Zoning and Scavenging

Just before dawn on a Thursday in March 2012, the same year that plans to rezone north Bed-Stuy were approved over community objections,Footnote ¹⁰ Sal and his crew of scavengers headed out to locate a new demolition site in the rapidly-transforming landscape. As an ex-New York City fireman and gut-demolition worker, Sal was well-versed in the patterns of destruction and construction that rezoning projects would bring. Growing up black and working-class in Bed-Stuy in the 1970s and 1980s during the fire epidemic ravaging the South Bronx, Bed-Stuy, and Brownsville, Sal was aware of how state disinvestment in black spaces would result in neighborhood transformation. In fact, Sal could predict when a building was going to come down. He'd walk down a street with private street cleaners, or see a local pharmacy close its doors, and shake his head, “There she goes.” Capitalizing on knowledge borne out of years of living and working under state-sanctioned racism, he created a business scavenging disinvested and discarded spaces. He “saw how things were being turned into junk but [he] knew it was gold.” “Hell,” he'd say, “I was one of the guys gutting these buildings and I would pull these fixtures out and think, ‘Look at this molding, I'm holding black history!’” Not unlike the impulse to become a fireman in a dispossessing time, he began salvaging what was left of the ghetto. After retiring as a firefighter in 1995 and as a demolition-man a few years after that, he opened a shop in 1999. A “junk” shop.

As Sal, his scavengers, and I walked along Fulton Street, Bed-Stuy's central commercial corridor, pushing a cart to transport the fruits of our scavenging, Sal pointed out the new silver garbage cans that had sprouted since the rezoning. Embossed around the lip in blue: “Bed-Stuy Clean and Proud.” The trash cans iconified the newly-minted public-private partnership between Community Board 3 and the Business Improvement District (BID), Bed-Stuy Gateway. In response to the recently-released NYC scorecardsFootnote ¹¹ of Bed-Stuy's streets, for which the neighborhood gained the rap of “Pigsty Bed-Stuy,” The Bed-Stuy Gateway sanitation and surveillance team re-routed litter along Fulton to make Bed-Stuy “desirable.” The data collected in the scorecard program, which measures and reports street and sidewalk cleanliness, is often used by BIDs and other urban renewal programs as “evidence” to justify neighborhood development and betterment. As the Bed-Stuy Gateway website remarked of its private waste-management crew, “Your safety is our number one priority.” Making the elision between cleanliness and safety that the surveillance of clean-up commands, the BID assures residents of its capability to surveil many kinds of waste: “Our [sanitation] team uses technology to manage the Fulton-Nostrand commercial corridor […] in partnership with the NYPD in order to address quality of life issues and deter crimes.” But the collapsing power constitutive of trash as a category pulls waste as metaphor (social disorder, deviance, criminality) and waste as material objects (litter and debris) in proximity, if not a metonymic relationship, with one another. While this privately-owned trash can spoke to a future Bed-Stuy that would be clean and safe, it could not account for the uptick in objects on the street, which were accumulating rapidly with the demolition and construction of new apartments spurred by gentrification, nor could it protect the people long-since evicted, whose discarded lives we were about to scavenge.

On this spring morning, the two-story pre-war building we were standing in front of was intact. A giant tarp partially covered a sunken-in wall in the structure's side caused by damage to the adjacent building. Empty for nearly six months, a suspicious fire had collapsed that building's roof in the middle of the night. In the manner of all cascading changes, damage to the neighboring structure leaked through to damage this one: A burst pipe soaked through the insulated wall between buildings, causing the weight imbalance now pulling the building akimbo. Sal suspected that the building had been intentionally damaged because the property owner refused to sell. Repudiating the landlord's stubbornness, Sal cautions:

“Literally,” I said. “Literally,” he echoed. Sal was positive that the fire was set on the developers’ behalf because the owner was holding up the project. “You might be too young to remember but the Bronx was on fire in the seventies.” Charting the violent flow of spatial transformation, he continued, “Now it's Bed-Stuy. Soon it'll be Brownsville.”

Sal walked around the scaffolding, making sure the building was stable enough for us all to go in. During a prior trip, Sal had determined that the building was safe and that it had materials worth scavenging. Sometimes you can find intact personal effects, but normally visiting these sites is about scavenging structural elements like doors, molding, and iron beams. Sal knew how to make friends with everyone, which made it easy for him to bring rented trucks around to transport larger objects—pieces of the building, furniture—back to his shop. Given that this building was still standing, there was a good chance that there were salvageable personal effects, according to Sal. On this day, the goal was seeing what small treasures lay in the rubble of eviction.

