I thought it would be at least a month before I got yelled at about gentrification!

As Rachel Reinke pulled into street parking outside her new home on Spring Street, a middle-aged black man on a bicycle took a loop back into her driveway (I thought to avoid Rachel's opening of the car door.*  I said out loud, "What is that fool doing in our driveway?" only half-kidding...but half-not kidding, huh.  As we walked onto the porch, he started yelling (we didn't know at whom).  Rachel's friend assumed it was her bad parallel parking job (she had pulled up behind us), but once inside and on the upstairs porch, I soon realized he was complaining about the trash cans that belonged to the address and had been left on the sidewalk (thus, impeding his cycling). 

About the trash cans:

1)  In college of charleston fashion, no one is quite sure where they are exactly or when they are to be brought out 

2)  The tenant below most likely brought them out, but didn't bring them back in (maybe tacitly trying to establish some symbiotic-waste-removal relationship OR he didn't even realize that a new fantastic foursome of 20-something roommates had moved in over the past couple of weeks.

3)  At my own two former addresses I had no trash can responsibilities (on radcliffe street a helpful street person did it for a tip that not i, but a friend living below me paid, and on rutledge the coffee house below me did it all...well not the house itself) 

Back to the man in the story:

He was already in conversation with another housemember's significant other, so I took that as clearance for me to participate.  Once I/we realized what he was fussing about, we both apologized, said we did not do it, but said we would move them.  In the end, it was just me--but I'm a girl scout and like it that way.  

He didn't really care that it wasn't was.  

The conversation turned sour after a few exchanges.

"I was born here, and I've lived here my whole life.  This used to be all black people living here..."  (or something to that effect)

The first thing out of my mouth was something like, "I know.  I get gentrification.  But we're all victims of the capitalist system in some way."  (WHAT?!)  

Then he started talking about the trash cans, and I called him out on a (bull shit) city ordinance that you can't ride a bike on the sidewalk.  And (as Rachel Reinke drew to my attention), he was also biking against traffic.

He told my porch mate that I was a smart girl, and smart women always keep the men straight.  Then he mumbled a little more as he biked off and I was left a little dazed (in traditional white, upper-middle class, college-aged female -- black, lower class, middle-aged interaction fashion**).

I really can't walk down the street without thinking "oh god, I'm the gentrifier!" as I pass the new skate shop and floral shops at the corners of spring and st philip (thereabouts).  But really, I'm just a pawn of the gentrifying force...and of the 'real' bad guys--real estate developers.  

Thanks to my friend Tom, I know a little something about the Downtown Plan.  Part of this plan (with the goal of 'cleaning up' the neighborhood, e.g. no trash, no overgrown plants, no broken windows, no drugs, no loitering, and no visible black people) is to use college of students as 'chess pieces' in order to pressure tradition (working class black) residents from the neighborhoods.  

And cue Morris Street constructions.  Cue every other house (in chessboard fashion) now belonging to a white developer (who then in turn hires a minority workforce for low wages and poor conditions to clean it up for some rich white person to live in).  

College students are perfect because of our transient status and low standards of living.  Oh, and our parents' money.  

And having all of us college students do this really dumb thing where we live in a new apartment every year allows the real estate peeps to up the rent every year on us.  

Not in nearly as [insert intelligent, politically correct word here meaning something close to tragically misused] as our black working class neighbors, we're still cogs in the wheel.

Fuck the wheel.

*I have horrible width and depth perception.

**Well, really only when these interactions take place from a second-story porch to a sidewalk/street in "midtown" (when did this start to be called that?), Charleston.