Ghettorification:  The restoration and revitalization of areas done with Hispanic coloring of homes, sounds of hip-hop, bells of push ice-cream carts and two-for-one businesses (e.g. hair-cut and car wash).  Often results in the displacement of middle class due to “deterioration” of the neighborhood.

            Ghettorification follows gentrification.  Living simple barrio residents watch their neighborhood transform.  Who is making the decisions?  Did we vote them into office?  Investors, developers and money paint the colorful area white, “proudly” give the neighborhood a new village name and corporate businesses take over every corner.  The residents stand in disbelief, exhausted by the lack of resources.  Ghettoees are directly and indirectly forced to relocate, to search for affordable housing.  For prices will go beyond their reach in their own neighborhood.

            Gentrification is the marriage of landowners, bankers and developers disinvesting, cleaning up and increasing residential costs.  It has taken place in many different spaces in time and geography.  Author Neil Smith, in “the New Urban Frontier”, discusses the history of gentrification.  Records document in 1685, a family was removed from their residences in Nantes ordered by Henry IV.  Moving through history, in the 1930’s and 1940’s, Georgetown’s neighborhood in Washington D.C. was “recycled”.  And to the present, in South Phoenix, barrios with richness of tasty Ranch Market and chatty barbershops are getting a corporate look.  For now there is color everywhere, buildings, signs, people and personalities.  But times are changing, walled in closures, restrictive zoning and money shadows the brightness of the barrio.

            With this process the working-class is pushed out, but where?  This is the stage at which South Phoenix currently sits.  Perhaps they will find housing in Central Phoenix or to the far edge of the West near Goodyear.  Ghettorification could be coming to your neighborhood.  Embrace it, the rap music is poetry and the empanadas are mouth-watering.

Kill two birds with one stone, get a hair cut while your car gets washed