?

Historically, Bushwick has acted as a destination for working class immigrants. In the early 1960s Bushwick experienced a rapid increase in low-income Puerto Rican and African American residents, many of whom were displaced to Bushwick by Robert Moses’s urban renewal projects in Williamsburg (Marwell 2009, p. 99). A massive FHA municipal loan program that aimed to improve the housing stock ended in scandal (Perine 2005), while redlining practices made it extremely difficult for residents to attain insurance coverage and mortgages (Dereszewski 2007). Housing abandonment became rampant, and by the mid-1970s, Bushwick—the “forgotten neighborhood” of Brooklyn (Marwell 2009, p. 8)—had reached a staggering unemployment rate of 80% (Perine 2005).

Although Bushwick was stabilized through a series of relatively inclusive urban renewal projects in the 1990s and 2000s (Marwell 2009; Rauscher and Momtaz 2014), the neighborhood began experiencing significant demographic changes indicative of gentrification in the 2010s. American Community Survey (ACS) data reveals that Bushwick’s non­-Hispanic white population quadrupled from 2006 to 2014, rising from 4.1% to 16.6%. The total non-­Hispanic white population in New York City actually decreased slightly in that same time period (34.8% in 2006 to 32.2% in 2014). Bushwick’s majority ethnic group (Hispanic/Latino) shrunk from 70.3% to 59.1% from 2006 to 2014, and the second largest group (Black/African American) also declined from 20.6% to 17.4%.

In addition to racial and ethnic changes, Bushwick has seen other socioeconomic and demographic shifts indicative of gentrification (Brown­-Saracino 2010). These changes are displayed in Table 1. The share of the population over 25 with a BA or more as their highest level of educational attainment rose sharply, from 14% to 23.7%, while the share of nonfamily households in Bushwick also rose (39.6% to 44.6%) from 2006 to 2014. Both the median household income and the median gross rent also rose significantly in Bushwick during this time period.

Table 1 Changes indicative of gentrification in Bushwick, 2006–2014
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While total median income has indeed risen in the neighborhood from 2006 to 2014, ($32,715 to $40,484) this change appears to be mostly the reflection of an influx of non­-Hispanic whites. When disaggregated by race and ethnicity (Fig. 1), it becomes clear that median income has risen sharply amongst non-­Hispanic whites while the median income for Hispanic/Latino and Black/African American households has remained relatively stagnant.

Fig. 1
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Source 2006 1-year American Community Survey; 2014 1-year American Community Survey.

Median Household Income by Race/Ethnicity in Bushwick, 2006 & 2014.

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Renter occupied households make up a much greater share of the total occupied households in Bushwick (89.1%) as compared to New York City in general (68.8%). Although the median income for renters in Bushwick is lower than the median income for renters in New York City ($38,468 to $41,210), median gross rent in Bushwick has risen to a level almost equal to that of New York City by 2014 ($1,269 in Bushwick as compared to $1,276 in New York City), a sharp increase from 2006 (when Bushwick median rent was $967 compared to $1,110 in New York City, adjusting for inflation). Unsurprisingly, in a neighborhood like Bushwick, where 27.2% of residents have income at or below the poverty level, rising rents have taken a toll on thousands of low-income people. A whopping 61.1% of Bushwick residents reported spending over 30% of their income on rent in 2014 and could be defined as rent burdened (Schwartz 2014). With the unequal levels of income by race and ethnicity in mind, it can be assumed that lower income Hispanic and Black residents are affected most severely by recent rent spikes in Bushwick.

Thus, by the mid-2010s, Bushwick was hardly forgotten by anyone. On the contrary, it emerged as one of the trendiest and most sought-after neighborhoods in New York, due in large part to its active arts community and ample cultural attractions. As Hernandez (2021) notes, “with the largest concentration of artists, galleries and artist studios anywhere in the city…, [Bushwick] is arguably the centre of art production and the bohemian scene in New York City” (p. 23). These developments have led numerous gentrification scholars to identify Bushwick as a new paradigm of arts-based gentrification that has eclipsed previous art hubs such as the East Village and Williamsburg (Hernandez 2021; Valli 2015, 2021; Zukin and Braslow 2011).

