gentrification

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification

by Peter Moskowitz  · 7 Mar 2017  · 288pp  · 83,690 words

. markets@perseusbooks.com. Designed by Jack Lenzo Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moskowitz, Peter, 1988–author. Title: How to kill a city : gentrification, inequality, and the fight for the neighborhood / Peter Moskowitz. Description: New York : Nation Books, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016042410 (print) |

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LCCN 2016048855 (ebook)| ISBN 9781568585239 (hbk) | ISBN 9781568585246 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Gentrification—United States. | Equality—United States. | Urban poor—United States. | Middle class—United States. Classification: LCC HT175 .M67 2017 (print) | LCC HT175 (ebook) | DDC 307.3

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economies, demographics, and geographies—Nashville and Miami, Portland and Louisville, Austin and Cleveland, Philadelphia and Los Angeles—are all simultaneously undergoing the same process. 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

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It’s not that corporations are necessarily conspiring to overpower the pioneers, but because corporate buying power is so much greater than that of individuals, gentrification inevitably leads to corporate control of neighborhoods. Finally, in Clay’s stages, the process becomes completely top-down, wherein the only entities powerful enough

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Uptown, and Carrollton were the places where most New Orleanians lived: the musicians, the second-liners, the undervalued laborers scrubbing the banisters of hotels. But gentrification has challenged those geographic maxims. The rich crests of the city can no longer hold the rich, who are venturing beyond their traditional redoubts. Nearly

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increasing the share of wealth owned by the upper class. Jason Hackworth, a professor of planning and geography at the University of Toronto, writes: “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

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across the country, were instrumental in crafting the narrative of good-hearted pioneers the media still cling to today. Yet Ortner’s story proves that gentrification was never really about individual pioneers, but rather about a confluence of policies pushed by wealthy individuals, politicians, and the companies that stood to

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attention, and any increase in the concentration of gentrifiers comes largely from word of mouth. 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. San Francisco experienced an influx of

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Managerial-class professionals replace the artists and punks. Properties that were held vacant by developers are turned into high-cost condos. Displacement is rampant. And gentrification begins spilling over into other, less gentrified neighborhoods. In 1979, these phases provided a near-complete and prescient description of the process. But several researchers

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have to be willing to allow for it. There’s still debate in academic circles about what forces convince lawmakers to welcome or encourage gentrification. Some view gentrification as a production-driven process: real estate developers who see profit potential in inner cities are luring in the young and moneyed, displacing

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city as a space for personal liberation and economic possibility, and therefore create spaces within cities that conform to their needs. The negative effects of gentrification (displacement, cultural loss, etc.), in this view, are just unfortunate ancillary consequences of the compounded individual decisions of millions of former suburbanites who believe

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and/or to liberate themselves from the familial expectations of the suburbs—to be single, gay, queer, or just different. Others have posited that gentrification represents a more nefarious kind of individualistic expression: that of colonial power. In the same way that people of European descent colonized the Americas, some

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people.” Most cities in the US experienced slow bleeds of capital thanks to deindustrialization and white flight, which eventually made their inner cities ripe for gentrification. But New Orleans’s economic devalorization was instant, thanks to Katrina. The city’s real estate was already relatively inexpensive before the storm, but

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city high, the rent gap was bigger than ever, and so it made economic sense to gentrify New Orleans. Private profit only partially explains gentrification, though. Gentrification may not happen without the confluence of shifting cultural desires and newly focused real estate capital, but its pervasiveness—its existence not only in

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, and billionaires, to provide the bulk of their tax revenue. In 1960, economist Friedrich Hayek, one of the fathers of neoliberalism, laid out this gentrification strategy: “Though the majority of residents may never contemplate a change of residence, there will usually be enough people, especially among the young and more

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sense of authenticity that gentrifiers seek. As Jane Jacobs wrote, “We must understand that self-destruction of diversity is caused by success, not failure.” Gentrification brings money, new people, and renovated real estate to cities, but it also kills them. It takes away the affordability and diversity that are required

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neighborhoods near already gentrified areas gentrified much faster than adjacent middle-class areas. As Smith’s rent gap theory suggests, this makes economic sense: gentrification is more profitable if the area being gentrified is initially cheaper. So the question is, how did those areas become cheaper? The United States

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, demonstrators filled the park to protest an increased police presence there and the upgrading of buildings surrounding Tompkins Square into fancy condos and rentals. “Gentrification Is Class War,” one banner read. Police attempted to corral the crowds with netting and batons, and eventually the park erupted into a mini-

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Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.” I see

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monetarily because of a lack of reliable transportation) to turn the neighborhood into a Miami Beach–esque bonanza of consumerism. The city repeated this successful gentrification-promoting rezoning in many other Brooklyn neighborhoods. In total, under the Bloomberg administration, more than 40 percent of the city was rezoned. “The Bloomberg

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show where populations were most affected: the South Bronx, East Harlem, Greenpoint, Bushwick, and the Lower East Side—all areas that today are targets for gentrification. In all, between 1972 and 1980, according to an analysis by epidemiologist Rodrick Wallace, 2 million New Yorkers were displaced from now-gentrifying neighborhoods,

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, Park Slope, and Windsor Terrace, respectively). Prospect Lefferts Gardens is the logical next step for developers. And the neighborhood is a good candidate for gentrification: it’s filled with stately old townhouses and large prewar apartments. In 1990, Prospect Lefferts Gardens was about 80 percent black. By 2010, it

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neighborhoods and the displacement of New Yorkers, it means that something bigger, more fundamentally transformative is needed. Municipal politics are a good start, but gentrification is a global problem that must be challenged on a global level. Mayors focused on attracting capital and jobs and focused less on providing for

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brutality. The meeting room, a normal office in Midtown Manhattan, was packed with about a hundred people who politely discussed their strategy for fighting gentrification. For a room filled with so many people representing so many different interests and backgrounds, the conversation was remarkably level-headed and productive—a rarity

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and New York Times Styles section pieces use such precise language about “frontier” neighborhoods and “pioneering” residents, it’s hard not to draw parallels. Gentrification is obviously very different from colonization, but they stem from the same mentality, which tells people that one person’s space is more valuable than

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“Micropolis: A Look at the Least Diverse Neighborhood in the City,” WNYC, May 8, 2012. Between 2000 and 2010, the black population: Richard Campanella, “Gentrification and Its Discontents: Notes from New Orleans,” New Geography, March 1, 2013. Rents in these three areas have increased: J. C. Reindl, “Rents Keep Going

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live below the poverty line: US Census Bureau, Poverty Data, 2013, http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/14_5YR/S1701/8600000US70113. “Gentrification is much more”: Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 120. Usually those

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policies come in the form: Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996), 37. the median area income at the 2000 census: “Lower 9th Ward Statistical Area,” Data Center, March

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native-born population going to college. See Data Center, “Who Lives in New Orleans Now?” about 5,000 new nonprofit workers showed up: Campanella, “Gentrification and Its Discontents.” the Housing Authority of New Orleans was forced to revoke: Richard Webster, “HANO Recalls 700 Section 8 Vouchers, Blames Sequester,” Times-Picayune

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). San Francisco experienced an influx of gays: “The History of the Castro,” KQED, 2009. there is evidence that the white LGBT community: Carolyn Senn, “Gentrification, Social Capital, and the Emergence of a Lesbian Neighborhood: A Case Study of Park Slope, Brooklyn,” master’s thesis, Fordham University, 2013. “the reach of

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global capital”: Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996), 100. a New York Times investigation found that 50 percent: Julie Satow, “Pied-à-Neighborhood,” New York

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socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/great-depression/wpa-the-works-progress-administration. Between 1977 and 1984, there were 130 such conversions: Lees, Slater, and Wyly, Gentrification, 29. “gentrification is a back-to-the-city movement”: Smith, New Urban Frontier, 70. “Though the majority of residents may never contemplate”: Quoted in Jason Hackworth

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/priorities, accessed September 4, 2016. It sold off properties (many abandoned since Katrina): Robert McClendon, “Where Will Working Poor Live in Future New Orleans, if Gentrification Continues?” Times-Picayune, July 30, 2015. It began marketing residential neighborhoods: Lauren Laborde, “GoNOLA TV: Discover New Orleans’ Bywater,” hosted by C. J. Hunt,

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“How One of Katrina’s Feel-Good Stories Turned Bad,” Buzz-Feed, August 22, 2015. Home prices in Bywater… doubled post-Katrina: Richard Campanella, “Gentrification and Its Discontents: Notes from New Orleans,” New Geography, March 1, 2013. one black New Orleanian named Henry Glover: Elahe Izadi, “Post-Katrina Police Shooting

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through foundationcenter.org. Chapter 5: The 7.2 In fact, one-half of all people who attempted to enter that program: Patrick Sheehan, “Revitalization by Gentrification,” Jacobin, May 11, 2015. Meanwhile, the 7.2 is booming: Kate Abbey-Lambertz, “These Are the American Cities with the Most Abandoned Houses,” Huffington

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Chapter 6: How the Slate Got Blank One 2014 study from the University of Chicago Booth School: Veronica Guerrieri, Daniel Hartley, and Erik Hurst, “Endogenous Gentrification and Housing Price Dynamics,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 16237, July 2010. Massey and Denton measure the racial dissimilarity: Douglas Massey and

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Crisis, 128, 140. “handy device for razing the slums”: Ibid., 47–48. Cobo called urban renewal the “price of progress”: Patrick Sheehan, “Revitalization by Gentrification,” Jacobin, May 11, 2015. New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey: Patrick Sharkey, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality

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Anti-Displacement Coalition, 2015. The nonprofit San Francisco Tenants Union estimates: Ibid. the number of Latino households fell by 1,400: “Development Without Displacement: Resisting Gentrification in the Bay Area,” Causa Justa/Just Cause, 2014. 4 percent of one-bedrooms in the neighborhood cost below $2,500: Emmanuel Hapsis, “Map:

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conservative values: David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (September–October 2008). The suburbanization of the United States pushed whites: Schulman, Gentrification of the Mind, 24–25. Some ads were placed by homebuilders: Hayden, Building Suburbia, 97. “The person sitting in the living room window”: Ibid.,

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, “Militarized Policing, Gentrifying City: Doubting NYPD Reforms,” City Limits, June 3, 2014. gentrifiers “look in the mirror and think it’s a window”: Schulman, Gentrification of the Mind, 28. “There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking”: Ibid., 51. in 2005, the city rezoned 170 blocks of Williamsburg and Greenpoint

