What’s in a name? How neighborhood rebrands can grease the wheels of gentrification
What’s in a name? How neighborhood rebrands can grease the wheels of gentrification
You’ve heard of SoHo, the neighborhood in Lower Manhattan “south of Houston Street,” right? How about LoDo, or “lower downtown” in Denver? SoBro in Nashville? SoWa in Boston? The list goes on and on. But as senior real estate reporter James Rodriguez recently wrote in Business Insider, these two-syllable neighborhood names aren’t just harmless rebrands — they can be a force for gentrification. The following is an edited transcript of his conversation with Marketplace’s Amy Scott.
Amy Scott: You open your piece with a story about your own experience of moving to Denver back in 2018. You asked a friend for some advice on neighborhoods to consider, and you got like a code in response. Tell me what happened there.
James Rodriguez: Yeah, exactly. It was like she was speaking another language. She was rattling off these names, like RiNo, SoBo, LoDo, LoHi. And those names aren’t anywhere on the city’s official maps, but soon I was parroting all of them.
Scott: Where do these names come from? I’ve always sort of assumed it was, you know, inspired by SoHo in New York and other neighborhoods like that.
Rodriguez: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And originally, I kind of wrote them off as a quirk of Denver, but then I started covering real estate on a nationwide basis, and found them all over the place. Charlotte has MoRa and LoSo, Nashville has a SoBro. Boston has a SoWa. Louisville, Kentucky also has a SoBro. It’s this effort, mostly on the part of developers, real estate agents, and business associations, to brand a neighborhood in a way that they think will draw new tenants and patrons to the area’s restaurants. It’s kind of almost like wiping the slate clean a little bit on existing neighborhoods and so, my story is all about some of the negative consequences of doing that.
Scott: Yeah, give an example of that, where, as you said, “wiping the slate clean” is sort of erasure.
Rodriguez: Well, I think going back to Denver, one of the examples is RiNo or the River North Arts District, which is this relatively recent district overlay on part of an existing neighborhood, the Five Points neighborhood, which is this historically black neighborhood in Denver. And now you have all of these developers and businesses that are touting their location in RiNo. Of course, there are exceptions there, and I don’t think it’s all malicious. In fact, in some ways, I think it’s kind of, you know, you arrive to a new place, and everyone’s calling it RiNo, so you do as well. But it turns out to be this lucrative, and, you know, a little cynical play of greasing the wheels of gentrification. And I think we’re seeing that kind of around the country in these up-and-coming cities where you have these rebrands, these two-syllable monikers,
Scott: You talked about how developers, real estate agents often do this to try to attract newcomers, maybe give it a hip sort of vibe. Does it work? I mean, do these rebrands work to bring more people, or do they sometimes backfire? Because it’s kind of cheesy.
Rodriguez: You know, I mentioned the story, it is hard to argue with the results in my hometown of Austin, Texas, which has the south Congress area, which used to be kind of this seedy area a few decades ago, and now it has an Hermes store and the Soho House, and it’s this thriving retail district, and it’s known as SoCo. But we also do see this backfire. You know, one prominent example is in New York, these real estate agents were trying to rebrand part of Harlem as Soha, South Harlem, and that really saw some fierce pushback from basically anybody who looked at that and saw, okay, this is clearly just trying to gentrify a neighborhood by erasing the existing brand and trying to put a new one in place.
Scott: Yeah, and that one certainly didn’t stick, yep.
Rodriguez: Yep, thankfully.
Scott: So, how do we move forward from here? I mean, do you think this, the strand has an eventual end when people are kind of over it?
Rodriguez: You know, I do think it gets to the point where it is, you know, made fun of so much that maybe people abandon it. On the other hand, I do think we saw so much interstate migration during the pandemic as all these remote workers were suddenly untethered from their desks and I think neighborhoods and their names should evolve with their populations. But I think what I’m trying to point out here in this story is that when they’re kind of just these bald-face moves that just wipe the slate clean on existing areas, I think that’s where we run into issues. It’s part of this whole messy process of naming and defining neighborhoods.
Stories You Might Like
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
