Does Gentrification Mean the End of the Laundromat?

Chances are that you have a co-dependent, if tenuous, relationship with your local laundromat. They're a necessary hassle of city living if you're not lucky or wealthy enough to live in a new or newly renovated apartment with on-site laundry. So do rising rents spell doom for laundromats?

The question came to my attention when data scientist Ben Wellington responded to WNYC host Brian Lehrer's request​ for opinions on whether gentrification drives laundromats out of low-income areas by analyzing licensing permits and neighbourhood income brackets using information from New York City's open​ data initiative.

According to Wellington, the top four highest income neighbourhoods in New York City have far fewer laundromats tha​n those with more modest median incomes. An interesting little tidbit, to be sure, but it doesn't necessarily indicate that gentrification is the culprit in the mysterious case of the disappearing laundromat. And, as convincing as the anecdotes of local 'mats gone missing in New York City told on L​ehrer's show were, they're still specific to New York City. Is the laundromat decline endemic to NYC, or something more widespread?

Parkdale, a neighbourhood in Toronto that I now call home, is a perfect area to investigate the question in. Parkdale is a neighbourhood with a trou​bled history involving poverty, strategic disinvestment in public infrastructure, and demolition by the city to build the Gardiner Expressway, an eyesore of a highway by the city's waterfront that resulted in more than 170 homes being razed to make room for it in the 1960s.

These days, Parkdale is the go-to neighborhood for young people looking for a cheap place to live, leading to rising rents and the familiar sights of a community being disrupted: a particularly grimy Salvation Army outlet next to a trendy store that sells 200 dollar pairs of jeans, for example, and a condominium under construction that looms in the disquietingly all-too-near distance.

In short, Parkdale is becoming gentrified, and the city is taking notice. In 2013, Toronto City Council passed​ a bylaw that restricted the number of new bars and clubs in the area to preserve the availability of key services like groceries and laundry. But those kinds of anti-gentrification actions haven't done much to stymie the activities of groups like Swedish-owned realty firm Akelius; the company owns several buildings in Parkdale and has been accused b​y residents of slumlording and rent-jacking once low-income tenants move out ostensibly of their own volition.

Amid all the social and economic tumult, there are several laundromats serving the washing machine-less community in the area. According to the owners of Speedy Queen—one such local 'mat—the financial crunch due to rapidly rising rent in the area is a serious concern for laundromats.

"Today, if you own a laundromat and you rent and pay to a landlord downtown, the rent is always going up because more people are moving in and the rent is being raised," said Huy, the owner of Speedy Queen. (He did not wish to provide his last name.) "They don't look at the people who run the store. In this kind of business, we can't start charging five dollars and then in half a year go up another 50 cents."

The owners of Speedy Queen are fortunate enough to own their building, meaning that they likely won't be squeezed out by rising rents in the area. But other laundromat owners may not be so lucky. Because laundromats face stiff pricing competition, charging customers more for the service is likely to be a losing strategy, thus creating a catch-22—laundromat owners are damned if they try to raise prices to match rents, and damned if they don't.

According to the owner of Queen Street Laundry, who asked only to be referred to as "Brewer," the sea change brought on by gentrification can work to centralize the laundromat industry as other laundromats close down due to higher rent. Gentrification could be a bittersweet boon for more established laundromats, perhaps, but a potential death knell for smaller businesses.

"If your lease is up, you're going to be faced with newer rents in the gentrified area," Brewer said, whose laundromat has been located just east of Parkdale for over 40 years. "The costs are always going up, but the customer base isn't always, so it's certainly more difficult to keep a laundromat in place. If an older laundromat closes down, then folks will have to migrate to another location."

But business owners aren't the only ones losing out when gentrification forces local businesses out. In areas with high concentrations of people living in older apartments or buildings not renovated recently enough to have their own facilities, laundromats serve up something akin to a public service, although they're privately owned.

Indeed, according to Brewer, they're a curious community space built around the assumption that washing machines and dryers are technologies still not widely available to a certain demographic.

"Laundromats are a very important and malleable service for some folks who don't have the service or the convenience—or the money—to keep a washing machine and dryer at home," Brewer said. "It's an important part of their week-to-week life."

To get a more academic perspective on the case of laundromats apparently being threatened by gentrification, I called up Will Straw. Straw serves as the director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University in Montreal and has authored books on urban culture such as Circulation and the City, as well as over 125 articles on the topic.

Straw told me that the laundromat also has a political dimension in terms of class demographics. They're spaces where everyone airs their dirty laundry together, literally. That kind of public behaviour might not be amenable to the bourgeois sensibilities of a gentrified neighborhood's new residents, who prefer a more private, individualized lifestyle when it comes to everything from big cars to washing machines.

"There's a strange intimacy about laundromats that we could say is part of a working class culture of doing things in public together," said Straw. "A rising middle class might avoid that because of a stigma. The kinds of amenities that you used to expect in a mixed neighbourhood get what I call 'restauranticated.' And the kinds of informal socializing that goes on in a laundromat—or a smoke shop or a tailor—is of a different kind."

If laundromats aren't full-fledged community hubs, then at the very least they are places wherein we spent a shitload of time, money, and effort, and share a certain feeling of low-level embarrassment. Laundromats even have their own unspoken etiquette. We might despise them most of the time, but we have to admit that they bring us together in some pretty strange ways.

It's not very often that we consider the laundromat as a weird kind of social space based around technological lack for a specific subset of the population, but perhaps we should begin to lest they begin to disappear before anybody notices.