BRITTANY LUSE, HOST:
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luse, and you're listening to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
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LUSE: This week, we're connecting the dots between AI essays, teenage ennui and Bill Gates. I know, I know. How are all of these things connected? Well, we're going to find out with NPR Education Desk correspondent and senior editor Cory Turner and Karin Klein, education reporter and author of "Rethinking College." Cory, Karin, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE.
CORY TURNER, BYLINE: Thank you, Brittany.
KARIN KLEIN: Thanks.
LUSE: So great to have you both. So it's September, which means the school year for many Americans is starting back up, if it hasn't already. I'm curious. Were you the kind of people who laid out what they were going to wear on the first day of school, or did you just wing it?
TURNER: (Laughter) Well, I do it now 'cause I have to help my kids lay out what they're going to wear. Otherwise, mornings are a disaster.
LUSE: (Laughter).
KLEIN: Well, up until high school, I was just a messy kid, and I would just lay all my clothes at the foot of my bed. And in the morning, I would just go through the pile and pick things out.
LUSE: (Laughter).
KLEIN: In high school, I got a lot of fussier, and I would plan in advance.
LUSE: Oh, I have to say, I love a preplanned outfit. I laid my clothes out every single year - every year, all the way through college. But enough about us, we're going to talk about the kids in school now, more specifically school-aged Gen Z students who range from 12 to 18. A new study from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation has shown that they're less engaged and feel less challenged than last year.
And I'll admit, I wasn't a big fan of school myself, even though I love learning new things, and I think that education is important. It's just that sometimes - I think when I was that age, it felt like something I had to do just for the sake of getting into college. And to my eye, it seems like questions of, what is high school for? - are really coming to a head with Gen Z. Forty-eight percent of them even say they do not intend to get a bachelor's degree right after high school. But their schools and maybe parents don't want to hear that. And - I should add - only about 40% of American adults even have a bachelor's degree.
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LUSE: We're going to be getting into all of that. But first, I want to go back to that study I mentioned. I want to know - why are students feeling less engaged? Cory, you said that there are three big things that you think are contributing to more disengaged students.
TURNER: Yeah, I mean, ooh, we could devote the whole pod just to this one question, Brittany.
LUSE: (Laughter).
TURNER: I'm with you. Like, school is just not always awesome, and it doesn't have to be. So a little disengagement is perfectly normal. But what the survey found, looking at the same kids year over year - a pretty big drop-off in engagement. So something is definitely happening. And I think the big factors behind it are there's a college divide in the way we talk to kids in middle and high school based on whether or not they're interested in going to college.
The pandemic also created a huge series of ripples for kids across the country when it comes to how engaged they are in school. We see it manifest now in really high chronic absenteeism rates that just haven't quite gone down, at least not to where we would like them to be or where they were before the pandemic. And then I think there's a funky wild card in here - AI. That's raising a lot of questions, not just for teachers but for kids, like, wait a minute. If the robots are going to be doing this for me in five or six or seven years, why do I have to do it this way now?
LUSE: I mean, you know, to your point about AI, students are using it more and more. Forty-eight percent of K through 12 students say that they use AI at least weekly. And - now, this one surprised me - 46% of teachers use it just as much. I mean, that's staggering.
TURNER: It is. I am taken aback by the stories I hear even anecdotally as a parent. Like...
LUSE: Oh, my gosh.
TURNER: Oh, don't even tell me this. I don't want to know. This is just terrifying to me as an education reporter.
LUSE: (Laughter) Right. You know, Karin, in our prechat for this conversation, there was something else notable in the study that really jumped out to you, which is that only 46% of respondents in the study said that they get to do what they are best at every day at school.
KLEIN: I think it was far worse for kids who are not planning to go to college. They were the ones who said they don't get to show what they do best, which is in a way not surprising because your basic academic day is leaning toward people who are going to college, it's toward people who sit in classrooms and are very good at taking notes and participating in discussion and have long attention spans and so on and so forth. And the people who aren't going to college very often have a different set of great skills. I think they're quite right. I don't think they have the opportunity to show what it is they do best.
LUSE: I mean, I remember feeling that when I was in school. Now, as an adult, I know that I had long-undiagnosed ADHD. But even though I did end up going to college and eventually graduating, I consistently felt like I didn't have the kinds of follow-through and behavioral skills that seemed to come naturally to other kids that made them beloved in the classroom. I was a little bit of a terror in the past, but enough about me.
