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Why We Must Eradicate Gentrification.
138 Plays6 months ago
On the third episode of the Defying Gentrification podcast, your host Kristen Jeffers (she/they), spells out why we need to treat gentrification like a disease and eradicate it.
But first, on our street corner, the hot topic is the need to call in our Black siblings who think that verbal transit and street harassment, especially the queer antagonistic kind, is ok, the need to care for our communities over policing them when they err in this manner, and why we should continue to support public transit and increase access to it.
Here's the news article about the incident.
Read my tweet about this situation. (CW: The recording of the incident discussed is in this tweet, which I quote tweeted)
(Also I misstated in the audio that the couple who intervened was heading from Silver Spring, they were heading from Dupont Circle, one of our legacy gayborhoods, to Silver Spring, Maryland)
Purchase from Kristen's Bookshop.org store.
Never miss an episode, subscribe to our Substack or on LinkedIn.
You can also find Kristen @blackurbanist or @kristpattern.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Defying Gentrification Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome back to the Defying Gentrification Podcast. I'm your host, Kristen Jeffers, and here at Defying Gentrification Podcast, we have taken a very bold view that gentrification needs to be eradicated and needs to be defined. And we're going to talk about specifically why we need to eradicate gentrification later in this podcast.
Kristen Jeffers' Personal Identity and Influence
00:00:23
Speaker
But one other thing we do here at Defying Gentrification Podcast is we have honest conversations about how
00:00:29
Speaker
Black life intersects with cities. This podcast covers pretty much all those aspects. If you haven't seen it before, I'm a black person, a black queer person. I'm disabled, I'm Southern, and that all comes out when it comes time to make these
Gentrification and Transit Harassment
00:00:45
Speaker
podcasts. Today, we're going to have two sections, our homeroom section, which is when we're going to discuss why we need to eradicate gentrification.
00:00:54
Speaker
And then our Street Quarter segment, which is our Hot Topics segment, the main meat of what we're going to talk about today in our Hot Topics section.
00:01:04
Speaker
is transit harassment, specifically harassment on the DC Metro. And then we're going to dig deeper into the nature of the person doing the harassing and the people being harassed and the things that that brings up around racism, queerphobia, and classism. But before we do that,
00:01:30
Speaker
I am going to take a short break, pay some bills. When we come back, we're going to the street corner and talk about these very important issues.
Bookshop and Curated Perspectives
00:01:39
Speaker
Hey everybody, Kristen here. Did you remember from last episode, or maybe this is your first episode, you're listening to me, but what I wanted to tell you is that I have a bookshop store. That's right, a bookshop store. And you can go online and support me there, and I have
00:01:55
Speaker
three book lists. I have a black queer feminist urbanist book list which I created a couple years ago because it represents my experience as being black queer and feminist and then merging all books that really speak to our experiences in place.
00:02:13
Speaker
you know our geographies all those things that make cities and places places for people like me and then you all may know that i'm very into my crafts and art in fact i'm actually recording this on the way to yet another craft night and i'm stuck in traffic and i have my chris pattern book list so those of you who are also interested in fiber arts
00:02:38
Speaker
you can go on that book list and i'm adding to that some of my favorite technique books design like drawing as well as fiber art graphic arts basically anything that would be at home in like an art bookstore kind of like the star like annex
00:02:54
Speaker
in LA. Of course, this wasn't supposed to be an advertisement for them, it's for me. You can go to bookshop.org slash shop shop, Kristin E. Jeffers, K-R-I-S-T-E-N-E-J-E-F-F-E-R-S, and you can find all those wonderful books along with my legacy Black Urbanist book list that has some classics on there like the Great Society Subway. And speaking of that Great Society Subway, when we get back, we're going to talk about it and talk about a horrible incident there, but
00:03:24
Speaker
Read your books, y'all. Read your books. And now back to the show. So welcome
Harassment Incident on the DC Metro
00:03:31
Speaker
back. This is your host, Kristen Jeffers, and you are just in time for us to sit on the street corner with our Hot Topic of the Week. This week, we are talking about a terrible incident that happened Sunday, April 7th in D.C. on the red line of the D.C. Metro.
