From ... in Economics History Managed Decline — Mar 17, 2025

Housing justice beyond consumerism – an excerpt from Defying Displacement

The following is an excerpt adapted from Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War (IAS/AK Press, 2024). Defining displacement Gentrification is commonly understood as consumption: who chooses to rent or purchase which housin

The following is an excerpt adapted from Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War (IAS/AK Press, 2024).

Defining displacement

Gentrification is commonly understood as consumption: who chooses to rent or purchase which housing unit. From this perspective we can ask many questions: why white people wish to live in “gritty” neighborhoods, or why they have the opposite attitudes of their parents and grandparents whose white flight bankrupted the cities they abandoned for segregated suburbs. We can debate whether the true villains in the story of neighborhood displacement are the punks and artists, or the yuppies, or the coffee shop patrons, or all white people who move into neighborhoods of color, or any people at all who move into neighborhoods where rents are on the rise. We might wonder at the confluence of factors which make a specific neighborhood appealing for different suspects at different times. And we can play the parlor game of deciding to what degree someone is or is not a gentrifier based on complex tabulations of identities, oppressions, and experiences.

What we cannot do is move beyond the liberal middle-class sport of achieving moral righteousness through carefully curated consumption: the ethical consumerism which pretends to change the world through the thoughtful selection of the correct can from the grocery store shelves. Analyzing gentrification exclusively through the critique of individual consumer preferences elides the socio-economic and political structures within which these preferences prevail. The scope of the anti-gentrification struggle is reduced to the moral turpitude within a new resident’s soul. And all the while, business districts are planned, tax abatements unveiled, redevelopment schemes dreamed up, corporate and university campuses expanded, neighborhoods transformed, and communities destroyed.

Producing poverty

Far from being an automatic or inevitable process, gentrification is “purposeful and produced.” In the mid-twentieth century, the US government began a concerted project of racial displacement from urban areas. “Our categorical imperative is action to clear the slums,” said Robert Moses, the hugely influential urban planner who masterminded public works projects in New York City for decades. Described by a biographer as “the most racist human being I had ever really encountered,” the New York City Planning Commissioner and chairman of the Slum Clearance Committee would continue: “We can’t let minorities dictate that this century-old chore will be put off another generation or finally abandoned.”

Deindustrialization and white flight drained municipal coffers as elites invested in a repressive War on Drugs. Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper point out that this might more accurately be described as a War on Neighborhoods, with working-class Black urban communities framed by politicians as particular dangers to be subdued. After withdrawing services and protection to attack urban neighborhoods of color, cities now court professional workers and their employers to build out their tax bases. The further elimination or privatization of social services goes hand-in-hand with increased investment in policing and infrastructure to smooth the process of displacement and attract capital for “redevelopment.” The residents who ultimately benefit from neighborhood change are not the first wave of white punks or artists but the professionals who inhabit the fully gentrified neighborhood.

“When Microsoft, Boeing, and other large corporations started to build in Seattle, they wanted to move their mostly white employees into these areas. They worked with banks and politicians to essentially pressure people into selling,” Dezmond Goff of Seattle’s Black Frontline Movement told me. “You have a lot of people who lost homes through both predatory loans and harassment but also people who now can’t participate because they have been incarcerated.”

Picture on Instagram logo on a building

Photo by Baruch Pi on Unsplash.

New directions

By itself, the fact that financial institutions have become the predominant players in the neoliberal housing market isn’t enough to explain why gentrification takes place in modern cities. In the settler colonial imperial heartland, the construction, movement, and survival of oppressed communities has always been contingent on their utility to capitalist interests. The communities displaced today have been subjected to double or triple displacements long before: from the horrors of the Middle Passage to the killing fields of the US-sponsored Dirty Wars to the fatal nighttime cold of the Sonoran Desert. The history of the United States could be written as the story of colonial dispossession and relocation for profit, but what is emerging today is a new pattern of urban dispersal. Hedge funds or institutional landlords concerned only with their own wealth could choose to invest in vast slums or modest homes for the lower-middle class. In the gentrifying city, what they find most profitable is to bet on slum clearance and invest in condominiums for the rich. The patterns of impoverishment and displacement are old, the directionality of urban displacement is new.

“So to answer the question of why gentrification happens,” writes P.E. Moskowitz, “we have to answer the question of why the city became profitable to gentrify.”

For comparison, I might harbor a deep-seated desire to own a Beverly Hills mansion. Books could be written about how I acquired such an inclination, about the social structures that induce such desires, or about what this preference says about me or the society in which I live. They would remain hypothetical texts since my desire to live in such a mansion would not change my inability to purchase one. It is a consumption preference I will never fulfill.

Only the complete transformation of a poor neighborhood creates the living standards, amenities, and neighbors that professional-class newcomers desire. Unlike my hypothetical mansion aspirations, these are desires they do fulfill, not only one-by-one but in cities across the world. Regardless of any person’s desire to live in an expensive condominium at a certain address, there is the matter of being paid enough to afford it. What has shifted over the years is not simply the living preferences of white Americans but the relative economic centrality of two class fractions: one segment paid enough to gentrify, another paid so little that they are priced out. A highly educated, largely white segment of working people are now paid astronomical wages while the remains of the urban industrial working class, previously crucial to capitalist profits, are now of so little importance that the utter destruction of their communities is a lucrative venture. To understand this process in rich nations’ richest cities, to situate it within the context of a broad economic transition in global capitalism, and to grasp how thoroughly this change must unsettle our inherited strategies of how to uproot this world, we must look at gentrification not only from the perspective of consumption but production, as well. The struggles around urban displacement are some of the clearest fractures emerging from what has been called the New Economy, the Knowledge Economy, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution, an economic arrangement within contemporary capitalism that we might as easily name the Gentrification Economy.

Andrew has appeared on a recent episode of The Response Podcast, “Resisting gentrification and displacement.”

This article originally appeared on Shareable.net.

Read the full article at the original website

References:

Search Results

Bookmarks

Housing justice beyond consumerism – an excerpt from Defying Displacement

Defining displacement

Producing poverty

New directions

Search Results

Bookmarks

Defining displacement

Producing poverty

New directions

Subscribe to The Article Feed