Giving us the okay, Sal popped open the old lock on the front door and carefully navigated the temporary structure supporting the second floor. In the dark, we crawled up the stairs on our stomachs and, standing now, we lined up behind Sal in front of the second-floor door. He took out a flashlight and a pair of keys.Footnote ¹² The person who had lived here had been forced out so quickly that there was no time or point in trying to “sell” her furniture. She left her keys with a friend, a fellow churchgoer, instructing her to let people know that if they could manage to carry anything out, they should take it. Sal waited a few days: “In situations like these, we at least wait until it smells a little funky in there and it's too difficult for other people to get things out.”

We opened the door into the pitch darkness of four o'clock on a spring morning, just before dawn. The power had been shut off and the tarp over the building covered the windows. We all turned on our flashlights. There were papers scattered on the floor and dust on every surface. My skin felt damp as the smell of wet plaster, metal, and wood wafted over me, only to be overtaken by the sweet twinge of putrefying organic waste that settled in after we closed the door. There were a few garbage bags stuffed with clothes in the corner of the two-room apartment, “maybe someone is coming back for those, let's leave them.” I obeyed. Sal's scavengers took one room and I followed behind Sal, observing how he moved through this dark and empty—yet filled of life—space. First, he scanned the two-room apartment as if reading the structure and discards to determine where to start. Then, he headed towards the tiny kitchen and opened the cupboards. “Ah, yup, that's what I thought,” as if he knew the dishes were going to be there. “Come on, help me look at these,” he instructed. “How did you know there were gunna be dishes in here?” I asked. Sal explains:

In the way that he surveyed the rooms and read the objects, Sal showed how what has been left behind is evidence of not just what happened but also how quickly and violently it happened.

While Sal redirects the flow in the dismembered ghetto, this flow is shaped by the spatial legacies of racial capitalismFootnote ¹³ in Bed-Stuy: redlining and its continued production of de facto racial segregation. The 1934 National Housing Act (NHA) established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), consolidating the first national housing program. In the wake of the transformation of laws governing access to housing and home loans, The Home Owners Lending Corporation (HOLC) created “residential security maps” for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. These maps documented lending risk and desirability, making it easier for banks to predict (if not produce) mortgage rates appropriate to the urban property-owning population. The NHA was a response to the economic collapse during The Great Depression, which had not only created a banking crisis but also a significant drop in home loans and ownership. The New Deal sought to re-make the failing economy by creating a more accessible homeownership market.Footnote ¹⁴ Creating a more “accessible” market, however, also relied on the devaluation of black spaces.

Racist renting practicesFootnote ¹⁵ predating the FHA were newly justified and materialized in emergent accounting, actuarial, and mapping practices attaching financial “risk” to black and ethnically mixed neighborhoods, while white urban (and suburban) neighborhoods were deemed desirable and stable investments. HOLC maps zoned neighborhoods on a color-coded grading system from A (green, desirable) to D (red, risky), thus earning that practice the moniker “redlining.” The HOLC had no reason—outside of racism—to assume that black homeowners were high-risk borrowers. Yet, by designating black neighborhoods as a priori risky, it set in motion a process of devaluing black spaces by making resident investment impossible—setting up the conditions for the kind of land devaluation that would make lending a financial risk and re-zoning a necessary tool for “bettering” the ’hood. Redlined Bed-Stuy would become one of these historically-black-and-mixed neighborhoods across the country to experience the cascading consequences of this policy.Footnote ¹⁶ Disproportionately indebted to high-interest subprime loans, when black families could get loans at all, these historical spatial patterns of value production helped set the conditions for the 2008 mortgage crisis.Footnote ¹⁷