CastleBraid: development and controversy

Amid these changes, CastleBraid—so named for the lot’s historic use as a textile factory—opened to the public. CastleBraid offers many amenities to boost artistic creativity, including a recording studio, movie theater, woodworking shop, library, rooftop “chill space” and graffiti wall. A 2010 New York Times article headlined “An Artful Way to Rent Apartments” profiles CastleBraid and lead developer Mayer Schwartz, who is depicted as a genial arts lover committed to his community. While the word “gentrification” does not appear in the article, it does note that “some have called his use of art as a ploy to sell apartments”. Immediately following, a retort from Mr. Schwartz: “A kiln is not such a big expense if it’s going to make people happy” (Lipinski 2010).

In 2009, The New York Post named CastleBraid one of the five most interesting places to live in New York City (Gross 2009), and a 2010 piece reported that “Schwartz trades free rent to tenants who do artistic work that betters the building” (Weichselbaum 2010). In the same article, an interviewed CastleBraid resident proudly proclaims that “Bushwick will burn again…but as a renaissance. As a contrast to the '70s when this neighborhood was rough” (Weichselbaum 2010).

But not all CastleBraid’s press coverage has been so positive. A 2013 Gothamist article titled “Bushwick’s Luxury ‘Artist’ Residence is Tearing Bushwick Apart” reported that “a group that calls itself Occupy Bushwick in November covered the building in crime scene tape writing the word ‘Occupy’ on the façade, an apparent response to the management company’s attempt to shirk their affordable housing requirements” (Evans 2013). The rule in question was the 421–a tax exemption, which grants property owners an abatement on property taxes under certain conditions and allows rent stabilization for the buildings’ residents. Although a 421–a usually requires properties to provide affordable housing, CastleBraid was able to skirt this requirement because it had broken ground prior to the affordable housing requirement adopted in 2011 (Merlan 2014).

CastleBraid’s use of the 421–a stoked community protest objecting to tax breaks being offered to developers who weren’t providing affordable housing units and rent stabilization to residents who didn’t need it. As Samuel Stein (2019) writes, the 421–a tax incentive program epitomizes public–private “geobribery” whereby public finances are used to prop up private investment and stimulate gentrification (p. 57). Since then, CastleBraid has been repeatedly targeted by anti-gentrification protesters who have defaced and vandalized the building. While luxury apartment complexes have opened in Bushwick since CastleBraid, few have received the criticism, infamy, and attention the CastleBraid has.Footnote 4

Findings

The ideal neighborhood structure

As the preceding section demonstrates, CastleBraid fits comfortably within current state and developer-led models of arts-based gentrification, where art is mobilized in anticipation of future economic growth (Cameron and Coaffee 2005; Hackworth and Smith 2001). But resident interviews reveal that CastleBraid’s occupants do not view their building this way. Instead, they describe their residences in deeply personal terms.

Through an analysis of respondents’ moving stories, we can begin to glean the generative principles inscribed in their group habitus; the shared classificatory system that binds residents together and guides normative distinctions between desirable and undesirable space. As Bourdieu and other cultural sociologists following Durkheim have noted, symbolic schemes of classification are frequently organized around a binary set of opposing signs, a “system of paired adjectives” employed to “classify others and to judge their quality” (Bourdieu 1991, p. 92).

For example, Alexander and Smith (1993) argue that public discourse in the United States has been organized around a relatively stable set of opposing signs. Through their analysis of American political crises over the last 200 years, the authors reveal a consistent “democratic code” that politicians invoke to designate actors, institutions, and policies as rational, pragmatic, autonomous, open, and honest. The counter-democratic code, on the other hand, is defined by irrationality, passivity, anger, and greed. The authors argue that these codes “not only communicate information, structuring reality in a cognitive way, but also perform a forceful evaluative task. Binary sets do so when they are charged by the “religious” symbology of the sacred and the profane” (Alexander and Smith 1993, p. 157).

