From Colonialism to Gentrification: A Deadly Pandemic
by Liat Guvenc
Gentrification
Over the last year, there has been an alarming 32 percent increase in the average asking price for homes in Kingston. The pandemic pushed people who wanted to escape from NYC to move to Kingston for its outdoor activities and spacious properties, drastically altering the housing market in Kingston and exacerbating gentrification.
Kingston’s housing crisis has many factors. One being a market boom coupled with housing scarcity during the pandemic. On July 1, 2020, the median home sale was $318,000, jumping to $345,250 by mid-August, as reported by the River. Another factor was Airbnb, which generated $24.4 million in revenue in Ulster County bookings. Kwame Holmes, a professor at Bard who studies gentrification in Midtown Kingston and Washington, D.C. and teaches the class, Urban Abandonment: A Housing Justice Lab, concluded with his class that out of the 481 properties they studied, 275 were owned by non-local owners. These owners spanned from Saugerties, Westchester County and New York city to California, Texas and Florida. The class realized that, “Kingston is a site of profit extraction, and very little of that capital directly benefits local residents.”
To address the lack of affordability in Kingston, Ulster county unveiled the Housing Action Plan, which showed that median rent in Ulster county increased 16 percent since 2010 while household incomes have stagnated or declined for most. For buyers in Kingston, the median household income in 2018 was $48,186 but the income required to purchase a median priced home was $93,000, meaning that the majority of residents in Kingston are priced out of purchasing a home. Additionally, 30 percent of renters are rent burdened, which means that 30 percent of more of someone’s income is spent on rent.
The history of unhoming people in Kingston goes back further than the economic fallout of IBM in the 1990s, which at its height employed more than 46,000 people in Dutchess, Westchester and Ulster counties, 7,000 of which were employed at its manufacturing and development center in the town of Ulster. In the 1960s, the city of Kingston tore down the Rondout area, or the downtown area, through urban renewal with $35 million from the federal government. Lost Rondout: A Story of Urban Renewal reports on how nearly 500 buildings and 1,000 people were displaced from the Rondout. Many of the people living in the Rondout were black and brown people, who struggled to find housing afterwards. The film documents how redlining, or standards set by the federal government that denied people access to loans, displaced people from Kingston. The urban renewal of Rondout resulted in the destruction of an entire neighborhood and the uprooting of people’s lives.
Urban renewal and white flight, which was when mostly-white suburbs developed, paved the way for gentrification, The Urban Displacement Project, a University of Berkeley California lead study on displacement and gentrification in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Portland, concluded. Although the Rondout remained barren for dozens of years after the bulk of housing there was torn down, the comparably lower prices (to NYC) allowed gentrifiers, like architect Scott Dutton, to move their businesses to the Rondout in the 1990s.
But the displacement of black and brown people is a further reaching issue, dating back to the 1600s. The gentrification of Midtown Kingston is the continuation of colonialism, which displaced both culture and people. According to Joanathan Wharton, an associate professor of political science and urban affairs at Southern Connecticut State University, there’s a direct line between developers, realtors, bankers, investors to elite colonizers and the young urban professionals “yuppies” to colonizers. Both require an economically advantaged few to systematically displace groups for economic and political power. An attachment to landownership and displacing long-time residents is the underbelly of exploitation and colonization. Wharton wrote, “Gentrification is in essence the new paradigm of colonizing the urban core in the twenty-first century.”
A History of Exploitation
Ever since the first colonizer came to shore through the Kingston waterfront, the city of Kingston has displaced people since the end of the 1600s. Kingston was a fort or stockade for Dutch families until the beginning of the 1700s. Owned in Life, Owned in Death: The Pine Street African and African-American Burial Ground in Kingston, New York by Joe Diamond reports on how the original fort stretched eight blocks. Since the fort was on a hill, this was a strategic location to protect the colonizers against flooding from the Esopus Creek and Indigenous people fighting for their land back. By the late 1700s, the fort and population expanded from several Dutch families into a city of 20,000, 20 percent of the population being enslaved Black Indigenous People of Color.
