Odes to Adair Park · Track 17 · middle

The Gentrification Wave: 2015 Onward

The 2015-onward wave — the renovated bungalows selling for $500K, the new white residents arriving with their dogs, the Welch Street tensions, the displacement of longtime renters. UPBEAT-LEANING but HONEST — focus on the porch culture trying to stay porch culture, the new neighbors learning to belong. Repton with weary honesty.

Lyrics

2015.
The year the hammers came back to Pearce Street.
Seven in the morning.
Already warm.

The FOR SALE signs were gone in a week.
Replaced by SOLD, in that confident red.
Then the dumpsters arrived.
And the scrape of old plaster hitting the bed of a truck.
New windows went in, the kind without mullions.
New people came out, with dogs that have names like people.
Carrying canvas tote bags from the brewery.
They nod.
They wave from the sidewalk.

And we watch from the porch swing.
The chain makes the same sound it made in 1993.
This is the test. Not the credit score, not the closing price.
The test is the porch.
Do you know how to sit?
Do you know how to listen to the evening come down on Lillian Avenue?
Do you know the difference between a neighbor and just... a deed holder?
We watch. We wait.

A 1998 Camry, paint faded by the sun, sits next to a silent electric car.
The man in the Camry still works the second shift at the airport.
The men who painted the new house, they spoke Spanish to each other.
Packed up their ladders at five, and were gone.
Their names aren't on the new mailbox.
Heard the new owner saved the avocado-green stove from 1978.
Said it was 'vintage'.
Funny what survives. And what doesn't.

And we watch from the porch swing.
The chain makes the same sound it made in 1993.
This is the test. Not the credit score, not the closing price.
The test is the porch.
Do you know how to sit?
Do you know how to listen to the evening come down on Lillian Avenue?
Do you know the difference between a neighbor and just... a deed holder?
We watch. We wait.

The apartments on Welch Street are quieter now.
We don't talk about the families who left.
Because no one wrote down their names.
They just became a number.
Forty-seven percent.
Down to twenty-nine.
A whisper in a report from the Atlanta Regional Commission.
But a silence on the block.
A missing voice in the choir.

The new Labrador sniffs the edge of my lawn.
Right on the property line.
The owner gives a small, tired wave.
I nod back.
The swing moves.
The sun goes down.
The test continues.