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the city was rezoned: Andrea Bernstein, “Rezoning Williamsburg,” WNYC, April 26, 2005. “The Bloomberg administration was kind enough to rezone”: Aaron Miguel Cantú, “Anti-Gentrification Protesters vs. Brooklyn Real Estate Summit,” Gothamist, June 17, 2015. parts of Brooklyn have become more expensive: Michelle Higgins, “Priced Out of Brooklyn? Try Manhattan

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Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 38. the 1929 Regional Plan suggested: Fitch, Assassination. The plan explicitly recommended removing people: Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996), 21. That explains why whereas industrialization peaked in 1956: Zukin, Loft Living, 24. It also explains why

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Inclusionary Housing and the East New York Rezoning,” December 2, 2015. The building received a $72 million loan from the state: Aaron Miguel Cantú, “Progressive Gentrification: One Community’s Struggle Against Affordable Housing,” Truthout, February 5, 2015. $98 per vote he received in the general election: David Chalian and Rogene

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Governance in the Luxury City (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 128. As one Bushwick activist group called Mayday says: Rebecca Fishbein, “Bushwick Woman Fights Gentrification with Christmas Lights: ‘Your Luxury Is Our Displacement,’” Gothamist, December 29, 2015. But as author and activist Samuel Delany points out: Ibid., 111. rental

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation

by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler  · 14 Sep 2021  · 735pp  · 165,375 words

in 2020, but it is not the only one. A Pandora’s box of urban woes has emerged including overly expensive housing, violent conflict over gentrification, persistently low levels of upward mobility, and outrage over brutal and racially targeted policing and long prison sentences for minor drug crimes. These seemingly disparate

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rather than on empowering the upward mobility of the less fortunate. That empowerment needs better education and fewer barriers to entrepreneurship, especially among the poor. Gentrification is often seen as a problem, but it is really a symptom of other urban woes. Urban residents of all stripes are victims of policies

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that artificially constrain the growth of city space. Los Angeles is the site of many gentrification battles, which is particularly sad since that sprawling city once practically stood for Latino opportunity in America. Los Angeles is not particularly dense, and it

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in Philadelphia showing white cops dragging an African American man from a bus by force. We focus on gentrification battles in Los Angeles, which illustrate the larger sense of struggle over urban space. Gentrification is a long-standing but not particularly difficult problem to solve. If cities don’t have enough space

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are battles between insiders and outsiders. In chapter 9 we turn to two conflicts that do not have the same simple legislative solution as the gentrification wars: policing and schools. The Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 were motivated by police brutality, but this requires executive reform, not

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that seemed like the future for the innovation district. The entrepreneurs relocated to cheaper, poorer parts of the city, which led to the fights over gentrification that are the topic of the next chapter. But if the banks go remote or move to another city, then the space becomes available again

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decline. We visit these urban problems in the next sections: underperforming urban schools, police violence, and mass incarceration. We turn first to the battles over gentrification that reflect the larger crisis of urban affordability. Chapter 8 THE BATTLE FOR BOYLE HEIGHTS AND THE CLOSING OF THE METROPOLITAN FRONTIER At 2:35

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see the police as oppressors rather than as the protectors who ran into the burning Twin Towers and died trying to save their fellow citizens. Gentrification has engendered conflict, and acrimony has replaced hope in the world’s wealthiest cities. That discord makes New York and other Western cities far weaker

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better shape than Rome in 541 CE, but they face fierce challenges: a limited supply of housing that generates high prices and acrimonious battles over gentrification, a criminal justice apparatus that seems particularly cruel to African Americans, and increasing inequality that is not offset by upward mobility. Many see a broken

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killing of George Floyd. The combination of profound challenges and political wildfire makes the post-COVID urban landscape far more treacherous. This chapter focuses on gentrification and the economic forces that turned neighborhoods like Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights into flashpoints. In the next chapter, we turn to race and policing

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history—for centuries, whites enslaved Africans and slaughtered Native Americans—but false to the underlying economics and the fundamental nature of urbanism. The battle over gentrification can be portrayed as a battle between white gentrifiers and long-term ethnic residents—but in fact, both groups have the same, common interest in

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is about opportunity. Cities have made space and enabled economic miracles for white, Black, Mexican American, and Chinese immigrants. The ground-level view of the gentrification battle sees only the fixed set of current resources, but cities are anything but a zero-sum game. We can make our metropolitan areas more

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with different heritages live cheek-by-jowl, and because urban history is replete with racial exclusion and discrimination. Boyle Heights is an epicenter of the gentrification battles because the neighborhood has a history of both discrimination and tolerance. Boyle Heights also illustrates the ability of urban density to empower the coordination

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cities from 1900 to 1970 as multiple forces turned areas near to the city center into neighborhoods for poorer urbanites. In a sense, the modern gentrification process is a reversal of the evolution from rich to poor that occurred in Boyle Heights a century ago. Houses naturally move from richer to

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mobility, thanks partially to a tradition of community organization. No wonder that non-Hispanic Angelenos would see Boyle Heights as an attractive place to relocate. Gentrification Explodes The original Anglo and Jewish exodus from Boyle Heights occurred during a time in which highways and unfettered home building meant that the southern

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metro opened the Gold Line in 2009, Boyle Heights gained a direct, traffic-free connection to the center of the city, and it became a gentrification magnet. Urban economists often make the seemingly paradoxical point that investments in poor places can make the poor residents of those places worse off, especially

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the train. Indeed, the coming of the Gold Line to Boyle Heights in 2009 is frequently cited as a starting point for the area’s gentrification. The core area of Downtown Los Angeles has gradually been reborn as a more pedestrian-friendly, public transit–friendly place. Many hipper urbanites were eager

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process “gentefication,” which embeds the Spanish word gente or people. By 2016, the web was ablaze with headlines like in boyle heights, the signs of gentrification are everywhere. In 2017, the brilliant and funny Marvin Lemus had produced a few digital episodes of Gentefied, which was turned into a full-fledged

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and generally acclaimed Netflix series in 2020. The series uses Boyle Heights’s gentrification to explore the conflict between financially rewarding integration and socially rewarding community loyalty. This is an old and central theme in many cities. The core

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are generally depicted as crass, rich, or foolish. In real life, gentrifiers are often seen as pure villains. Defend Boyle Heights, one anti-gentrification organization, declares that “gentrification is the true, highest form of hate crime,” which is quite a claim given the twentieth century’s history of genocide. Weird Wave Coffee

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the spot where Julian Nava warned the Brown Berets about the forthcoming police raid, “almost immediately became ground zero for the very public discussion about gentrification.” Weird Wave is an unlikely villain, with its homespun decor, octopus logo, and stated mission “to bring community together.” Nonetheless, the protests and vandalism were

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$1 million or more. The walk from the Institute of Contemporary Art to Weird Wave Coffee in Boyle Heights is only 2.5 miles, and gentrification oozes over space. Businesses and residents looking for cheaper quarters peek just over the horizon to the next, nearest neighborhood that hasn’t yet seen

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art gallery owners. Even those who didn’t take the death threats seriously wanted to protect their reputations from the tinge of political incorrectness. These gentrification battles rage so fiercely because Los Angeles’s supply of affordable space is so limited. The median sales price of a Los Angeles condominium was

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.” Locals called that process: “From.Boyle Heights to Netflix . . . and Back to the Neighborhood,” NPR. in boyle heights: Brand, “In Boyle Heights, the Signs of Gentrification Are Everywhere.” In 2017, the brilliant and funny: “Marvin Lemus,” IMDb. The core conflict: Bahr, “ ‘The Jazz Singer’ Celebrates Yom Kippur

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the True, Highest Form of Hate Crime!,” Defend Boyle Heights. “almost immediately”: Elliott, “This New Boyle Heights Coffee Bar Has Become a Gentrification Battleground.” “to bring community together”: “Meet Jackson Defa of Weird Wave Coffee in Boyle Heights,” Voyage LA. “cheer it on”: Elliott, “Someone Smashed the Front

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Twist with Gallery’s Offer to ‘Ceremonially’ Close in Boyle Heights.” “hipster bro”: Miranda, “The Art Gallery Exodus from Boyle Heights and Why More Anti-gentrification Battles Loom on the Horizon.” By 2018: Ahn, “More Galleries Are Leaving the Contested Los Angeles Neighborhood of Boyle Heights.” The median sales: National Association

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Criminology 15, no. 3 (September 2019): 289–311. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-019-09372-3. Brand, Madeleine. “In Boyle Heights, the Signs of Gentrification Are Everywhere.” Union de Vecinos (blog), July 20, 2016. www.uniondevecinos.org/index.php/in-boyle-heights-the-signs-of

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-gentrification-are-everywhere. Bremmer, Ian. “The Best Global Responses to COVID-19 Pandemic.” Time, June 12, 2020. https://time.com/5851633/best-global-responses-covid-19.

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. https://la.eater.com/2018/9/4/17819262/weird-wave-coffee-window-broken-smashed-news-update. ———. “This New Boyle Heights Coffee Bar Has Become a Gentrification Battleground.” Eater Los Angeles, June 19, 2017. https://la.eater.com/2017/6/19/15818374/weird-wave-coffee-boyle-heights-protest

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-gentrification. Ellyatt, Holly. “German Covid Cases Are Rising ‘Exponentially’—And Its Vaccine Pause Could Make Things Worse,” CNBC, March 17, 2021. www.cnbc.com/2021/03/

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after More Than 75 Years of Clinical Use.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 23, no. 5 (May 2017): 849–53. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2305.161556. “Gentrification Is the True, Highest Form of Hate Crime!” Defend Boyle Heights, November 3, 2016. http://defendboyleheights.blogspot.com/2016/11

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/gentrification-is-true-highest-form-of.html. George, Justin, and Greg Jaffe. “Transit Workers Are Paying a Heavy Price during the Pandemic.” The Washington Post, May

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Historical Society, August 3, 2012. www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS428. Miranda, Carolina A. “The Art Gallery Exodus from Boyle Heights and Why More Anti-gentrification Battles Loom on the Horizon.” Los Angeles Times, August 8, 2018. www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam

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-gentrification-protests-future-of-boyle-heights-20180808-story.html. Mitcham, Lester. “The Statistics of the Disaster.” Encyclopedia Titanica. Accessed January 03, 2021. www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/

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enforcement in, 292–93, 295 regulation in, 200–201 Boyle, Andrew, 246 Boyle Heights Anglo/Jewish exodus from, 258 anti-gentrification protests in, 260–62 and Brown Berets, 256–57 gentrification in, 258–63 highway building in, 251–52 history of, 246–52 local leadership in, 253–57 student walk out in

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gang crime, 295 Ganong, Peter, 272 Gary, Indiana, 102, 103 Gates, Bill, 156 Gates Foundation, 305 Geller, Amanda, 288 genetic sequencing, 327 Gentefied (series), 260 gentrification drivers of, 16–17, 258–59, 262–63, 264–65 impact on rents, 265 process of, 259–60 protests against, 260–61, 263–64, 265