The segregation of Bed-Stuy resulted in many forms of disinvestment, including infrequent trash pick-up. Sanitation districts were zoned as if to quarantine a growing black population by suffocating the neighborhood with its own waste. As the 1962 protest “Operation Clean Sweep,” organized by Bed-Stuy residents, suggests, redlining and other forms of ghettoization also produce proximity to waste. But the neighborhood of 1962, mostly black residents who owned their homes,Footnote ¹⁸ resisted the equation of blackness with filth. The group not only organized a neighborhood cleanup, they took that trash and dumped it on City Hall's steps, in response to Sanitation Commissioner Frank J. Lucia's unwillingness to address the New York Department of Sanitation's (DSNY) neglect of the neighborhood. The group protested the (un)sanitary conditions of Bed-Stuy as racist, but they were up against the on-its-face race-neutral spatial logic of sanitation districts, which determined the frequency of trash collection. Together, redlining and the districting of Bed-Stuy had allowed the DSNY to ignore that the population had increased three-fold since the 1930s, and, as a result, needed to be redistricted. But because sanitation districting maps do not look like they have anything to do with race, the DSNY could argue that Bed-Stuy was dirty not because it was intentionally neglected, but because its own residents were to blame.Footnote ¹⁹ The organized protest made an example out of Bed-Stuy's racialized proximity to trash and challenged who was “at fault” for the trashy conditions.Footnote ²⁰ However, as the recent sanitation scorecards would suggest, “clean-up” is a project that continually imposes ideas about civility and order: Trash is both an index of backwardness and a justification for (eventual) redevelopment. Thus, as the land-value logic of racial capitalism re-positioned Bed-Stuy from left behind to desirable, Bed-Stuy's “trash” turned from something proximate to blackness to something displaceable like blackness, so that Bed-Stuy could be admitted into a white gentrified future.

Racial capitalism devalues black space just as racial biopolitics devalue black lifeFootnote ²¹. In these intertwined processes of devaluation, Bed-Stuy as a space peopled and produced by blackness is turned into an anachronistic artifact, not a place with a black future. Sal abutted this way of seeing as he gutted buildings to the refrain, “I'm holding Bed-Stuy's history in my hands.” Taking stock of racialized material and spatial regimes, Sal responded to how gentrification reframes the materiality of Bed-Stuy as something to be bettered: “As pieces of the projects come down and housing for white people go up, our homes are turned into junk. But really, the ghetto is a gold mine.”

Doors and Boundaries

The processes, maps, redlining, and social relations that bind and border Bed-Stuy shape how objects can move from trash to treasure. Back at Sal's shop, “junk” resonated differently, emblematic of how things transform. The things that can be scavenged mark the racialized history of land use and how changes to land use (rezoning) rearrange whose bodies produce value. The rapid construction of “market-rate” apartments in the heart of the ghetto (near the Marcy Projects) brought on by the 2007 rezoning of south Bed-Stuy resulted in an influx of young, white, and upwardly-mobile residents, not only changing the landscape of Bed-Stuy but black residents’ relationship with their tree-lined neighbor Clinton Hill. And in Sal's shop, the way that objects moved in and out of the category of “trash”Footnote ²² points to the conditions that make the boundaries between Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy matter.

Sal always insisted his “junk” told the history of Bed-Stuy, even though according to municipal maps, Bed-Stuy did not start until at least a block west of the shop.Footnote ²³ According to Sal, the line between Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy was like the distinction between trash and treasure, “If you have power, you can call it whatever you want. If you don't have power, like you and me,” referring to our shared black history, “you have to defend what is yours.”

In the 1990s, when Sal first acquired the spot that became his shop, Bed-Stuy was portrayed as a dirty and dangerous place. The public discussion of city safety justifying intervention as “cleaning up” the city elided racialized conditions of poverty. “A cleaner city is a safer city,” Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said at a news conference in 1994. He continued:

By arguing that “dirtiness” signified disrespect for property rights, Giuliani showed how racial capitalism shapes policing priorities. Mayor Giuliani's anti-black racism, embedded in anti-graffiti, Stop and Frisk, and broken windows policing, used criminological theory to conflate “dirtiness” with deviance. Broken windows policing asserts that infrastructural decline is due not to poverty and state-sanctioned neglect, but to immorality and criminality. Thus, the problem with poor black people is that they are insufficiently respectful of the value of property: They steal it, they deface it, they misuse it.Footnote ²⁵ Cleaning up poor neighborhoods licensed the indiscriminate policing of poor black bodies—because it was black people, after all, that caused black spaces to be dirty in the first place.

