High on two espressos and having just purchased a book from Myopic called Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses, Victor Grigas sat down at a computer lab last Thursday at Columbia College, where he’s a film student, and started to rant. “I used to live in a neighborhood of human beings who happened to be black,” he wrote on the Conversation, a Lumpen-affiliated message board, “and the taxes were reasonable. Now realtors dicks got hard and they’ve been cumming the yuppie jizz all over my block. All I see is yuppie fear and resentment.”
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Victor Senior fought in World War II, then he got married, started a photo business, and moved to Willow Springs. He bought a Popular Mechanics how-to book on building houses and within about four years he had bought his first Victorian in the city and fixed it up. “It was pretty straightforward,” says his son. “Nothing funky. But then after he got it appraised he realized that the work-to-money ratio was a lot bigger in real estate than in photography.”
“All this new construction looks like a Soviet bloc in eastern Europe or something,” he says. “There it’s all concrete and there’s one contractor.”
He says his father was one of two white guys in the neighborhood until about eight years ago. “As long as I can remember growing up everyone was black. Around 1997 or 1998 a couple buildings here and there were getting bought, and in the last four years it got really aggressive,” he says. “I don’t have anything against white people. But I have something against yuppies. It’s an exploitative mind set. It’s like that show Friends–if you watch that show for long enough it makes you believe this myth of the city being a land of individualistic freedom. People come to this city, come to Lincoln Park and Old Town, and are like, ‘Oh, I love this–there are all these things to do, so many singles bars.’ They come here postcollege to flee their suburban life, and they do it while they’re young. But people don’t come here to live here.