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restrictive covenants, 249 Toffler on future of, 219 unaffordable, 3, 263 and urban opportunity gap, 301–2 and zoning regulations, 17, 268–69 See also gentrification Howitt, Arn, 151–52 Hsieh, Chang-Tai, 273 humility to learn, importance of, 10, 18–19, 293 Hurricane Katrina, 151 Hyderabad, India, 94–95 Iliad

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of urban America, 268 poultry plants, 175 poverty and the poor and drug use, 123 and fast foods, 112–13 and housing, 248 impact of gentrification on, 259 impact of pandemic on, 61 importance of addressing persistent, 4 and life-expectancy disparities, 98, 102 migration to rich places, 272–73 and

Vanishing New York

by Jeremiah Moss  · 19 May 2017  · 479pp  · 140,421 words

setting of considerable cachet.” That cachet, Deutsche and Ryan wrote, “conceals a brutal reality.” Namely, the city’s strategy to exploit the art scene for gentrification, for the housing of “a professional white middle class groomed to serve the center of America’s ‘postindustrial’ society.” Artists and gallerists, the authors

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blocks east. Protesting a new curfew and the removal of a homeless Hooverville, activists carried bedsheet banners spray-painted with the slogans: “Gentrification Is Class War” and “Gentrification Is Genocide.” Police on horseback beat people with nightsticks. Protesters smashed their way into the Christodora, a former settlement house that had just

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neighborhood,” Goldberger concluded. “By designing a tower with such a self-conscious shimmer, the architect has destroyed the illusion that this neighborhood, which underwent gentrification long ago, is now anything other than a place for the rich.” Gwathmey’s Sculpture for Living not only undulated, it dwarfed everything around it

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took over modest houses and turned them into “elegant, expensive residences,” while refurbishing larger Victorians that had fallen into disrepair. “Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district,” said Glass, “it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced and the whole

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Organized by the Brownstone Revival Committee and held at the Waldorf-Astoria, the conference presenters provided techniques for “unslumming” a neighborhood. In media reports, however, gentrification continued to be an offshore peculiarity that first struck London and then spread to cities like Amsterdam and Paris, where architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable

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described the upscaling of the slums, including Le Marais, “reclaimed as fashionable historic districts, with that curious side effect, ‘gentrification,’ or the driving out of the poor and working class for an influx of chic residents, restaurants and boutiques.” When the New York Times Magazine

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1993. Property values and rents fell. Vacancies went up. Real estate investors panicked as journalists wrote of “degentrification.” In 1991, the Times announced that gentrification was in retreat and “may be remembered, along with junk bonds, stretch limousines and television evangelism, as just another grand excess of the 1980’s

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by the Post as “New York City’s cuddliest anarchist,” the Slacktivists protested at various sites, irreverently bearing cupcakes, that ubiquitous and despised symbol of gentrification, with chants of “Die Yuppie Scum.” They protested Avalon’s Bowery Wine Company, where the New York Young Republican Club held its social gatherings.

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it free-market fundamentalism, globalization, free trade, laissez-faire, it’s all neoliberalism. Its followers will tell you that its effects are natural and inevitable. Gentrification? Natural and inevitable. Global warming? Natural and inevitable. They will echo Margaret Thatcher’s mantra: “There is no alternative.” But these are lies that

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year earlier, the Times included it in their Weekly News Quiz: “Working-class people in London are resisting a process they refer to as ‘gentrification.’ What is gentrification?” Gentrification and neoliberalism go hand in hand, and they both became public policy in New York for the first time under Koch. This was the

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, Koch gifted developers and corporations with the expansion of three kinds of tax abatement: J-51, giving subsidies to landlords to renovate apartments and increase gentrification; 421a, reducing taxes on luxury buildings to induce their construction in “underused” areas; and “individually negotiated tax reductions,” giving hundreds of millions to corporations

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of poor immigrants came to downtown Manhattan in the 2000s. (Chinatown, though it’s slipping, is the only downtown neighborhood having any success resisting hyper-gentrification today.) Instead, Little Italy saw an influx of wealthy Americans who weren’t moving to Little Italy, but to a fashionable new neighborhood called “

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after-hours spot for leathermen, transsexuals, and trend-seeking slummers. Things were changing. Morellet himself has credited the restaurant with bringing the first touch of gentrification. By the 1990s, the meatpacking plants had dwindled, thanks to supermarkets and refrigerated freight. Vacancies opened and rent was cheap, as low as six

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the corridor contained about one million buildable square feet—and everything caught within its net could vanish. Except the art galleries. Art is good for gentrification, so the city granted the galleries unique protections. In the zoning resolution, the planners wrote out the explicit purposes of creating this special district.

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for the established and emerging leadership of New York.” Especially when Ronald Reagan pulled federal funds for cities. The resulting rise of mass tourism, like gentrification, was planned. Through a grand campaign, Greenberg says, the city was reframed, packaged, and branded as “one that was almost entirely white, Manhattan-centric,

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The fauxstalgia craze that gripped lower Manhattan, upscaling our classic restaurants and bars, had spread to Harlem, riding in on the potent dose of hyper-gentrification that the Bloomberg administration injected directly into the neighborhood’s central artery. Considered the Main Street of Harlem, 125th Street runs across the width of

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and shared, and where neighborhood people gathered together. Over the years, the Happy House survived disinvestment, high crime, and riots, but state-led hyper-gentrification would prove to be a much more formidable foe. In 2007 Robinson received an eviction notice. His building, along with several others, had been purchased

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s important to understand that displacement can be direct, like eviction, or indirect, what Peter Marcuse calls “the pressure of displacement.” In his 1985 paper “Gentrification, Abandonment, and Displacement,” he writes, “When a family sees the neighborhood around it changing dramatically, when their friends are leaving the neighborhood, when the

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“art galleries, dance clubs, and studios have been the shock troops of neighborhood reinvestment.” Not artists exactly. While they certainly play a role in the gentrification process—some more deliberately than others—it is inaccurate to equate artists with a powerful military operation. Worse, it distracts us from the real culprits

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are living in intentional, often racially mixed, housing collectives across gentrifying Brooklyn. In the past, they might have had a decade or more before hyper-gentrification found them, exploited their cultural capital, and pushed them out—along with their neighbors. Today it happens overnight. For the development-friendly cachet of

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Peck argues that creativity strategies become policy in part because they “work quietly with the grain of extant ‘neoliberal’ development agendas, framed around interurban competition, gentrification, middle-class consumption and place-marketing.” Creativity agendas can deceptively feel lefty, like old Jane Jacobs with her diversity and vibrancy and mixed use. As

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be a gentrifier. In her book A Neighborhood That Never Changes, urban ethnographer Japonica Brown-Saracino divides gentrifiers into three types: 1) Pioneers, who “celebrate gentrification’s benefits and unabashedly welcome the transformation of the wilderness” as they “seek financial gain”; 2) Social Preservationists, who “work to preserve the character of

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weren’t black people expressing anger about white people moving to Brooklyn, the ultimate urban frontier of the twenty-first century. 23 BROOKLYN Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network protest at Real Estate Summit, Brooklyn Museum. Ann McDermott, 2015 IN THE FALL OF 2015, AN IPHONE VIDEO APPEARED ON THE BLOG Gothamist

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the window!” Since then, several protests have taken place, organized by groups like Take Back the Bronx and South Bronx Unite, to oppose hyper-gentrification. They’ve protested against FreshDirect and the de Blasio administration’s planned transformation of blue-collar Jerome Avenue into a new neighborhood—about which Bronx

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Walking down Alexander Avenue and Bruckner Boulevard on that sunny Saturday afternoon, I passed mostly shuttered storefronts. One lonely sushi restaurant, a frequent sign of gentrification, wouldn’t open until dinner. Scaffolding shadowed the sidewalks. A storefront gospel church offered all-day prayer. On the side of an old piano factory

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1970s, someone had slapped stickers for #whatpianodistrict and “Boycott FreshDirect.” I kept searching for signs of the “South Bronx Sizzle,” that gold rush of gentrification that everyone was buzzing about. In the pioneering Clock Tower Building, I wandered into Charlie’s Bar & Kitchen. I found groups of young people eating

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New York’s “tale of two cities,” his rhetoric helped to shift the collective conversation. Previously ignored or left largely undebated in the mainstream press, gentrification became a trending topic. In the February 2, 2014, issue of New York magazine, Justin Davidson published a controversial and much-discussed piece titled “

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nostalgic.” The statement is likely meant to invalidate and minimize the complaints of those who point out that the city is being destroyed by hyper-gentrification. The preservationist’s argument is framed as emotional, not rational, and therefore not to be taken seriously. In our Enron Society, emotions, associated with

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conceptions of democracy, tolerance, and self-realization.” The city was open—especially to people and ideas unwelcome elsewhere. Rebecca Solnit, writing on the neoliberalized gentrification of San Francisco, put it well when she said, “Cities had a kind of porousness—like an old apartment impossible to seal against mice, cities

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Bloomberg’s New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Brown-Saracino, Japonica. A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Caro, Robert. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New

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City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Madden, David, and Peter Marcuse. In Defense of Housing. London and New York: Verso Books, 2016. Marcuse, Peter. “Gentrification, Abandonment, and Displacement: Connections, Causes, and Policy Responses in New York City.” Washington University Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law 28 (1985). Martinez, Miranda. Power

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at the Roots: Gentrification, Community Gardens, and the Puerto Ricans of the Lower East Side. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. Montgomery, Charles. Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through

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Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Osman, Suleiman. The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Page, Max. The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies

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2003. ———. “My Lost City.” In Kill All Your Darlings. Portland, OR: Yeti, 2007. ———. The Other Paris. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015. Schulman, Sarah. The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Sennett, Richard. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social

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the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America. New York: Vintage, 2005. Smith, Neil. “Gentrification Generalized: From Local Anomaly to Urban ‘Regeneration’ as Global Urban Strategy.” In Melissa S. Fisher et al., Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New

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, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai. Routledge, 2015. Zukin, Sharon, et al. “The Omnivore’s Neighborhood? Online Restaurant Reviews, Race, and Gentrification.” Journal of Consumer Culture, October 14, 2015. NOTES The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To

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1, 1995; also Earl Wilson, Earl Wilson’s New York (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964). 17Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan, “The Fine Art of Gentrification,” October, no. 31 (Winter 1984). See also Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). For a counterargument, see James Cornwell,

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“Villains or Victims: Are East Village Artists Willing Agents for Gentrification and the Displacement of the Poor?” in Clayton Patterson, ed., Resistance: A Radical Social and Political History of the Lower East Side (New York: Seven

