The Great Equalizer

Aug 9

Climbing Gym Locations Over Redlined Districts from the 1940s

The history of a place creates future results for the space; this means if we want to understand the current reality of the indoor climbing industry, we must look at the history of where climbing gyms are built, and why. Climbing gyms around the country exist on the ashes of redlined neighborhoods, occupying familiar bands of warehouses, crumbling brick, and food deserts. They seek gentrifying areas, and they target the key demographic of those areas—that is, the young, white, and well-educated residential class. This is the current gold standard for cities because then you can get a Trader Joe’s. It’s no secret that locations where young white people have disposable income, real estate is cheap, and communities of color can be pushed aside, will usually be where a climbing gym opens its doors. What’s important to note here, is this is not by accident, but by design.

Real estate is both a resource and a weapon. It’s the principal driver of wealth and it’s a refined system designed to keep a wealthy minority in power. It’s the ur-resource undergirding capital—washing it, magnifying, and multiplying it. The weaponization of real estate has been a central tenet of structural racism in America; it is an overwhelmingly white (74%) industry and carries enormous power. “...(racial) steering is accomplished by an area estate agent or broker when a potential customer is either encouraged or discouraged from purchasing housing in a particular area or community because of the agent's actions” (Bruce 1977). With such a white stranglehold on real estate, it’s no wonder buyers of color experience discrimination and in some places, black buyers experience unequal treatment 49% of the time. The Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1964, 1968 all centered their protections around property and housing—precisely because they were such profoundly powerful tools of inequality and inequity.

Gentrification, then, is the weaponization of real estate fully manifest. It is predicated, principally, on taking advantage; it follows the ancient watermarks of racist policy, lapping up in predictable waves, etching a unique pattern on the surface of a city. Redlining—defining “hazardous” and “declining” neighborhoods—was intended to keep the “threat of infiltration of foreign-born, Negro, or lower grade population” from encroaching onto white spaces. It began as a gentrifying practice during the Great Depression and has established the topography for modern American cities 70 years later. Your local warehouse of plastic and plywood most likely sits behind an invisible line from a generation ago.

As devastating as the impact of redlining has been on property ownership by people of color, it has created more than difficulty in buying a home and exponential differences in inherited wealth by race. Redlining also creates the economic conditions necessary for urban “revival” programs where neighborhoods isolated and devastated by redlining, are re-acquired cheaply by white landowners and businesses. Redlining is also a major factor in disparate health outcomes in American cities.

In Louisville, KY, 75% of the black population lives on 5% of the land, in part a feature of the intentional destruction of the Clarksdale housing project in 2005 to create the “NuLu” neighborhood, which displaced and relocated more than 700 predominantly black residents. In the void created by Clarksdale’s destruction, a gold rush ensued, with cheap real estate being gobbled up and sparking protest from Black Lives Matter. Perhaps there is no better summary of NuLu’s current disposition than the “Social Justice Rating System” created by locals to critique businesses’ racial equity. The average grade is a D.

NuLu is such an easy case study for gentrification that it’s constantly studied. Who created NuLu? “...developer Gill Holland (who is married to Augusta Brown of the Brown-Forman bourbon fortune).” As of 2020, 90% of business owners in NuLu are white.

Louisville’s only modern climbing facility was built exactly a decade after Clarksdale came down and shares the name of the reclaimed space that made it possible. The old redlined zones don’t just displace residents & chop up the city; they create zones of artificially depressed real estate prices. “On average, a home located in an area that was given a “hazardous” rating back in the 1930s is only worth 85% of the median value of a home in the surrounding, non-redlined neighborhoods.”

So who benefits from redlining? White people, and white-owned businesses. Redlining and gentrification are a one-two punch, a kind of reverse blockbusting that does two important things. First, it divides and displaces communities with interstates, new zoning, and demolished housing; then, once the area is sufficiently depressed that nothing and no one can safely live or make money, gentrification kicks in. The depressed areas are “discovered” and “refurbished.”

Who is doing the ‘discovery’—paying leases, rents, and mortgages on valuable properties? White business owners, who pick up downtown real estate for pennies on the dollar, spend a few years collaborating with other white business owners and the white government (Louisville employed 3,467 workers of which 840 (25%) were Black and 2,514 (73%) were white) to make business “affordable”. Tax rates are slashed, concessions are made, and businesses flock to the area. What was once unprofitable, historically black, and an overwhelmingly low-income residential bloc of the city is now a profitable white business hub.

This divide-and-conquer tactic is often promoted as a way of “revitalizing” a neighborhood, but it also often carries unintended consequences. Louisville’s first step in revitalizing a neighborhood is removing the “problem” elements which, to white businesses, means removing low-income black residents. The police are an essential tool to nudge or drag a neighborhood, or an entire zone of a city, into its desired condition. In Louisville, this means flooding low-income “revitalization” zones with police, where the intersections of majority-white police forces and communities of color are invariably fatal.

Last year the family of Breonna Taylor filed a lawsuit alleging that Taylor’s home was targeted because of gentrification. Studies show that “policing will intensify in response to two distinct aspects of gentrification: demographic changes and real estate market changes. Demographic change occurs when middle–class and white people move into a previously working-class, predominantly non–white neighborhood.”

Louisville, fresh from the success of NuLu, began looking to its remaining unreclaimed and redlined properties to repeat the cycle. This time, it was Vision Russel - which is responsible for the intensified destruction of homes to devalue property, which the city bought for pennies on the dollar. Why pay $17,160 for a home when you can make the neighborhood an unlivable wasteland and buy it for $1? All it takes is demolishing another housing project and moving the displaced residents - many of whom were moved from Clarksdale already.

Indoor climbing is a beneficiary and co-creator of gentrified spaces. It requires the low overhead of an underdeveloped neighborhood to maximize profit but attracts almost exclusively nonresidents of that neighborhood until the balance shifts and the old residents are pushed out so that 18-34 consumers can have a 5-minute walk to coffee, climbing, and beer. This, coupled with the poverty wages that are nearly universal in climbing, create a powerful generator of capital. Low rents, grandfathered in from a time when the neighborhood was unlivable, low wages, exploiting young and “psyched” employees excited for a pro deal and free membership make the gamble of capital much more attractive.

Look at your own climbing spaces and ask yourself why they are there. Who climbs there? Do they live in the neighborhood? Is it a community or is it an awkward white mushroom, slowly & inexorably consuming the flesh of the neighborhood? Is your redpoint brought to you by a red line?

-Rob

Scholarship

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