Similarly, in respondents’ moving stories, Bushwick and CastleBraid are portrayed as ideal living spaces that facilitate free expression, autonomy, and inclusivity. Manhattan, Williamsburg, and suburban neighborhoods, on the other hand, are symbolically construed as antagonistic, constraining, and exclusive. Just as the democratic code structures characteristics that are appropriate for actors and institutions within a functional civil society, the “ideal neighborhood code” (Table 2) anchors a practical logic that determines what spaces, activities, and residents are desirable.

Table 2 The discursive structure of the ideal neighborhood
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Physically, the ideal neighborhood is presented as eclectic, industrial, unrefined and edgy, in contrast to places that are homogenous, residential, or overly commercialized. Sam, 26, a tennis instructor and amateur musician, characterizes Bushwick as having

a lot of, like, hidden gems. You know? Like, it seems pretty industrial, you know, lots of warehouses. But one of the cool things I learned to really love about it was that, like, on the exterior you really don’t see the quality of some of the places that are here until you, like, go inside and explore what’s in the area.

Repeatedly, Bushwick is painted as a place in which one can explore and discover new “hidden” places in contrast to more fixed or established neighborhoods that have become stagnant and bland, often construed as a consequence of commercial development.

In other instances, Bushwick’s perceived industrialism and cultural diversity is highlighted. As Charlotte, a 31-year-old nonprofit coordinator, explains:

I’ve always lived in places that are sort of a little bit more edgy….I kind of craved different, different spaces…a community with people who are different from myself. Um, so you know, Bushwick to me was quite—has that industrial and grimy element to it, and what I came to really enjoy about the area was, um, engaging with a Latino–based community…. And, you know, it excited me that there was also this sort of movement of artists and young professionals like myself moving in, so I felt that it was, um, a diverse neighborhood, and that was something that I was looking for.

The ideal neighborhood as diverse, fluid, industrial, and heterogeneous plays into its symbolic status as a place that is somewhat undefined and consequently capable of fostering creativity. One interviewee succinctly identifies this concept when he describes Bushwick as a place “more self-created by people with ideas, and it looks like it was a place for them to go to start those ideas.” Ideal neighborhoods are places where one can “take risks”, either in business or in art. As Cody, a 28-year-old director of photography, put it, Bushwick is “culturally competitive…people kind of pushing the boundaries. Bushwick’s a great place, because there are a lot of artists here that are doing really weird things.”

The CastleBraid residents I interviewed mostly hold steady jobs in creative professions such as web development, graphic design, and journalism, and could neither be described as political activists nor full-time artists. However, the ideal neighborhood code represents a symbolic resistance against a perceived “corporate” realm, typified in places like Manhattan and Williamsburg, which are construed as oppressive and unwelcoming. Within the ideal neighborhood logic that respondents outline, simply living in a diverse neighborhood like Bushwick, being near an avant-garde arts scene, and patronizing independent restaurants and bars seems to be a satisfactory alternative to the “mainstream”. The very act of living in Bushwick is construed as a lifestyle choice that marks individuality, independence, and difference.

The ideal neighborhood code underlies the group habitus of CastleBraid residents, a “subjective but non-individual system of internalized structures, common schemes of perception, conception and action” that draws lines of inclusion and exclusion (Bourdieu 1990, p. 60). The ideal neighborhood code reflects an inversion and rejection of “crass” economic logics, a feature consistent both in Bourdieu’s (1984) analysis of the cultural field and in descriptions of first-wave artist-gentrifier pioneers (Ley 1996, 2003).

