Denver residents respond to ink!’s cavalier marketing campaign, reminding us that collective action, not individual consumption, is the way forward in staking out rights to the city.
Happily Gentrifying?
I recently made an unexpected trip home to Colorado and just two days after my arrival, local news was churning out a story about ink! Coffee’s controversial storefront sign that angered locals for its tone-deaf celebration of gentrification in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood. On one side of the sign it read “Happily gentrifying the neighborhood since 2014” and on the other side “Nothing says gentrification like being able to order a cortado”. The publicity stunt in what was once called “Denver’s Harlem of the West” caught my attention, and also gained national traction in media outlets like The Guardian, Washington Post, City Lab and The New York Times.
Over the last two decades the neighborhood has become inundated with hip cafes and bars and now includes an area officially coined the River North Arts District (RINO). This development led to rising tensions between residents, new developments and municipal decision makers. The media coverage of the ink! incident, replete with protests from neighborhood residents and ink!’s reactions to the public outrage, continued to loop on the local news for days, leading ink! to shut down until the media storm blew over. Over more than two weeks, protestors seemed to be on a quest to remind us that they reject the narrative of “happy gentrification”.
During the time of media coverage, I overheard someone discussing the ink! incident, delegitimizing the protests out front of the coffee shop by claiming they were led by middle class white people who now lived in the neighborhood and who “showed up to protest in their Lexuses”—something I found odd but possible (see Boyle Heights in Los Angeles). The commentator also excused the behavior of ink! since they are a “conscious” company that donates to good causes in the Global South and other charities around Denver. It was a strange equation: ink! was ‘happily gentrifying the neighborhood’ and proud of it, and any problematic outcomes from gentrification in Denver were somehow offset with charity elsewhere.
Alternative visions of development
Yet, after reading through the slew of media articles, comments and watching news clips of the protests, it became clear to me that the protestors from the Five Points community represented everything but white, wealthy people in expensive cars. Rather, both long-term and newer residents of various racial, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds were featured in news coverage and social media.
From reviewing media articles and video footage as well as comments on social media about the ink! marketing campaign, I also realized that there is a gap between how gentrification is covered in the media, and how it is experienced by local residents. Media coverage frames gentrification as a binary where the choice becomes either urban renewal and improvement—at the cost of displacing some—or abandonment and decay. When urban renewal is presented in this way, the choice for or against urban renewal is both obvious and straightforward–communities would not willingly choose disinvestment.
However, this problematic view suggests that displacement through investment is a natural part of urban renewal. It is what Tom Slater refers to as false choice urbanism. Not surprisingly, residents challenge the notion that negative impacts from gentrification should be accepted as a price of neighborhood improvement. They collectively argue that urban renewal in Five Points does not have to be limited to ‘gentrify or decay’. By demanding to ‘reclaim the city’, they are trying to shift public discourse about the role of businesses and gentrification towards alternative visions for Denver’s development.
Five Points Neighborhood
By the 1920s, Five Points was one Denver neighborhood that experienced segregation due to discriminatory real-estate covenants, red-lining and the presence of the Klu Klux Klan. Due to this, the neighborhood developed as a predominantly black neighborhood, but also had Jewish and Japanese populations. The segregation in the neighborhood was a recipe for disaster when suburbanization and inner-city disinvestment started in Denver in the 1940s and lasted into 1970s. White flight in Denver took place between the 1960s and 1970s and was not independent of existing racial tensions at the time. The wealthier, predominantly white, residents fled beyond the confines of the municipal boundary set tight by the Poundstone Amendment. Low-income, often Latino and African American residents remained in city centers while financial disinvestment ensued. Resources from tax revenues and property sales were pulled out from under the feet of municipalities, effectively emptying municipal coffers. Resources were funneled out of cities towards highway construction and suburban development. By 1990, 39% of the population in Five Points was African American, 41% Latino and 20% non-Hispanic white. Due to disinvestment, city centers were doomed to the path of decay with social services and infrastructure falling by the wayside.
