What is this place, and can I touch these?

My husband Jason once laughed when I referred to our bookstore location as “inner city”. And indeed, when you look at our block today, you see a colorful hodgepodge of brightly painted facades along a brick sidewalk lined with green, leafy trees. James Beard-nominated restaurants dot the main street, and historic venues host major performers and musicals. A brand new food hall up the street serves boba tea and sushi alongside vegan, gluten-free waffles and avocado toast. Our neighborhood is gentrified. Or ‘rejuvenated’ as our mayor prefers to call it.

Shiny, minimalist apartment buildings erected by the major developer in our town hold down the defensive line at the edge of our playing field, shielding us from the real city that lies hidden out of sight. (I apologize in advance if this sportsball metaphor doesn’t make sense. I attempted to consult with my husband who played American football in high school, but I find the sport so confounding, I’m not sure I understood his explanation.) As long as you stay within a few blocks of the main street, downtown feels remarkably safe and clean too, especially to recent transplants like us from Portland, OR where seeing someone high on fentanyl shit into a residential planter right in front of you is just your average Tuesday as the city has failed to meet the demand for social services and housing, leading to rapid urban decay.

As downtown building owners in our new city, we collectively fund a non-profit which staffs our streets with cleaning and safety ambassadors; kind men (and the occasional women) who regularly stop in to chat and who genuinely care about the safety of our shop girls. We jokingly refer to them as the Yellowcoats, a highly visible force that is ever-present, day or night. Around closing time, they stop in and ask for verbal confirmation that everything is okay, especially since a recent incident where an employee was intimidated into exchanging fake money after closing hours. If anyone at our store has to park a few blocks back behind the new developments, the Yellowcoats will escort us to our car after dark. If they encounter people in need, they don’t call the police, they direct them to local shelters and food banks. We call them when someone becomes aggressive and refuses to leave our bookstore, and they will typically be at our door in under two minutes. In other words, our downtown is clean, safe, and I feel comfortable walking outside even at 1am as a woman alone. The community feels intimate also; if I walk a few blocks to a nearby independent coffee shop, where I can sit on rope swings and drink a pandan latte, I will inevitably pass at least five familiar people who cheerfully greet me.

But this friendly image does not tell the true story of our city and what lies behind those modern apartment buildings.  In the early 2000s, an investigative hit piece in Newsweek dubbed us “Murder Town, USA”. While the statistics were somewhat skewed and misleading, it’s hard to deny that the city was struggling. Violent crime was rapidly rising and most of our street had closed. A sharp racial divide left a poor, African American working class stranded in the food deserts of downtown, while the wealthy bankers and lawyers for which our area is known drove straight from their suburban McMansions into their office parking garages, not to emerge until evening. One of the major banks near us actually has a massive Starbucks within their gated community. Luxuriously furnished, spacious, and meticulously clean, this private Starbucks is hidden away from the public on a fenced and heavily guarded campus. The grubby local Starbucks on our street, which routinely runs out of pastries, sandwiches, and cold brew all at once, pales by comparison. Incidentally, I discovered from someone at the major bank that they can’t close off that location to mobile orders, so if you “accidentally” place an order in the app, they have to let you come in and get it. I was strictly warned against attempting to sit down when I did so though. Of course, I assured them I would never be so bold as to besmirch their chairs with my retail cooties. And then sat down anyway. Come at me, bitch.

When we post on social media about our location downtown, we inevitably get a number of comments about how dangerous downtown is. Recently, an elderly man began to incessantly message me about how I will be raped and murdered and how it’s not safe to be downtown unless you wear an armored suit and “show up in blackface”. We’ve gotten used to the racist, bigoted trolls, though I must admit I was surprised to learn from his profile that he’s an otherwise liberal, gay man. Even in person, I receive similar responses in which “dangerous” inevitably seems a thinly veiled reference to “demographically black” rather than anything grounded in fact. When I recently sold books at a conservative event at a wealthy country club, at the request of a publisher, it was evident most people in attendance had not been downtown in decades. (By the way, I was a little puzzled that one woman proudly proclaimed to be a Republican, in a way that suggested the author and I surely were Republicans also, and we needed to know she was one of us. I have no idea why she thought an academic and a bookseller would be Republicans, but perhaps the idea of a non-Republican being permitted on the grounds of the country club was simply beyond her imagination.)

I did once convince a “brave” MAGA troll to actually come downtown and see for himself that it’s clean and safe. I told him, if anything downtown makes him feel unsafe or uncomfortable, I’ll give him a free book. (I had a few helpful books from the Social Justice or Gender Studies section in mind.) To my amazement, he showed up and was friendly. HE didn’t buy anything. And he inappropriately put his arm around me as older, conservative men often feel entitled to do to younger women. But he came. And maybe someday he will return again, for dinner, a musical, or even a book. It felt like a start.

