What Will You Do When the Gentrifiers Come for You?

OK, I have to admit I was thrilled when our landlord informed us that he was selling our building. This was a guy who would tell us how much he appreciated us as tenants and then — mere days or even hours later — threaten to evict us over some imaginary breach of our lease or Seinfeldian personal slight. Basically, he was nuts, and over the years, we grew to hate dealing with him.

However, my relief over being rid of the bipolar landlord was short-lived.

You see, I live in Los Angeles, which is very tenant-friendly. For example, rent control exists, and owners can’t just boot people out if they feel like it.

However, there are ways to send renters packing — even those who pay their rent on time and are model tenants.

One way is to buy a building and then move an immediate family member in. Now, this isn’t some vile loophole. It makes sense that if you buy a building, you or your kid can live in it.

But legal and ethical isn’t always the same thing, as you may have heard.

In our case, the new owners took possession of our building and promptly deflected any questions about their intentions — good or otherwise. 

We were concerned about this for a very real reason. Our neighborhood, as I’ve written, has morphed from skuzzy to somewhat nice to flat-out hipster, all in a brief blink of time. We moved in seven years ago, when the area was still affordable, and young guys in Civil War-era beards weren’t clamoring for more coffee bars.

I still love living here, and the rapid gentrification hasn’t been so egregious that the neighborhood has lost all its character.

Of course, old-timers might disagree with me. For example, our neighbors have been here for 15 years. And as a lesbian couple, they were at ground zero in prodding the area from seedy enclave to happenin’ LA hotspot. 

Yes, let’s just get this out of the way. There is never a better development for a downtrodden neighborhood than the news that gay couples are moving in.

Our friends are a big reason why this neighborhood is so popular. They worked to turn this area into a beautiful urban garden.

And the new owners have responded by kicking them out.

Our landlords have announced that their daughter, in her twenties, will be moving into our friends’ apartment. 

It’s hard to view this development as anything less than the following scenario:

Spoiled Millennial: Daddy, I want to live in that neighborhood that was divvy, but now it’s all hip and trendy.

Rich Daddy: You’re in luck, sugar plum. I just expanded my vast real estate empire by buying a building there.

Spoiled Millennial: So I can have my own place, rent-free?

Rich Daddy: Of course. All we have to do is kick out the couple who has lived there for 15 years and helped make the place great in the first place. Consider them gone.

Spoiled Millennial: Goody goody. Thanks, Daddy.

Is that a bit much? No, it’s not. Because regardless of how the actual conversation went down and the tone of voice used and the amount of angst that occurred, the result is the same. 

The rich kid wanted our friends’ place, and she got it. And our friends are packing up.

I’ve written before about gentrification, and how it tends to hit black and Latino neighborhoods harder. Indeed, there is a large Hispanic population in our neighborhood, but it has been dropping steadily for a few years now. 

In our case, some very rich white people have decided that our area is now desirable, and they will ultimately take whatever they want.

Damn, maybe we were better off with the crazy landlord. 

Let Us Count the Ways

OK, we all know Donald Trump is about as popular with Latinos as the Zika virus.

After all, we have fun little statistics like this one, which reveal that about 90 percent of Hispanics have an unfavorable impression of Trump.

But we’re missing specifics. We don’t know exactly why Latinos are more likely to vote for a dead mongoose than Trump for president. We don’t know which of the myriad offensive, boneheaded, antagonistic behaviors that Trump has engaged in have pissed off Latinos the most. 

Until now, that is.

You see, the National Institute for Latino Policy (NiLP) recently polled Hispanic leaders nationwide to find out precisely why Trump has made himself as loveable to Latinos as a vigorous round of chemotherapy.

The NiLP says 304 Latino opinion leaders participated in their poll, and in the interest of creating a fuller picture of the Hispanic community, participants were broken down by ancestry (i.e., Mexican, Puerto Rican, Other Latino). The survey’s goal was to stimulate “discussion and debate on critical issues facing the Latino community by providing some insights into the thinking of a broad range of engaged Latino leaders.”

Well, let the discussion and debate begin. And we can start with this intriguing nugget from the poll: Trump does best with participants who identify themselves as Other Latinos. A full 10.4 percent of this group intends to vote for the GOP nominee.

No, that doesn’t seem very impressive, until you see that 0 percent (zero!) of the Mexican American opinion leaders plan to vote for Trump. Yes, it looks like Trump has just a little bit of ground to make up there.

So how did Trump manage to alienate the largest ethnic minority in America? Well, the poll revealed that every group of Latino opinion leaders was most offended at Trump's implication that Mexican immigrants are rapists, which as you recall, was how he kicked off his campaign.

