East Of Liberty Analysis

I really enjoyed the documentary East of Liberty. It is very important to talk about issues surrounding gentrification, especially when it is clearly happening in the neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh has a very strong identity, and pushing people out of these neighborhoods takes away from the identity of our city because they are Pittsburgh. It is very easy for people who live outside of the city, such as myself, to say they are from Pittsburgh, but that simply is not the case. The people from Pittsburgh are the ones who are being pushed out. The documentary provided a lot of really interesting perspectives surrounding the issue of gentrification in East Liberty. On one hand, the displaced residents of the high rise that was torn down really felt the
It was very notable that most of these people were white while a majority of the community is black. It is not necessarily a bad thing, but it definitely had a role in the outcome of the redevelopment. A common goal among developers was to create an area with good shopping and restaurants for members of the community and for people from the suburbs to come to visit. One issue with this, however, was that a lot of the members of the community could not even afford to shop at the stores brought in. There was a very touching story told about a grandmother trying to buy a few things for her grandchildren at whole foods so that they would have good, healthy food to eat, but she could not afford the things that she wanted to buy. The cashier let her have the food anyway, but it is still upsetting to think that these people cannot even afford the nice things that were forcibly brought into their community. However, it does not even seem like this was an issue even thought about by the developers. In most cases, they believed that they were bringing good things to the