00:03:55
Speaker
This was first recorded by one of the victims of this incident who technically was a bystander, not the direct victim, but when they intervened to try to help the victims of this incident, they received slurs thrown at them. So, the cast of characters is a person that appears to be a black straight man. Now, this may not actually be true, but this person does appear
00:04:23
Speaker
to be fits the traditional description of a black straight man. This person then it is really interesting that we're thinking about what this man looks like and what he sounds like and what he's wearing because this man has decided to judge two parents
00:04:46
Speaker
There is a child, presumably about elementary age, but the child is not directly visible, but the tweet that referenced this from one of the bystanders said that this was an elementary age child. And this black man decided to yell that it was horrible for two slur commonly levied at gay men to have a child.
00:05:12
Speaker
When these other couple, also a queer couple, tried to intervene and stop the presumably straight black man from yelling at this family and the child. This man yelled directly at the child. It is on the tape. The man is yelling directly at the child, just standing by the door of the metro train that is en route from presumably around Silver Spring to at least judiciary square where this man got off.
00:05:39
Speaker
and more on that in just a second when the other queer couple tried to intervene all of a sudden this man decides to throw out and call them the slur commonly used for those traditionally in the lesbian community which can be reclaimed you may hear us reclaim that slur but this black straight man presumably straight man by the way had no business using it and definitely not the way that he was using it so
00:06:05
Speaker
that is part, that's the first part of the situation. The second part of all of this is that not, this man could not, the black man could not stop at harassing this couple and this child on the train. He gets off of the train, switches cars, goes out, chases them down, keeps yelling at them, gets right back on the train, and then just starts staring down the remaining queer couple that had taped this.
00:06:33
Speaker
They, the queer couple that had taped this did speak with a news outlet, DC News Now.
Media Critique and Racial Bias
00:06:41
Speaker
They're a relatively new TV news outlet that has shown up on the scene. They tend to have more of a center-right slant. And unfortunately, like many TV news, but not all, I do want to give a shout out to NBC4 Washington because I think they do an excellent job. They probably the best job of balancing
00:07:03
Speaker
talking about hard issues and also humanizing their subjects. Now, let me be clear, I'm not just saying that because they have highlighted me in the past, they have highlighted my partner less, and they've highlighted a lot of other people that we like and they have phenomenal traffic coverage and transit coverage. But this particular new site, when I went to look at it and when I went to fact check everything going on in this week's Hot Topic,
00:07:32
Speaker
I found that most of the headlines of people that were African American, there are about people that were African American, where African American people engage in some kind of crime.
00:07:46
Speaker
I would hate to think that the only real hook besides this shouldn't have happened and we need to keep our hands to ourselves and we need to respect ourselves. We need to keep our thoughts to ourselves, especially if they are negative and especially to a child that you don't even know. Bad enough that you're doing this to adults, but to a child that you don't even know that is learning how to navigate in the world.
00:08:10
Speaker
And back to this news outlet. It is a shame that this news outlet, the way everything was framed, it seemed like this news outlet saw a hot Twitter moment, noticed that the people that were involved were white, queer, presumably all transplants to the region.
00:08:29
Speaker
maybe not, or at least presumably, once again, that presumably piece is important. And then platform this story. Before then, this was just something that was going around the black, well, not just the black queer internet, but the DC queer internet and somewhat of the black, the DC urbanism internet and Twitter, the site formerly known as Twitter, as we refer to it on this show, the site formerly known as Twitter,
00:09:00
Speaker
And yeah, unfortunately this is not uncommon, but this is one time where it was actually platformed enough to make it to a new story. And I wanted to spend some time in this week's hot topic to
00:09:15
Speaker
pinpoint some things that this brought up for me.
Community Intervention vs. Policing
00:09:18
Speaker
Now also on that site formerly known as Twitter, when I retweeted this particular, the bystanders account of this story, not the news story, I did keep up with this and found a news story and I wanted to include that, but initially I just retweeted the bystanders account the day after it happened and said,
00:09:38
Speaker
said basically because I saw in the comments underneath that lots of people were calling on the police as a solution. Now here's the thing about that. So absolutely, this man needed a brother to brother talk, especially a brother that black brother as it were, black sibling even, that would say, look man, you know, times have changed.