CastleBraid’s physical design structure (Fig. 2) can also be read as informed by the ideal neighborhood code. Unmistakable in Bushwick’s residential landscape, the complex is covered with symbols that express artistic self-creation, experimentation and multiculturalism. In a deliberate break from architectural modernism that favors a bare, functional aesthetic, CastleBraid’s façade is adorned with a kaleidoscopic collage of signs and art pieces in an eclecticism common in postmodern architecture (Harvey 1989b). The letters in the “CastleBraid” sign have an uneven, ransom note–like quality, with each letter in a different font and made of a different material, resulting in a found-object aesthetic suggesting DIY execution. The backwards “L” furthers this point, as this “mistake” suggests a non-professional grassroots effort in contrast to mass production. Step ladders affixed to the building call to mind craftsmanship and self-creation, and the word “WELCOME” is written in dozens of languages across the building’s exterior, signaling openness and multicultural appreciation. Near the main entrance, crumpled sheet metal, recycled automobile exteriors, and strips of steel grates adorn the building’s base, spattered with multicolored, Pollack–esque paint speckles. Atop this façade, the question “Why Is This Art?” is written, reinforcing the building’s presentation as cutting edge and avant-garde.

Fig. 2
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Source Taken by author, early 2016

Exterior of CastleBraid.

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CastleBraid’s architecture complements residents’ self-image in a way that may be read as a “harmonization” between material structures and the cognitive principles of the habitus. As Bourdieu writes,

[…] inhabited space—starting with the house—is the privileged site of the objectification of generative schemes, and, through the divisions and hierarchies it establishes between things, between people and between practices, this materialized system of classification inculcates and constantly reinforces the principles of the classification which constitutes the arbitrariness of a culture (Bourdieu 1990, p. 76).

Despite risks of “Disneyfication” (Harvey 2013), a finely tuned calibration between the ideal neighborhood code and CastleBraid itself bolsters a fantasy of artist-as-pioneer gentrification being spearheaded by the building’s residents.

Still, the well-known economic and social consequences of gentrification stand in direct opposition to the qualities that make CastleBraid and Bushwick supposedly desirable in the first place. When anonymous vandals, bloggers, and journalists hold CastleBraid and its occupants to be perpetrators of gentrification, residents are dragged into association with the counter-ideal neighborhood code. In such circumstances, CastleBraid residents are faced with a threat to their collective identity that must be countered.

Accounting for gentrification

Bourdieu (1990) writes that the habitus is adept at avoiding challenges and dissonance, tending to favor social contexts that reinforce it (p. 61). The harmonization between CastleBraid and the ideal neighborhood code ensures that most of the time, residents neither need to think about gentrification nor interrogate their role therein. Classificatory schemes of the habitus conform to an “economy of logic, whereby no more logic is mobilized than is required by the needs of practice” (ibid., p. 87). But when CastleBraid residents are directly confronted about their role in gentrification—either during interviews or when their building is vandalized or criticized in blogs—they deploy what Bourdieu terms “secondary officializing strategies”, intended to make questioned behavior accountable to “disinterested, collective, publicly avowable, legitimate interests” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 40).

Bourdieu’s notion of secondary officializing strategies resembles Scott and Lyman’s (1968) sociological notion of “accounts”, which they define as “a linguistic device employed whenever an action is subjected to evaluative inquiry” (p. 46), specifically used to explain untoward behavior. The authors distinguish two general types of accounts, excuses and justifications, which operate as “socially approved vocabularies which neutralize an act or its consequences when one or both are called into question” (Scott and Lyman 1968, p. 47). Excuses are accounts in which one admits that a questioned act is wrong or inappropriate but denies responsibility for it. Justifications on the other hand, are accounts in which one accepts responsibility for the act in question but denies the pejorative quality associated with it.

When discussing the causes and effects of gentrification, CastleBraid residents mobilized both excuse and justification accounts. Interestingly, respondents did not hesitate to use both excuses and justifications within a single interview, and no respondent stuck to a single coherent account logic when discussing gentrification. Thus, I was unable to bucket respondents into typologies corresponding to their perceptions of gentrification. Instead, accounts were oriented to the specific question at hand. Importantly, all interviewees’ accounts were crafted within the “socially approved vocabulary” of the ideal neighborhood code. Finally, when respondents were confronted directly by anti-gentrification activism, both agency and pejorative qualities were denied through the delegitimization of their accusers.