You know, according to this survey, only about half of Gen Z even intends to go to college. And actually, the percentage of jobs that require a college degree has dropped a bit from 51% in 2017 to 44% in 2021. But according to this survey, kids are hearing a lot about college, as both of you mentioned, and they aren't hearing much at all about other options. And while all engagement is down, the engagement of students who don't intend to go to college is significantly lower than those who do. I wonder, what was high school for in the past, and how did we get to this place where high school seems to mostly be prep for college?
KLEIN: Well, in my youth, which is before your youth, there were two tracks, essentially. There was college track, college prep track, and there was vocational track. And in fact, where I grew up, which was in Yonkers, N.Y., there were different high schools for the different tracks. So the kids who, after middle school, wanted to pursue a vocation went to one of the two vocational high schools. Over time, people felt that students were being pushed into very narrow tracks that were limiting their future. This was especially happening to Black and Latino students. And this came to a kind of head.
Bill Gates - if people don't know - had a huge effect on American education. So one of his many campaigns was to get more people to go to college and that if people didn't go to college, our economy would be behind. We needed 11 million more people going to college than were currently going to college, or we would not be able to fill the jobs of the 21st century. What didn't occur to him was that maybe a lot of those jobs of the 21st century didn't need bachelor's degrees.
LUSE: You know, and to that point, the prospect of college, you know, maybe isn't as rosy as it used to be. It's still super expensive. For a lot of Americans, the benefits of college have to be weighed against the cost of being in debt. It almost feels like we're past a tipping point. High schools focused on college prep at the expense of career and technical education, but then college got really expensive, if not prohibitively expensive, for many people. And now enrollment in college for recent graduates is on the decline. There's a shift happening here that it kind of seems like schools have not yet responded to. Cory, why are schools so slow to respond to these kinds of massive generational changes?
TURNER: Our public schools can't do it all. You know, the mandate for the longest time has been focusing on grades, on test scores, on proficiency, on college. And we know - I mean, Karin knows this even better than I do - high school counselors, I think the average student caseload for a high school counselor is, like, 400 kids. So, like, how can you possibly - with the funding levels that so many of our public schools are at right now, how can you meet the demand without, like, reorienting philosophically? And that's just a thing that schools don't do quickly.
KLEIN: And yet, I don't think it's that difficult. If you have a somewhat large high school that has more than one school counselor, you could designate a school counselor to become the expert on what are the things you can do if you're not planning to go to college. And right now, school counselors are just not very aware of those things. If they mention anything outside of college, the two things are military and skilled trades, like being a plumber or a welder. We all...
LUSE: Right.
KLEIN: ...Hear about welding and how we need more welders. Those are both great paths for people, but there's so much more. As Cory said, there's entrepreneurship. They actually can find their way to great jobs through volunteering. They can go into the creative fields. There now are apprenticeships for junior and senior high school kids. Even as it is, more than 40% of people who get a bachelor's degree end up working in a job that does not require a bachelor's degree. They are underemployed, and more than 30% of students who do go off to a four-year college will leave before they finish. So that's almost the worst because they've spent the money. They've spent the time. And they have absolutely nothing to show for it, not even a certificate or an associate's.
TURNER: Yeah. You know, Brittany, I think it's important to reckon with this idea that Karin just mentioned, you know, because I have spent so much of my time these last few years at NPR covering federal student loans and the student loan system and really the mountain of debt that has accrued over the last 5 to 10 years in part because of this economy we've created, where we're driving as many high schoolers as possible directly into college, whether or not that's the right thing for them. And I think we're - you know, the last couple of years, the language, the dialogue around student debt has turned really pretty toxic.
And I think that's part of what is driving students, you know, in middle school and high school to look around and go, wait, why is this a thing I should necessarily do? I think it's well past time that we investigate, we really poke at this idea of, well, no, college is the end-all and the be-all. I don't think it is. A lot of middle and high schoolers are trying to tell us that, that they're tired of hearing that. And they want to hear about other options. But they're also just kids. They're teens. Like, they don't know what they don't know, and they're being let down by the adults.