00:10:07
Speaker
The children are different, and you know, heck, we're different. We're different as men. Now, we have more opportunities to flex our muscles, and not just flex our muscles, but if we want to do things that used to be girly, that quote-unquote females used to do, and of course there's that whole thing of calling women females, but let's assume that the brothers are having this
00:10:30
Speaker
kind of hardcore brotherly talk to help with regulating the behavior of this man who needs a little bit of regulation. Not total regulation. Wasn't nothing wrong with him standing on the train. Wasn't nothing wrong with him wearing a hoodie. Wasn't he should he should be riding the train because we should all be using public transportation. You know I'm actually recording I had done a take of this when I was sitting at home and now I'm doing a take of it on my voice memo.
00:10:57
Speaker
as i'm driving my car so you may hear like engine noises but yeah because we don't always get to do that and so many people use situations like this as reasons why they don't ride public transit and i don't want this man removed from public transit by default but if he can't keep his hands and his mouth to himself then yes i do agree
00:11:23
Speaker
but this is not a reason to increase our fare gates because presumably this man still managed to get on metro and he could have paid his fare he could have still paid his fare and still been you know for lack of a better word a poop head you know i want to keep my clean rating here so we're just gonna call him poop head so he could have still made those comments
00:11:49
Speaker
he could have still had that mindset but I want us and that's why I talk about a lot and I have been really emphasizing that this podcast is basically bridging the worlds of
00:12:04
Speaker
academic kind of white leaning fascination with cities, public transit systems, housing, et cetera, that comes from the children, mostly white children that come from suburbs that have been excluded from the city that moved to the city.
00:12:20
Speaker
Many of them who are of the LGBTQ community and discovered that it's a safe haven for them, it presumably, and people that moved to DC because it's known to be a safe haven for queer people of all races and ethnicities.
00:12:37
Speaker
I want us to, I'm having this conversation specifically around this because I want us to start doing better as a community, a black community. And we do, and we do well. And I know there's a brother, there's a kind of, you know, heavy duty masculine presenting man. Maybe he, I'm imagining him being like a coach of a little league team. So already he's like, you know, man, it's foul that you call out a child, you know,
00:13:06
Speaker
children can't help who their parents are. And on top of that, you know, some of us ain't couldn't show up, but here are these two men and they showed up and they wanted to be a parent. And I bet you like they, there was a reason they wanted to be parents and we need to honor that. We don't need to be raggedy about why they're parents. We don't even, there's no need for that conversation. Cause guess what? Children need, everybody should be looking out for the wellbeing of children.
00:13:34
Speaker
And brother, if you're still tripping over who's going home and who, that's none of your business either. So I, but I want to, I want to say that we are as a community and I want to, on the show notes, I'm going to, if I don't overlay it, I'm, you'll either see this, these two maps overlaid, you'll see them side by side, depending on where you see this.
00:14:04
Speaker
basically showing that the racial dot matrix map and the DC metro service map showing that these areas are both very diverse and that there's a lot of different people here
00:14:20
Speaker
there's a lot of different people across different areas. And yes, if you take all the two states and the district as a whole, as well as watching that, seeing it all the way up the 95 Carter, all the way up to Baltimore, and of course, as to the chagrin of natives of these areas, or at least people that have been living here that were born here and raised here,
00:14:45
Speaker
Yes, the two areas have grown together. They are very urbanized. There are a lot of black folks and a lot of black folks here are able to make the kind of money that they can't make in other jurisdictions. A lot of people, period. Minimum wages have increased across the region. There is not a single jurisdiction that pays anybody less than $12 anymore in this region. A few of the counties, well, actually, yeah, because state
00:15:13
Speaker
Statewide minimum wage in Maryland has increased. The district has increased to almost $20 an hour. And yeah, parts of northern Virginia on the county by county basis, but the ones that consider themselves and are looped into being part of the DC metro region.
00:15:29
Speaker
those counties pay well. So this is an attractive region for a lot of people. This is the golden region. This is the chocolate city. This is the golden region. And real talk, when you still have mega churches removing gay men from teaching Sunday school to elementary school kids,
00:15:50
Speaker
because we're scared that they're showing them the wrong image of God or whatever sorry excuse that that church is using. And yes, that particular church is known and it's documented and they have codes of conduct and everything, but there are a lot of other churches that are real quiet about it.