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293D’Amato singing, from David Bird and Sara Rimer, “Disharmony and Housing,” New York Times, October 22, 1985. 293–294Neil Smith and Richard Schaffer, “The Gentrification of Harlem?,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 76, no. 3 (1986). 295Reverend Butts, “slave catcher,” from Peter Noel, “The Sins of Reverend

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Uneven Urban Growth in Bloomberg’s New York City” (M.C.P. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015). 301Cynthia Cornell, quoted in Brendan Bartholomew, “Gentrification Evictions Could Amount to Elder Abuse,” San Francisco Examiner, March 10, 2016. 302Robin Middleton, quoted by Harlem historian and activist Michael Henry Adams on his

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the Creative Class,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 4 (2005). 324Bloomberg’s transportation commissioner knew well: Samuel Stein, “Bike Lanes and Gentrification: New York City’s Shades of Green,” Progressive Planning, no. 188 (Summer 2011). 323–325Richard Florida, “The Creative Class and Economic Development,” Economic Development Quarterly

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of our neighborhoods. These are just a few. Please Google them and get involved. ASAP: Artist Studio Affordability Project Bowery Alliance of Neighbors Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network (BAN) Coalition to Protect Chinatown and LES Crown Heights Tenant Union El Barrio Unite Equality for Flatbush FIERCE (Fabulous, Independent, Educated Radicals for Community

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History of Neoliberalism (Harvey), 106 Bright Food Shop, 219 Broderick, Matthew, 173 Bronck, Jonas, 55 Bronx. See South Bronx Bronx Borough Courthouse, 398 Bronx Gentrification Conference (2013), 396–97 Brooklyn, 329–55 Brooklyn Ash Removal Company, 377 Brooklyn Bridge, 253 Brooklyn Cyclones, 364–65 Brooklyn Nets, 352, 370 Brooklyn Wars

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353 Pinochet, Augusto, 105–6 Pintchik, Tess, 354 Pioneers, 325–26 “Pioneers, O Pioneers!” (Whitman), 343 Plague on Your Houses, A (Wallace), 75, 76 Planetary Gentrification (Lees), 285 “Planned shrinkage,” 76–78, 111, 392 Playpen, the, 271–72 Plaza Hotel, 201 Podhoretz, Norman, 331 Poe, Edgar Allan, 149 Pool, Gene (Can

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America

by Jon C. Teaford  · 1 Jan 2006  · 395pp  · 115,753 words

citizens, where those over sixty could be isolated from the more youthful; with gentrifying communities for young singles and gays; and with incipient hubs of gentrification inhabited by artists and others who liked to deem themselves bohemian. Because of their poverty, still others were relegated to the areas no one else

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investing in real estate and renovating aging structures that until recently appeared destined for abandonment. This return of the white middle class became know as gentrification; the gentry were reclaiming down-at-the-heels neighborhoods and making them upscale. Especially prevalent among the gentrifiers were young, upwardly mobile professionals, the so

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rapidly as was the population of young, childless individuals who were more likely to know the location of singles bars than schools. Another factor encouraging gentrification was the increase in white-collar jobs in the central cities. Manufacturing employment continued to plummet as blue-collar jobs moved to the suburbs, to

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of urban rehabilitation efforts was not uniform throughout the nation, a number of cities experienced reinvestment in old neighborhoods. One of the hot spots for gentrification was Washing-ton, D.C., with its large population of white-collar government employees and its army of professionals in law firms dealing with federal

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as early as 1975. “You have a vacant house and they grab it like wildfire.”10 Other Washington neighborhoods were also feeling the impact of gentrification. “Four years ago, the only places in Washington where white people were willing to buy older homes and renovate were Georgetown and Capitol Hill,” commented

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.”18 Across the country in one city after another, older neighborhoods were becoming trendy and attracting Yuppie dollars. Old Louisville was the principal example of gentrification and rehabilitation in Kentucky’s largest city. In 1970 all four of the district’s census tracts had median family incomes well below the citywide

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, childless professionals. Moreover, artistic creation lent a touch of class to an area, no matter how poor the resident artists. At the beginning of its gentrification cycle, Seattle’s Capitol Hill district had, in the words of one observer, “developed a widely held image as a lower-class ‘Bohemian’ neighborhood where

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1970s, anti–Vietnam War activists had pioneered the resettlement of Adams Morgan in Washington, D.C.; the leading student of that neighborhood described its progressive gentrification as a shift from “counter culture” to “quiche culture.”23 Lincoln Park’s Wells Street had once been the center of Chicago hippiedom. “Barefoot, long

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-collar families. Moreover, rising real-estate values meant increased rents and soaring property tax assessments that counterculture habitués and working-class residents could not afford. Gentrification seemed to spell displacement for many incumbent residents of rehabilitated neighborhoods. And fear of displacement stirred protests. The complaints were heard in cities across the

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process looks to me inexorable. Money follows money—and it’s just eating the neighborhoods alive!”31 In Seattle’s Capitol Hill district, opponents of gentrification took action, throwing balloons filled with red paint against the white walls of a chic neighborhood restaurant. In a letter to the restaurant’s owners

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a protest against your rich white intrusion into this poor, multi-racial community of Capitol Hill.”32 Throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, gentrification sparked sporadic battles between longtime residents and newcomers. In 1990, for example, blacks were fighting whites over the designation of the Church Hill neighborhood in

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a historic district. Working-class black residents believed that historic status would raise property values and consequently property taxes and accelerate the pace of white gentrification in the community. They also recognized that it would impose the rehabilitators’ aesthetic judgment on them. Exterior changes that did not conform to the rehabilitators

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one planning journal article, this was a means for “protecting industry from Yuppies and other invaders.”36 Perhaps the most publicized and bitterest conflict over gentrification occurred in New York City’s East Village. An aging tenement district, this Lower Manhattan neighborhood experienced a wave of abandonment in the 1970s as

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protesters marched from the East Village to City Hall Park, where a crowd of more than two thousand demonstrated against the city’s support for gentrification and burned the mayor in effigy.38 Tension persisted throughout the 1980s and peaked in August 1988, when the police attempted to enforce a curfew

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East Village. They met resistance from what one author has described as “alarmed and outraged punks, post-hippies, [and] housing activists” who carried banners reading “Gentrification Is Class War” and chanted, “It’s our fucking park, you don’t live here!” Forty-four people were injured in the fray, casualties of

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a cultural clash that was evident, although less boisterous, in many American cities.39 Despite the shouts and complaints, gentrification proceeded, especially in cities with strong downtown office sectors staffed by well-paid young employees eager to avoid the commute to suburbia. It was especially

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minted cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, there were few old structures to lure rehabilitators. A glance at population and income statistics would reveal that gentrification did not radically shift the overall course of American urban development. In most of the older central cities of the Northeast and Midwest, as well

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population continued to decline. Moreover, the percentage of city dwellers living in poverty continued to rise. Gentrification transformed select neighborhoods; it did not produce a citywide return of the middle class. Where it existed, however, gentrification marked a noteworthy stage in metropolitan development. Central cities were profiting from their age, the one

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Ukrainians of Upper Fells Point, the “post-hippies” and squatters of the East Village, and the artists who could no longer afford a loft once gentrification had transformed a neighborhood. Tight-knit working-class neighborhoods were endangered as central-city factories shut down and the population of Yuppies increased. No longer

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a sign reading “Black and Blue Is Beautiful.”63 Property values and business sales soared in the Castro as the homosexual population increased, and gay gentrification appeared to buoy the city’s economy. The publisher of a leading gay periodical observed: “Our cities are in very bad trouble as the groups

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a ghetto of some kind.” But his business boomed, as did others along the increasingly upscale street. Some less affluent homosexuals resented the degree of gentrification. “The rich white pricks are trying to move lesbians and other poor women and men out of Seattle,” claimed one angry activist in 1978. “Take

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imposed sexual regime of the past. Metropolitan fragmentation opened the path to liberation for the gays of West Hollywood. Life in the Edge City While gentrification and gay migration were transforming some central-city neighborhoods, the metropolitan fringe was continuing to spin off from the central city and was pursuing its

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’s population rise of 9 percent clearly was owing to newcomers from abroad who were reinforcing the city’s role as a multicultural mecca. Moreover, gentrification probably accounted for a share of the good news. The city had not lost its allure for at least some of the young and childless

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and secure new customers for the remaining downtown businesses. There were reports of new downtown residents not only in Manhattan or such traditional bastions of gentrification as Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, or San Francisco. The centripetal movement seemed to be occurring in a broad variety of cities across the country. By December

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Forest. Suburban Chinatowns were a short drive from Latino barrios, and southern California could boast of both homosexual West Hollywood and Leisure Worlds for retirees. Gentrification created communities of historic but renovated townhouses, art galleries, and expensive eateries. The jarring mix, the cacophony of communities, might not have appealed to planners

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Press, 1990), pp. 288, 294. 9. Rachelle L. Levitt, ed., Cities Reborn (Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 1987), p. 18. 10. Jeffrey R. Henig, Gentrification in Adams Morgan: Political and Commercial Consequences of Neighborhood Change (Washington, D.C.: Center for Washington Area Studies, George Washington University, 1982), pp. 19, 22

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Revitalization as a Challenge to Diversity? Seattle,” in Back to the City, ed. Laska and Spain, pp. 193–94. 22. Ibid., p. 196. 23. Henig, Gentrification in Adams Morgan, p. 19. 24. Chicago Tribune, 6 June 1984, sec. 8, p. 3. 25. James R. Hudson, The Unanticipated City: Loft Conversion in

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, “Hidden Dimensions of Culture and Class,” p. 150. 32. Hodge, “Inner-City Revitalization,” p. 198. 33. Washington Post, 22 October 1990, p. D5. 34. Revitalization, Gentrification, and the Low-Income Housing Crisis: Hearing Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office

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; black exploitation films; conflict of, with Asian Americans; conflict of, with Hispanics; and crime, fear of; displacement of, by highways; employment of; empowerment of; and gentrification; and housing discrimination; in new towns; population of, in cities; in public housing; and racial violence; and school integration; and segregation; in suburbs; and urban

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II defense industry in Aurora, Colo. Austin, Tex. Bakewell, Danny Baltimore, Md.; abandoned property in; African American population of; department stores in; downtown decline in; gentrification in; Harborplace, as festival marketplace in; highways in; manufacturing decline in; metropolitan population, share of; postwar planning in; racial discrimination in; retailing decline in; revitalization

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, Minn. boomburbs Boston, Mass.; African American district of; African American population of; department stores in; downtown decline in; Faneuil Hall Marketplace, as festival marketplace in; gentrification in; heroin users in; highways in; manufacturing in; North End; office employment in; office space in; parking in; population of; pornography in; retailing decline in

