Comment of the week – common sense from PilsenPoet

A reader with the screen name of PilsenPoet posted the following must-read comment in response to a post on Chantico Lofts.

Actually the wiki entry is mine. It is vandalized every blue moon but truth is hard to fight and folks protect it. The following was a response I made to a small film decrying “gentrification” in Pilsen, I thought you might all get a kick out of it.

An old Czech woman, in her late 80s and born in Pilsen, had the building she rented a flat in for fifty years purchased by a Mexican immigrant family. They subsequently gave her a 30 day notice and threw her out. She was forced to leave most of her family’s lifelong belongings behind. She couldn’t carry them down 3 flights of stairs and was too poor to hire movers, it was 2001.

After being beaten up everyday on his way home from school by Mexican immigrant toughs Andrej’s family sold their house and moved to Berwyn. It was 1969.

After yet another innocent child was killed by stray bullets, the Guillermo family put their house up for sale and moved to Plainfield. It was 1997.

Purchasing their home in 1958 for $30,000 the Suarez family has finally seen their investment return to a current market level that matches what they paid in indexed 1958 dollars.

The ongoing story of Pilsen gentrification has been a simpleton’s view of our neighborhood with a large dose of nostalgia as for what Pilsen was and is mainly decreed by the current majority ethnic population. In 1962 you would have heard the same story, from a different group, decrying change they perceived not to be in their interest.

The reality is that when folks go to sell they now want top price and are taking advantage of the increased values to get their piece of the pie, often in Plainfield.

Many of the speculators flipping properties these past few years are poor Mexican immigrants now rich with a Ranch back home driving around Pilsen streets in their Hummers.

Everybody has the right and freedom to choose where they want to live and societal changes and forces beyond any individual’s control continue to change neighborhoods. No one complains as huge swaths of the city become Latino, East Indian, or Asian and in counter to that no one can complain when other swaths become gentrified which is just code for white despite what some may say. What is the opposite of gentrification? Disinvestment? Why do folks in Pilsen think that they should be allowed to discriminate against others with more money or a different ethnic background? Does anyone really think that they have a right to decide where people are allowed or choose to live?

Underlying this whole controversy is a reverse of what was perceived as a racist ethnic mindset in the 1960s. When the Bohemians decried change they were labeled racist, ditto for the Lithuanians, when the Mexican immigrants do the same thing it is construed by many as fighting the good fight.

It isn’t.

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