Gentrification and the Right to the City

The well-read red has been reading about gentrification, as well as seeing plenty of it.

Despite what we often hear in mainstream media, gentrification is not simply a cultural change in a neighborhood, and not simply a matter of individual choices.  Rather, it involves changes in property ownership driven by structural, economic forces and backed by state power.  As Ronnie Flores notes in Socialist Worker.com, "Gentrification is the result of capitalism, a system characterized by the relentless pursuit of profit." Drawing on the work of  Neil Smith, Flores points out that "When there's a wide enough gap between the current rent in an area and the potential rent that can be made if it were to undergo reinvestment, a project for gentrification is born. This "rent gap" is the mechanism underlying gentrification."

Similarly, Gavin Mueller in Jacobin observes that "Gentrification has always been a top-down affair, not a spontaneous hipster influx, orchestrated by the real estate developers and investors who pull the strings of city policy, with individual home-buyers deployed in mopping up operations."

Focusing on the example of Washington, DC, Mueller points out that
 

The first installment of DC gentrification began as the smoke lifted after the riots following Martin Luther King’s assassination. Large parts of the black areas of the city . . . were burned. With the fear of urban insurrection hanging in the air, property values plummeted, paving the way for local real estate magnates to snap up hugely lucrative portfolios.

Developers succeeded in getting the city government and banks to assist in their purchases, promising community projects, like homeless shelters and hospitals, that they rarely delivered before they flipped the property....

Currently the area’s fortunes are managed by the Downtown DC Business Improvement District [or BID]....

Among their tactics: implementing mandatory fees to price out small businesses; hiring non-union workers to pick up trash and check parking meters; encouraging crackdowns on poor and homeless residents to push them out. The Downtown DC BID was one of the first organizations to raise an alarm about Occupy DC’s encampment.... and ... to insist on a police response throughout the entire occupation....

 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 DC’s professional class with a choice. If their household income is in the six-figure-range, they can generally secure mortgages in gentrifying neighborhoods, buy property, have low-wage workers fix it up for cheap, and [reasonably hope to] ride those property values into a secure position in the middle class. Or they can pay exorbitant rent until they move back to Peoria. Not much of a choice. If they buy, they’re putting everything on the line, albeit a line that, in [DC], has only gone one way in the past decade....
 

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. The people who move to gentrifying areas tend to have liberal, tolerant, cosmopolitan sympathies. But they are aligned materially with reactionary and oppressive city restructuring, pushing them into antagonism with established residents, who do nothing for property values....

This produces racism. Racism isn’t just a bad feeling in your heart, as a liberal believes when she insists that she isn’t at all racist. It’s a force that emerges from the pressures of maintaining one’s own position, and the resentments that spring forth from this process. It produces fear and hatred of the poor for being poor, for having any pretense of being on equal footing with the propertied. It is a hatred for the potential threat to the property values which underpin a tenuous future among the professional middle class: blackness.

This bubbles up into everyday life in all sorts of ways. ...

Mueller describes the discomfort--the rage and fear--shown by a nice white man in response to the noisy black and brown kids in the neighborhood.
 

Young black bodies have been mass culture’s symbol for irrational, savage violence for decades, for centuries. And so the whites fear them, and this fear can manifest as anger, as callousness, as hatred. And yet, Washington’s rate of violent crime against whites is lower than the national average. White skin is quite literally a protection from harm. But it doesn’t insulate your property values. That requires extra vigilance.

Noting that really the teens of color "have much more to fear from the whites living alongside them," Mueller continues,
 

We can leverage state violence against them — we can call the cops. On message boards, police officers urge gentrifiers to report any “suspicious activity,” which includes legal activity such as walking, talking, and standing. Smoking weed in the alley? Call the cops. A group of teenagers talking loudly? Call the cops. Litter? Call the cops, just whatever you do, don’t actually approach people! State repression is the solution to all problems....

The liberal discourse on gentrification has absolutely nothing to say about finance or prison, the two most salient institutions in urban life. Instead, it does what liberal discourse so often does: it buries the structural forces at work and choreographs a dance about individual choice to perform on the grave. We get tiny dramas over church parking lots and bike lanes and [soccer fields]. Gentrification becomes a culture war, a battle over consumer choices: gourmet cupcake shop or fried chicken joint? Can we all live side by side, eating gourmet pickles with our fried fish sandwiches? ....

“What choice do I have?” ask the liberal gentrifiers, if you press them a bit. “This is the only place I can afford to live!” This sums everything up perfectly, puncturing the bubble of individual choices that make up liberal politics.

You have no choice; everything’s been decided ahead of time. If you want the American dream of a middle-class life with a home you own in the city in which you work, you have few other choices than to join the shock troops of the onslaught against the urban poor. Align with big capital and the repressive state in the conquest of the city, and maybe you’ll have enough equity to send your kids to college.

Sure, you may feel a bit of guilt, but when it comes down to it, you’re still calling the cops at the slightest provocation. After all, it’s not just trendy bars and cafes at stake — it’s the yuppies’ privileged position in ruling class administration, one of the dwindling means towards any semblance of economic and social stability in this time of crisis. ...

Marx called the violent expropriation of the poor from their lands “primitive accumulation.”

But as Mueller notes, it is not "a one-time sin, in the distant past"; it "accompanies capitalist development every step of the way, wherever valuable land meets valueless humanity."

Because of this,  David Harvey has suggested calling this process instead "accumulation by dispossession."

Harvey is among those who have taken up the work of Henri Lefebvre, whose 1968 text on The Right to the City has provided a name for movement against the projects of  urban dispossession and neoliberal gentrification.

Harvey notes that

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.

The  World Charter of the Right to the City, that came out of the World Social Forum in 2004, seeks to promote the

just distribution of the benefits and responsibilities resulting from the  urbanization process; fulfillment of the social functions of the city and of property; distribution of urban income; and democratization of access to land and public services for all citizens, especially those with less economic resources and in situations of vulnerability.

In the US, the national  Right to the City Alliance affirms "that everyone, particularly the disenfranchised, not only has a right to the city, but as inhabitants, have a right to shape it, design it, and [put in practice] an urban human rights agenda."

Here in Portland, the Right to the City Coalition  "commits to empowering working class people in Portland’s political process" and promoting a progressive vision different than that of "Portland’s current elected leaders who are primarily responsive to big business."

Their next meeting is Sunday November 9 at 3pm at Concordia University's Library.  Check their website for more, at  righttothecitypdx.org.

[image above by Mark Nerys for Portland Right to the City]