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FIGHTING

GENTRIFICATION

Kvillebäcken, Gothenburg, Sweden. Cover image used by kind permission of Catharina Thörn

Tom Slater

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For David M. Smith, an inspirational teacher

“Our real duty….is not to explain our sorry reality,

but to improve it.”

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“There exists today widespread propaganda which

asserts that socialism is dead. But if to be a socialist is to be a person convinced that the words ‘the common good’

and ‘social justice’ actually mean something; if to be a socialist is to be outraged at the contempt in which millions and millions of people are held by those in power, by ‘market forces’, by international financial

institutions; if to be a socialist is to be a person determined to do everything in his or her power to alleviate these unforgivably degraded lives, then

socialism can never be dead because these aspirations never die.”

Harold Pinter, May 1996.

“Place is necessary for human existence. This goes beyond other needs, such as for food and clothing, and

indeed beyond the physical occupation of space and of a structure thereon. Our place, and sense of geographical space or territory, merges imperceptibly with a broader

sense of identity, of who we are, of position in the general scheme of things. Satisfaction with all this is

central to well-being. ….Those who would take other people’s place should have very good reason, and the moral principle of universalization, expressed in the

question of how they would feel if the positions were reversed, is an appropriate test of whether the reason is

good enough.”

David M. Smith, 1994, p.253, 276.

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Table of Contents here

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Preface “All of us have stories that shape our worldview and lurk behind our scholarship.” Stephen Steinberg (2010: 213).

Emancipatory Gentrification? From Toronto to Glasgow

In the autumn of 2000 I arrived in Toronto as a graduate student to conduct fieldwork on gentrification - the first stage of a comparative research project comparing the causes and effects of the process at the neighbourhood level in Toronto and New York City. The project was guided by a simple and, in retrospect, rather naïve aim: to provide some contextual thickening to some thin speculation that frequent references in the literature to “North American gentrification” might be too broad to capture what was happening on the streets of different cities in Canada and America. Before leaving to begin my fieldwork, I had spent at least a year doing the obligatory graduate student work of reading as much as I possibly could about my chosen research theme. At the time, I felt the literature on gentrification was stuck in a rut. It was dominated by a maddening tautological theoretical and conceptual stalemate, which had left one influential scholar to suggest abandoning research on the process altogether: [T]he more researchers have attempted to pin it down the more burdens the concept has had to carry. Maybe the loss of momentum around gentrification reflects its inability to open up new insights, and maybe it is time to allow it to disintegrate under the weight of these burdens. (Bondi, 1999: 255)

It was easy to sympathise with these words: what was once such a vibrant and politically engaging field of inquiry had almost collapsed into a tedious and soporific debate about whether the causal explanations of Neil Smith or David Ley were more convincing in a certain gentrifying context. It was also clear that a highly cited 1991 survey of the literature (Hamnett, 1991), one that portrayed these two scholars as polar opposites and the de facto representatives of mutually exclusive ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ explanations respectively, had ensured that a generation of scholars saw gentrification in the stark and unhelpful binary terms of production or consumption, supply or demand, structure or agency, economics or culture. We will encounter these explanations as briefly as possible in Chapter 1 of this book, but as Wyly and Hammel (1999: 718) astutely observed at the time I was beginning my doctoral work: “despite attempts to forge a new synthesis, much of the gentrification literature remains balkanised along lines of debate established a generation ago.” After I had versed myself in different theories of gentrification by reading the original contributions several times (rather than simply the divisive treatments of them), I started to get to grips with the literature on gentrification in Canadian cities in general, and on Toronto’s gentrification in particular. On the latter, I discovered that there was one book-length treatment on the topic, written by the sociologist Jon Caulfield (1994). The study, at once rigorous and compellingly written, rightly remains a major reference point for anyone wishing to learn more about the middle class colonisation of central Toronto since the 1970s. But Caulfield’s interpretation of this colonisation was troubling. The book extended arguments he had made in an earlier paper entitled