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American employment in; African American population of; Asian Americans in; big-box stores in; crime in; department stores in; downtown revitalization in; edge cities near; gentrification in; Hispanics in; homosexuals in; hotels in; Korean-African American relations in; manufacturing decline in; metropolitan population, share of; municipal finances of; new town near

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. Clayton, Mo. Cleveland, Ohio; abandoned property in; African American district of; African American empowerment in; African American population of; department stores in; downtown living in; gentrification in; housing discrimination in; metropolitan population, share of; municipal finances of; office buildings in; population of; race relations in; racial violence in; retailing decline in

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.; abandoned property in; African American district of; African American employment in; African American empowerment in; African American population of; department stores in; downtown decline in; gentrification in; highways in; metropolitan population, share of; municipal finances of; office buildings in; population of; postwar planning in; racial discrimination in; racial violence in; school

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Worth, Tex. Friedman, Milton Frommer, Arthur Frye, Marquette Garden City, N.Y. Garreau, Joel Garrity, W. Arthur Gary, Ind. gated communities Gateway Center (Pittsburgh, Pa.) gentrification: bohemian antecedents of; opposition to; transformation of neighborhoods through; Yuppies, role of in Ghirardelli Square (San Francisco, Calif.) Gilligan, Thomas Glendale, Ariz. Glendale Heights, Ill

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of; Asian Americans in; big-box stores near; Columbia University; crime in; downtown living in; and Edison, N.J.; festival marketplace in; foreign born in; gentrification in; highways in; Hispanics in; homosexuals in; hotels in; Korean-African American relations in; manufacturing decline in; municipal finances of; narcotics use in; Ocean Hill

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business in; African American population of; crime-fighting mayor of; department stores in; downtown decline in; downtown living in; downtown retailing in; downtown revival in; gentrification in; highways in; manufacturing decline in; municipal finances of; population of; postwar planning in; racial discrimination in; racial violence in; revitalization boosters in; shopping mall

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, N.Y. Saint Louis, Mo.; abandoned property in; African American districts of; African American population of; as comeback city; edge city near; festival marketplace in; gentrification in; municipal finances of; population of; postwar planning in; public housing in; racial discrimination in; railroad station in; retailing decline in; revitalization boosters in; sports

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San Antonio, Tex. San Bernardino, Calif. San Clemente, Calif. San Francisco, Calif.; African American population of; Chinatown; department stores in; Filipinos in; foreign born in; gentrification in; Ghirardelli Square, as festival marketplace in; highway opponents in; homosexuals in; office buildings in; postwar planning in; public housing in; racial discrimination in; racial

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, Ill. Scottsdale, Ariz. Seal Beach, Calif. Seaside, Fla. Seattle, Wash.: Asian Americans in; department stores in; downtown decline in; downtown population of; edge city near; gentrification in; homosexuals in; Pike Place; rehabilitation of old commercial areas in; shopper preferences in; theaters in Shaker Heights, Ohio Shelley, John Shelley v. Kraemer Shively

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, Va. Wagner, Robert Walnut Creek, Calif. Walton, Sam War on Poverty Warren, Mich. Washington, D.C.; African American population of; crime in; edge cities near; gentrification in; heroin addicts in; Hispanics in; metropolitan population, share of; new towns near; newspaper support for renewal of; racial discrimination in; racial integration in; railroad

Hollow City

by Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg  · 1 Jan 2001

becoming the global capital of the Internet economy. San Francisco has been for most of and an anomaly. Soon city it will its be neither. Gentrification by driving out the poor and working chosen to give their lives 150-year existence both a refuge class, is transforming the including those over

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to unlucrative pursuits such as ism, social experimentation, social service. But gentrification fin above water. Below is the rest of the shark: a 13 who have art, activis just the new American economy HOLLOW 14 in which

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and while the racial aspects renewal have often been addressed, ative activity (and, ticket or new 'In this this book and diversity, Both political. of gentrification and urban focuses particularly on of course, the two are extensively overlapping cre- sets hip-hop and mural movements being two hallowed examples). Cities are

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those raised on the urban crisis of poverty. Wealth has proven able to ravage cities as well as or better than poverty. In discussions about gentrification here, artists are a controversial subject —sometimes because the focus on the displacement of artists eclipses the displacement of the less privileged in general, sometimes

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because art- with graphic by Eric Drooker. HOLLOW 20 ists CITY have played roles in promoting gentrification as well as resisting sometimes because artists and their ilk are conceived of as middle-class people slumming and playing poor. After people who were

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neighborhood, and 21 valet parking suddenly appearing where lowriders once cruised Mission Street. As for the effects of this gentrification, what is happening in San Francisco pening everywhere, which precisely the term is gentrification traditionally describes the borhood rather than term altogether a whole hap- problem (and because the transformation of a

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on entertainment, while the real history of a neighborhood wracked it it and proposes participates in erasing by urban renewal, then first by crack and gentrification. The jarring thing about these privileged young newcomers is there before what came ers, is that they accept as unquestioned fact them know before. as

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a century progressive forces against Richard Nixon in 1950. He's one of on the Democratic Central Committee, judg- ing by what he says about gentrification and come the got into politics here working for Helen Gahagan Douglas, the woman who ran for the Senate more It's of rain, and

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building housing clinics, Spanish-language media, nonprofits, this was leased which to a dot-com, evicting is them all. and In the old days of gentrification, getting bounced firom a neighborhood meant you just landed somewhere else, but in this available chairs are over the horizon. Exchange is going to going

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the pline of our time, as visual art, literature, film, history tions of place. Car-based suburbia has version of Utopia since the Second the gentrification of cities, been all central disci- take up ques- a particularly nowheresville World War, but the spread of chains, the ability of administrators to control

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to resemble about the said threaten to life all bland and inert as suburbia, to erase place. as 29 Lower East A few people Artists Gentrification Insurrection orga- Evicted, and Side artist Eric life. Yuppie Eradication Project put up posters The Mission March of the civic its Drooker posters with a

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, and they join the ranks of the dis- A steady stream of the displaced is trouping to the East Bay, where they are accelerating the gentrification of Oakland and Berkeley, whose poor are in turn Rauber put it in moving further from the center themselves. As Paul an East Bay Express

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. At that point Haight Street was percent boarded up and overrun with alcohol and heroin and there fifty was no sense of here it felt gentrification being around the corner kind of bleak and slumlike. I didn't didn't have a sense of the previous cultures. ing around me, and

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deal with the burgeoning eviction and homeless- ness problems. And the new battlefront is the Mission. The Mission, which survived urban renewal untouched, force entirely. Gentrification vate, individual acts Ruth ing-class quarters upper and lower a facing another cumulative public effect of numerous and thereby action of urban renewal. ish

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Glass, who pri- wrote, "One by one, many Brit- of the work- of London have been invaded by the middle classes Once this process of 'gentrification' starts in a district. Vacant room, Milner graph by Ira Hotel, 1974. Photo- Nowinski. HOLLOW 60 it goes on rapidly until In his 1988 or

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even dangerous area livable and attractive to others a feminist run-down who would not normally venture there; they constitute the unintentional 'shock troops' for gentrification These social and encourage the beginnings of housing speculation. elements are not necessarily wealthy in objective terms, but they do often enjoy a conditional affluence

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ily of people the who in the Castro; Noe Valley, which influx is it ended up over objected to less avail. a sort of pre-gentrification; it con- have more economic mobility, though not necessar- more income, than character of their first youth the earlier residents and who value the existing

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wave —especially if is that they attract the second, afflu- they're white many with the second or holding the analysts of gentrification argument has become a radicals on gentrification was some poor whites never who were first hard-working style rather it on artists, and this —have been moving into the

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that influx of wealth. is artist by gen- not a justification for the problems caused by the As Neil Smith writes in his study of gentrification, "The language of revitalization, recycling, upgrading and renaissance suggests that affected neighborhoods were somehow devitalized or culturally mor- ibund prior to

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gentrification. While this is also true that very vital working-class ized through gentrification as the insulting applied to US West. Now, as then, pioneered new middle it cities as devital- idea of

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'urban pioneers' no one and lives in is as the area being In fact, the Mission has political community being erased by gentrification. But the history of

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gentrification is often class scorns the streets in at least. a vibrant Latino cultural with the history of bohemia, and that it is the

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commuter Transit, the intercity train system) were put in on Mission Street as part of a plan to redevelop the neighborhood for down- town workers. Gentrification is, thirty years later, carrying out that rede- velopment, with the delicate balance between the poor and the not-sopoor, the white and the nonwhite

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and clothing stores, but bookstores, theaters, dance studios, galleries, "monoplex" movie houses and nonprofit this stage Of activist organizations are shrinking, not multiplying, with of gentrification. course, progressive culture has its own history of displacements. As Juana obliquely mentioned, the Women's Building evicted the Dovre Club, the Irish bar set

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daring patrons remained within ranks, notably Albert Bender, an Irish who obtained One was for the man able to sell brains to the merely rich."^' Gentrification of a sort Bohemian Club, though some become members and initiated Rivera's two commis- (now the San Fran- for the Pacific Stock Exchange. HOLLOW

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artists in culture, because afford- hit limited. New York hardest in the had ever been involved SoHo, where hordes of 1980s. Probably the first in gentrification in artists had moved any significant way in the 1960s and 1970s, HOLLOW 100 only to find the 1980s. become first fashionable and then prohibitively

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. fication; I girls it is creeps tend to follow teenage girls around, but teen- all, way neither create nor encourage them. Another is like party; gentrification contributions and or drink in lives onstage, not necessarily their fault that wealthy professionals follow redevelopment artists neighborhood, rather am not sure that artists should

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its cafes and out in them —that seeds bars, is and why the Haight born What is ists in the 1980s. redline visible bohemia, along gentrification. This famous largely elsewhere —by a for a Beat is still is why North bohemia that was selling psychedelia to kids the counter-argument: should

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to camp gentrifying, some fought Tompkins Square over whether there, and a plethora of graffiti A REAL ESTATE HISTORY OF THE AVANT-GARDE and anti-gentrification posters made the struggle more 1980s, there art that was which many of ent, politics the individuals but the sense of a is a credential

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ity ists' certification program sition fi-om renting to status New York Affairs' art- legalized the conversion of industrial working Ownership Program helped some in gentrification into a for legislation giving artists special rights buildings into artists' living and ists that change without so For example, the Department of Cultural roles

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be It took —managed to buy- so, a little less and the Internet isn't and so does the new it going to make up gentrification. mass culture of bohemia was just possible during the period of postwar afiQuence, that the GI created a large-scale cultural may mean convenient; sent