The ideological and aesthetic equation whereby “dirtiness” signifies deviance made Bed-Stuy's boundaries a point of contestation between the city and the community. If Bed-Stuy was most notably characterized by the racist rhetoric of the 1980s crack epidemic, which described the neighborhood as ravaged by illicit drug circulation and moral deviance, then the border with Clinton Hill, a middle-class neighborhood with clean, respectable, property owners, emblematized the demarcation between “progress” and “black backwardness.” Sal's insistence decades later that his shop was in Bed-Stuy and not Clinton Hill marks the refusal to be “transformed” despite the processes of gentrification that pushed against the neighborhood border.

Sal's reclaiming of Bed-Stuy through scavenging and his refusal to adhere to “new” neighborhood boundaries, even as he capitalized on the discards wrought by gentrification, points to the complicated ways in which marginalized people in Bed-Stuy use their knowledge of racism to make a place while being displaced. If redlining is a socio-material process that distributes risk and reward with durable consequences, gentrification is a process that effaces black material histories by rewriting what matter matters. As gentrification asserts that geographic borders make neighborhoods what they are, scavengers like Sal assert that what makes a neighborhood might be something else altogether.

“Doors are the key to Brooklyn,” Sal says, showing me around his shop. “With all of this brownstone retrofitting going on, or whatever it's called, the market, right now, is all about doors.” Spread out across the back section of the shop were doors, doors upon doors upon doors. Different sizes, different materials, different colors. A lot of the guys that worked for Sal just stripped and sanded doors. Sometimes they used varnish, sometimes they stripped them down and repainted them. They polished doorknobs and tightened and replaced old screws. They stripped years of paint off hinges and polished them until they shone, oiling them to loosen up layers of rust. They measured the widths and lengths and organized them by size.

One day, while I was observing the work on the doors, Marvin, one of the scavengers, approached inquisitively, joking: “What is a girl like you doing in a place like this?” “I'm doing research about reusing trash in Brooklyn.”

The racialized circuits along which these doors traveled was not accidental. The shop was full of doors that closed on black lives only to become decoration for whites. Doors mark both borders and openings. Their circulation and appropriation move through a route produced by racial capitalism, which not only expropriates black labor,Footnote ²⁶ but turns blackness into a commodity when it is moved out of “the ghetto” and into adornment. This process of cultural appropriation devalues racialized people, turning their labor and history into artifacts of a lost exotic other.Footnote ²⁷ Bed-Stuy's dismembered material history is not valuable to new residents because it tells the story of how redlining, segregation, policing, and state disinvestment have made these objects available through demolition. Rather, Bed-Stuy's materiality, produced by but disentangled from black history, becomes valuable for retrofitting and “preserving” “old New York”—an old New York curiously without a racial identity, or, more precisely, an imaginary “old New York” in which Bed-Stuy was always white.

Marvin's commentary on closing the doors of black livelihood in Bed-Stuy also suggests how objects signify neighborhoods in and out of time. Gentrification is a way that racial capitalism brings neighborhoods in decline into (present) time,Footnote ²⁸ despite reproducing the same structural problem that created degradation in the first place.Footnote ²⁹ If black neighborhoods are made to decay through racist urban planning practices and the devaluation of black property, then blackness is not only made anachronistic (until appropriated by and through whiteness), blackness seems to adhere to objects and environments left to die. It is this racialized temporality that conditions and shapes the way black spaces—the objects and people within them—are managed as places with no future on its own terms. By implying there was a different time when he belonged, Marvin implied that he is left out of the present. The current neighborhood may utilize the same objects, but they are re-arrangements of a past moment—a moment that was his. Because of the way things have changed over time, it was no longer his place.

In and Out of Time

In Virginia, references to north and south are not only spatial, but temporal. The North's rapid “progress” outpaces the South's slow-moving inertia. The South isn't just a region, it lags behind. Take NYC Mayor Giuliani's brazen remarks, whose closing of the infamous landfill Fresh Kills, sedimented a long-standing relationship between NYC's trash and Virginia's landfills:

While for NYC the closing of Fresh Kills was another mark of “progress,” Giuliani's explanation was made possible by the ideology of an “uncultured” South that lags behind Northern times. In remarking on the increased flow of waste from NYC to Virginia, Giuliani implied that Virginia was doing its part to make sure that NYC remained a national treasure. Insofar as cheap land helps determine where waste “belongs,” Virginia preserves NYC by acting as its dumping grounds, and, by extension, its discarded past. But even as Virginia is supposed to be grateful (or, at least, virtuous) for receiving NYC's trash, clean-up is a national discourse about transformation and improvement. And if southeastern Virginia was positioned as the natural resting place for what NYC cast off, the region doubled down on clean-up as surveillance as if to signal: We can be modern, too.