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‘Gentrification and Desire’ (Caulfield 1989), where gentrification in Toronto was explained as a middle-class reaction to the repressive institutions of suburban life: [C]ity people…express their feelings….where they are able, individually and collectively, to pursue practices eluding the domination of social and cultural structures and constituting new conditions for experience. For the marginal middle class, resettlement of old city neighbourhoods is among these activities. (Caulfield 1989: 624)

In a deliberate riposte to structural Marxist interpretations of gentrification, Caulfield viewed 1970s and 1980s gentrification in Toronto as a ‘critical social practice’, a collective middle-class rejection of the oppressive conformity of suburbia, modernist urban planning and market principles - all part of what became known (and is now often romanticized) as the ‘reform era’ of Canadian urban politics, an attempt by Toronto’s expanding middle-class intelligentsia to create an ‘alternative urban future’ to the city’s post-war modernist development. The gentrifiers of Toronto were seen by Caulfield to be involved in a deliberate operation of resistance to the dominant ideals of suburbia, breaking free from “a routine of placeless space and monofunctional instrumentality” (Caulfield 1989: 624-5). Drawing on the writings of urbanists such as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jonathan Raban and Marcel Rioux, Caulfield outlined the attractions of central city neighbourhoods for the middle classes: Old city places offer difference and freedom, privacy and fantasy, possibilities for carnival . . . . These are not just matters of philosophical abstraction but, in a carnival sense, . . . the force that Benjamin believed was among the most vital stimuli to resistance to domination. ‘A big city is an encyclopaedia of sexual possibility,’ a characterization to be grasped in its wider sense; the city is ‘the place of our meeting with the other. (Caulfield 1989: 625)

For Caulfield, the gentrification of many central Toronto neighbourhoods had consolidated a new ‘postmodern urbanism’ (Mills 1988; Knox 1993; Ley and Mills 1993), where the “resettlement of old city neighbourhoods is not reducible to bourgeois politics but rather is an effort by people, together with their neighbors, to seek some control over their lives.” (Caulfield 1989: 627). Through his portrayal of gentrification as a liberating experience for those involved, Caulfield’s focus was less on critical social practice (words that formed part of the title of the book) and more on ‘emancipatory’ social practice. As Lees (2000) argued, the critical aspects of middle-class resettlement were not as clear as Caulfield’s characterisation of gentrification as a process that unites different people in the central city, creating opportunities for social interaction and tolerance. So the only book-length treatment of Toronto’s gentrification had reached the conclusion that gentrification was a Castells-like “social movement” by the urban middle-classes (Caulfield 1994: 228-9): a deliberate, concerted rejection of the oppressive conformity of suburbia and of modernist urban planning, and the outcome of a desire for the positive encounters that could be achieved in socially diverse central city neighbourhoods. Whilst Caulfield (1994: 201–11) did acknowledge that the early gentrifiers became increasingly concerned about what was happening to their neighbourhoods (and working-class neighbours) as gentrification accelerated and matured, I remember thinking at the time that Caulfield’s portrayal of Toronto’s gentrification probably did not tell the whole story. But nothing prepared me for what I was about to encounter in a year of fieldwork in that city.