As you’ve gathered by now, we are a small city of great contrast, and a city that has changed rapidly. Much of our struggle in marketing to our urban area is convincing people that our bookstore is in a safe area. Yet even I will admit that things don’t look great behind the new residential giants that shield us. Just blocks from apartments that rent for $2800 stand three bedroom homes that barely cost $120,000. The Yellowcoats don’t venture this far, and I suspect an African American resident of this neighborhood would wait a lot longer for police to show up to her door if something went wrong. Drug addiction, poverty, and homelessness continue to blight these neighborhoods even as violent crime is greatly reduced from two decades ago. I do often suspect that many of the white people who complain about being afraid to park too far back from our store are actually just subtly signaling their racist fear of anyone who is not white, but it’s hard to deny that crime rates are much higher on those blocks than our friendly, colorful main street where our Yellowcoats stand guard.

The racial divide and prejudice we have encountered since moving to our city are unexpected, or perhaps we are naïve. The Pacific Northwest is not an especially diverse place, but we never felt that we saw major demographic segregation in a city like Portland, beyond some remnants of historic neighborhoods that were predominantly black, white, or Asian and still remain less diverse. On our street in our new city, however, the segregation is palpable. Stand in front of Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts, located across from each other on opposing corners, and you will see a 90% black audience enter Dunkin, while Starbucks is 90% white, especially on days when there is a show at the opera house. There is a fabulous fine dining restaurant one block from us, and I have yet to meet a single white resident who lives downtown and has heard of this restaurant. I know, that doesn’t seem possible, and while they’re on the back side of the block, there’s a more obvious explanation: the restaurant is black-owned. Every time we go, almost everyone else is black. The people we’ve told about the restaurant don’t seem racist, and they’re always eager to go try it out, but why have all these avid restaurant goers not already heard of this fabulous restaurant?? It’s certainly not a matter of economic class; the restaurant is as expensive as all the white-frequented fine dining establishments around us. The food is terrific, the drinks are innovative and delicious. There is no reason it shouldn’t be just as packed with white lawyers and bankers as every other fine dining place near us. But it’s not. And it’s obvious why.

We’re never sure how to reconcile our own presence as a nice-looking, full-price book and gift store in this divided, gentrified downtown that barely hides the poverty of an inner city just blocks away. There is no doubt we benefit from the “rejuvenation” of the town. Even as I write this, I don’t know if I’m writing something ignorant, naïve, or inadvertently racist. I grew up outside of America, and my time here was mostly spent in the more homogeneous Pacific Northwest. There is so much I don’t understand about our city and about the East Coast.

We try our best to always carry a representative selection of books, including large sections on African American history, social justice issues, and children’s books with children of all abilities and ethnicities. And we do have many African American customers, but not nearly as many as we’d like to reach. And while I appreciate the white parents who buy diverse children’s books, and the African American grandmothers who pick up every book we own with a black child on the cover, ultimately we see few children in the store. No amount of children’s events with diverse authors seems to make a difference there. I see the kids outside when we park on our back streets, but I don’t see them in the store. The only exception is a small group of four kids around 12 years of age; we give them candy, free ARCs (advance copies from the publisher), and Pokemon cards even though they never have money to spend, in the hope that they will at least have a positive association with a real bookstore, not just a mall Barnes & Noble, if they even get out to the suburbs for those.

So I refer to our bookstore as “inner city”, because in many ways, we still are. We have our lawyers and bankers on their lunch break, and we have a growing number of young professionals moving in, but the vast majority of residents around us are still living in poverty. Their kids go to subpar schools because of a broken system that funds schools out of property taxes which, as you might imagine, aren’t high in a neighborhood of $120,000 homes with many vacant buildings compared to the McMansion suburbs. We actually still live in a food desert. There are no grocery stores in our neighborhood. No convenience stores with any kind of fruits or vegetables, only chips, tobacco and lottery tickets. The only thing approximating a place where you can buy a few groceries (nothing fresh) is the Walgreens, and they close after office hours and on the weekend. On Sundays after 2pm, there are no cafes, restaurants, or other food establishments. Chips or ice cream at a smoke shop is the best we can do. Well, that and our bookstore where we sell granola and protein bars along with cold brew coffee, but we don’t have a license to serve fresh foods. You could reach a McDonald’s if you walk about ten blocks down a very busy street through neighborhoods with high crime rates. That’s it.

It’s not a great place to raise a child, which explains why we’ve only ever had one (!!) child show up at a children’s author event. We keep trying, but nothing ever changes. In many ways, the beautiful facades still hide an inner city with all the disadvantages that come with that for kids.

We do have teenagers walk in on occasion. One dramatically laughed, slapping his knee, shouting down the store: “Y’all SELL BOOKS?? Why would anyone buy one?? You can get them at the library for free!” Which, fair enough, is true, though all our kids events have been free with no pressure to buy anything.  We’ve been shocked though at the number of teenagers who walk in without any concept of what a bookstore -is-. They ask us, are we a library? Do they need membership cards? Do they need to pay to get books? They wander around in seeming wonder that one could -buy- books rather than borrow them. My heart ached for the boy who came in and politely asked if it was okay to touch the books… He was 18-20 years old. There are no other bookstores near us, and he may have never been inside of one before. Seeing how segregated our city is, I can’t help but wonder if they feel apprehension about coming into what they may perceive to be a “white space”. How many walk by and are nervous to enter at all…? We’ve tried outreach through nearby schools and other organizations, but with no real success. For now, all we’ve been able to do is offer them ARCs and hope they feel comfortable enough with us to come back again someday.