Gentrification on My Mind

A story of a house.

“But at the end of the day, that’s what gentrification is: a void in a neighborhood, in a city, in a culture.” - P.E. Moskowitz, How to Kill A City

You can still find the house on Google Maps, if you mind to look; a long rectangle in the “vernacular” style of old St. John’s architecture. The building is pale yellow in color and has a baby-blue door. Outside sit two bags, garbage and recycling. Most striking, however: The tree out front, which towers over everything, the house, the power lines, the utility poles opposite. You can click and drag the view around, taking in the tree as if you were there, looking up at the canopy of leaves, as if you had stopped, for a moment, in their shade.

Dig a little deeper online, and you find other fragments. A classified ad in the Evening Telegram from September 28, 1911, about a house to let. Another, from January 21, 1921, in which a Mrs. W. B. Fitzgerald seeks a “General Servant”. There’s a black and white photo of the house in the book Streetscapes ‘83, Volume 4; a car sits out front and there’s a short wooden fence around the yard. The tree is there, of course – in fact, it takes up two-thirds of the picture, obscuring the front of the house altogether. 

Other references, more recent, include a real estate listing, which describes the house as follows: “Charming character home with high main floor ceilings.” The lot, by the numbers: 7,250 square feet, with three bedrooms and one bath. List price, $294,900.

You can find two mentions of the address in city council records: a development permit to consolidate it with an adjacent lot, approved in September 2022; and a demolition permit for a “Single Detached Dwelling,” issued in November. 

Here’s what you won’t find online: The yellow house with the tree went up for sale (hence the listing), and a young couple bid on it, hoping to make it their home. The next-door neighbors bid higher, paid cash, and tore the house down to make space for an extension on their building (hence the permits). They cut down the tree, as well.

You can find pictures of the process on social media, if you know where to look. You can see a tractor pulling the old house to pieces, see it sitting atop the rubble. You can see the tree, limbed and bucked, the stump protruding from the yard like a broken bone. 

I share this story with you because, I’ll be honest, it enrages me. A so-called “heritage” house demolished, a magnificent tree and a young couple’s hopes hewn at the root. For no other reason than that wealthy people, already comfortable, wanted more space. 

But I share it also because it feels like a parable for our times, one that consolidates many of our current crises. People in St. John’s have been staying in tents all winter for lack of a place to live and due to deplorable conditions at for-profit shelters. Over two-dozen bodies rest in freezer containers outside a hospital because surviving family members can’t afford to bury them. There were nearly five drug-related deaths per month in Newfoundland and Labrador in 2023, a record amount. The list goes on.

This isn’t about assigning blame; it’s about the big picture. As Moskowitz argues in How to Kill A City, gentrification is not the result of individual acts, but rather “a political system focused more on the creation and expansion of business opportunity than on the well-being of its citizens.” That system they describe as, in a word, neoliberalism.

And there the crises, and that house and tree, connect.