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Following the suggestion of another graduate student, I immersed myself in the neighbourhood of South Parkdale, one of the few areas of central Toronto yet to experience intense gentrification, and therefore one of the last bastions of affordable housing in the central city area. It quickly proved to be the ideal observatory for a methodical analysis of capital flows, displacement, and class struggle brought about by neoliberal municipal and provincial policy1. Much of the neighbourhood’s housing stock consisted of large Victorian residences that had been illegally subdivided into tiny apartments known locally as ‘bachelorettes’. These apartments had two rooms, one serving as the living and sleeping space with a kitchen in the corner, the other being a bathroom.2 Many of the occupants of these bachelorettes were people who had been discharged from two nearby psychiatric hospitals in the 1980s under the rhetoric of ‘care in the community’, the language used by the provincial government to justify massive mental health care spending cuts (Dear and Taylor 1982; Simmons 1990). But these bachelorettes also housed new immigrants to Canada – for over three decades South Parkdale, due to the affordability of its housing stock and the existence of social networks amongst those new immigrants, had been a crucial settlement location for people literally with nowhere else to go, as many recent immigrants were political refugees seeking asylum. At the time I began my research, gentrification in South Parkdale was just beginning to gather momentum, for three reasons First, surrounding neighbourhoods had gentrified, and the central city housing market was becoming tighter and tighter, causing middle-class people to look towards areas where affordable and attractive properties could be purchased or rented. Second, the City of Toronto government was attempting to eradicate the significant stigma attached to South Parkdale via a policy of legalising and cleaning up its bachelorette buildings – part of an overt effort to attract middle-class families to live in the district, justified by the language of creating a ‘more balanced community profile’ in a part of the city famous for having a high percentage of single persons living in small rented dwellings. Third, some landlords were taking advantage of the 1998 weakening of tenant protection by the Provincial (Ontario) government3 by making life very difficult for their tenants, with the hope of getting them out of their properties and attracting a wealthier class of tenant, or selling the buildings they owned for a tidy profit. Once I had established the causes of gentrification via a varied panoply of research methods (analysis of official statistics, the scrutiny of policy documents, lengthy interviews with community organisers, government officials, middle-class homeowners and artists, and ethnographic observation of various neighbourhood forums), it struck me as impossible to gain a full understanding of the impact of gentrification on the existing residents of South Parkdale without talking to those low-income tenants living at the bottom of the class structure. With help from people who I encountered (officially, a strategy of ‘snowball sampling’) I managed to make contact with people for whom the gentrification of their neighbourhood was nothing but stressful, worrying, and

1 More complete accounts of gentrification in South Parkdale can be found in Slater (2004a, 2004b, 2005a, 2005b) and Whitzman and Slater (2006). For an elaborate, beautifully crafted 20th century history of the neighbourhood, consult Whitzman (2006). 2 I will not forget one interviewee stating with a curious mix of pride and dismay that he could “stand in the shower and flip pancakes at the same time”! 3 My time in Toronto coincided with the high-water mark of the neoliberal provincial government’s ‘Common Sense Revolution’, which had such disastrous consequences for marginalised urban dwellers in Ontario (Keil, 2002).

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upsetting. Most of these particular interviews were quite harrowing, listening to the stories of socially isolated people struggling to make rent at the same time as they were struggling with debilitating mental health problems for which ‘care in the community’ was a spurious, empty slogan. But one encounter in particular has haunted me ever since, and will all my life. It has shaped to a considerable extent how I view gentrification, and whenever I hear or read pleas to offer a more ‘nuanced’ portrait of the process (taking into account its supposed ‘positives’), it is the first example I think of as I form a critique. On a bitterly cold afternoon in March 2001 I went to meet a young woman, a Tibetan immigrant who arrived in Toronto with her family in 1998 as political refugees. She invited me into her home, a bachelorette apartment that housed her, her husband and their three young children. The place was remarkably tidy and clean given the overcrowding, but there was a pervasive smell of damp in the entire building, and the alarming cracks in the plaster of the walls suggested major structural faults. I sat at their small dining table whilst she served me a cup of Jasmine tea. I asked her about her landlord: “We’re really scared of him, we do whatever he says. If there is a maintenance problem we will try to fix it ourselves if it is not too big, as if we ask him to do it he will send us the invoice.”

She had also faced a rent increase: “A year after we moved into our home, the landlord appeared on our doorstep with a letter saying that our rent was going to go from $580 to $685. I tried to plead with him but he wouldn’t let me, and I didn’t know if he was allowed to do this, so I went to Legal Services [a non-profit legal aid clinic] to see what they could do. They told me that my landlord is a nasty man who takes advantage of recent immigrants and poor people as he thinks we do not understand the rules and all the forms you have to complete, and also he knows we are afraid of being kicked out. When the Legal Services people said that I needed to provide a copy of the landlord-tenant contract for them to help me, I called him to ask for it and then he showed up at my door again saying, ‘Well, what can you pay?’ and he said ‘If you promise me you will never go to the Legal Services people ever again, I will give you a discount’. So we agreed on $630 a month, and he said to me ‘If you can’t pay up on time you’re out of here’”

She continued to tell me about an ongoing predicament that was faced not just by her family, but by other tenants in the same building: “Everyone in the building is really scared of him. If we complain, the City inspectors might show up and we are going to get thrown out of here as we are probably in here illegally as none of us have signed a lease, and it’s really damp and cold in the winter, and we don’t have a fire escape. My neighbour told me that the City inspectors are never on our side, always with the landlord.”

