An analogy that I use is, it's like blaming slumping company profits from a company that has a $40 million a year CEO on the bottom tier workers demanding higher minimum wage.ĭo you believe that someone who moves into one of these neighborhoods can do anything to compensate for the effect of their presence?ĭaniels: Yeah, I think so. It's subsidies that go to real estate, you know, like people that are buying property wholesale.ĭaniels: The conclusion that I came to is that artists are definitely complicit and play a role in gentrification, but they simply don't have the power or the capital behind them to bear the brunt of the blame. I ended up squatting after a bunch of years and part of that was because rents increased as other kinds of people moved in, and I wasn't able to pay the rent anymore.īut I mean, the real way of gentrification is deregulation, or laws that prevent rent stabilization, that make home ownership really hard for certain kinds of people. I was out of art school, trying to be a professional artist, and I moved to New Orleans, which was a cheap city and also a really culturally vibrant one.

Passmore: That's really the first wave, things that blight, like white flight.

Have you yourselves ever been gentrifiers? I was moving to neighborhoods that were cheap because that's all I could afford.Īs artists, you both belong to a group that can take the lead in gentrification and can also get pushed out of gentrifying neighborhoods. I moved to Chicago from Portland, Oregon, and I'm a person of color. It's very true to my experience of Chicago, which obviously isn't everyone's experience. A lot of the book is a love letter to my time in my early 20s in Chicago.

It's set in Chicago, right? Is Chicago's particular pattern of gentrification reflected in the book?ĭaniels: I think so. I wanted the bad guys to get their comeuppance in a way that was cathartic but also entertaining - a way that just doesn't happen in real life.' This was a way for me to deal with those issues. 'I think it's the same with a lot of people living in big cities and dealing with the ramifications from gentrification - not only in terms of finding cheap places to live, but also their complicity in gentrification. Daniels, who wrote BTTM FDRS, and Passmore, who illustrated it, wanted to distill the complex politics of gentrification into digestible (well, really fairly indigestible) form.ĭaniels told me that gentrification was on his mind a lot when he began the project. That's the kind of visceral revenge meted out in BTTM FDRS, Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore's comedic horror comic.

What they don't usually get are body parts spilling over toilet bowl rims and face-eating tentacles crawling out of ventilation systems. When young urbanites move into poor neighborhoods in search of cheap rents and local color, they often get more than they bargained for.

BTTM FDRS by Ezra Claytan Daniels