00:16:09
Speaker
They've got that beautiful sound and gospel music with that country tinge, much of which that country tinge that we really liked in Cowboy Carter. And yes, I'm going to just keep talking about that album because it's the album of the moment for me right now. But besides that, many of us
00:16:29
Speaker
Our entry to the United States, ancestrally, we were brought to what has become the South. And honestly, it wasn't like some of those plantation and forced labor camp owners actually had an agenda and had a culture. They really didn't. They took our culture and they monetized our culture.
00:16:51
Speaker
And that's what they did. That's how they decided to act and appear in the world. And so that's what a lot of us are looking to when we go to houses of faith. There is a cultural experience.
00:17:09
Speaker
Yet for many of us, those houses of faith aren't safe and they're telling people that it's okay to be like our brother that was on the train speaking out. It's very being very violently, verbally violent towards people trying to not just help the one gay couple escape being harassed, but to a child just because of who their parents were.
00:17:36
Speaker
So I want to end this hot topic this week with encouraging us. If you live in the DC Metro area, you live in a salad bowl, not a melting pot, but a salad bowl. We all have our cultures and we can coexist, but we don't get to coexist violently. We don't get to come out of pocket and come out sideways. Secondly,
00:17:59
Speaker
Being black and middle class and church does not mean we get to disrespect people in public and loudly. We do need to examine what we think the Bible says around all of these things. It does not say what you think it says for the reasons you think it says.
00:18:17
Speaker
So sit on that and sit on why we think it's important. And unfortunately, many of us are are staying silent about the churches that are preaching these things that allow people to even even folks that may not even come to your church where they see it online and they hear these things in locker rooms and at family reunions and
00:18:37
Speaker
and folks are still cultivating these prejudice ideas. And not only that, that is no reason to get off of Metro. Metro is here for us. Yes, it should have been expanded. No, they shouldn't have waited to create the green line and other lines that would benefit our communities. And of course, our community shouldn't have been segregated in the first place. But here we are, and public transportation has benefits.
00:19:00
Speaker
And the benefit of everybody can hop on there and keep their mouths shut or at least keep their voices down. Yeah, it's fun when you meet people on Metro. It's fun to have conversations and have meetings of the minds and meet in the middle. But it is not fun to get on there and people are harassing you.
00:19:21
Speaker
But we still need it and we need to be good. We need to keep each other safe. We need to be mindful of conflict resolution. We all should be able to intervene and practice conflict resolution so that we don't have to stick people with criminal records forever. We should be able to have heart to heart talks with our community members.
00:19:45
Speaker
and we should also in some and let me go let me go even further say we shouldn't have to
00:19:52
Speaker
have them necessarily with people that are exactly like us we should listen to people saying no don't do that just because it's the right thing to do y'all but that's just that's just fact so when we come back from our break we're going to talk about something else that needs to end that is gentrification yes the show is called the fine gentrification not taking it a step further to talk about eradicating gentrification but after the break i will explain a little bit of my logic and why we're saying this
00:20:18
Speaker
So come on back to the Defying Gentrification podcast with Kristen Jeffers.
Land Ownership and Colonial Impact
00:20:22
Speaker
That's what you've been listening to and we'll be right back.
00:20:26
Speaker
Yeah, so books, you know, I just talked to you about my bookshop.org shop, bookshop.org slash shop slash Kristin E. Jeffers. And if you are curious about the racial dynamics of Washington, D.C., I have a book for you. It is called, there are two, actually two books called Chocolate City. One's called Chocolate City. Another one's called Chocolate City's The Black Map of American Life.
00:20:53
Speaker
If you go on my store, click on my Black Urbanist Booklist, they are right there. Or you just go, when you get to the Chris and Jeffers Media Bookshop store and you scroll down, they're right next to each other. Go ahead and grab them. Both of them are great reads. One of them is just focused on DC and the history of creating the race of the nation's capital, the what should be the 51st state. And then the other ones are based on just looking at America.
00:21:21
Speaker
and breaking down the map and breaking down the fact that for most African-American people, our entry point was what we call the deep South, but the census still terms as the South, the census South. And basically the researchers they take, they look at each kind of the way in name parlance, there's West's,
00:21:41
Speaker
For Black folks, everything's a style. And so they go through it. They put numbers out there. They illustrate how so many figures of Black history were the first Black urbanist. So of course, y'all know I'm gonna like that as a Black urbanist. So bookshop.org slash shop slash Kristin E. Jeffers, scroll on down, read them after you listen to this episode. And yeah, I'm gonna get back to the episode because I got something to tell you and it's very important.