Seeking to understand how waste flows affect transformations in Norfolk, Virginia—a city in the region importing NYC trash—I met Superfly, a local panhandler described by passersby as the city's “trashy” leftovers. Out of the windows of their cars people would yell to us (a black woman and a homeless white man) as we walked Norfolk's deserted streets, “fucking white trash,” and “I thought we already cleaned up this city.” Constantly displaced by the private investment that had transformed the historically black city into one that Superfly and others would characterize as “clean and white,” I learned quickly, in step with the routes made through Superfly's laboring of discarded objects, that the sprawling gentrification of southern development means that walking is a mark of poverty, if not criminality. That Superfly could represent a past state of the city to its own residents—a past characterized by poverty, crime, and filth—was indicative of how city clean-up projects meant the eradication of the poor through disappearance.

This logic of disappearance also shapes how waste moves from NYC streets to the bowels of the nation's not-so-secret history of slave plantations and Jim Crow. Virginia, riddled with the history of expropriated black labor, has a spatial history with environmental consequences, including the production of soil-depleted former plantations as a place of cheap sprawling land, a resource for waste facility siting.Footnote ³¹ As Norfolk became clean and white, the poor and black cities surrounding it, Suffolk and Portsmouth, became the sites of new facilities for NYC's waste. And those cities cannot become part of the future until and unless they are enrolled in betterment.

Like Sal and Marvin, Superfly used discarded objects to reclaim spaces from which he had been displaced. As space stands in for time in discourses of north and south, so too is Superfly's out-of-place-ness expressed as “out of time.” If sanitizing the South's dirty history in part entails cleaning up public spaces, this process also makes the southern urban landscape “in time” by bringing the South into the present. Thus, as remnant, as “white trash,” Superfly is anachronistic. Walking through the cleaned-up landscape, Superfly told me he's an alien:

Being out of human-evolutionary time, Superfly used his knowledge of Norfolk's spatial history, with the largest naval base in the country, and how it has transformed to exclude him. Instead of understanding himself as belonging to the present, he drew on an alternative temporality to explain his experience of not belonging in this time, or in this Virginia.

But as Sal's labor exposes in Brooklyn, present geographies are not self-evident, they are shaped and produced by whose labor counts as making or progressing towards “the future.” Superfly's autobiographical narrative, which pivots around WWII, is worth noting here, not only because of the military's ubiquity as a path towards economic security, but because WWII brought massive urban transformation through “slum clearance” projects. These projects were touted as “renewal” and undertaken at the expense of black and immigrant communities who had labored to make a place for themselves in the face of displacement. While on the one hand, Superfly's narrative marks him as not belonging, on the other hand, it points to the multiple and intersecting histories that shaped Norfolk's present racial geographies and material transformations.

Theories of time are not only spatial, they are racial. If narratives of time are used to tell a story about racial progress, then it also matters that out-of-time-ness marks Superfly's poverty as an aberration of whiteness. Storytelling is a way of inscribing the history of places when particular pasts are not only unmarked and un-memorialized in urban landscapes, but rendered unremarkable.Footnote ³² Superfly's use of the past is a way of justifying why he was “still here” when so many others were gone:

As racialized and classed uplift, cleaning projects shape the present paths along which Superfly was allowed to move. His dirtiness made it difficult to “take up space”; yet it was also his dirtiness that marked him as improperly white. Superfly's whiteness made him unlike the poor people of color who have been displaced from Norfolk (to a different city), because being poor and a person of color is not exceptional. Their poverty is planned for in cities, naturalized in places like Suffolk—the ghetto—where black people “belong.” Because Superfly was white, however, his poverty was exceptional.Footnote ³³ In the “modernizing” South, there is nowhere “natural” to which he belonged. As white trash, Superfly was excluded from Norfolk's “progress”—when progress is signified by white exclusivity and white exclusivity, in turn, is predicated on distance from poverty, assumed to be inherent to blackness.