LUSE: You know, along with their disengagement, there are a lot of things that also schools are fighting uphill battles on - I mean, general lack of resources, teacher burnout. Even enrollments in public schools are down, and many school districts are having to close schools. I mean, you know, to put it plainly, there's a lot of pressure on the American school system from all sides, and it's been under pressure for a long time. How does that factor into how students engage in or even value their own educations?
TURNER: (Laughter) Yes, everything you said, Brittany. It's, like, you perfectly captured these past many years I've been covering education. Like, if it's not funding issues, it's teacher retention. Let's not forget not only has the language around student debt become pretty toxic in recent years, but so has the way we often hear teachers talked about in the public discourse. Teachers have been so vilified, and I think that's just sort of worked its way into the groundwater. Kids hear it, and I think it just conjures all sorts of questions about, what are we doing here? What is this collective enterprise we call public education? And who values it?
KLEIN: Obviously, we never have enough money in the public schools - right? - to do all the things we want. I would love to see more arts education. I would love to see more career education that actually excites students and engages them. We need to have facilities that look nice, that kids want to go to. When kids go to a messed-up place where the water is leaking through the ceiling and it just looks shabby and awful and the heating isn't working, the air-conditioning isn't working, what's the message we're sending them about education? If we think they're not hearing it - you know, they know. They know that things that are valued look nice. They cost money. That might be clothing, but it also is their school. And when we don't invest in saying school is something we adults think is very important and we think that how you spend your time as a teenager is very important, they pick up on that, and they say, why - if nobody else thinks this is important, why should I think it's so important?
TURNER: You know, Brittany, I've been - obviously been in a lot of schools. But one stands out to me that is so relevant to this conversation. It was in Des Moines, Iowa, and it was an alternative school, so it was for students who were at risk, many of whom had already dropped out, I think, once. But this school was a marvel. To Karin's point, you could see the money on the walls, in the spaces. When I say see the money, what you really saw was care, was intentionality. So they had a marine biology program, and there was an aquarium. They had a fashion design studio. And you could see the pride among the students. You cannot ignore the fact that somebody out there cared about us.
LUSE: Oh, and my producer just looked into this, and sadly, that school, Scavo High, has technically closed. You know, thinking about all this, as a culture, do we need to rethink the point of high school?
TURNER: I mean, look, the Gen Z survey suggests to us that only about half of them say they have plans to go and get a four-year degree. If most of what we're talking about with them when it comes to this is what the future looks like, is college, well, then, yeah, I think it's fair to say we're getting something wrong. It sounds like I'm trashing college right and left. I'm not. I think having a college degree is hugely helpful, and there are lots of jobs out there for which a degree is a gatekeeper. But if we want a well-rounded economy, then we've got to do this differently.
I want to be a little glass-half-full here. Of all the education issues I have covered politically, the solutions here are among the only things I've heard Republicans and Democrats actually agree on. And that means, like, increasing access to community college. Like, let's look at our local economy and ask, instead of just sending all kids to these four-year colleges where they may or may not get a degree or ever pay off their debt, let's think, what is a local or regional need, like nursing, and how can we help meet that need by training students specifically for those jobs?
LUSE: When we talked yesterday, Karin, you had mentioned something about trying to figure out ways to serve different kinds of students who had varying degrees of interest in college while also not returning back to the old track system that you had mentioned earlier. Talk to us about that.
KLEIN: It's going to be a tough one. I have to admit it that in writing my own book, my big concern was once we say, yeah, there's a great valid path that doesn't need to include a four-year college, will we go back to old racist ways of using that to tell Black and Latino kids, you don't really need to go to college; you can go do this? Now, they can, and they can have a very successful future along with white kids and Asian kids who don't go to college. But if we're not applying that evenly, people aren't being offered opportunities. So we can't offer all courses. We can't - high school can't be all things to all kids 'cause we just don't have the money. But we can offer clubs and extracurriculars on entrepreneurialism, on creative pursuit, apprenticeship.
LUSE: Well, Cory, Karin, I've learned so much here. Thank you both so much.
TURNER: You're welcome, Brittany. Thanks for having me.
KLEIN: It's been a pleasure.
LUSE: And as a thank you to each of you, I'd like to teach you something by playing a game with you both. Can you stick around for a tiny bit longer?