00:22:10
Speaker
Welcome back to the Defining Gentrification podcast. I'm your host, Kristen Jeffers, and hopefully you're still listening. Maybe you might've heard a few things in the Hot Topics segment. Maybe you might be a little toasty, but know this. I care about every member of our community. I care about everybody thriving, and I care about everybody's voice being heard, and that is not necessarily happening, but what I don't care to hear is violence,
00:22:37
Speaker
verbal violence for no good reason other than tradition or you feel uncomfortable. Find somebody to help you get comfortable, process your issues. And that is relevant today because more often than not, when we talk about gentrification,
00:22:54
Speaker
And for a lot of people, gentrification has been sold. Well, I will say people in the state, specifically when we talk about investing in black communities, when we talk about reclaiming our land, when we talk about buying the land back. So let's think about land back a little bit for a minute. So obviously,
00:23:18
Speaker
land ownership should be land stewardship. And so part of the reason that land back from the peoples who had been stewarding this land until the advent of colonialism and chattel slavery, part of the push to bring to give those lands back to those folks is to at least give them a chance
00:23:41
Speaker
to sort through some of the other things like genders and figuring out how to feed people and figuring out how to not navigate living life under there on the court. Not, oh, well, we don't like what you look like, we don't like what you sound like, and we didn't like our country, so we're gonna come over to your lands and we're going to seize them.
00:24:05
Speaker
And we you said you wanted to like trade some I don't know maybe some corn with us But we don't like your corn prices, so we're just gonna kill all y'all we're gonna leave y'all hanging well literally physically all of that so Deep down to me especially thinking about how the origin of the word gentrification came from observing a London neighborhood where
00:24:32
Speaker
white folks who initially just wanted to live in a vibrant community of Afro-Caribbean people. However, the landlords saw dollar signs and for some reason they weren't seeing dollar signs in the eyes of the black folks. They were seeing dollar signs only in the eyes of the white folks.
00:24:49
Speaker
that is the gist of gentrification that's why it's got to be shut down because yes it's it's okay for land to have inherent value but when you're talking about land having inherent value because of who is living on it or not living on it that's where the problems start and of course let's not we it'll be a future episode and a future hot topic when we talk about climate stewardship but that is why i believe gentrification should be eradicated
00:25:19
Speaker
And I have created my own process of eradicating gentrification.
Vision for Eradicating Gentrification
00:25:25
Speaker
And yes, I use the word eradicate because to me it's a disease. Like thinking somebody is more worthy than you because of their skin color, yeah, it is a mental disease. Some of the things we wanna call mental diseases aren't really that, they're just results of trauma of people thinking that you're lesser than or you're no good, et cetera, et cetera, and so on and so on.
00:25:47
Speaker
So the first thing we need to do to get rid of gentrification once and for all, and I've alluded to it already in this segment, we need to care about people.
00:26:00
Speaker
quite simply. Care about people just like I talked about in the Hot Topics segment. We need to care about people just because they're people. We need to care about people because they are alive. We need to care about people because we're all humans and we have one Earth and we have to share it and we should be stewarding it. We shouldn't be abusing it. We shouldn't be like beating on it. And yeah, I say this as someone who's working to like manage their meat consumption. That's why when I do eat
00:26:28
Speaker
me I'm mindful of the food chain because of course some animals don't actually you know they're they eat each other and they don't really think about it and that's you know not having our brains be what they are supposed to be making us like the quote unquote better animals but in saying that we are better or worse animals as it were you that's still this leaves room and we still should honor
00:26:59
Speaker
each other. And there are humane ways not only to treat humans, but to treat animals.
00:27:08
Speaker
It's not happening. People shouldn't be, people should have shelter. That was the one thing that I had hoped would happen with the fact that COVID or at least SARS-CoV-2, which when you actually read up on what that terminology for that means,
00:27:30
Speaker
Yeah, nobody should have been left hanging when it comes to dealing with the onset of this pandemic by themselves. No one should have been left to die. Eviction should have never resumed. Masking and especially in healthcare settings where you're trying to contain the illness and know where it is, contact tracing, all those things should have never stopped. Yet here we are and this is the world we're living in.
