You may have noticed by now that things can get a little verbose around here; I tend to gravitate towards big, complicated subjects, as they give me an excuse to run my mouth for much longer and far more often than I ever ought to be allowed to. In an effort to avoid solipsism and to pay deference to the brevity that so often eludes me, I've done what I can to step aside and let others do the talking as we move forward. Given the rather sensitive nature of the subject – gentrification – it's not likely to make one lick of a difference; somebody's going to get offended, no matter what. But it might as well be by someone else's words, not my own. Or at least, as few of them as possible.
Gentrification is messy. It's painful. It's costly. There are so many factors and perspectives to consider, such a large web of tensions and intentions that functions far too readily at the expense of those most ensnared by it. To the poor, mostly black and brown people who populate America's urban centers, even the most well-meaning of gentrifiers often appear like well-manicured Visigoths sacking Rome through top-down development deals, oppressive neighborhood restructuring, and the threat of state violence. Without some drastic new thinking upon the subject, this war of metropolitan attrition promises only to intensify.
Thankfully, the new thinking is out there, and as per usual, it's on the fringes of mainstream thought. Take Gavin Mueller of Jacobin Magazine, for example, who released an article last week entitled “Liberalism And Gentrification.” Mueller makes the case that “gentrification has always been a top-down affair, not a spontaneous hipster influx,” and attempts to explain why a practice once widely considered anathema by progressives has become so widely embraced among those with what he refers to as “liberal, tolerant, cosmopolitan sympathies.”:
"It’s important to understand what’s going on here. A powerful capitalist class of bankers, real-estate developers, and investors is driving gentrification, using a mixture of huge loans (to which only they have access) and government funding to push land values higher.
This leaves [America's] professional class with a choice. If their household income is in the six-figure-range, they can generally secure mortgages in gentrifying neighborhoods...Or they can pay exorbitant rent until they move back to Peoria. Not much of a choice.
Tying up your assets, your middle-class future, in home values does something to people. It alters their interests. It sutures a professional class, of liberal and even progressive beliefs, to the rapacious capitalist expansion into the city...they are aligned materially with reactionary and oppressive city restructuring, pushing them into antagonism with established residents, who do nothing for property values."
Mueller's Catch-22 goes far in explaining how even the most principled members of the gentry are manipulated by moneyed interests into so-called “mopping up operations,” designed to evict people of color in large numbers from urban neighborhoods, and how gentrification is the tip of the spear upon which America's urban poor will be skewered and removed from their neighborhoods. “Forget your fairy tales of urban pioneers bravely staking out territory in the urban hinterlands,” Mueller writes. “At every point, this has been a takeover.”
Gentrification didn't begin in a vacuum; like today's repatriation by the middle class of the country's urban centers, the expatriation was equally systematic, and endemic to America's harrowing and ongoing history of institutionalized racism. Predatory lending practices and rampant real estate speculation have always gone hand in glove with Jim Crow, leading to the rise of the black ghettos in the forties and fifties, a product of so-called “White Flight” away from desegregated urban centers and into racially pure suburban neighborhoods. In a recent segment called “Are We Passing the 'Tipping Point' for Black Habitation in the Cities?", Black Agenda Radio host Glen Ford describes how the trend has been slowly reversing for years, and how after the housing market crash of 2008, a phenomenon described by as “Black Flight” began to occur, as millions of white families began looking to cities as a viable housing alternative once more:
"Ultimately, whites' refusal to share urban space with blacks created an American racial and economic geography unique in the world, in which the black and brown poor resided in hollowed out, shrunken, capital-deprived central cities surrounded by a belt of suburban white wealth, the exact opposite of the historical world model of urban development...Finance capital, corporate muscle, and the political parties that serve them have set in motion the new phenomenon of 'Black Flight' from the cities, and white return. Unlike "White Flight" of the previous era, the current black exodus is mainly involuntary and economic...Today, the question in city after city is: what is the tipping point in black populations? How many upscale, mostly white people does it take to make a neighborhood, and ultimately whole cities like San Francisco unaffordable and downright hostile to black habitation?"
You can listen to the segment, courtesy of
Best Of The Left, by clicking on the link below:
"Are We Passing The Tipping Point For Black Habitation In The Cities?"
As the American dream continues to collapse upon itself, gentrification will continue to spread, and rapidly. Without being able to shift policy discourse away from the frames being set by Mueller's “real estate developers and investors who pull the strings of city policy,” or Ford's “corporate class [who] longed for the centralized amenities that only big cities can provide,” America's urban facelift threatens to do little more than reverse the poles of housing discrimination, turning every suburb into a modern refugee camp, and every stretch of Gotham into Babylon.