By the end of our conversation – interview seems a rather cardboard word for it – she was in tears as she reflected on her family’s situation. If they complained, they faced eviction from the building, and if they didn’t complain, they remained tenants trapped with an unethical landlord apparently devoid of compassion, living in sub-standard accommodation and dreading another rent increase letter. As I thanked her for her time and stood up to leave, she showed me the letters she had received from her landlord (as if proof were needed!), and then asked politely if there was anything I could do to help her and her family. These are the situations that ‘social research methods’ classes and textbooks cannot prepare you for. This woman had welcomed me, a complete stranger, into her home, and told me all about the miserable predicament she and her family were in, and I was leaving with what social scientists

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call ‘data’ whilst leaving her with tears running down her cheeks from the ordeal of describing her situation. As I wiped my own tears away on the streetcar heading back towards my apartment, I felt that the very least I could do was fulfil the moral obligation of writing about the social injustice that was the gentrification of a neighbourhood in the West-End of Toronto. This was, after all, just one example of many sad situations brought about by the fact that there was a lot of money to be made from the changes happening in a neighbourhood where the potential ground rent was far higher than the capitalised ground rent (we will discuss these terms in more detail throughout the book). But perhaps most troubling of all, the emotional shock of this interview took place in a city where gentrification had been portrayed in the literature as a liberating experience, creating opportunities for tolerance, social interaction and diversity. This is not at all to indict Jon Caulfield for being somehow socially irresponsible in his research, but very simply to point out that a different

picture of gentrification emerges if one takes the trouble to talk to those who do not

stand to profit from the rising costs of land and real estate. This is a profoundly important analytical and political lesson, one that I feel is marginalised in public debate, media coverage, and even some scholarship. After completing my fieldwork in Toronto and then New York City, where equally depressing accounts of displacement were conveyed by my interviewees, I arrived back in Britain in September 2002, more or less in the middle of writing up my thesis. That month I headed for a conference in Glasgow entitled “Upward Neighbourhood Trajectories: Gentrification in a New Century”, in order to present my work, meet other scholars working on similar questions, and learn about gentrification in other contexts. Over those two days some presentations were very informative and displayed a clear concern for social justice on the part of the presenters, but my lasting memory of the conference is the sense of genuine surprise and dismay I felt listening to the perspectives offered in many presentations, particularly from scholars based in Britain. In a literally breathtaking retreat from social critique, there were numerous accounts delivered under the rubric of ‘positive gentrification’, ‘sustainable regeneration’, ‘middle-class belonging’ and ‘urban renaissance’, to name a few, all of which seemed to me as bordering on the surreal. Some scholars were even talking about ‘policy-driven gentrification’ as if it was a new development - before going on to advocate such policy. After my own presentation, which I gabbled dreadfully because I was nervous that my critical take on the process would not be appreciated by the audience, I was asked by one delegate over a cup of coffee: “You told us about all the negative things you found, but where are the positives?” I hoped that this conference was to prove an aberration, perhaps a reflection of its slightly boosterish title and the product of a strategically circulated call for papers, but in the years that followed it was impossible to ignore a general trend in the literature on gentrification, matching a trend in the research funding proposals and manuscripts I was receiving for the duty of peer review. Many scholars were writing about middle-class gentrifiers as if they were the only ‘agents’ involved in gentrification, the only voices that mattered. A torrent of publications – outputs from a stream of policy-oriented research projects – had emerged on gentrifiers’ everyday lives, dilemmas, desires, all divorced from any structural context but positioned as theoretically salient via appeals to Pierre Bourdieu’s masterbook Distinction, yet completely missing the political purchase of that book and of Bourdieu’s scholarship in general (it was telling that nobody felt it relevant to quote Bourdieu on the not