Excusing gentrification

In respondents’ excuse strategies, gentrification is acknowledged as detrimental but is blamed on forces outside their individual control. Commonly, this meant attributing blame to (1) landlords and the real estate market; (2) gentrifiers who moved to Bushwick after the respondent moved; and (3) vague inevitable and unknowable forces of urban change. Respondents would often symbolically align themselves with longtime residents when mobilizing excuse strategies, positioning themselves as victims, rather than agents, of neighborhood change.

The most common excuse strategy that residents employed was blaming negative consequences of gentrification on individual landlords and real estate development broadly. Landlords were often depicted as callous, profit-seeking opportunists bleeding the neighborhood dry without regard for the community they extract capital from. When respondents acknowledged the damage (or at least unequal distribution of “benefits”) gentrification inflicts on longtime residents, property owners were most often blamed. Landlords construed as “absentee” was a repeated theme in my interviews. More often than not, however, they were unknown and unseen “others”, both symbolically and physically separate from Bushwick’s community. Victimized by these shadowy figures are Bushwick residents both new and old.

For instance, I asked Will, a 29-year-old web developer, what he thought the long-term implications of development would be in Bushwick. His response shows how respondents interpreted commercial development as a threat to the characteristics of the ideal neighborhood:

Well, the long-term implication is that it would be kind of unaffordable for the class of people that came out here and started businesses or community groups that made a mark. Um, you know, a lot of the neighborhood fixtures that I think attracted the wave of residents who are moving in right now are all sort of made possible because it was fairly affordable at the time. So, if you want to run, like, a vintage clothes store, for example, there’s definitely a sort of level of overhead that you can afford, and once it gets past that level, then you move somewhere else.

In Will’s response, he views commercial development as a threat primarily to the “class of people” that initially gentrified Bushwick, not to longtime residents. When landlords are blamed for gentrification, respondents often saw themselves and/or people like them as potential victims.

Similarly, respondents frequently blamed new(er) gentrifiers for negative qualities associated with gentrification. Families or older people were often portrayed as either a cause or an effect of gentrification. Most commonly, they were presented as threatening to Bushwick’s convivial, experimental atmosphere. When respondents blamed newer movers for gentrification’s negative effects, they temporally position themselves as moving before gentrification began in Bushwick. This was evidenced by residents describing Bushwick as “desolate”, “scary”, or “post­apocalyptic” when they first moved to the area. Positioning one’s self as moving to Bushwick before gentrification began was a recurring theme amongst all residents, including those who had moved to Bushwick only very recently.

While many respondents perceived newer migrants to be families, others perceived new migrants to be a younger or more recent generation that paid little respect to the neighborhood and its residents. During my interview with Steven, who moved to Bushwick in 2007, he repeatedly mentioned a “younger cohort” that he had observed migrating into Bushwick and into CastleBraid during his time in the building. Steven saw this group as a threat to the stability of informal art galleries and DIY show spaces in Bushwick, saying “when there’s so many more young people around there are limits to what you can get away with”.

In the final salient excuse strategy mobilized by respondents, gentrification is presented a naturally occurring phenomenon. This strategy can be seen as a variation of what Scott and Lyman (1968) call the “appeal to fatalistic forces”. By conceiving of gentrification as a process that occurs naturally and inevitably, gentrifiers position themselves wholly apart from commercialization and displacement effects. For instance, after acknowledging the negative consequences of gentrification, Sarah, 27, lamented,

Change is inevitable. I think the city’s fun, but you can’t be too sentimental about it because it’s always changing. Like, we’ve had this same problem since the 1600s. Neighborhoods come and change and grow, and whatever else, and you really can’t predict it. I think it depends a lot on the future we can’t predict.