This is a familiar story that has unfolded across cities in the United States, leading to the crisis of inner-cities. Today we see the opposite happening, with people flocking back to city centers since significant public investment and urban renewal began in 1980s and 1990s. The inflow to Denver continues today, underpinned by promises of sustainable urban lifestyles and job opportunities, and investors sniffing out opportunities for profit.
Five Points is one of several neighborhoods included in Denver’s downtown strategy that has undergone urban renewal since the 1980s. By the 2000 census, the population had shifted in Five Points to 26% African American, 43% Latino and 27% non-Latino whites. By 2015, the African American population was down to about 11%, the Latino population at 21% and the white population up to about 65%.
Renewal in Five Points has led to displacement and tremendous increases in property prices due to property speculation, the construction of new sports stadiums, riverfront clean-up, installation of large green spaces and new forms of public transportation. This package of amenities in and around Five Points, Denver’s proximity to the Rocky Mountains, Colorado’s thriving tech industry, and its image of a health-centered lifestyle add up to Denver becoming an ever-more appealing place for middle-class eco-conscious professionals. The city ranks as one of the best places to live and one of the greenest cities in the nation. Denver’s population has increased by 17.3% from the early 2000s to 2013. The median sales price for a home in the Denver metro area (including in Five Points) has soared from about $250,000 in 2012 to over $400,000 by 2017. I myself was stunned at the growth of Denver and at the number of construction cranes dotting the skyline a year after my last visit. With prices soaring to the point of unaffordability for many, tensions over displacement are rising, even sparking a municipality-led gentrification study and the creation of an initiative for housing equity.
False promises of conscious consumption
But what about socially conscious businesses and charity, some might ask? We are told that ink! works to provide education, health and environmental programs to Brazilian coffee farmers and their families. In Denver, ink! donates proceeds to National Jewish Health and provides free drink cards to people receiving medical assistance from There With Care. In a world that is seemingly without alternatives to growth-oriented, neoliberal development, we are supposed to feel good about ourselves through conscious consumption, sustainable living and self-improvement. But clearly, on the street outside of ink!’s doors and on social media, protestors refuse to buy in into ink!’s promise of socially conscious consumption.
Not everyone can afford to buy into the conscious consumption ethic in at least two ways. First, local residents may not have the spare cash to sip sustainable coffee at $2-5 dollars a pop. Residents, thus, face exclusion when food items like a standard cup of coffee are transformed into a trendy, unaffordable commodity and paired with ‘colorblind’ marketing strategies. Second, they may not have the assets, jobs, savings, etc. to be able to stay in neighborhoods that are gentrifying with the help of sustainable coffee sipping consumers.
Reclaiming the city through collective action
History has taught us that sustained progressive social change does not come from individual consumption choices, no matter how well intended, but from political organizing. Protestors of the ink! sign incident know this intuitively. Having little leverage in guiding how urban development unfolds due to historical reasons going back several decades, they have no choice other than to organize for collective action. To residents, the choice then, is to take the blue pill and maintain the illusion of business-as-usual that comes wrapped up in do-gooder promises for those who can afford them, or take the red pill, and reject the promises made through marketing campaigns and struggle to reclaim the city against dispossession that is taking place outside their own doorsteps.
Sparked by the protests, the ink! incident has stirred up a continued city-wide discussion on gentrification and led to a gentrification summit that was organized by Denver Community Action Network on January 13th. Attendees said they were set on “turning our collective outrage into political power” and “creating a foundation for a movement”. The summit lead four discussions organized around promoting coroporate responsibility, systemic accountability, developing affordable and accessible home and business ownership opportunities, cultural preservation and a celebration of resistance. We may just be witnessing the turn of a new page, with Denver residents laying the groundwork for a move away from a model of false choice urbanism.