Though Superfly's poverty was constantly re-inscribed, it was his whiteness that made his poverty peculiar in Norfolk. If Norfolk's successful gentrification has effectively cleaned up the city, and if cleaning is always a racialized project, then it was Superfly's whiteness that both let him remain in Norfolk and made him an anomaly. In White Trash, Nancy Isenberg argues that class was not always thought of as a social construct. In fact, throughout the nineteenth century, the widespread belief that class was congenitalFootnote ³⁴ authorized eugenicist support for social “cleaning” projects, including quarantines for the poor and the mass sterilization of women of color.Footnote ³⁵ Though women of color were seen as contagious in their own rightFootnote ³⁶ (namely, in their deviant sexuality), poor whites (and white women in particular), or “white trash,” were seen as polluting the “white race” and, by extension, the species. White poverty may not be understood in contemporary Norfolk as something under the skin, but it is treated as something that is passed on, and sometimes, passed on by the city itself (the slums, the trash, are contagious).

“Walking Dirty”

As racial spatial transformations determine what ought to be discarded, the things and people moving out and moving within point to how racialized class relations build, define, and surveil space. The slum-cleared city epitomized the deepening of Jim Crow segregation and racist urban renewal programs with durable materialities in Virginia. While southeastern Virginia, the region in which Norfolk is located, continues to be the second largest importer of waste in the nation, Norfolk's successful gentrification secured itself through the continuous displacement of its material waste onto its post-industrial neighboring cities (Suffolk and Portsmouth), while also surveilling the contagious people “within.”

“Waste Watch,” a Norfolk community partnership between sanitation and policing, authorized sanitation workers to “remove” blight from public space (by which they mean homeless persons and sex workers), identify theft (of waste objects on the street and panhandling), and stop vandalism (including graffiti). This form of “watching waste” defines poverty in proximity to waste in all its forms (from social deviance to litter) and ensures that poverty is considered a threat to cleanliness as a racial spatial order.

Upheld through policing and the selective use of Begging Ordinances, forms of managing waste expose spatial “order” (who belongs where), what and who is being turned into a “waste problem,” and how “waste” is allowed to move. Not unlike the elision of safety and sanitation used by the Bed-Stuy BID, municipal ordinances around “street” labor managed poverty in Norfolk. More often than not, municipal codes that criminalize povertyFootnote ³⁷ are called upon to justify the removal of homeless “blight”Footnote ³⁸ from “public” space.Footnote ³⁹ Being outside for Superfly was a direct affront to the clean-up programs that sought to move him out of sight and out of (at least Norfolk's) mind. In fact, “walking dirty”—as he would sometimes refer to panhandling—was not just about describing how people viewed his poverty as “out of place” in the landscape, it was also an insistence that he understood, claimed, and used his out-of-place-ness to make his own place.

Carefully navigating the downtown district, Superfly taught me how to move. Concentrated with financial buildings and surrounded by two and three-story residences just beyond the edges of the bank district, most of the streets were tree-lined and wide, suggesting that the neighborhood was built for walking. “Why is it so empty here?” I asked, as we walked, slightly disturbed by the idyllic yet ghostly space. “Nobody walks here,” he responds, slightly riled up by the question, “they walk from Starbucks to their cars, and from their cars to work. Walking means that you're poor. Walking means you're dirty.” Over and over again, I was amazed by the empty streets, devoid of pedestrians but lined with cars.

The rejuvenated blocks of downtown, part of Norfolk's 2014 Downtown Improvement District (DID), were covered in a specialized graffiti-resistant coating. As Superfly taught me to move cautiously through the downtown, quarantined by accusatory stares and racial and classed epithets hurled out the widows of cars, he would point out the vest-wearing crew pressure-washing the empty streets. The DID not only covered these revitalized districts in materials that reproduce the aesthetics of civility, they employed “Clean Team Ambassadors” to parole and wash the streets. Waste Watch and the private Clean Team Ambassadors did the work of “providing assistance to the Norfolk Police Department, offering security escorts and maintaining a clean urban environment through a comprehensive program of sidewalk cleaning, pressure washing, graffiti removal.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Turning down one street or another, carefully patrolling how he was patrolled, Superfly's movements expose how the DID named waste in ways that slipped from graffiti to bodies, for it was not merely tagging that was easily removed from the glossy bricks, but the homeless and poor people who “linger too long” are obviously out of place, and are washed—or pushed—away.