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insignificant matter of what he famously called “social suffering”). Particularly troublesome was the apparent rightward shift of scholars once at the forefront of analysing class inequality in cities, who were now smoothing over inequality and smooching policy with writings that showed not a glimpse of the analytical and political tradition from which they emerged. Endowed with plausibility by the sheer weight of ‘policy relevance’, and reinforced by thinly-veiled sentiments that effaced the working classes whilst empathising with middle-classes, for me such scholarship did nothing other than truncate and distort our understanding of the ongoing articulation of class and space in cities. This was happening at the same time as high-profile work emerging from America that argued that concerns about displacement caused by gentrification were overblown, as government housing databases apparently offered little evidence of high rates of ‘exit’ of low-income people from gentrifying neighbourhoods. In February 2006, the day I received yet another manuscript to review (on the dilemmas of the middle-classes in gentrifying London), I felt compelled to intervene, so I penned a critique of the literature entitled “The eviction of critical perspectives from gentrification research” (Slater, 2006). Judging by the correspondence I received (and still receive) from those supporting my argument and those angered by it, it seemed to touch a nerve.

Myths and Structure

This book emerges, then, from an emotional shock caused by the housing turbulence brewing at the bottom of the class structure in Toronto, quickly followed by the intellectual shock triggered by many contributions to the gentrification literature. Although many absorbing critical studies of gentrification can easily be found in the literature since 2006 (and of course before then), seldom does a week pass by where I am not confronted by what we might call the mythology of gentrification and displacement. It might be a comment made in person when I describe my research to a stranger; it might be something in a newspaper article or TV news report on urban affairs; it might be a perspective offered in a scholarly publication; it might be an entirely valid, probing question from a student; or it might be a discussion at a conference. But for an instance of the mythology in full steam, nothing has ever topped something that appeared in 2001 in The American Enterprise, the publication of the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank. Written by the architect and urban planner Andres Duany, the hugely influential founder of Congress for a New Urbanism, in less than 2500 words it contains every single myth on gentrification that exists, the exposure and challenge of which constitutes the heart of this book. Duany’s words appear in their entirety in Box 1.1.

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Box 1.1. “Three Cheers for Gentrification” Published in The American Enterprise, April/May 2001, Volume 12, Number 3 These days, whenever more than a handful of middle-income people move into a formerly down-at-the-heels neighborhood, they are accused of committing that newest of social sins: “gentrification.” This loaded term—conjuring up images of yuppies stealing urban housing from rightful inhabitants—has become embedded in the way many activists understand urban evolution. And the thinking behind it has become a serious obstacle to the revival of American cities. “Affordable” housing isn’t always what cities need more of. Some do, but many need just the opposite. For every San Francisco or Manhattan where real estate has become uniformly too expensive, there are many more cities like Detroit, Trenton, Syracuse, Milwaukee, Houston, and Philadelphia that could use all the gentrification they can get. The last thing these places ought to be pursuing is more cheap housing. Gentrification is usually good news, for there is nothing more unhealthy for a city than a monoculture of poverty. As Reuben Greenberg, the African-American police chief of Charleston, South Carolina, has said, “Urban problems are caused not by poverty, but by the concentration of poverty.” Gentrification rebalances a concentration of poverty by providing the tax base, rub-off work ethic, and political effectiveness of a middle class, and in the process improves the quality of life for all of a community’s residents. It is the rising tide that lifts all boats. Opposition to gentrification often starts from the assumption that it is artificially induced, and controllable. But with few exceptions, neither of those things are true. There have been a few examples where the power and resources of governments were used to try to force revitalization of decrepit parts of cities. Two famous examples are the harbor area of Baltimore and the West Side of Manhattan. In Baltimore, the city created a multitude of entertainment, sports, and cultural venues at Baltimore Harbor. In New York, the catalyst was the building of Lincoln Center in the early 1960s. But in those places, and other cities as well, force-feeding gentrification was expensive, slow, and only partially successful. So induced gentrification has been rare. By contrast, examples of spontaneous gentrification—improvement that takes off without municipal intervention—are legion. New York has undergone a continuous sequence of these, beginning with Greenwich Village and proceeding to SoHo and all the subsequent Hos. Elsewhere around the country, it is hard to believe today that the real estate of Georgetown, Beacon Hill, Charleston, Santa Fe, or Nob Hill was ever down; but so it was, before spontaneous gentrification. South Florida, in just 20 years, has witnesses the gentrification of Coconut Grove, Miami Beach, and the scrappy old town of Key West. Each of these transformations was driven not by planners but by individuals discovering the excellent urban qualities of the place. The government caught up later, sometimes trying to take credit, often interfering with the natural cycle. Spontaneous gentrification begins surreptitiously, when a first wave of poor but savvy pioneers discovers the urban allure of a hitherto decrepit area. These are usually students, artists, gays, and other self-marginalized social groups. Such folk have been characterized by sociologists as the “risk-oblivious.” With their creativity and sweat they demonstrate that old lofts and townhouses are habitable, indeed charming. They transform ratty bad-food joints

