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Gentrification is not about individual acts; it’s about systemic violence based on decades of racist housing policy in the United States that has denied people of color, especially black people, access to the same kinds of housing, and therefore the same levels of wealth, as white Americans.
Gentrification is also the inevitable result of a political system focused more on the creation and expansion of business opportunity than on the well-being of its citizens (what I refer to as neoliberalism).
gentrification inevitably leads to corporate control of neighborhoods.
The poverty rate in the suburbs, which for decades rose at a rate similar to poverty in cities, began quickly surpassing urban poverty after the year 2000.
Gentrification is a system that places the needs of capital (both in terms of city budget and in terms of real estate profits) above the needs of people.
When I interviewed African Americans who left New Orleans after the storm, they told me they’re afraid to go back because it feels like a different city, like it’s no longer theirs, and in many ways they are right.
New Orleans used to be 67 percent black and only a quarter white. Now white people make up 30 percent of the city, while the black population doesn’t seem to be returning at the same rate, accounting for just 60 percent of the population, according to the 2010 Census. That change—67 percent to 60 percent—might seem like a modest one, but when you crunch the numbers the human toll is clear: by 2010, the city’s white population had just about returned to its pre-Katrina levels, while today approximately 100,000 black people are still missing from New Orleans.
Gentrification, at its deepest level, is really about reorienting the purpose of cities away from being spaces that provide for the poor and middle classes and toward being spaces that generate capital for the rich.
Gentrification is much more than the physical renovation of residential and commercial spaces. It marks the replacement of the publicly regulated Keynesian inner city—replete with physical and institutional remnants of a system designed to ameliorate the inequality of capitalism—with the privately regulated neoliberalized spaces of exclusion.” In other words, gentrification is the urban form of a new kind of capitalism.
predictable effects of turning cities into spaces that benefit no one but those who control capital.
you can usually trace the start of that change not to a few pioneering citysteaders but to a combination of federal, local, and state policies that favor the creation of wealth over the creation of community. Usually those policies come in the form of the deregulation and privatization of urban services: transportation, education, and especially housing. By the time the hipsters arrive, the political and economic forces that paved the way for them have been at work for years.
There’s some evidence that historically this phase of gentrification was often spearheaded by gays and lesbians in search of safe spaces outside homogenized suburbia where they could congregate.
Gentrifiers may be seeking art, emancipation from suburban norms, and a sense of discovery, but the entire process would grind to a halt if it weren’t profitable.
the rent gap.
The rent gap was the disparity between how much a property was worth in its current state and how much it would be worth gentrified.
A rental market where the poor are adequately provided for, where there is enough space in a neighborhood to accommodate everyone, costs building owners more and is less profitable.
But regardless of individual intent, the basic tenet holds true: gentrification works on a mass scale only because most inner cities have been purposely depressed and therefore are now profitable to reinvest in. That led Smith to conclude that “gentrification is a back-to-the-city movement all right, but a back-to-the-city movement by capital rather than people.”
cities are looking for the rich and the upper middle class to use their tax dollars and spending power to fund what used to be paid for by America’s semi-robust federal welfare state.
She told me she has no problem with white people moving to the area, but she wishes they had an understanding of the power they carry.
The process involves mountains of paperwork and can be confusing. That means it favors parents with extra time and money, and it often means that the students struggling most end up in New Orleans’s worst schools.
Chicago lost nearly 16,500 units of housing.
12,381 people, 99 percent of whom were African American, were removed from stable public housing in New Orleans in the last two decades, most right after Katrina.
And the rejiggering of a city to squeeze out profits hurts nearly every citizen, regardless of socioeconomic background: budget cuts means public transit gets worse, museums and other cultural institutions suffer, public schools have to do more with less.
Only those who can afford to do without the government institutions most of us rely on every day—those with private transportation, money for private schools, and enough funds to either buy real estate or withstand rent fluctuations—can float above the effects of gentrification.