TURNER: Yeah.
KLEIN: Oh, joy.
LUSE: Wonderful. We'll be right back with a little game I like to call But Did You Know? Stick around.
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LUSE: All right, all right. We're going to play a little game I like to call But Did You Know?
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LUSE: Here's how it works. I'm going to share a story that's been making headlines this week. And as I give you some background on that story, I'll also ask you trivia related to it. But don't worry. It's all multiple choice, so the right answer is in there somewhere. And the first one to blurt out the right answer gets a point. Person with the most points wins, and their prize is bragging rights. Are y'all ready?
KLEIN: I've always wanted those bragging rights.
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KLEIN: Go for it.
LUSE: I like that fight in you, Karin. I appreciate that.
TURNER: (Laughter).
LUSE: All right. Hot dogs are hot right now. We've talked about them before on this show, but now economists are concerned that increased sausage demand could be a worrying signal for the economy. Today's trivia is about people who are insatiable when it comes to encased meats. They are having a real brat summer. Joey Chestnut and Takeru Kobayashi - who, if you don't know, are competitive hot dog eaters - on Monday, they faced off in a live Netflix special called "Unfinished Beef," which brings me to my first question. This particular competition banned a specific technique that many competitive eaters rely on. What is that technique? Is it...
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LUSE: ...A, eating the meat and the bun separately; B, dunking the hot dogs in water; or C, ripping the hot dogs into smaller pieces so they don't have to chew?
KLEIN: I'm going to go for C.
TURNER: How about separate the dog from the bun?
LUSE: Unfortunately, neither one of you is right.
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LUSE: The answer is B, dunking the hot dogs in water. It acts as a lubricant for the throat and also the bun.
KLEIN: I call trick question 'cause I was thinking of the hot dog, not the bun.
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LUSE: My man Joey Chestnut, he usually does up his hot dogs with water. But what do either of you put on yours?
TURNER: I like some spicy brown mustard. But...
LUSE: Love that.
TURNER: If I'm at the ballpark, it's got to be relish.
LUSE: Oh, OK, relish at the ballpark.
TURNER: Yeah, but it's really only a ballpark indulgence. So...
LUSE: (Laughter) OK.
TURNER: I don't know why.
LUSE: Alrighty (ph), alrighty. So question No. 2 - so at "Unfinished Beef," Chestnut was able to beat Kobayashi and his own world record at the same time. No water dunking, OK? So I ask, what is the new record?
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LUSE: Is it A, 174 hot dogs in one hour; B, 16 hot dogs in one minute; or C, 83 hot dogs in 10 minutes?
TURNER: Eighty-three in 10.
KLEIN: I agree.
LUSE: The answer was indeed C. So, Cory, you got that one correct. You were first.
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LUSE: Chestnut said this on stage - I've been trying to hit 80 hot dogs for years.
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LUSE: And without Kobayashi, I was never able to do it. But this is where it gets beautiful. Chestnut said, he drives me.
TURNER: Oh.
LUSE: We weren't always nice to each other, but I love the way we push each other to be our best.
TURNER: To be our best - that's adorable.
LUSE: Well, to recap the score, Cory, you are at one point, and, Karin, you are at zero points.
TURNER: Karin, you can have half of my point right now. I'm going to break it like a hot dog.
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TURNER: You get half the hot dog. I'll take half the hot dog. We're even.
LUSE: Well, then this is the tiebreaker. All right, question No. 3. Once the time was up and all the dogs were safely packed away into the competitors' stomachs, the officiators had to check to make sure no funny business had happened. What did they do to verify the result? Did they...
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LUSE: ...A, check the bottom of the competitors' shoes to make sure no one hid any crumbs; B, inspect the insides of their mouths to make sure nothing was hidden away; or C, give them a pat-down?
KLEIN: B, 'cause I saw an eating competition thing on "House M.D.," which used to be one of my favorite shows.
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TURNER: And the guy had to open his mouth and show...
KLEIN: Yeah. Actually, that rings true for me, too, for some reason.
LUSE: Well, I'll tell you what. Unfortunately, neither one of you got this one.
TURNER: Oh. Is it the pat-down?
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LUSE: The answer was A, check the bottom of their shoes to make sure no one hid any crumbs.
