How “Gentlefication” is helping transform neighborhoods and fight gentrification
An effort to improve one man’s suburban Dallas neighborhood is now spreading across the country, even touching South Bend, Indiana. Incremental developer Monte Anderson coined the term “gentlefication,” valuing people and buildings as he envisions what an area could look like. He’s teaching other cities to do it. Some say it can’t come soon enough as gentrification becomes faster and more widespread.
The Issue
The National Community Reinvestment Coalition says gentrification, “remains a significant threat to minorities and LMI (low or moderate income) families in some of the largest and most prosperous parts of the country.”
Gentrification is a process of neighborhood change that can result in an influx of wealthy, white residents to a previously poor urban neighborhood. Because of the speed of change and increased property values, the people who lived there usually have to move out because they can’t afford it.
Cincinnati
It happened in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in the early 2000s with crime skyrocketing and much of the neighborhood falling into disrepair. Through the Cincinnati City Center Development Corporation (3CDC), the city spent $30 million to buy up 200 buildings.
In 2021 CEO Steve Leeper told WVXU, “The fact is there are still hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of affordable housing units in this neighborhood.”
Not everyone agrees. Reginald Stroud was displaced when the development company Urban Sites bought the Over-the-Rhine building he lived in. It invested over $100 million there. CEO Greg Olson said in 2021, “Our purpose is to lift up the entire neighborhood.”
At the time, Urban Sites owned and managed more than 500 units and said, “almost half of our units are affordable – 232 qualify at 80-perceent of area median income (AMI) and 64 of those qualify at 60-percent AMI.”
Assistant University of Cincinnati History Professor Anne Delano Steinert lived in Over-the-Rhine before and after the 2001 civil unrest. She thought developers were barreling through the neighborhood and trying to make big changes too quickly.
“I’m of two minds about it,” she says. “Did they save the architecture? Yeah, and that’s amazing. Did they cause displacement and hardship for longtime residents? I think they did.”
Dayton
Dayton was one of 72 cities the Eviction Lab studied when trying to draw a comparison between eviction and gentrification. Researchers looked at six million eviction cases filed between 2000 and 2016.
President of Dayton View Historic District Fred Holley wrote in 2020, “Dayton has placed over 70-percent of the lower/subsidized housing west of the river. We have all become ‘West Dayton.’ This may have been by design or perhaps by happenstance. In any case……A redevelopment concept that is both meaningful and sustainable for all of us, (is needed and) some would choose to call it gentrification. I call it rebalancing the approach we take to sharing responsibility for all citizens in the region.”
Positive change is happening in West Dayton. The Dayton Daily News reports $62 million in investments have been made including:
- The QuickTrip Store.
- Expansion by Bonbright Distributors, Malt Products and DuPont.
Community development projects in West Dayton include:
- The $18 million Homefull Healthy Living Campus with a grocery store, food hub, a pharmacy, and medical services.
- The $16 million Germantown Crossing apartment building that is helping to replace DeSoto Bass public housing.
Monte Anderson’s approach
Suburban Dallas developer Monte Anderson didn’t like the white, black and brown flight from his neighborhood in the 1970s and 80s. Out of desperation he tried to figure out what was ugly and make it prettier. He asked, how can we make it more humane, more walkable, more sustainable?
He looked for opportunities as a “town maker” and champion of his community saying, “The project is not just the one building, the project is the neighborhood.”
Anderson explains you see where people are selling properties for less money and then if you can re-envision those properties into something more, those are the opportunities.
The concept
Monte Anderson refers to what he does as “Find your Farm.” This involves getting to know everybody in the community, including bankers and construction crews and having them on board as you focus on redeveloping one block at a time.
“The project is not one building. It’s the neighborhood.”
The suburban Dallas developer might build or rebuild on main street. Because small, with two retail spaces and two apartments, is not really a good investment property for him, he will look for a special entrepreneur to occupy the building. He says, “I might loan them a down payment. I might co-sign on the note with them and then that’s where you get the secret sauce.”
He tries to do it without government subsidies. “We first go to the banks, the local banks, commercial banks and we find out how much they will loan me on this project.” For the gap he looks for community impact investors.
The community impact investors he describes this way. (In Duncanville, TX) “that’s usually a baby boomer, not always, that’s worth maybe between $2 and $20 million. Not a billionaire, but a community person maybe that’s never invested in real estate before that’s interested in making their community better and they don’t have to get a return like they would on Wall Street.”
The 12 Steps of Town Making
An increasing number of communities are using Monte Anderson’s approach. He says, “We’ve been hired all the way from Canada all through the United States to go in and help mostly the red lined part of cities, the sides of the cities that have been neglected for a long time.”
- Pick your farm-Decide on a neighborhood and commit to it.
- Get to know your neighbors-They’re going to be your ecosystem, your engineers, your tenants, your future buyers.
- Learn about the money-You’ve got to learn how to attract money.
- Learn how to hire the right professionals-Bookkeeper, and maintenance person.
- Find a small project to start.
- Take that old property and clean it up.
- Develop the right teams.
- Develop the right scale of architects.
- Decide on the construction.
- Lease the space.
- Manage the space.
- Help others do the same thing.
Anderson has 12 step meetings going on in South Bend, IN, Lafayette, LA, Kansas City, MO, Dallas, TX, and Madison Wisconsin. Here’s one of them:
Looking ahead
Beyond the twelve steps Anderson says the following has to happen:
- You must have a businessperson in the community willing to do this work who wants to make money and do good. This person could be called a town maker or a champion.
- It takes a whole community, including some people at the top in government who understand what “farming” is.
Aways the cheerleader, Anderson says, “You just start with one little thing at a time, and you start building off of that. And the more we call it the flywheel effect; the more you go, the more it goes faster and all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘wow, where did this come from?’”
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Ann Thompson – Host, Producer
Over the last thirty years in Cincinnati, Ann Thompson has brought a wealth of knowledge and expertise to her reporting. She has reported and anchored for WVXU, WKRC, WCKY, WHIO-TV and Metro Networks and freelanced for NPR, CBS and ABC Radio. Her work has been recognized by the Associated Press and she has won awards from the Association of Women in Communications and the Alliance for Women in Media. She is a former News Director and Operations Manager. Ann has reported from India, Japan, South Korea, Germany and Belgium as part of fellowships. Ann thinks of the Brick by Brick project as “journalism for good.” She serves as host and producer. Ann lives in Anderson Township with her husband Scott. They have two boys. Jake graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2022 and Kurt attends West Point.