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into ratty good-food joints. This first wave produces social more than economic or physical gentrification.

By the time the corner stores are stocking olive oil, the area is noticed by a second wave, characterized as the “risk-aware.” These people are able to invest in renovation not just with sweat equity but financially. They expect to secure loans, and therefore must satisfy the building codes and permits that the first wave probably ignored. The second wave includes a group that is pervasive among baby boomers: individuals who affect the bohemian lifestyle while holding secure jobs. This cohort is an economic but not necessarily a physical gentrifying force. They like the place to look rough and edgy, even as it becomes more expensive. The third wave, which follows, is “risk-averse.” This group is led by conventional developers who thoroughly smarten up the buildings through conventional real estate operations—physical renovation, improved maintenance, and organized security. Their clientele has been characterized as “dentists from New Jersey.” Whether induced or spontaneous, once gentrification begins, the chain reaction tends to continue. The difficulty with any attempt to intervene, supposedly on behalf of low-income residents, is that urban gentrification is organic and self-fuelling. Its motive force is great urbanism: well-proportioned streets, a good mix of activities in useful types of buildings, a certain architectural quality. These days the allure is all the stronger because good urban areas are rare. And this naturally boosts their market value. What spokesmen for the poor call gentrification is actually the timeless urban cycle of decay and rebirth as a free society naturally adjusts its habitat. In any case, gentrification usually benefits the present owners. They receive better prices for their homes if they sell. If they remain, there is a general improvement in quality of life as a result of improved consumer services, higher tax bases, and the beneficial effects of middle-class vigilance over municipal services. The only losers may be the local community leaders and poverty advocates who fear their constituency is being diluted. The evidence: It is the leaders who complain of gentrification, rarely the residents themselves, who know they have much to gain. The question is not whether affordable housing should be available. Of course it should. But it is necessary to distinguish between creating affordable housing and retaining it. Paradoxically, retaining affordable housing may be more difficult than creating it—which can be accomplished indirectly through subsidies for the private sector, directly through government public works, or gradually through the aging of buildings that cease to fit today’s lifestyles. The market provides affordable housing in the form of older, unfashionable building stock. Cities with such older housing typically serve as portals for immigrants. A “Chinatown” or “Little Havana” is an economic incubator where affordable housing exists in its ideal form: as the “old neighborhood” eventually to be fondly recalled by the foes of gentrification. Such neighborhoods are not destined, however, to remain affordable forever. If they were originally built for the middle-class, their inherent quality will ultimately, after a down cycle, attract gentrifiers. Most old neighborhoods experiencing revival are only recovering their intrinsic value and reverting to their origins, not being “taken away” from the poor. Can anything be done to prevent existing housing from becoming expensive? Yes, but it’s very difficult. To begin with, it’s not easy for people to agree on making affordability a political objective. People sell their property willingly in the open market, and they reap a higher price after gentrification gets under way. If their right to enjoy the fruits of the market is rescinded, owners will react violently. Artificially restraining resale value solely to keep

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housing low-priced is unfair to poor homeowners. Life is unfair enough for low-income people without their well-intentioned overseers denying them their just profits.