Implicit in Sarah’s response is an argument against trying to understand neighborhood change, which is held as mysterious, unceasing, and unpredictable. Fatalistic gentrification accounts allow respondents to avoid violating the ideal neighborhood code through the total abdication of agency and responsibility.

Justifying gentrification

Like excuses, justifications function to neutralize acts or consequences that present potential threats to identity. However, when one justifies a questioned act, they do not deny responsibility but rather work to “assert its positive value in the face of a claim to the contrary” (Scott and Lyman 1968, p. 51). Most often, gentrification was justified through appeals to (1) increased safety in Bushwick, (2) increased cultural facilities within the neighborhood, and (3) increased property values for longtime residents.

All three of these justification techniques attempt to counteract the pejorative characterizations of gentrification through what Scott and Lyman call the “denial of injury” (Scott and Lyman 1968, p. 51). Like excuses, justification accounts simultaneously reaffirm the symbolic order because they are articulated through the logic of the ideal neighborhood discursive structure. Underlying justification accounts is a sense of paternalistic altruism oriented towards longtime residents. In other words, Bushwick’s gentrification is justified as a process that helps and protects longtime residents, whether they know it or not.

Nearly all respondents appealed to increased safety in Bushwick, arguing that the crime rate has dropped significantly and that Bushwick has become far safer due to recent changes. Importantly, increased safety is nearly always presented as a benefit primarily for longtime Bushwick residents. For instance, Sebastian, a 30-year-old “learning designer” describes how gentrification impacts longtime Bushwick residents:

I don’t think that my former downstairs neighbor, um, a man from Ecuador who’s feeding his family of three kids and wife as a carpenter in the city…I don’t think he bought a lot of espresso drinks in any of the fancy coffee shops. But I also don’t think he minds that they’re there. I do think he benefitted probably quite a lot from the fact that it’s safer. I think that’s a very good possibility.

While Sebastian acknowledges his former neighbor likely did not benefit from the “fancy coffee shops” in Bushwick, other respondents did present the array of newly opened restaurants, cafes, grocery stores and cultural event spaces as a positive addition to the neighborhood for longtime residents. For instance, when I asked Miguel, a 36-year-old software VP, how he felt longtime Bushwick residents were affected by neighborhood change, he responded by drawing from his experiences at the neighborhood co-op, where he recently started volunteering:

I feel like, being at the co-op, I kinda see that longtime residents do really appreciate the co-op…because it’s food that they wouldn’t be able to get otherwise. So I do see that as being like a unifier. The fact that they’re able to access high-quality, well-priced food.

Longtime residents are gifted with access to healthy food that they would otherwise be deprived of, and although this act has a beneficial physical component (by increasing resident health), it perhaps more importantly produces a “unification” effect. Other residents pointed to “increased culture, in terms of, you know, spaces for art and music, and a fun bar scene and restaurant scene” as a potential result of neighborhood changes for longtime residents.

A final way that respondents justified gentrification was by pointing to an increase in property values that longtime residents are able to profit from. When I asked Jeff, a 29-year-old art director at the New York Times, how he thought longtime residents were impacted by gentrification, he told me:

Um, I’ve seen people all over the place in terms of how they’ve been impacted. I’ve met people who are, like, “Oh, I bought this house for $10,000 and now it’s worth over a million dollars, I’m gonna go fucking retire when my kids get out of school and move out of here.” Like, great for them!

Delegitimizing conflict

Though respondents are hesitant to acknowledge any contribution to the exacerbation of inequality in Bushwick, CastleBraid’s symbolic status in the community makes it a recurring target by anti-gentrification activists and journalists. Through these incidents, CastleBraid residents are explicitly labeled as counter-ideal neighbors who perpetuate racial displacement and neighborhood commercialization. In countering these affronts, gentrifiers mobilize delegitimization strategies to account for questioned behavior. Delegitimization strategies do not fall neatly into either account category provided by Scott and Lyman. In delegitimization strategies, both individual responsibility and the pejorative qualities associated with the accusation are denied. Individuals who criticize and/or vandalize CastleBraid and its residents are simply construed as fundamentally misinformed or even as psychologically deficient.

