Is Gentrification Good?
A Written Version of The Recently Released 'Gentrification' Video
Over the years, scholars, neoliberals, city planners and YIMBY (Yes in My Back Yard) Enthusiasts have begged the question: Is gentrification actually good for a community?
Here’s my long winded answer. Let’s start with a general definition of gentrification.
gen·tri·fi·ca·tion
/ˌjentrəfəˈkāSH(ə)n/
noun
gentrification; plural noun: gentrifications
the process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, typically displacing current inhabitants in the process.
"an area undergoing rapid gentrification"
A gentrified neighborhood typically includes mixed use development with both commercial and residential spaces interfacing with arterial road corridors embellished with tree line parkways and sidewalks. Modern international architecture styles signify new or renovated facilities. Some gentrified areas may focus on pedestrian and transit-oriented development, and other prominent design strategies of contemporary urbanism. The coalescing of physical forms of buildings, infrastructure and communal space vary by city, but a community usually receives the rubber stamp of gentrification when big box retailers and franchises enter the area. International restaurants or artisanal shops may be intentionally placed back in the area to create the appearance of inclusivity and diversity, but this typically part of rebranding the area as a new local hotspot, available to all individuals, but only for temporary recreational and consumption. What once was known as a cultural hub for local artists, a historic district, or a designated low-income neighborhood is now home to a privileged class of individuals who can afford to live work and play in these exclusive, high-priced inner-city enclaves.
In its most perverse form, gentrification is the outcome of city’s prescription of market fundamentalism that exclusively benefits the ruling and landowning class. This practice intersects with commodity fetishism of the bourgeoisie consumer class whose vested interest stems from conforming their socioeconomic status to their material surroundings. A gentrified area requires a class of well-off consumers to rent, buy and spend in these redefined areas. Because American culture, if ever there were such a thin, is conducive to materialism and hyper consumerism, we strive to keep up with the latest products and commodities, as the possession of these items are in and of themselves, status symbols. So long as our cultural affinity to materialism and consumerism is embedded in our communities, we’ll recognize these American values in any new area and feel as though it’s where we belong, not necessarily as a member of a community in its original term as a collection of residents with shared values, customs or communal practices, but as a collection of personal spenders.
In its conceptual form, gentrification represents the convergence of sociological, political, and economic interests between the state and the capitalist class. In its physical form, gentrification represents the neoliberal city’s outsourcing of land to the landowning class, at the expense of the renter class, who’s most impacted in this process. Land ownership is translated into political power by granting self-determination to private shareholders insofar that these land use decisions promote the practice of creating vibrant, attractive, taxable places. Unlike the capitalist or landowning class, renters and low-income residents don’t offer economic prosperity through job creation or have the equity for self-purchasing land grabs. This creates a class division among renters and landholders, where renters are perpetually beholden to all unilateral decisions made by their landlords. Without having claim over the land, itself, renters lack the political agency to challenge gentrification once the process has begun in their neighborhood, typically beginning with price gauging of rent and eventual displacement, once housing costs have exceeded a renter’s income.
The state’s role as capitalism’s co-conspirator in the unfettered real estate market today is only nominally different than the role it originally played during settler colonialism. That is, granting opportunities for land ownership exclusively to members of the hegemonic class. This landholding practices reflect neoclassical economists’ prescription of market fundamentalism, fully embracing the principles of private capital investment as the prominent vehicle driving economic growth. Incentivizing land speculation in a neoliberal city gives investors nearly limited access to any area that has the potential for profit. City officials have relinquished their responsibility as Administrators of equitable public policy, and instead assume the role as a centralized purveyor of land within the private real estate market.
The city’s facilitation of private land transactions to the capitalist class embodies a vulgar political economy, devoid of socioeconomic or cultural implications to a city’s development in its physical form. Instead, cities focus on the financial proclivities of economic development through a competitive, profit-driven market system of residential, commercial and industrial growth. A commitment to deregulation in the real estate market has been detrimental for low-income areas, particularly of color. In many respects, the state’s withdrawal from any regulatory obligation to protect low-income renters has physically relegated these communities into designated, concentrated areas of poverty. In fact, many neighborhoods that originally formed in inner city areas were a direct consequence of redlining, racist housing practices that kept nonwhite and immigrant householders from qualifying for mortgages during the commodification of housing in suburban areas.
These entrapped city dwellers were not only stripped of the opportunity to build their own wealth through home ownership, but they were also forced to live in substandard living conditions. Some of their buildings were so neglected, they became uninhabitable. Due to the state of decay of these dispossessed, downtown areas, a nationwide model for redeveloping cities, known as the Urban Renewal Movement, received federally backed assistance to facilitate the process of state sponsored gentrification. This billion-dollar initiative was part of the 1949 Housing Act, and became colloquially known as Slum Clearing Projects, as most subsidies went to demolishing extremely low-income communities in the city.