People know this. In one neighborhood of small houses that was supposedly intent on fighting gentrification, our firm was asked to avert a sharp rise in housing prices, so we dutifully proposed limiting the size of buildings, based on their lot size. The measure we recommended would have prevented the existing houses from being enlarged enough to accommodate yuppie expectations. Additional family rooms, mega bathrooms, and super closets would have been impossible. When the price-depressing effect of this limitation became clear, public posturing soon disappeared; the participants in the planning process would have none of it. The proposal suffered rejection by acclamation. Only those who were unaffected—activists from outside the neighborhood—were surprised at the outcome.

To allow some of the existing residents to remain in the neighborhood, when proposed subtler techniques, such as permitting one or two ancillary units to be built behind an existing small house, these new units could be rented out. We also wrote new codes to allow small-scale services, such as caring for a few elderly persons, taking in laundry, or minding children—the type of income-generating businesses that already crop up throughout poor neighborhoods illegally. Such businesses are part of the mutual support system that was dismantled in the federally sponsored demolition of urban housing in the `60s and `70s, and that was eliminated from redevelopment areas when suburban-style zoning codes were imposed—inappropriately—on the traditional city. But the question remains: Can anything be done to prevent gentrification? Yes, there is one proven technique that holds down prices: Give people bad design. Because gentrification is essentially a process of real estate seeking its proper value, the places that revive are inherently attractive enough to be sought out by the affluent. The places that resist gentrification are those where housing is poorly designed or the quality of the urban space is mediocre. Thus the most surefire technique for permanently preventing gentrification is to provide dismal architectural and urban design. The federal government inadvertently tested and proved this principle in two periods of the twentieth century. During World War I the U.S. Housing Corporation built 55 projects in cities where the defense industry needed more workers. The housing, though inexpensive, consisted of traditional houses and rowhouses skillfully designed by first-rate architects. Today, most of that housing is still in good shape, much of it having gentrified over the years. In stark contrast, in the 1960s the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) produced housing designed in accordance with then-fashionable socialist models, which our modernist architects admired in Europe. Most of that housing rapidly decayed, and it persists in its decay despite multiple renovations over the years. (For the record, this brand of housing has fared just as badly in Europe.) A side-by-side comparison of this phenomenon can be seen in a pair of housing projects in Bridgeport, Connecticut. One project, Seaside Village, is a delightful little community, now more than 80 years old and in perfect condition. The other, barracks-like Marina Village, was built a few decades later and most of it is trashed. Modernist design, sadly, has become a proven technique for keeping housing in the hands of the poor. “Affordable” housing has been more successful when constructed in traditional forms—the very opposite of the experimental 1960 “projects” that self-destructed and are now being demolished by public housing authorities, but provision of even this kind of affordable housing is vehemently opposed today by the middle-class. Is this simple prejudice? Is it reasonable fear of crime? Statistics do show a relationship between crime and poverty; so it’s difficult to argue that opposition to low-income housing is simply prejudiced.