In nearly all of my interviews, the recent and ongoing vandalization of CastleBraid was brought up independently by my respondents, most often when we discussed the implications of gentrification for longtime Bushwick residents. Graffiti reading “YOUR LUXURY IS OUR DISPLACEMENT” and “GENTRIFICATION IS THE NEW COLONIALISM” (Appendix B) was stenciled on the sidewalk in front of CastleBraid in the summer of 2015. In my interview with Sebastian, he characterized these occurrences as part of a “hate campaign” against CastleBraid and its residents. When I asked Sebastian why he thought CastleBraid was being characterized in this way, he told me:

It just, like, looks different from everything else. It looks foreign in the landscape. It looks like something that came and landed, descended on the neighborhood…and some people are against anything that’s different or new or foreign, again, like politically, they don’t feel a part of. Most people don’t care, I think. And a few people are maybe excited about it, that it is a sign of progress, and, you know. But I think it has less to do with the building and more to do with the eyes of the beholder.

Sebastian delegitimizes anger towards CastleBraid by characterizing the vandals as closed-minded people who simply reject anything “different or new or foreign”. In doing so, Sebastian denies agency in contributing to a perceived negative consequence by refusing to acknowledge the claim as legitimate in the first place. The accuser is simply wrong, a consequence of their closed-minded and intolerant worldview.

Appeals to psychological deficiencies were common in delegitimization strategies. For instance, when we discussed a recent act of vandalism in which a brick was thrown through CastleBraid’s window, Cody stated,

I don’t see a lot of people that are bitter about it, and I think…everyone’s always pretty nice. Um, the only people I ever see that are antagonistic are usually people that are not well. Um, I mean there’s, like, a clinic on Myrtle–Broadway, you know, I’ve seen needles lying around, people that are just very fucked up. When I see people who are shouting or antagonizing people, it’s usually people who are hanging around Myrtle–Broadway, off that clinic….That’s where also a lot of the shootings that have happened in this neighborhood—they’re also people who have had mental issues and whatnot, so…

Like Sebastian, Cody first establishes that not everybody in the neighborhood feels antagonistic towards CastleBraid, but that those who do are “not well”. Cody implies that individuals who criticize or vandalize his building are mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs. By portraying those who confront CastleBraid as psychologically deficient, respondents imply that critics are incapable of thinking rationally.

Others delegitimized assailants by claiming that their conceptions of CastleBraid and their residents were misinformed. For instance, when Summer, 38, told me how a stencil reading “YOUR LUXURY IS OUR DISPLACEMENT” recently appeared on the sidewalk outside the building, she explained that “some people found it kind of comical, like, if they only knew this building, half the time the elevators are shut down”. Like all gentrification accounts, Summer’s explanation of the confrontational act seeks to subvert negative associations outlined in the counter-ideal neighborhood code (luxury, commercialization, displacement) directed towards herself, her neighbors, and her building.

Discussion and conclusion

In this article, I show how CastleBraid residents negotiate tensions between their proclaimed values and contributions to neighborhood inequality via gentrification accounts rooted in the symbolic structure of the ideal neighborhood code. Although this classificatory scheme is “fuzzy” and “irregular” in practice, it nevertheless anchors group membership while validating residents’ place in Bushwick. As Bourdieu writes, these shared symbolic vocabularies constitute group members’ “own idea of themselves, the primordial, tacit contract whereby they define ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’” (Bourdieu 1984, p. 478).

CastleBraid itself, through its carefully manicured presentation, achieves a harmonization between its own “materialized system of classification” and the ideal neighborhood code underlying occupants’ group habitus. This harmony prevents hysteresis by providing the habitus “a milieu to which it is as pre-adapted as possible” (Bourdieu 1990, p. 61). Both combine to maintain a misrecognized “imaginary anthropology” (ibid., p. 108) that upholds CastleBraid as a grassroots artist commune—even though it is “really” a luxury apartment complex actualized through the coordinated efforts of real estate developers and urban planners.