The survey pointed out that “although directed specifically at Mexican immigrants, the group that found [the comment] most offensive were the Puerto Rican opinion leaders. 

Basically, every Latino — regardless of specific ancestry — pretty much dismissed Trump’s candidacy from day one.

Not that there isn’t much more to choose from when cataloguing Trump’s disastrous outreach to Hispanics. 

Mexican American opinion leaders were also incensed at Trump's criticism of a Mexican American judge. But while Puerto Ricans and Other Latinos agreed that this episode was bad, they were more likely to pinpoint Trump’s condescending insistence that “Hispanics love me” as even worse. And of course, Trump’s boasting of the wall that he’s going to build on the Mexican border was not exactly a hit with Hispanic opinion leaders.

Oddly, the poll’s researchers looked at all this data and concluded that there was “some variation in how specific Latino national-origin groups viewed these comments.”

But actually, there was no variation in how Hispanics viewed these comments. They pretty much found all of them — and many more of Trump’s comments — to be reprehensible, vulgar, and idiotic. The only variation was in identifying which one of the man’s reprehensible, vulgar, and idiotic comments was the worst.

It’s sort of a socio-political version of debating whether Bryce Harper is a better player than Clayton Kershaw. We all know Harper and Kershaw are great. But which one is the best?

Author’s note: it’s Kershaw.

In any case, what this survey confirmed is not just that Latino voters dislike Trump. The poll shows that Hispanics just about trip over themselves pinpointing all the many ways in which they despise Trump.

As such, it is quite possible that we are seeing the nadir of the Republican Party with Latinos, and that no major candidate for office will ever again be so openly disrespectful to Hispanics or so hated by an entire American ethnic group.

Really, it is hard to imagine someone in 2020 doing much worse. 

Proving the Theorem

Well, everything is all official and shit, and America has finally gotten the cage match that it has long been clamoring for: a former senator, secretary of state, and first female nominee of a major party versus a short-tempered, short-fingered billionaire who despises everyone who isn’t a white male and who casually utters treasonous asides in public.

Yes, it should be a quite entertaining few months.

But before we go into the pros and cons of the respective candidates, let me refer back to my most recent post, in which I pointed out that the Republican Party has a strong pillar of racism propping it up, and that moderate GOPers are in denial about this. 

I could point out that the RNC featured any number of speakers making veiled bigoted comments. Or I could mention that one Trump delegate proudly tweeted what the GOP later called a “racially insensitive” term (i.e., the N-word) and that this is fresh proof not only of bigotry but denial.

Note #1: The N-word is not “racially insensitive” or anti-PC. It is as flat-out obscenely racist as it gets. And why do I have to point that out to people?

No, instead I would like to refer to this article, in which a well-known conservative intellectual, Avik Roy, says that as bad as Trump is, the GOP suffers from “a much bigger conservative delusion: They cannot admit that their party’s voters are motivated far more by white identity politics than by conservative ideals.”

So the guy agrees with me.

Roy goes on to say that the lament of liberals that many conservatives are racist is “an observation that a lot of us on the right genuinely believed wasn’t true — which is that conservatism has become, and has been for some time, much more about white identity politics than it has been about conservative political philosophy. I think today, even now, a lot of conservatives have not come to terms with that problem.”

No, they have not.

We see it not just in the outright insistence of many conservatives that racism doesn’t exist in the GOP — or indeed, in America. We see it in the strange reaction that Trump has provoked in those conservatives who have refused to support him.

I would like to think that many Republicans are taking a stand against bigotry by refusing to vote for Trump, and indeed many of them are. But a disturbing number of Republicans say they are against Trump not because he's a misogynist or hates Muslims or sees every Latino as a potential rapist.

No, they say it’s because he is not sufficiently conservative. By this, they mean Trump doesn't despise gays as much as they do, and he once said a few nice words about Planned Parenthood, and he has issues with free trade.

This is so backward and bizarre, so perplexing, that it defies belief. It’s sort of like saying you hated Limp Bizket not because their music sucked, but because you didn’t care for red baseball caps.

Note #2: Limp Bizket really sucked.

To ignore Trump’s racism, in favor of focusing on his conservative bone fides, is yet another example of GOP denial. Maybe these Republicans are happier with the vice presidential nominee, Mike Pence, whose views are just as bigoted but more reliably in the GOP mainstream.

Yeah, that’s the direction they should go in. It will all work out great.

Reality Check

This week, there were few images sadder or more pathetic than the sight of moderate Republicans desperately clinging to the hope that they could somehow, against all odds, stop Donald Trump and not have him be the GOP nominee.

Moderate Republicans refused to accept the reality that this is what happens when you associate yourself with bigots for decades on end. Yes, eventually the bigot becomes your flag bearer.