TURNER: Eighty-three hot dogs, and we're talking about crumbs?
LUSE: Hey, buns. Buns count.
TURNER: Luckily, we each have half a point. We are winners, Karin. We are weiners (laughter).
KLEIN: I appreciate that, Cory, but I can live with being a loser this time.
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KLEIN: I really think I can.
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LUSE: Well, Cory, Karin, thank you both so much for joining me today.
TURNER: Thanks for having me.
KLEIN: Thanks.
LUSE: That was NPR Education Desk correspondent and senior editor Cory Turner and Karin Klein, author of "Rethinking College." I'm going to take a quick break, and when I get back, gentrification has long been known as a big city phenomenon. But what does it look like when it hits smaller cities?
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LUSE: Stick around.
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LUSE: New York is a city of about 9 million people from more than 150 countries around the world. And that's a lot of opinions. But if there's one thing just about every New York resident can agree on, rent and housing in general could stand to be a little cheaper.
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JAMES MCMILLAN: Rent - it's too damn high.
LUSE: And boy, am I feeling that these days. My husband and I, we got lucky with our current place, but it's not somewhere we want to live forever. But when we looked at moving to a new spot, we quickly realized that a similar apartment, even a smaller apartment, could mean upping our rent by $2,000 or more each month.
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LUSE: That's, like, 24,000 extra dollars per year. And buying a place in the city - forget about it. So we thought, why not look in the Hudson Valley area? We like nature and wide-open spaces, and it's just a bit north of New York, so if we needed to go into work, we're just a train ride away. But as we looked at different towns in the area, we kept noticing a dynamic that felt a little familiar and not in a good way. For one, the homes were still expensive, even two or three hours north of New York City.
But in some of the cities we visited, we'd see blocks and blocks and blocks of Black and Latina neighborhoods with neglected sidewalks and abandoned buildings, and then an aggressively cute downtown strip of artisanal shops and dog-friendly cafes and white people. Naturally, I had to find out what was up with that. A quick search led me to the book "Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification And Race In A Small American City." It's a chronicle of the ongoing transformation of Newburgh, N.Y., a small riverfront city smack in the middle of the Hudson Valley. And its author, Richard Ocejo - he and I had a few things in common.
RICHARD OCEJO: So I don't live in New York City anymore because, you may have heard, it's expensive.
LUSE: (Laughter) Trust me, I'm dealing with that myself, yes.
OCEJO: You know about this, right? So...
LUSE: Yes.
OCEJO: ...The same housing affordability issues that have caused a out-migration of working-class folks, but even the middle class finding themselves unable to afford to live comfortably in large cities like New York is affecting people moving out and moving to the surrounding regions. So I was one of those people.
LUSE: After moving upriver with his family, Richard noticed a lot of the same dynamics that I did. And because he's a sociology professor who studies urban environments, he was especially fascinated by the changes in Newburgh. Newburgh had changed before. During its urban renewal that began in the late 1940s, almost 1,300 buildings in Newburgh were raised, displacing mostly Black residents.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Newburgh has made a modest start at solving some of its economic and social problems. A zoning code has been enacted. A belated urban renewal program has just begun.
LUSE: But what's been happening in Newburgh lately is not that. It's a somewhat subtler, more modern change. Newburgh has been getting gentrified. And the same thing is happening in small cities across the country, which is what I want to talk about today because when we talk about gentrification, most people think of how it looks in big cities like San Francisco, New York or LA. But Richard says small-city gentrification has the potential to be even faster and more impactful than the big-city gentrification we usually discuss, which is why Richard is here - to look at small city gentrification, how its beneficiaries want to reframe it as a good thing and what could happen to local residents and eventually all American small cities if it goes unchecked.
Richard, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE.
OCEJO: Thank you. Thank you for having me, Brittany.
LUSE: So let's start with why people moved to these small towns. There's saving money, of course, but you also heard some really interesting comments from people who were moving there about what attracted them to Newburgh in particular. I was kind of shocked to read in your book that the broken sidewalks and weathered buildings were actually a draw for some people. Can you talk more about why these people were so attracted to Newburgh?
OCEJO: Yeah. I mean, it felt like a real urban environment. It felt like the kind of industrial city that they imagined when they thought about what city living was supposed to be about. It's supposed to be kind of rough, supposed to be kind of gritty. It was supposed to have that element of perceived danger.