On paper, the program intended to reduce substandard housing, and de facto segregation. In reality, the government exercised eminent domain to purchase properties from private landowners only to resell the city owned land back to private developers at below market rate. Developers instead focused on building commercial space and housing for middle income families in inner city areas, adjusting market rate higher than what the original residents of the neighborhood was be able to afford. As expected, this new development brought a new cohort of city dwellers and businesses, solidifying the local government’s preference of privatized, real estate production over state owned property and community spaces. Over 300,000 residents were displaced or priced out from these rebranded communities. Instead of addressing the consequences of displacement, city and planning officials focused on the benefits of expanded tax bases that revitalized neighborhoods offered. Cities across the country began to incentivize capital investment infused directly into downtown working-class areas. This re-imagining of commercial and residential districts displaced its original residents by design.
State sponsored gentrification efforts of the Urban Renewal Movement ultimately generated a market for private investors to exercise control over the use of property, further amassing both wealth and political power to private corporations and rentiers.
This concept of state sponsored gentrification was emulated again the 1980s when cities began to implement design strategies from the New Urbanism movement. New Urbanism is a planning paradigm shift to eliminate further expansion of the suburbs. The motives tied to New Urbanism focused on creating diverse, mixed income neighborhoods, but that rarely occurred in practice. Although proposed community designs rejected Urban Renewal’s homogeneous residential composition of disadvantaged populations, pushed to live in distressed areas, these programs relied heavily on public-private partnerships, a major foundation of neoliberalism. The profit motive imposed by private landowners and developers were too high to provide mixed income, affordable housing options.
The latest installment of federally backed gentrification maintains the state’s promise to uphold the interests of investor capital in local government. These top-down vectors for gentrification, known as Opportunity Zones, aren’t necessarily tied to a planning paradigm or housing policy. However, the program is postured to offer low-income residents’ economic growth through the reinvestment process. In reality, it’s a low interest loan scheme folded into Trump’s trillion-dollar Tax Reform Bill authorizing predatory investment in vulnerable neighborhoods. The underwriting of opportunity zones reveals the same austerity laden strategies from Urban Renewal and New Urbanism, serving the interest of the investor class, while displacing the long-established renter class.
The states commitment to neoliberal hegemonic practices supersedes any concerted effort to address longstanding inequities predating the rise of gentrification in undeserved communities. But the underclass of low-income communities is no longer solely affected by the gentrification process. In 2017, a survey found that doctors working in the San Francisco Bay area couldn’t afford 58% of the homes on the market. Price indexes in newly gentrified areas may still be below average compared to other areas in a saturated market, which means that some residents are entering a gentrified area because they were priced out of their own. This keeps the cycle of gentrification in place. The more expensive an area becomes, the higher the incentive to enter an undeserved neighborhood that’s more affordable for middle income households. Rather than apply market corrections, like price ceilings and vacancy taxes to stabilize housing costs, the government encourages predatory investment in neighborhoods where property is cheap and the promise for occupancy is nearly guaranteed.
This has become the conventional relationship between a neoliberal city and capitalism. Capital, in these terms, is the proliferation of profits driven by investment in the real estate market as well as the local or regional economy. Between 70 to 75 percent of local governments revenues are now sourced from taxes, solidifying the reliance of capital to fund a city’s operational budget, including the distribution of public services and utilities. This in and of itself means that capitalists wield massive power that informs the city’s planning and budget development process. By using their status as economic drivers, companies demand special accommodations, from tax incentives and amenities, to other publicly funded resources ensuring that their physical locations are oriented within the context of a clean, well-functioning public sphere. This dynamic was on full display with Amazon’s public request for cities to compete in a bid to host its HQ2 Headquarters. This request listed several requirements, including a proposed location within 30 minutes of major metropolitan area with an airport that had direct flights to Seattle. But competing cities took their packages a step further; creating plans for tax breaks, expedited construction approvals, promises of infrastructure improvements, and crime reduction programs among other assurances.
The integration of capitalism and planning as two diametrically opposed practices has ultimately besmirched planning departments and their failure to equitably distribute municipal land and services. The pressure to appease the hegemonic class has resulted in city planners operationalizing cities around capitalism instead of it’s residents. Planners are highly aware that capitalism and racist housing policies have disparaged low-income, nonwhite communities, and these inequities have never been reconciled.
There is no state sponsored contingency plan for the displaced. There is no mandate that residents must stay in their communities during times of renovation. There is no ordinance preserving the neighborhood’s cultural identity during redevelopment. Without political and purchasing power, there are little options of recourse for these dispossessed residents, once the gentrification process begins.
Rather than use their authority to make land use decisions centered around restorative justice, local governments have instituted the practice of place-based capitalism, giving corporations and landowners disproportionate control over the public decision making process of land use and community space. Upholding capitalism means upholding class struggle.
Under these conditions, gentrification is never good. Ever.