Hipster Living: Why We Need To Pay More Attention

Post date: Apr 18, 2017 8:50:31 PM

Written by Caroline Uphus at Thursday, April 6, 2017 8:41:47 AM

When my grandfather was twenty, he was an assistant to a lawyer at a paper mill. In time, he learned the tricks of the trade and made enough connections to rise through the ranks at Verso Paper Mill; he worked so hard that by the time my mother was eleven he was the vice president of the paper mill. He grew up with four siblings in a one bedroom house in Canada, his family never had enough to eat, and he never even considered college as an option. The American Dream is something that my grandfather’s generation fully subscribed to, the notion that physical and mental fortitude are enough to make one successful. My grandfather says he is living proof that the American Dream is real. At the age of eighty, he is an owner of multiple homes all over the country and multiple cars he stores in his colossal garage in Wisconsin. With no college education, with no substantial connections my grandfather managed to be a millionaire by the time I was born in 1997.

This year I turned twenty. I am privileged enough to go to a private liberal arts college without the assistance of financial aid. I am someone who has many professional connections in the English and Education field all over the country. I am all of these things and yet something that I am extremely worried about is that once I enter into the workforce as a sustainable adult, I will be a perpetuator of gentrification. Gentrification, “the process of renovating and improving a house or district so that it conforms to middle-class taste.” (Merriam-Webster) I’ve seen it happen in my hometown of Minneapolis and had friends be displaced from their homes and neighborhoods because rent got too high and they couldn’t afford a membership to the new organic co-op that replaced the K-mart where they used to get their groceries. Expensive micro-apartments have popped up all over NorthEast Minneapolis, forcing many Somali and Ethiopian immigrant families to move into the already over populated South Minneapolis neighborhoods. What ends up happening is that families are displaced from their homes and therefore children are forced out of school districts, which leads to a large group of children of color missing weeks if not months of school while their family struggles to find an affordable place to live. This leads to families, especially single mothers, being more suscep to state intervention due to there not being adequate housing or resources for their children.

This connects directly to the fight for reproductive justice. Gentrification and the displacement of families is directly tied to the ways the state takes children from their parents due to neglect or not having the means to care for children. Not only is here not enough being done to uplift families that are already struggling, but they are actively being pushed out of their neighborhoods in the name of microbreweries and farm to table restaurants that they cannot afford. Living in cities is convenient: public transportation is more accessible, there are more people to connect with, and they act as intense hubs for certain professions. I understand why someone would want to live in a city. I would ask though, that people put some thought into where they are living in said city. What borough? What neighborhood? What do you see around you? What is its history? Are you contributing to the lack of reproductive justice in this country?