00:27:55
Speaker
And I don't blame people that don't have the means for giving up on mitigations. For a lot of people, they're dealing with all kinds of other illnesses. They're dealing with poor health care. But I do think those of us who can, should try to help and heal and protect each other from illness. And likewise, anything else. We should be looking out for each other. And we shouldn't let
00:28:24
Speaker
Oh, this person dates women and they're a woman, a presumed woman. Or this person has been living at the housing project for years and years. Well, maybe they're being prudent. They're being prudent and they're saving money. And surprise, surprise, maybe they're educating themselves. Maybe they have the cure for cancer, the cliche statement when we're trying to humanize people as it were.
00:28:53
Speaker
With that, caring is something that we can all do, but I do put the burden of care on those who are the descendants of those who colonized and enslaved the world.
00:29:10
Speaker
I put that burden on those folks or even allowed it to happen because that's the second burden I put it on. So some of us who have managed to be middle and upper class and who try to uphold the systems that persecute and
00:29:30
Speaker
Harm yeah, we we're not now. Yes. There's that's where that's you're in that sandwich of oh I need to do this to survive and oh this makes me feel good but you should not be stepping on your fellow people and Honestly, the top the top bun shouldn't even exist at all You know, it should be maybe we should all be up. We should be inside of a burrito We should all be inside of a burrito maybe instead of a a bun
00:30:01
Speaker
So with that pause, I want to get to infrastructure. Talking about like what's not being, the buns and burritos, thinking about structures leads us to the second thing I think we should be doing for
00:30:20
Speaker
people to eradicate gentrification is just providing the infrastructure. And once again, most of that infrastructure funding comes from those who have been hoarding resources and capital in the first place. So yeah, stop hoarding, release it. Time's up for you to release, time's up for you to have all this power over people and what they're doing. Time's up, let it go.
00:30:44
Speaker
You're still going to have resources, but guess what? We're gonna all share. We're gonna all be happier because we'll all have everything that we need. Once again, if you're just insisting on being greedy and hoarding, somebody needs to call you in too.
00:31:04
Speaker
This podcast is the beginning, but I would suggest somebody that you, especially if you're listening to my voice and ready to cut it off, then find somebody that will tell you the truth and listen to them, please. In the meantime, when I mean infrastructure, I mean everything from public transportation to hospitals, to educational institutions, to houses, to places to live.
00:31:28
Speaker
And there's some countries that they don't mind the fact that they're a building specifically for people that don't want to think about housing.
00:31:37
Speaker
You know, everybody has a house and then if somebody wants to go live in the luxury tower, they go live in the luxury tower. Another complication here is that here in the United States, we were all promised plots of land with single family homes and everybody has a yard. Number one, that is not environmentally sustainable. Our earth will not stand for us to continue to live like that.
00:31:58
Speaker
So yes, we do need to be thinking about shrinking our footprint where of our housing, we could actually get away with some of us living in row houses, we could get away with some of us living in. Some of us could live still live in single family homes live in groups.
00:32:17
Speaker
Going back to talking about care, many of us need to take care of family conflict and friend conflict, and build on our conflict resolution skills, as well as practice radical acceptance of who our family members are. Not cruelly, but I'm talking about the people who are fatphobic,
00:32:37
Speaker
are fat antagonistic. Actually, these are antagonizers. I'm talking about our fat antagonizers. I'm talking about our queer antagonizers. I'm talking about our colorists. I'm talking about people that even hate that one child is blind and one child is a brunette.
00:32:52
Speaker
that or one child is presumably a girl and one child is presumably a boy. That's the kind of stuff that's got to be let go of. And the infrastructure to provide conflict resolution, that's also something that needs to be
Infrastructure and Access Needs
00:33:07
Speaker
provided. And yes, it needs to be subsidized as we release wealth hoarding. And when we release that wealth hoarding, when the billionaires pay their fair share, that opens up a lot of money and a lot of space and a lot of time for us
00:33:21
Speaker
as humans to utilize the technology that we have created to make it easier to survive. You know, we don't have to go all the way back to subsistence farming. We could literally spread mobile devices and the internet around the world and then that would connect us with each other. We could trade each other's art products.