Gentrifiers begin filtering into self-defined niches in order to differentiate themselves from those they feel are ruining the city. No one wants to be labeled a gentrifier, and a new class emerges: the white, relatively well-off who also hate gentrification.
once you start turning the city into a capital-accumulation machine, it’s kind of hard to turn back.
country’s consciousness went back to its usual state of ignoring the fact that black people, especially low-income black people, are daily denied democracy and equality in this country.
“It bothers me,” he told me in his new living room. “We had a riot in ’67. And the Caucasians, I mean they ran. And then in the 1970s, we got a black mayor, and they ran some more. And then these guys come in and start buying up stuff and tearing down and rebuilding stuff, and they’re coming back.
Urban planners and other Florida followers seem to believe Detroit proves that attracting the creative class works. All you have to do is ignore the rest of the city and its (mostly black) residents, who keep slipping further and further off the grid.
But believing that hipsters can reverse the consequences of late-stage capitalism is a more attractive thought for city planners in cash-strapped cities than realizing that many American cities are, for now, screwed thanks to postindustrial decline and growing inequality.
A real solution to the economics of American cities would require more work—more taxes, more laws, more intervention from the federal government. Those things are hard. Gentrification is easy.
Detroit has been in need of revitalization for decades. Its population has been shrinking since the 1950s. Black people in the city have been working that entire time to try to keep Detroit from falling apart. Why, some have asked, is it that the country seems to pay attention only when the white people show up?
“The city doesn’t really see black life as life,” he told me. “When the pollinators come, that’s when the civilization comes.… It makes me angry, but you know something? That’s the way it is.”
And they do not seem to realize that they are benefiting directly from the past oppression of those whom they hope to lift with their rising tide.
Detroit’s rebirth has been built on the backs of people who were too poor to leave.
economists nearly unanimously agree that spending public funds on private stadiums is one of the least efficient ways for governments to spend money.
But because of the massive risk inherent in the federal government getting involved in normal people’s mortgages, HOLC could not lend to just anyone. So the agency devised a comprehensive system for predicting the ability of people to pay back their mortgages. That system was blatantly racist.
The FHA, VA, and HOLC all explicitly used race in determining where they would approve mortgages.
The FHA manual was perhaps the single most detrimental document in the history of urbanism in the United States.
Half of middle-income black kids fall down the economic ladder compared with the previous generation, while only 14 percent of white kids do.
That ignores not only the 700,000 other people who still live there but also the historical reality that the “blank slate” was created through decades of brutal racism.
But gentrification is simply a new form of the same process that created the suburbs; it’s the same age-old, racist process of subsidizing and privileging the lives and preferred locales of the wealthy and white over those of poor people of color. The seesaw has just tipped in the other direction.
Gentrification is not integration but a new form of segregation.
Logan and Molotch argue that the city-as-growth-machine is an inherent feature of late capitalism in the United States.
Pushing a highway through a rich neighborhood wouldn’t only cause more opposition, it would lose a city more money.
This is capitalism’s constant urban conundrum: what makes cities profitable is inherently at odds with the needs of the poor and middle classes (who are needed for a city to function), and centrally located land has inherent value if it can be made amenable to the rich.
What would happen if gentrifiers saw themselves not as consumers but as active members in a community, or as actors in a larger system, able to fight against what enables their presence to be a harmful one?
In nearly every other industrialized nation besides the United States, there is near-consensus that purely private land markets will not meet the needs of the poor, and so measures have been taken to ensure that at least some land remains off the market or subject to regulations that make it affordable.
Though the governments of Sweden, Hong Kong, and Germany are by no means anticapitalist, they have accepted a truth that few in the United States are willing to grapple with: unregulated capitalism cannot provide a complete solution to the housing question.
The poor, artists, and activists, who are never stably housed in this country, are constantly fleeing the wave of capital searching for its rate of highest return.
