Clarissa's Blog

Does anybody know what the opposite of gentrification is? I ask because I think this is what my town is experiencing. When I first moved here in 2009, there was a number of elegant, high-quality restaurants and stores that have been disappearing ever since.

There was a really chic restaurant run by an award-winning chef right next to my house. It closed down and a nasty buffalo wing joint opened in its place. A formerly elegant place with a great selection of wines and interesting food now serves pizza. A family run mansion restaurant closed down. A popular store selling original ornaments and hand-made jewelry from all over the world closed down, too.

The reasons for this transformation are neither demographic nor economic. We are a college town, and the people who live here are the same as 4 years ago. The demand for pizza parlors and buffalo wing joints is lower than that for elegant places. The only remaining stylish restaurant that serves things like foie-gras desserts and $200 wines is bursting at the seams. You have to wait for up to an hour in order to get seated on any Tuesday or Thursday, let alone on a weekend. So it isn’t the law of supply and demand that squeezes chic places out of our town.

The reason why all those elegant places closed down is not that they stopped being profitable. As the owner of the jewelry store explained, business was better then ever in the year before she closed her doors for good. The owners of these places simply reached a certain age and decided to retire on the money they’d made.

The young generation, however, only knows how to open buffalo wing places and has no idea how to run elegant establishments. The foie-gras place was opened last year by a couple that moved to the area from California. The local young people have no idea how to offer what the young Californians are offering even when there is a huge demand.

The Midwest desperately needs an influx of people with interesting new ideas and modern lifestyles. It isn’t the economy that brings us down. The real problem is cultural.