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of live /work spaces are notorious for pro- and sometimes successfully shutting down the actual industries testing and cultural activities of the neighborhood. If true gentrification includes kind of refusal to coexist, then bohemians are indeed a distinct and this separate much phenomenon, since they generally coexist enthusiastically. Too is not

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there's media attention and there were only two that explains in jargon-free terms horn or anything, but ganda because its I what think gentrification really it is. Not to to posters. All The posters. on first one . . my own blow succeeded as revolutionary propa- message was completely transparent without

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gravitating to neighborhoods Manhattan's like East Side, Alphabet City, and San Francisco's Mission District and " we end up initiating the whole process of gentrification Keating, who is going on forty, struck me mostly as an anachronism. A then mailroom clerk in an architectural ticipating in altering the city too

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Kozloff, who was Club Is a my own neighborhood, much holding me there," I started to feel Nick says the graphic artist a dedicated anti-gentrification artist in the Lower East Side during the late 1980s. His street posters dealt with, in his words, "real estate, landlord terrorism, police brutality." Allen

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Jimiping," San Francisco is to an article in the April 2000), " p. A Regional Analysis of Gentri- iii. Rolling Stone, December 9, 1999. Peter Williams, "Gentrification of the City," quoted in If You Lived Here: The City Theory and Social Activism, a project by Martha Rosier, Brian "WaUis, ed. (New York

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for the Arts, 1991), 148. 9. William Saunders, editor of Harvard Design Magazine, and Globalization of Harvard Square," MS "Is Up-Scale a Downer? The Gentrification for Boston Globe editorial handed to the author in April 2000. December 24, 10. Paul Rauber. East Bay Express. 1 1 .American Indian Contemporary Arts

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San FranCD-ROM produced by Chris Carlsson and mentioned in Lucy Lippard's On the Beaten Track. cisco in Francisco, 13. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City 32. Brian Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition: The Making of San Francisco's Ethnic and Nonconformist Communities (Berkeley: University of California Press

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, and various stories in the San Francisco Chronicle, includ- A19. Carol Lloyd: "I'm the enemy! At a meeting of San Franciscans trying to stop gentrification, ize that I'm the Internet zine. yuppie scum that's ruining my neighborhood!" October 29, She took up the same sidetracking arguments online) piece

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places

by Sharon Zukin  · 1 Dec 2009  · 415pp  · 119,277 words

flow of origins and new beginnings that continually wash over the city’s shores—the ebb and flow of economic growth, immigration, and, most recently, gentrification. Just before the crisis broke, New Yorkers were complaining about their disenchantment with the city. Too many favorite landmarks had disappeared, replaced by faceless towers

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every wild inspiration and kept our work on track; of the informal research group of graduate students who worked faithfully with me on boutiques and gentrification in Harlem and Williamsburg, including, besides Valerie, Peter Frase, Danielle Jackson, Tim Recuber, and Abraham Walker; and of Kathleen Dunn, who carried out insightful

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Bowery transformed from Skid Row to a boulevard of boutique hotels, Harlem with cafés, Williamsburg with condos on the waterfront. We often call these changes gentrification because of the movement of rich, well-educated folks, the gentry, into lower-class neighborhoods, and the higher property values that follow them, transforming

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the merely affluent upper middle class sell their nicely restored houses and apartments to the superrich. The British geographer Loretta Lees calls this process “super-gentrification.” But when one neighborhood after another goes upscale and new residents are not just fixing up old houses and lofts but also moving into newly

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minimized their potential as both physical and symbolic barriers to upscaling, while reducing the potential power of the poor—in terms of numbers—to oppose gentrification. A third change concerned gentrifiers such as Jane Jacobs herself. While they increased in numbers, they developed into an influential political force and, less

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of origins—by loosening the authentic self and bonding with the poor and underprivileged—opened a new beginning for urban redevelopment in the 1970s, alongside gentrification and gay and lesbian communities.19 The allure of newly hip neighborhoods spread through the power of alternative media. Years before “edgy” became another

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organic, … unique.” To the use-values of longtime residents and the exchange-values of real estate developers, bohemians and gentrifiers add aesthetic values.28 Although gentrification was just beginning in the United States and England when Jacobs wrote Death and Life and still lacked an American name, Herbert Gans had some

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because city dwellers are increasingly concerned with making their way between the promise of creation and the threat of annihilation, whether by urban renewal or gentrification, by warfare or ecological disaster. In the following chapters I show how origins and new beginnings create a sense of authenticity in both “uncommon”

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a residential influx of people with money, and, finally, the building of new luxury apartments with extravagant rents. It sounds like a typical process of gentrification. In this case, though, down and dirty hipster culture, rather than a sanitized version of entertainment, has produced a new kind of authenticity. Like most

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economic capital of Williamsburg’s new entrepreneurs reinvented the community as a new terroir for indie music, alternative art, and trendy restaurant cuisine. Together with gentrification in other neighborhoods, this remade Brooklyn’s image as well. Cool cultural production created a new, ethnically white, cosmopolitan image of Brooklyn centered on the

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three creative neighborhoods—Williamsburg, Park Slope, and Dumbo—that represent a new, more affluent, and more aesthetically attuned “urban village.”36 Most people call this gentrification. But that is too narrow a term to describe the demographic and economic changes that have reshaped both Brooklyn’s physical fabric and its reputation

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neighborhoods where they had never gone before. Race used to be considered a barrier to these changes. The recent whitening of Brooklyn, though, has expanded gentrification into working-class black neighborhoods while new immigrants as well as white gentrifiers have made other areas into an ethnic mosaic. If racial barriers still

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hold back gentrification anywhere, however, we would surely see their effects in Harlem, “the capital of black America.” The historical connection between race and place should be

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through the streets became a risky matter for visitors and residents alike.19 For all these reasons experts believed that Harlem would prove immune to gentrification. White homeowners, who made up the largest portion of “urban pioneers” in all American cities, were reluctant to settle in poor black neighborhoods. Most

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affluent black middle class, a potentially significant agent of change that would be attracted to Harlem’s stately townhouses and cultural authenticity and could anchor gentrification. Little by little, though, a new black middle class holding professional, financial, and media jobs began to buy the cheap, dilapidated, but still stately houses

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was cosponsored by a powerful insider as well: the Abyssinian Development Corporation.32 Though most residents welcomed new shopping opportunities, some expressed discontent that commercial gentrification was destroying Harlem’s authenticity as a place for low-income black residents. “At a June [2002] town hall meeting at the Schomberg Center for

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screamed: ‘Where the hell are the politicians?’” The changing face of 125th Street, in these residents’ view, was unmistakably connected with higher rents and residential gentrification. They sensed that upscale stores would bring about their own displacement.33 But UMEZ continued trying to reshape the retail landscape. In 1995 only 3

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real estate promotion, articles in the black-oriented Amsterdam News expose dramatically rising property taxes, difficulties in selling dilapidated homes, and rapid residential and commercial gentrification, with black tenants and shopkeepers being displaced by speculators, both black and white. The Amsterdam News expresses both the community’s pride in members of

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“Sweetz” recommends Harlem, though, others jump in, strongly denying that Harlem is “middle class.” According to Sweetz, Harlem “is getting pricey and a lot of gentrification [is] taking place!” But “Hustla718” (718 is the telephone area code for Brooklyn and Queens) immediately contradicts him: “Hahaha! Please tell me your kidding. [Stuyvesant

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expressing appreciation for African-American heritage, they usually prefer Settepani to a chicken shack. These consumption preferences point to a significant black constituency for more gentrification.49 Blacks’ ambivalence about Harlem resonates with larger social questions about black cultural diversity. In a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, more than

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revival. Despite the influx of young people, or “studentification,” longtime residents felt they benefited from this kind of upscaling. Neither did residents complain about residential gentrification. Because new apartment houses took the place of factories and other commercial buildings, some of which were already partly empty, few residents were displaced. Moreover

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the bright lights of either commercial or residential redevelopment.1 The city government has never seriously pursued new, green manufacturers that could locate here, and gentrification has been limited. The homes are too small, the area is too far from mass transit, there are environmental nasty spots like a waste transfer

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Health Department inspection and returned to their location at the ball fields.17 Some vendors think the growing number of white customers reflects the expanding gentrification of Brooklyn neighborhoods, including Red Hook. But it also reflects the vendors’ growing media presence, especially in the food blogs and wikis that began

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1970s landlords, banks, and the city government had not walked away from working-class and lower-middle-class neighborhoods. During the 1990s, when prospects of gentrification made these neighborhoods more interesting to investors, the Giuliani administration pushed to replace the gardens with new housing development. Developers were coming up with new

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auctions provided a target for attacking Giuliani, who was already disliked for his rough approach to civil liberties, confrontations with liberal opponents, and support of gentrification.11 College-educated social and environmental activists used the creative tactics of street theater to dramatize their defense of the gardens. In 1997 two hundred

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symbols of Gaia, the earth mother, represented nostalgia for a different utopia, one not tied to a specific homeland. As time went by, though, and gentrification expanded, the numbers of Puerto Rican gardeners declined. Gentrifiers’ social and aesthetic values gradually became more pronounced in the gardens’ use and design; casitas disappeared

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or several neighbors living in the same building nearby, they cannot claim to represent an entire community. Changing demographics also create problems, not just with gentrification but with new immigrants arriving from other regions of the world with different traditions. In East New York African American and Caribbean community gardeners now

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city’s chronic need for funds drove New York’s elected officials to embrace an entrepreneurial approach. Not only did Mayors Koch and Giuliani welcome gentrification as an important step toward private sector reinvestment in formerly “blighted” neighborhoods, but they also offered up the public space of streets and parks

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of the gardeners’ common origins gave their gardens life and opened the way to using public space to express ethnic identity. But with immigration and gentrification continuing to change local demographics, this form of authenticity is hard to maintain. Community gardens need to create roots for all newcomers and develop an

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to the dark ghetto, from one point of view, and forced removal of the poor or ethnic succession in reverse, from another. Calling these changes “gentrification” minimizes and oversimplifies the collective investment that is at stake. A lot of organized effort has gone into shaping the transformations we see. Real estate

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. For the past thirty years many big-city mayors have taken their cue from market-oriented administrations in national government and the unanticipated success of gentrification. Their priority was “making markets,” as the entrepreneurial slogan puts it, rather than helping poor people and small businesses to stay in place or

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, 1962); Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). 13. Suleiman Osman, “The Birth of Postmodern New York: Gentrification, Postindustrialization and Race in South Brooklyn, 1950–1980,” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2006; Walter Firey, “Sentiment and Symbolism as Ecological Variables,” American Sociological Review 10