LUSE: Authenticity.
OCEJO: Right. It's the...
LUSE: Yeah.
OCEJO: It's the authentic image of it can't just have that, right? It has to also have some of the signs of a renaissance. It has to have the signs that there's something there that's for them. And that's where some of the new businesses that had been opening up and some of the renovated housing came into that picture.
LUSE: That also reminds me of another element, specifically many white Newburgh newer residents mentioned when they were describing their desire to move there, which is diversity. Talk to me about how those factor into this vision of urban living as well.
OCEJO: Yeah, absolutely. They would always use the word diversity. What they wouldn't do is examine just exactly what diversity means and how Newburgh arrived at this moment where we can say that it is diverse, right? Newburgh is 80% non-white. It's Hispanic and Black - very high poverty rate, especially in the historic district. And so this gritty authenticity and diversity is a consequence of racialized disinvestment and racialized poverty. Those get all kind of smoothed out by this term diversity, which has a very positive value to it. It's the idea that, well, I didn't want to live in the suburbs 'cause those are not diverse. Suburb becomes like the code for white, basically. Diversity becomes kind of the code for urban, as part of the scene in a way.
LUSE: It's something that isn't always spoken - that the suburbs, you know, are stereotypically understood to be white, and urban areas are, you know, quote-unquote, "diverse," even if that has flipped in many areas. And like you mentioned, diversity has, like, a very positive association with it. So, you know, there's kind of a halo effect from, you know, touting that word or having a desire for diversity. These folks are moving from big cities to places that might emulate the feel of a big city. And when they move there, they are presumably buying there. It's kind of known that homeowners have more power than renters. But what does that look like in a city like Newburgh?
OCEJO: Yeah, so when folks move to smaller places, where their buying power goes a lot further, these folks - by moving to a smaller town, a smaller city, where real estate is much less expensive - they're able to become homeowners, business owners, property investors, even small-scale developers and real estate actors right away. And this is a second key difference, and that's that when the urban middle class moves to these smaller municipalities, they often get more involved civically and politically. The folks who I studied, when they were in New York City, they almost never got involved in local politics. They were interested in, you know, national politics and national issues.
LUSE: But they weren't - like, their community board meeting or anything like that.
OCEJO: They weren't going to community board meetings. They didn't know who their council person was.
LUSE: Oh.
OCEJO: They weren't going to city hall. But in this new place, where they're property owners, where the scale of the governments and bureaucracy is so much smaller and so much more legible, in a place like Newburgh, the mayor is the history teacher. Council people are accountants, and they work for the board of ed, and they are just people in the community. There's volunteer opportunities in economic development, in zoning, in planning.
LUSE: It sounds like it's a lot easier for a middle-class person to become powerful in a sense.
OCEJO: Yes, absolutely. And as a group, they'd be - they could certainly become very powerful in relatively small numbers, getting kind of politically engaged to further their own interests, to protect their own housing investment, to want to shape the city to reflect their own personal preferences, consumer tastes, cultural ideas and things like that.
LUSE: This is a city that is mostly residents of color. How have they been dealing with these changes?
OCEJO: Yeah, I saw two things, and I describe it in the book as a demonstration of ambivalence toward it. On the one hand, there was an appreciation for what was happening. There was a sense that change is good. We need to see change here. We've been struggling. The city's been struggling for a long time.
LUSE: So there's, like, some openness to it...
OCEJO: Yes. Yes.
LUSE: ...Perhaps, as opposed to immediate pushback.
OCEJO: Yes, correct. Like, oh, there's new people coming up from New York City. They've got some money. They've got some ideas. There was that hope. But on the other hand, there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the results (laughter). There was a lot of feelings of resentments that a lot of their own efforts toward addressing poverty, towards their own forms of place-making were being neglected and were being pushed aside. There was the sense that what's being done here is not for us, because in part it's not really taking our needs very seriously. It's imposing them upon us from people who have that stronger leverage to do so.
LUSE: You've discussed what some people have felt like are the pluses or the upsides to gentrification, such as having more areas of commerce or new restaurants or bars or certain kinds of opportunities and whatnot. Talk to me about the negative repercussions of Newburgh's gentrification and what that looks like.