Since 1697, people of African descent were barred from being buried at churches in New York. So, their bodies were buried on the property where they worked or in mass graves. In Kingston, people of African descent were buried on Pine Street, in a plot on the Armbowery, or common grounds, which were used for agriculture and gardening. The plot itself was chosen because it could not be used by the enslavers. Historians are unsure of exactly when the plot stopped being used as a resting place but by 1880, the common grounds had been parceled out to private owners and the cemetery had been covered up by a lumberyard.
After the cemetery on Pine Street was erased from the map, the Mt. Zion Cemetery was established, also in Midtown, as a place for people of African descent to be buried.
In 1990, when archaeologist Joe Diamond was researching archaeological sites in Kingston, he came across a 1870 map marking the spot of a cemetery in Midtown. When Diamond arrived at the site, 157 Pine St, it was a house. It wasn’t until two different homeowners on that block turned in bones found in the foundation of their homes that the site was considered legitimate. Diamond and other archaeologists estimated that the cemetery, which overlaps with other family homes on Pine Street is 70 feet wide and almost 400 feet long, stretching from Pine to Fair Street.
Rededicating the Land
At first, Diamond’s research was not sufficient enough to prove the existence of the cemetery to the Kingston Common Council because there was a lack of gravemarkers at the cemetery.
The Mt. Zion Cemetery was rededicated on June 5, 2011, by the Kingston Land Trust because of gravemarkers and the presence of black veterans buried there. At the ceremony, reverend Kenneth Walsh and pastor Rob Sweeney read their co-authored apology from the church for their part in perpetuating segregation and racism based on the Belhar Confession, which confronts the sins of racism.
It wasn’t until the Kingston Land Trust and Harambee combined efforts in convincing the mayor and the Kingston Common Council to take the Pine Street cemetery off the market until they could fundraise so the KLT could buy 157 Pine St and the rear property outright in 2019 for $127,500, which saved it from becoming a parking lot.
As a land trust, the KLT has the ability to acquire conservation easements. The easement for the cemetery was written with Harambee and gives legal protection to the cemetery so that it will never be forgotten or disrespected. On the conservation easement the KLT wrote, “The easement will forever protect the site’s specific cultural, social, historic and environmental conservation values as a place of gathering, ritual, ceremony and archeological significance.”
On Feb. 5, 2021, the Kingston Land Trust transferred the cemetery’s conservation easement to Harambee, an organization made up predominantly of people of African descent, during the transfer of easement ceremony at Pine Street. Transferring the easement from the KLT to Harambee allowed Harambee to grant the easement to any other land trust as it sees fit.
Systematic Erasure
Systematic erasure of people of African descent is what connects the displaced burials and displaced people in Midtown. The burial grounds were covered up in Midtown since the 1880s and the cemetery itself is only present on two maps of Kingston. Urban renewal in the 1960s caused people living in the Rondout to move to Midtown and are now people priced out by Brooklynites.
Displacement goes deeper than just being priced out of your own neighborhood according to an article by Adam Elliot-Cooper, Loretta Lees and Phil Hubbard, who wrote about the mental and physical relationship to being unhomed. Displacement, they wrote, “involves forms of social, economic and cultural transition which alienate established populations.”
Remembering What Remains
There is still archaeological work to be done on the site and many questions are still unanswered. This summer, archaeologists are working with Harambee to do facial reconstruction and a DNA analysis of the remains to link the community to those buried at the Pine Street cemetery. Diamond said that physical stress shows up on the skeleton after death through muscle growths from overstraining, broken bones, fractures, inflammation in muscle attachments and suspects that the remains at Pine Street may share similar characteristics.
The archaeological work will also be focusing on researching burial rituals. The team of SUNY New Paltz archaeologists and students are looking to find anything buried with the people at Pine St like necklaces, medicine bottles, beads and metallic objects.