When respondents are accused of exacerbating neighborhood inequality, they show little difficulty deploying spontaneous accounts to save face in a way that both further legitimizes their presence in Bushwick and strengthens the shared meaning structure guiding normative distinction. Acting as “secondary officializing strategies”, gentrification accounts make questioned behavior accountable within the logic of the group habitus. As Bourdieu writes, “being the product of the same generative schemes as the practices they claim to account for, even the most false and superficial of these ‘secondary explanations’ only reinforce the structures by providing them with a particular form of ‘rationalization’” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 20).

By claiming ownership of an ethically and aesthetically superior worldview, gentrifiers can situate their arrival as beneficial to the longtime residents whose neighborhoods they besiege (as they do in justification strategies). And when rising rents and racial displacement edge Bushwick closer and closer to a counter-ideal neighborhood, they simply switch sides, claiming to be themselves victims of the ceaseless tide of urban capitalism (as they do in excuse strategies). This “practical mastery of classification” (Bourdieu 1984, p. 472) underscores the important point that the habitus is never “directed towards the pursuit of logical coherence…but charges and defenses” (ibid., p. 476).

The rhetorical templates detailed in this article are concordant with existing scholarship on place and culture documenting how people dodge or reappropriate spatial stigma in a variety of residential contexts (Corcoran 2010; Horgan 2018; Kirkness 2014; Kusenbach 2017; Watt 2006). I extend this literature by showing how gentrifier accounts constitute a “collective denial” (Bourdieu 1990, p. 110) that sustains an outdated myth of artist-led gentrification well into the third wave. Though gentrifiers are richer in cultural, social, and economic capital than the populations they will eventually displace, this privilege must be stubbornly misrecognized; otherwise their collective identity and sense of neighborhood belonging risks being undermined. Misrecognition of privilege is thus key for gentrification accounts to function as a form of symbolic violence that naturalizes spatial inequality.

As David Madden (2014) writes in his analysis of arts-based gentrification in DUMBO, “the ideology and idolization of neighborhood often helps to legitimize an unequal urban order” (p. 484). In this article, I describe a parallel cultural mechanism at play in the habitus of individual gentrifiers. As such, this study sheds light on the contours of “actually existing” (Borén and Young 2017; Brenner and Theodore 2002) arts-based gentrification unfolding at the microlevel. I do not contend that it is a generalizable or typical case. However, as scholars across the globe have demonstrated, arts-based gentrification is hardly unique to the United States, and analogous contradictions between culture and economic development have recently been detailed in the state-sponsored “creative revitalization” of Berlin (Haghighat 2020); Seoul (Hartley 2018); Singapore (Chang 2016); Lisbon (Pinto 2018); Vancouver (Szőke and Parizeau 2019); and Cape Town (Makhubu 2017). Future research might investigate how gentrifier accounts compare across these diverse contexts, and the extent to which they legitimize local processes of uneven development.Footnote 5 Additionally, future researchers might explore whether there exists a “tipping point” of neighborhood transformation at which gentrifiers’ own neighborhood presence begins to be recoded as counter-ideal—something I was unable to evidence in this study.

Finally, it would be of interest to probe how gentrification accounts vary across distinct subgroups of gentrifiers. Chiara Valli (2021), for instance, has recently dissected the meaning-making practices of “real” (i.e., professional) artists in Bushwick, finding that these residents justify gentrification because of the career support and networking opportunities that living in Bushwick provides. Valli, also drawing on Bourdieu, shows how the logic of the cultural field leads its participants to reproduce cycles of spatial inequality and residential displacement despite their best intentions, and I view her scholarship as wholly complementary with the analysis presented here. This sort of renewed, critical engagement with Bourdieu may help steer future studies away from the unproductive tendency to bucket gentrifiers as either uncritical champions or radical opponents of gentrification. Such an approach, I argue, is ill-equipped to capture how gentrification accounts operate practically as symbolic violence.