Of course, refusing to accept reality has been a hallmark of the GOP for a while now. In the conservative mind, Iraq did have WMDs, climate change is a hoax, and Obama was born in Kenya.

So Marco Rubio riding to the rescue and winning the nomination at the last second was another naive fantasy, the latest in a long line of truthiness. It was Republicans yet again insisting that reality would bend to their wishes, and the world would be the way they wanted it to be, rather than the way it actually is.

And this brings us to the biggest truthiness of them all, which is the Republican insistence that their party is not attractive to racists.

“No,” they shriek. “That is a liberal lie.”

Well, somebody better tell all those white supremacists and neo-Nazis who are celebrating Trump’s victory that they are mistaken. Clearly, the Democratic Party is the place for them.

Now, let’s be clear about this, because it always bears repeating. The vast majority of Republicans are not racists. In fact, the vast majority of Republicans want nothing to do with racists.

However, to deny that there is a virulent strain of bigotry in the GOP is to once again deny reality. And as Exhibit A, I give you their presidential nominee, a man so prejudiced that members of his own party regularly call him out on it.

And we’re not even getting into the infamous Southern Strategy and the dog-whistles that have helped the GOP build a base of white resentment, all while moderate conservatives held their noses and rationalized it.

Strangely, it is now — when all doubt has been removed about the bigotry in their ranks— that conservatives have indulged in the most far-fetched of all scenarios, which is that racism is not only nonexistent in their party, but in America as a whole.

Cops aren’t killing unarmed black men, and Latinos aren’t the targets of hate crimes, and Muslims are absolutely beloved, and on and on.

Hey, I’m trying to be sympathetic. It’s psychologically disturbing to say that America has a racism problem, and that if you’re conservative, you’re enabling it.

But let’s not kid ourselves. There is a very strong practical and political reason for this denial. Basically, if the Republican Party continues to insist racism is not a serious problem, then they don't have to do anything about it. After all, why would you solve a problem that was already taken care back in 1968?

It is this mindset that has given us the modern Republican Party. I have to wonder if the GOP will do anything about it, or if conservatives will just insist that everything is fine.

Just fine.

Don’t Feed the Animals

As many of you know, I am the father of the most awesomeness, coolest, greatest multiethnic little boy ever (and no, I’m not biased in the least).

And as many of you parents out there also know, being a toddler’s dad means that you spend a lot of time at the zoo. I’m talking yearly membership and don’t make any other plans for Saturday mornings — that kind of thing.

Now, many people have issues with zoos, based on animal rights and other noble ideas that I really don’t want to debate right now. But suffice to say, I’ve encountered a few protesters on occasion when I’ve taken my son to the zoo. They have all been polite and reasonable, by the way.

So I was unsurprised when I approached the zoo gates this past weekend (chasing after my turbocharged kid, of course) and saw a man with a bullhorn.

I figured he was a PETA supporter or was angry about Billy the elephant or something like that. But no, he was yelling about racial discrimination and the evil bigotry that went on at the zoo.

This naturally got my attention.

He was a gangly white guy, clearly on his own, with no protest signs or marching compatriots or petitions to sign. He was just screaming about Mexicans (and by this, I assumed he meant Latinos in general) and their supposedly shoddy treatment at that most nefarious of places: the zoo gift shop.

Yes, he insisted that the zoo gift shop discriminated against Mexicans. To be honest, I'm not sure how they supposedly discriminated, because his ranting was a bit hard to follow. Apparently, the zoo gift shop was refusing to hire Mexicans, or refusing to sell items to them or exploiting their labor or some combination that I didn't quite understand.

In any case, I was mildly impressed that this white guy would take time out of his day to stand up for his Hispanic brethren.

This era of good feelings lasted about twenty seconds.

Because then the guy shouted, “And do you know who the gift shop helps? All those filthy horrible Muslims!”

Yikes…

I’m still trying to figure out this man’s rather precise prejudice. After all, he apparently liked Hispanics. But in accordance with the new pyramid of bigotry prevalent in America, he despised Muslims — completely abhorred them, in fact, because he went on yelling some pretty grotesque things about Islam and Mohammed and sharia law and on and on and on.

Let’s be clear: this is the kind of support we Latinos most definitely don't need.

My son did the wise thing and ignored the bigot at the front gate, and we went in to see the gorillas because they’re his favorite.

When we came out, the nutjob protester was gone. But I couldn’t help but think of him on the drive home.

More specifically, I couldn’t help but think of my favorite Lou Reed lyric: “Well I know one thing that really is true / This here’s a zoo / And the keeper ain’t you!”

Tell ‘em, Lou.