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preservationists. “Social Preservationists and the Quest for Authentic Community,” City and Community 3, no. 2 (2004): 125–56. 14. The aesthetic and political complexity of gentrification in London in the 1970s is beautifully evoked by Patrick Wright in On Living in an Old Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Richard Florida

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David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), p. 83, emphasis added. Also see David Ley, “Artists, Aestheticization and the Field of Gentrification,” Urban Studies 40 (2003): 2527–44; Mike Featherstone, “The Aestheticization of Everyday Life,” in Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1991), pp. 65–82. 29

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. James Agee, Brooklyn Is: Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes (1939; New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); Suleiman Osman, “The Birth of Postmodern New York: Gentrification, Postindustrialization, and Race in South Brooklyn, 1950–1980,” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2006. 4. Betty Smith, “Why Brooklyn Is That Way,” New York Times, December

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12, 1943. 5. Rexer, “Brooklyn, Borough of Writers.” This 1983 interview with Paula Fox suggests a much more settled, optimistic view of gentrification than she depicted in her novel Desperate Characters (New York: Norton, 1970). See Osman, “Birth of Postmodern New York.” By the 1980s Brooklyn Heights and

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mainly white; Bedford-Stuyvesant and Fort Greene were declining and mainly black. On nearby Clinton Hill, see Lance Freeman, There Goes the ‘Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); on Boerum Hill, Jonathon Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude (New York: Doubleday, 2003). 6. Interview

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Susser, Norman Street: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Winifred Curran, “‘From the Frying Pan to the Oven’: Gentrification and the Experience of Industrial Displacement in Williamsburg, Brooklyn,” Urban Studies 44 (2007): 1427–40; also see interviews in Made in Brooklyn, a documentary film

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“The Births of the Cool,” New York Times, May 19, 2002; Joyce Ketterer, “L Café,” www.11211magazine.com, 3, no. 1 (2002). 20. Greg Sargent, “Gentrification’s Foamy First Wave,” New York, May 10, 2006; Steve Hindy, cofounder, Brooklyn Brewery, personal communication, April 2007. 21. www.brooklynindustries.com; Lexy Funk, talk

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at Science, Industry, and Business Library, New York Public Library, February 2007; Peter Geoghegan, personal communication, June 2006. 22. Jason Patch, “The Embedded Landscape of Gentrification,” Visual Studies 19 (2004): 169–86; Jay Walljasper and Daniel Kraker, “Hip Hot Spots: The 15 Hippest Places to Live,” Utne Reader, November–December 1997

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“authenticity,” such as dark skin, with a softer, more subjective performance of racial identity, tied to intention, that he calls “sincerity.” In her study of gentrification, Harlem between Heaven and Hell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), the anthropologist Monique Taylor considers how authenticity is represented in Harlem by contrasting “market

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Real Estate; Historic District Is Undergoing Transformation,” Washington Post, March 13, 2005. 46. On an especially fraught discussion thread on www.brownstoner.com, about the gentrification of mixed-income black neighborhoods in Brooklyn, see Adam Sternbergh, “The What You Are Afraid Of: A Mischievous Online Bogeyman Is Haunting the Dreams of

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Domino Effect, Another Park Cracks Down,” New York Times, June 12, 1994. For a contrasting, highly critical view, see Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996). 31. Gregory Squires, ed., Unequal Partnerships: The Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment in Postwar America (New Brunswick

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, 69, 78, 83 redevelopment. See urban redevelopment Red Hook community farm, 160, 208 consumer culture’s effect on, 189–90 film depictions of, 253n.31 gentrification of, 178, 184, 189, 191 and globalization, 191 industrial roots, 165, 168, 169, 191 pool renovation, 173–74 public housing, 165, 168, 253n.31

Big Capital: Who Is London For?

by Anna Minton  · 31 May 2017  · 169pp  · 52,744 words

, from Bristol to Manchester and Margate to Hastings. This has led to a constant hum of debate about the impacts of that much misunderstood term ‘gentrification’. But this isn’t gentrification, it’s another phenomenon entirely. The flood of global capital is being allowed to reconfigure the country

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. ‘Gentrification’ is one of those terms, rather like ‘affordable housing’, that lost its real meaning long ago. It was first coined in 1964 by the sociologist

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desirable Victorian residences. ‘One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes … Once this process of “gentrification” starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character

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of the district is changed,’ she wrote. Fifteen years ago the academic Loretta Lees wrote about ‘super gentrification’ to describe the impact of the new class of finance professionals in New York and parts of London such as Barnsbury and Notting Hill Gate

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. Although it has always been a contested term, ‘gentrification’ adopted positive connotations associated with improving areas. But the speed of capital flows into places between the 1960s and the early 2000s bears no comparison

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on one of the most prestigious roads in Notting Hill. She moved in twenty-two years ago as part of an earlier wave of ‘super gentrification’20 characterized by the arrival of very wealthy professionals working in the City of London. ‘We were the generation of bankers who pushed out the

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by long-term resident and Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan as ‘the only place in all of London and the south-east to remain impervious to gentrification’, is starting to see the usual suspects springing up – hipster cafés, delis and a vintage-style tea room. The changes in all these places will

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as the growing number of activists and campaigners were concerned. In 2008, Lendlease were named lead developers. The council’s promise of managed but ‘inclusive gentrification’14 soon fell apart as barely any of the promised new homes were built by the time the majority moved out. As the estate emptied

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redeveloping estates – is driven by American academic Neil Smith’s concept of the ‘rent gap’, which he developed as a different way of looking at gentrification. The model favoured since the 1970s maintained that the middle classes moved back to the post-industrial city attracted by new economic opportunities and lifestyle

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played by central and local government in estate regeneration, for many academics the population shifts which result from it are no longer known as ‘gentrification’, but ‘state-led gentrification’. For those at the sharp end, even this change in terminology fails to define it; at an event I attended on the housing

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crisis in 2016, one member of the audience after another got up to say that the term ‘gentrification’ no longer covered what was happening: ‘It’s the wrong terminology for a state-sponsored demolition programme,’ one said. ‘It’s a positive term for

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and a lot of them are benefit claimants, or on drugs, or worse’. There is a symbiotic relationship between the deliberate attempts of state-led gentrification to increase land and property prices – with the consequent change in social composition of the area – and a casual, everyday discrimination against people on low

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Forest Gate, which he described as ‘the new Hackney’. ‘This is an area undergoing the most dramatic change – the council doesn’t use the term “gentrification”, they use the term “regeneration”,’ he said as we strolled down a pleasant high street in the sunshine, looking up at Victorian façades renovated by

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in South London in a process that has long been credited with maintaining diversity in cities while also unwittingly kick-starting a slower process of gentrification in those areas. But in 2013 legislation was passed which made squatting in residential buildings illegal, and property guardianship can be seen as an attempt

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to co-opt the perceived desirable elements of squatting by artists in a blatant bid to accelerate gentrification. At the same time, it is a highly lucrative, unregulated business, and guardians, who have no property rights, often have to put up with poor

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.fn1 In the US, Right to the City is also the name of an influential campaign movement which emerged in 2007 as a response to gentrification, aiming to halt the displacement from communities of people on lower incomes. Now a global movement, the concept was included for the first time in

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the legislation, political declarations and charters of national and local governments. As such it represented a very significant victory for civil society groups battling against gentrification, repossessions, the privatization of public space and the criminalization of homelessness.fn2 Today, the right to the city is an intellectual idea, campaign slogan, political

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other German states, including Hamburg and Bavaria, have followed suit.13 Imagine that happening in London, where Sadiq Khan’s main intervention with regards to gentrification is to commission a research report. In Berlin thirty-three districts have been designated ‘urban conservation areas’ where expensive redevelopments are banned, and in 2016

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-development-rights/ 19. Shaxson, Nicholas, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World, Vintage, 2012 20. Butler, Tim and Lees, Loretta, ‘Super-gentrification in Barnsbury, London: globalization and gentrifying global elites at the neighbourhood level’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 31, Issue 4, pp. 467

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Council, 2004. Available to view at: http://heygatewashome.org/displacement.html 6. Loretta Lees, Just Space and Southwark Notes Archive Group, ‘Staying Put: An Anti-Gentrification Handbook for Council Estates in London’, London Tenants Federation, 2014 7. Analysis of Freedom of Information requests, Heygatewashome.org, http://heygatewashome.org/displacement.html 8

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10. ‘Knock It Down or Do It Up?’ 11. Lees, Loretta, Slater, Tom and Wyly, Elvin, Gentrification, Routledge, 2008 12. Lees, ‘The urban injustices of New Labour’s “urban renewal” ’ 13. Lees, Slater and Wyly, Gentrification 14. Minton, ‘Scaring the living daylights’ 15. Moore, Keith, ‘Muggers’ “paradise”, the Heygate Estate is demolished

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, Remaking London 24. Allen, Kate and Pickard, Jim, ‘London councils urged to demolish and redevelop council estates’, Financial Times, 22 March 2015 25. Smith, Neil, ‘Gentrification and the rent gap’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 77 (3), pp. 462–5, 1987 26. Watt, Paul, ‘ “It’s not for

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us”: regeneration, the 2012 Olympics and the gentrification of East London’, City, Vol. 17 (1), pp. 99–118, 2013 27. ‘Homes for Londoners. Draft Good Practice Guide to Estate Regeneration’, Mayor of London

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council estate: the case of Cressingham Gardens’, City Vol. 20 (2), pp. 287–91, 2016 40. Chakrabortty, Aditya and Robinson-Tillett, Sophie, ‘The truth about gentrification: regeneration or con trick?’, Guardian, 18 May 2014 4. FROM BRICKS TO BENEFITS 1. Watt, Paul, ‘A nomadic war machine in the metropolis. Encountering London

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Knowledge Exchange blog, 6 May 2016, https://theknowledgeexchangeblog.com/2016/05/06/rent-controls-lessons-from-berlin/ 14. Chazan, Guy, ‘Germany: Berlin’s war on gentrification’, Financial Times, 10 October 2016 15. ‘Land Value Taxation’, House of Commons Library, 17 November 2014 Acknowledgements My first thanks go to the 1851 Royal

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the Aylesbury Estate and was the first to provide a forensic examination of the unfolding scandal. Loretta is now leading an ESRC-funded study into gentrification, displacement and council estate renewal which is certain to keep this issue on the agenda. Roger Burrows, professor of cities at Newcastle University’s School

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities

by Alain Bertaud  · 9 Nov 2018  · 769pp  · 169,096 words

could possibly be aware of the change in demand, such as global macroeconomic events, shifts in consumer demand and therefore industrial production, or even rapid gentrification. In cities, markets create new types of land use and make others obsolete. Marx’s observation in his Communist Manifesto that markets produced “everlasting uncertainty