OCEJO: The big one is housing costs - skyrocketing property values, escalating rents. A lot of newcomers, they'd buy a building that was in need of repair. They have the capital to do that. But once that building is done, the people who were there before are not going to be able to afford to come back. They will have moved on.
LUSE: Yeah, we see this throughout. I mean, that's something that happens in big city gentrification all the time.
OCEJO: Exactly. But there's also the social and the cultural and the political displacement, a feeling that once a new business comes into the neighborhood, it's selling products that are not being targeted at you. Everybody talked about the $5 croissants that the new bakery opened up, right?
LUSE: Right - which might not sound huge, but when there's only so many businesses, that can feel like a big change.
OCEJO: Exactly. And it's a term called exclusionary displacement. Even if people are not going to be displaced today, the next generation is simply not going to be able to afford to live in...
LUSE: In the area.
OCEJO: ...These neighborhoods. Right.
LUSE: So many of my friends from New York are starting to accept that even though they grew up here and their parents grew up here, they're not going to be able to raise their children here or buy a home here themselves, especially people who are in their 20s, 30s and teens. You had a great term for how some of these newcomers are reframing gentrification and their role in it in their minds. Please talk to us about that.
OCEJO: Yeah. So I call it in the book the moral frame of opportunity. Opportunity means primarily economic employment. Also housing and exposure to arts and culture because a lot of these folks are in the creative economy. And that's how they got around it.
LUSE: The tension from both being pushed out from gentrification but also becoming a gentrifier.
OCEJO: Yeah. I mean, it's like, well, yeah, sure, gentrification has been shown to cause all these problems and displace people but not the way we're going to do it. The way we're going to do it - because we're in charge now - it's not the big real estate industry. It's not the big investors. It's not the big businesses. It's just us. We're just a bunch of artists who are going to bring our artistic cultures and our craft cultures and all the jobs that we can provide. We're going to bring that to you, and you're going to - we're going to spruce up the housing. You're going to be able to afford it. It's going to be fantastic. Trust us.
LUSE: Basically, they can say to themselves, we're not as bad as the big real estate developers and kind of get to absolve themselves of the stigma of being gentrifiers.
OCEJO: They can say, what I really am is a revitalizer, right? What I really am a bringer, a provider of opportunities that didn't exist before. So let's look at it that way. Second, it becomes a way of justifying why gentrification should be expanded because it's a good process, because it's giving the opportunities that were not there before. Affordable housing didn't bring those opportunities. It's not based in the market. It's not going to attract the people you want it to attract. So forget it. Let's instead think about other types of businesses that we could bring in here that are going to expand the process further.
LUSE: As we're specifically talking about, today, small-town gentrification, so many of these harmful dynamics are bigger, and they run deeper than even the most dedicated group of longtime residents or even the most dedicated group of principled newcomers can fix on their own. And so I wonder, in your opinion, how do we get out of this and make urban living something that can be accessible and enjoyable for people of all kinds?
OCEJO: We can look at just practical solutions - building more permanent affordable housing, stronger rent protections or inclusionary zoning. But then there's, like, the deeper issues - right? - the relationship between race and real estate. How communities that are majority Black tend to have lower real estate value than comparable communities that are majority white, even ones that are next to each other. You could almost kind of say, well, all right, you can pass laws. You can pass policies, but we're not going to, like, really resolve a lot of those issues until we start to address racism. We see how central race is to so many of these problems. Then race has to also be central to the solutions.
LUSE: Well, gosh, Richard, I mean, we will see how all of that turns out. But in the meantime, I really, really appreciated the perspective that you shared in this book. And I thank you so much for coming on and talking with us about it today. Thank you so much.
OCEJO: Thank you so much for having me. This was a pleasure.
LUSE: That was Richard E. Ocejo, author of "Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification And Race In A Small American City." Next Tuesday - I repeat - next Tuesday in this podcast feed, I'm headed to Birmingham, Ala. We are continuing to drop into cities across the country for the smackdown. A debate over what are the most influential things and people from American cities, which I ask you, how much do you know about Birmingham, Ala? For example, did you know that of the city's nearly 200,000 residents, 137,000 are Black? Look out, D.C. Turns out you're not the only chocolate city. Tune in to the Birmingham smackdown next Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by...
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