00:33:42
Speaker
the things that we do well, you know, so having market infrastructure, having financial infrastructure, having access to the internet, that infrastructure, and that gets us to our final, our final piece of eradicating gentrification, and that is access. Just allowing people to use it. The infrastructure is often there in a lot of places, but think about all of the utilities that we pay for.
00:34:09
Speaker
We should not have to pay for water, electricity, the internet. To be real honest, if the billionaires shook it all down, they probably could, their wealth and progress could probably pay for us and all of our bills for
00:34:24
Speaker
years and then solar panels that's generating power and then that could like run buses and trains and then we could build things build our human like stores and communities and homes a little closer together little by little a little over time.
00:34:43
Speaker
yes we are we are sprawling part of reason we're sprawling is because we don't have a complete plan and a lot of people don't have access to the places they want to be so they often get pushed to other places so that's just kind of accepted and it doesn't have to be the case so
00:35:00
Speaker
Those are my three ways to eradicate gentrification. And I hope that you will take up the banner. But in the next episode, I'm going to talk about, I'm going to switch gears a little bit. We're actually going to be debuting my new segment called the Diary of a Gentrification Defier.
Personal Stories Segment Preview
00:35:20
Speaker
where we're going to talk to someone about how they're defying gentrification. Occasionally, we'll have gentrification eradicators, but for the most part, it'll be people I consider defiers, unless a billionaire shows up magically. But we'll talk about the nuances, but basically, we're gonna be hearing from personal stories from people who are defying gentrification. And I'll also be telling more of my story of defying gentrification.
00:35:48
Speaker
Over the years, so I hope that you'll come back to it I'm gonna take one more break and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna really truly wrap up the episode today
00:36:01
Speaker
Okay, so now you know, I have a bookshop store and you should use it and you should order from it. Please order from it. Bookshop.org slash Kristen. Well, actually bookshop.org slash shop slash Kristen E. Jeffers. And there's some wonderful books in there. I told you about a few of them at the top of the show. I told you, I told you about a few of them in the middle.
00:36:23
Speaker
But yeah, please just get some books, read. But I will, and yeah, the two that I recommended, they'll help you out. They'll really help you out with this episode. Understanding the two chocolate cities are great and they're all in bookshop and you can order them. And yeah, bookshop.org slash shop slash Kristin E. Jeffress. Yes, I'm a bookshop affiliate. I do need to say that I'm affiliate legally so that they don't come after me.
00:36:49
Speaker
But that is a great way to support this show. And now, let's close it out.
00:36:55
Speaker
So welcome back. It has been a great time to talk with you. These conversations can get a little rough and heavy, but they're necessary. And I want you to know if you've listened to this point that I love you and I believe in you and I believe in your humanity and you don't have to resort to putting somebody down. You don't have to resort to outdated notions of who certain humans are in order for you to have your civil rights and you to have your dignity and respect.
00:37:25
Speaker
So I don't want us to be using this moment of harassment on streets and on public transit to ask for more surveillance and policing. I want us to look out for each other. And I want us to care for each other. I want us to release the infrastructure. I want us to build the infrastructure. And I want us to provide that access. So that is our episode for today.
00:37:52
Speaker
The Defying Gentrification Podcast is a publication of Kristen Jeffers Media. That means I am your host, I am editing this, I am picking the music, I am picking the guests, I am picking the hot topics right now, but that may change in the future. But for now, it's a one-person show.
Podcast Accessibility and Platforms
00:38:11
Speaker
You can find this podcast wherever you find your podcast. Now, if there's somewhere where you were expecting this podcast and it's not there yet, you can go to the Zencaster link that comes in the show notes. That link will take you to the RSS feed, and you can add that RSS feed to your favorite podcast player. Otherwise, we are where all the podcasts are, and I won't list them all out, but you know where those places are. This is not an ad, so.
00:38:40
Speaker
Well, not an ad for those platforms. There are ads here and I thank you for patronizing my bookshop.org show that helps keep the lights on here at the defined gentrification podcast.
00:38:52
Speaker
And you can find me at Black Urbanist on the site formerly known as Twitter, as well as Instagram. And if you're curious about my crafty adventures at Chris Pattern on Instagram, as well as, I think I'm on Pinterest. I'm definitely on YouTube, definitely on YouTube with that as well. So until next time, take care of yourselves and keep doing what you can to defy and eradicate gentrification.