Superfly moved cautiously through the DID, never staying still long enough to be forcibly removed, although the specter of Clean Team Ambassador policing meant that he was always pushing himself along. His travels frequently included a stop at Bean There, a coffee shop in the DID that discarded their old magazines once a month. As one of the few coffee shops in Norfolk that offered the New Yorker and other “cultured” magazines, this was an important stop on Superfly's itinerary. Superfly, who resold the magazines and books he scavenged to other local shops, understood that the New Yorker not only had a particular class readership; it had an aesthetic, “committed to looking uncommitted and pretentious, all at the same time.” As we walked into the coffee shop, he poked fun at its aesthetics:

Laughing as he signaled for me to order a coffee while he searched through the magazines that they were about to recycle, he said, “But hey, this nonsense keeps me in business, so …”

While Bean There may not be a place for a poor man, their garbage was still valuable. Superfly resold these magazines to black barbershops and nail salons—businesses whose presence in the newly-white and upwardly-mobile district was itself precarious. In this gentrified southern landscape, Superfly redirected the flow of objects destined for displacement, out of the waste-bin and into new kinds of circulation.

At one of the barbershops where Superfly sold magazines, a barber talked to me about the neighborhood: “I use to live in New York where people really went to barber shops, you know, all kinds of people. I made good money. But the city just got to me. I like it better down here. Things move slower, there's more room, you know. Problem is, white people don't go to barber shops and the black people keep disappearing. I just appreciate that Superfly keeps me in magazines. At least he knows what's up!”

Waste and Time

Attendant to how things are made to degrade, being careful not to assume that what is degraded for some may just be what it's like to be “the other,” this article has focused on how those dispossessed by the call to “clean up,” “better,” and “gentrify,” labor on, with, and through objects discarded by transformation. I have argued that “trash talk”—talk about the value of “trash”—reveals structures of power producing working-class proximity to trash. While those who labor are undoubtedly subject to how the language of waste is used to denigrate, this article points to the complex power dynamics within which my informants theorized the spatializations of race and time that bind and define their work, their homes, and their histories. By focusing on the objects and people whose value(s) are called into question as the context around them changes, I show how dispossessed waste laborers—through which I refer to the illicit labor of pan-handling and scavenging—name the power relations that circumscribe changes that turn objects, people, histories, and labor into waste.

Gentrification makes trash a discursive and material index of degeneration, mobilizing projects to “clean” and “better” neighborhoods and people. Implicit in the process that gentrification makes visible is how racial capitalism, through its attributions of racialized value, produces waste—objects and people—through force. But this spatial process is not only racial, it is temporal. By turning black spaces into places that “need” bettering, black spatial and material histories are forcibly relegated to a backward past, treated as impediments to a “better,” whiter future. Embedded in this racialized temporality is the presumption that black places inherently have no future of their own (unless or until enrolled in white betterment). But as Sal and Superfly make clear, whiteness not only restricts how people are allowed to move, find and make value, it often effaces and delimits the possibilities for present or future(s) otherwise.

The violence of this racialized teleological framework makes trash adhere to blackness and poverty in particular ways. For Superfly, it is his white poverty that makes trash a resource. Unlike poor people of color who have been displaced from Norfolk, for whom their conditions are “natural,” Superfly's experiences emblematize the way whiteness is constructed through class, eschewing the white working class and poor as inappropriately white. His whiteness, however, also makes it possible for him to continue to act and direct circulations within Norfolk, where poor people of color have more or less disappeared. Superfly's work also shows us how tenuously blackness is allowed in Norfolk: the barber shops that no one really goes to as a site of re-directed flow. His labor also allows us to see what kind of value whiteness makes possible, in, for example, the New Yorkers that Superfly redirected. Unlike Sal in Brooklyn, where it was a black neighborhood's structural history that could be revalued from trash to treasure, in gentrified Norfolk it was the discards of upward mobility.

When I returned from Virginia in 2016, I went to visit Sal's shop, looking forward to finding refuge in our shared blackness. Though he had withstood the pressure for over twenty years, Sal had finally been bought out. What used to be Sal's shop, a chaotic but inviting space, had been closed off and sealed by a frosted-glass window. From the street, I could see the sleek, minimalist inside, a far cry from the space once populated by objects whose lives Sal was eager to share. Heartbroken at the realization that I would probably never see Sal again, I hear his words run through my mind, but this time the loss of Sal weighted the words differently: “The ghetto is a gold mine.”