Gregory Heller

In the 70 year effort to “redevelop� the LES, the city, state, and federal governments have enacted land disposition policies that have, either wittingly or otherwise, served the real estate industry and disempowered area residents. In New York City, most land use decisions have benefited real estate developers more than they have benefited the current residents of the neighborhood. Such decisions have resulted in the displacement of residents and the disruption of voluntary associations, as discussed later. These policies include the use of urban renewal powers, selective enforcement of building code, tax foreclosure, provision of city services, and demolition and sale of city owned (in rem) properties.
Yet, despite these ongoing efforts to change the LES, the residents most adversely affected have resisted. Although she wrote about the slum clearance of the 1930s, Suzanne Wasserman’s words resonate for each subsequent wave of gentrification:

Both renewed tenant activism and economic reversals contributed to the failure to alter the LES. In addition, and not to be underestimated, was the deep commitment and attachment Lower East Siders had to their neighborhood. While it could not prevent all development, it did strengthen resistance against displacement. Developers and planners had underestimated how attached residents were to their community. They had viewed the resident population as transient and passive, ignoring the power of tradition and the attachment to place felt by East Siders. This attachment to place energized their fight for better conditions and stimulated opposition to gentrification (1994, p. 109).

The population of East European ethnic holdovers and Puerto Rican newcomers exhibited a similar “attachment to place� during the 1960s as did their predecessors. During the 1970s, residents of the Alphabet City area held their ground and created community gardens that exhibited their attachment to the neighborhood. Again in the 1980s, when the newcomers included artists and young anarchist types, they too showed a strong attachment to the neighborhood they had appropriated. This newest group expressed their resistance with the slogans: “Mug-a-yuppie,� “Yuppie: GO HOME!,� and “Gentrification = Class War,� which were popular toward the end of that decade (F. Morales, personal communication, Dec 3, 1998). During each period, politicians, developers, and planners did not redevelop the district as successfully as they had hoped because,“[they] both ignored and trod on Lower East Sider’s attachments to their community.� (Wasserman, p. 111).
Cloward and Piven offer a self-preservationist explanation of the local resistance to renewal in the late 1960s. Just as Wasserman’s explanation fit later generations, their’s fits earlier ones:

Confronted with the stress of upheaval, the loss of neighborhood and the prospect of greatly increased rentals these people were the hardest hit by the costs of renewal but were not to receive the benefits provided by the new development. They were people already together in neighborhoods, united by a common deprivation or threat of deprivation to the neighborhood, and in no significant way appeased by any benefits. The new developments included chiefly high-rental housing; slum clearance was no boon to slum dwellers for whom it meant mainly dislocation (1972, p. 19-20).