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case of the Bangladeshi migrants, they outbid their more affluent neighbors by consuming less floor space than the existing residents. It is the opposite of gentrification. While the city planning department claims social inclusion (i.e., neighborhoods with mixed household incomes) as its objective, it prevents the emergence of mixed-income

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will then become a trickle up. Trickle up means that housing units previously affordable to lower-income households are being bought by upper-income groups (gentrification). This happens quite often in government-subsidized housing when the overall housing market is heavily constrained by land use regulations or the lack of infrastructure

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change, and the housing stock will be transformed by demolition, reconstruction, and extension into new greenfield development. Neighborhoods rarely remain static; they are subject to gentrification or its opposite: degentrification. In general, when incomes are increasing rapidly, as in Shanghai in the 2000s, higher-income groups tend to move toward newly

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pricey hotels. The cycle between degentrification and regentrification lasted about 50 years. Most cities’ ancient neighborhoods have similar stories with longer or shorter cycles between gentrification, degentrification, and regentrification—for instance, the West Village in New York, the Marais in Paris, and Soho in London. The main lesson to draw from

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of the streets) prevents any large displacement of the poor from the best-located kampungs. The low road standards are the best guarantee against massive gentrification. Some households that have reached sufficiently high incomes are likely to leave the kampung and move into formal development neighborhoods. This movement creates vacancies in

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were renting for US$750 per month in 2014. The scarcity, combined with the environmental quality, induced by regulations has created a continuous process of gentrification. Traditionally, the arrondissements5 located in the western and southern parts of the city were considered bourgeois, while the arrondissements to the east and north were

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bourgeois. The distinction is now between type of bourgeoisie: “old bourgeois” like the sixteenth arrondissement or “bourgeois-bohemian” like the nineteenth or twentieth. This massive gentrification is a direct result of the land use regulations that restrict the construction of additional floor space while making Paris more attractive. Middle- and low

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suburbs outside the municipal boundary, limiting their access to transportation and jobs in the city center. The municipality of Paris is attempting to slow down gentrification by purchasing apartments in old buildings and renting them below their market value to middle-income households. However, the impact of such rearguard action against

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gentrification is very limited because of its high cost. The restrictions on building height in Paris have therefore contributed to shaping the city in a way

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the benefits that are mostly aesthetic. Every Parisian is aware of these nonquantifiable benefits and, so far, is willing to pay their costs. However, the gentrification that progressively will prevent low- and middle-income households from living in the municipal boundary is a much more serious social problem. No amount of

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social housing with below-market rents, as promoted by the municipality, could reverse meaningfully the gentrification trend. In this book, I have often compared markets versus design. In Paris, the opposition between the two concepts is clear. There is a very

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, 392n17 affordability in, 268–271, 270f, 272f, 273–275, 275f government in, 300 GDP. See Gross domestic product General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), 156, 389n10 Gentrification, 246–247 Germany, 203–204, 204f GHG emissions. See Greenhouse gas emissions Gibrat’s law, 21–22 Giuliano, G., 152–153 Glaeser, Edward, 7, 18

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(Oregon), 344, 388n24 Poverty affordability and, 236–239, 238f, 287–288 culture of, 256–257, 296–300 economics of, 242–243 FAR and, 284–285 gentrification and, 246–247 for government, 290–292, 291f homeless population in, 302 in informal settlements, 257 infrastructure and, 260 in New York, 287–288 plot

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

by Joel Kotkin  · 11 May 2020  · 393pp  · 91,257 words

delayed that their IQs will never exceed 90.28 This portends a future as something like the Gammas and Epsilons of Brave New World. The Gentrification of the Left In developed nations, as the middle classes are being proletarianized and the working classes fall further behind, the longstanding alliance between the

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immigrants.39 Europe’s multicultural capital, London, by some measures now has a higher crime rate than New York, although fewer homicides.40 Densification and Gentrification The social fabric of big cities is being further frayed by efforts to redesign the urban landscape on an upscale model. In many cities, a

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driving blacks out, meaning black population decline is de facto public policy.44 This is part of a process that has come to be called gentrification, a term whose origins lie in mid-1960s London.45 At first it was unplanned, but over time it became a matter of design to

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similar—often with the same repetitive streetscape, shops, and even similar people—in major cities throughout the high-income world.47 For many people, this gentrification means a worsening quality of life. In fact, the urban world now being fashioned in London does not resemble “the social democracy imagined after the

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living in the cities outside the “glamour zone” feel trapped—victims of an urban system that doesn’t provide opportunity for them. A backlash against gentrification has appeared in many cities, such as Ontario, Berlin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New Orleans.59 Tactics for repelling gentrifiers have included vandalism

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sixth chapter, drew upon work done for the Urban Reform Institute, formerly the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, based in Houston. Our work on alternatives to gentrification were shaped in large part by Wendell Cox, Pete Saunders, Karla del Rio Lopez, and Cullum Clark, now at the Bush Center in Dallas. I

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, “Chicago’s Awful Divide,” Atlantic, March 28, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/chicago-segregation-poverty/556649/; Center for Opportunity Urbanism, Beyond Gentrification: Towards More Equitable Urban Growth, https://opportunityurbanism.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Toward-More-Equitable-Urban-Growth.pdf. 8 Linda Lutton, “The Middle Class

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/; Kevin Baker, “The Death of a Once Great City,” Harper’s, July 2018, https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrification/?ex_cid=SigDig. 25 Francesco Andreoli and Eugenio Peluso, “So close yet so unequal: Reconsidering spatial inequality in U.S. cities,” Dipartimento di Economia e

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-franciscos-black-population-is-less-than-5-percent-exodus-has-been-steady. 30 Kathleen Maclay, “More gentrification, displacement in Bay Area forecast,” Berkeley News, August 24, 2015, https://news.berkeley.edu/2015/08/24/more-gentrification-displacement-in-bay-area-forecast/; Sam Levin, “‘Largest-ever’ Silicon Valley eviction to displace hundreds of

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19, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-19/why-london-has-more-crime-than-new-york. 41 Center for Opportunity Urbanism, Beyond Gentrification: Towards More Equitable Growth, January 2019, https://opportunityurbanism.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Toward-More-Equitable-Urban-Growth.pdf. 42 Jane Jacobs, Dark Age

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-DISINVESTMENT-1940%E2%80%932000.pdf; NYU Furman Center, “Focus on Gentrification” June 9, 2016, http://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/Part_1_Gentrification_SOCin2015_9JUNE2016.pdf; Jonathan Wynn and Andrew Deener, “Gentrification? Bring It,” The Conversation, October 11, 2017, https://theconversation.com/gentrification-bring-it-82107. 47 Kevin Baker, “The Death of a Once

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Great City,” Harper’s, July 2018, https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrification/; Theodore Dalrymple, “The Architect as Totalitarian,” City Journal, Autumn 2009, https://www.city-journal.org/html/architect-totalitarian-13246.html; Claire Berlinski, “The Architectural Sacking

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Golden State,” Center for Demographics and Policy, May 5, 2017, http://centerforcaliforniarealestate.org/publications/Kotkin-Fading-Dream-printable.pdf. 54 Center for Opportunity Urbanism, Beyond Gentrification. 55 John Aidan Byrne, “The Exodus of New York City’s endangered middle class,” New York Post, December 22, 2018, https://nypost.com/2018/12

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5, 2013, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2013/12/05/rich-neighborhood-poor-neighborhood-how-segregation-threatens-social-mobility/. 59 Helen Raleigh, “Gentrification Provokes a Cofee Clash in Denver’s Five Points,” Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles

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/gentrification-provokes-a-coffee-clash-in-denvers-five-points-1513983831; Cameron McWhirter, “Atlanta’s Growing Pains Are Getting Worse,” Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2018, https://

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www.wsj.com/articles/atlantas-growing-pains-are-getting-worse-1535707800; Richard Campanella, “Gentrification and Its Discontents: Notes From New Orleans,” New Geography, February 28, 2013, http://www.newgeography.com/content/003526-gentrification-and-its-discontents-notes-new-orleans; “Google abandons Berlin base after two years of resistance,” Guardian

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, October 24, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/24/google-abandons-berlin-base-after-two-years-of-resistance; Chantal Braganza, “Why opponents of gentrification have taken to the streets of Hamilton,” TVO, April 5, 2018, https://tvo.org/article/current-afairs/why-opponents-of

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-gentrification-have-taken-to-the-streets-of-hamilton; David Streitfeld, “Protesters Block Google Buses in San Francisco, Citing ‘Techsploitation,’” New York Times, May 31, 2018, https://

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/la-me-ln-oakland-construction-ires-20170710-story.html; “Is Boyle Heights Coffee Shop Vandalism An Anti-Gentrification Message?” CBS Los Angeles, July 19, 2017, https://losangeles. cbslocal.com/2017/07/19/boyle-heights-vandalism-gentrification/. 61 Rakesh Kochhar, “The American middle class is stable in size, but losing ground financially to

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rules in; pessimism in Austria automation, baby boomers Ball, John Beard, Charles A. Beard, Mary R. Beijing; birth rates in; class division in; as “full”; gentrification in Belgium Bell, Daniel: on knowledge class; on technological control Bellow, Saul Benedict, Ruth Berry, Wendell Bezos, Jeff Bing, Stanley birth rates; in East Asia

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Friedman, Thomas Fukuyama, Francis Future Shock (Toffler) Galbraith, James Galbraith, John Kenneth García Martínez, Antonio Garreau, Joel Gates, Bill Gates Foundation Generation X Generation Z gentrification: of left; of urban core George, Stefan Germany: Berlin; demographics of; energy costs in; Green Party; inequality in; migrant influx in; Peasants’ Rebellion (1525); Social

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us

by Joel Kotkin  · 11 Apr 2016  · 565pp  · 122,605 words

a city that is increasingly divided by class and provides limited options for upward mobility. In the past decade, for example, there has been considerable gentrification around Chicago’s lakefront. But during this period, Chicago’s middle class has declined precipitously. At the same time, despite all the talk about “the

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what it was in 1970.99 In Portland, the nation’s whitest major city, African Americans are being driven out of the urban core by gentrification, partly supported by city funding.100 Similar phenomena can be seen in Seattle101 and Boston,102 where long-existing black communities are gradually disappearing.103

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minorities,” Markham is now widely considered the most diverse city in Canada. As in the United States, this trend has been accelerated by the rapid gentrification of the city’s inner core, which has become both more expensive and denser as apartments have replaced the more preferred single-family house.121

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Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire

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Sixty Days and Counting

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Pattern Recognition

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by David Else  · 14 Oct 2010

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After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine

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The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

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9Tail Fox

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The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021

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A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

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Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards: Memoirs of a Rock 'N' Roll Survivor

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Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation

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The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

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