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To begin to solve this, we have to recognize that the manner in which affordable housing is provided can cause problems. If low-income housing is built in large groupings, as it usually is, people are not wrong in fearing it. To be socially sustainable, housing for low-income people must come in small increments. Ten percent is a good rule: imagine two townhouses among a row of 20 and you can deduce that this is imperceptible—particularly if the buildings are architecturally indistinguishable from middle-class housing. In Montgomery County, Maryland, the county gives builders strong incentives to sprinkle affordable units among new middle-class subdivisions. The subsidized housing is kept to a low ratio of the overall development, and it looks like the market-rate housing nearby. This program seems to work well; we designed one such project, Wyndcrest, in Sandy Spring, Maryland, and can attest to its success. You might wonder why, if there is such a strong need for it, our market-driven economy is not providing affordable housing. One answer is that America’s housing market is not free. It is trammeled by building and planning bureaucracies that obstruct its smooth operation. In the past, people would build for themselves. There was a self-help system that created housing through sweat equity; by this method the continent was colonized. But there are now myriad regulations that, in the name of eliminating bad housing, have inadvertently eliminated the supply of inexpensive housing. Today only licensed professionals can design, permit, and build housing. Bureaucratic friction thus makes housing for the poor available only with artificial supports. The possibility of housing oneself has been taken away from the individual and has become the responsibility of government or charitable organizations—another instance of government solving a problem that was created by government itself. It’s worth noting that there do exist certain “code-free” zones, where government looks aside while regular people make underused places habitable for themselves. That’s how the “risk-oblivious” broke into the housing market in SoHo in the `60s. A similar method could be followed in many older American cities where the upper stories of commercial buildings are underused or abandoned. Those floors are empty because, to renovate them, the building codes require a thorough upgrading to current code standards. Much would-be affordable housing is illegal because it lacks a few inches of stair width or fails to conform to some other ideal. A more sensible application of building codes would stipulate that if a building satisfies the code that was in force when the building was originally constructed, the building cannot be forced to meet new code requirements when renovated. This simple rule change would facilitate renovation of old housing stock at reasonable prices by eliminating unnecessary and expensive “upgrading to code.” New Jersey has such a law, and it has contributed to the spectacular comebacks of Jersey City and Hoboken. So what is the fuss over gentrification about? Many times it’s just the squawking of old neighborhood bosses who can’t bear the self-reliance of the incoming middle-class, and can’t accept the dilution of their political base. But theirs is a swan song. Middle-class Americans are choosing to live in many inner-city neighborhoods because these places possess urbane attributes not found in newer residential areas, and this flow cannot be regulated away. The only permanent solution to overpricing as a result of gentrification is to build new urban development in the time-tested forms, so that our older neighborhoods don’t become overvalued through scarcity. We must create more traditional neighborhoods, and less sprawling modernism. Forget a narrow focus on affordability. We can make room for people of modest means by avoiding rigid rules and controls which make it harder for them to house

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themselves. And finally, people should not be prevented from profiting on the natural appreciation of their neighborhoods. Not in America.

Given the sponsor of Duany’s article its content is unsurprising, but beneath the rather obnoxious tone and declamatory reasoning, the myths being propagated are as follows:

1) Gentrification induced by the state is rare, and it happens ‘spontaneously’ and ‘naturally’, with middle-class gentrifiers the primary causal agents.

2) Gentrification causes limited or no displacement of poor and working-class people, who in fact stand to profit or benefit from neighbourhood reinvestment.

3) Gentrification creates a healthy neighbourhood ‘social mix’, breaking up concentrations of poverty.

4) The increasing presence of the gentrifying middle-classes improves the quality of life for all of a community’s residents.

5) Gentrification is better than the apparent “alternative” of disinvestment and poverty, and in fact can be the remedy for such a bleak alternative.

6) The only way to prevent gentrification is through “dismal architectural and urban design”.

Whilst for purposes of clarity it is useful to single out these myths like this, it almost goes without saying that they are fundamentally intertwined, and as we shall see in this book, they are by no means confined to the discussion about gentrification in the United States. The purpose of this book is to expose and challenge all these very damaging myths, with the hope of constructing a positive research agenda for future engagements with the field, whatever forms those engagements take – research, teaching, activism. It is called Fighting Gentrification for two reasons – first, in light of my past conversations with people who suffered the devastation of displacement (and reading the research of others that documents similar devastation), I have felt a scientific and civic duty to intervene at length. In short, serious urban policy errors follow from analytical blunders and confused conceptual logic with respect to gentrification. The vast amount of misinformation circulating freely amongst policy elites, journalists and housing/urban scholars is therefore something that I contend needs to be fought. Second, the book takes seriously the question of what is to be done. Whilst my very modest forays into activism mean that I would never be able to offer a pragmatic guide to how to fight displacement of the kind offered in Chester Hartman’s seminal writings (see Hartman et al 1982), this would be a naked book without careful consideration of what has been tried, what has been achieved and what has failed in various contexts where the preference for profit has become so threatening that people have fought back. In an era when most institutions and many individuals are committed to the notion that unregulated markets always work best, when influential urbanists sponsored by think-tanks (not just Duany) argue that gentrification is nothing more than a change in the equilibrium of urban location, it is a formidable challenge to protect affordable housing and to make a powerful case for rights to home, shelter, community, place and the city. But this is essential work that needs to be analysed in the detail it deserves.

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In Chapter 1 I chart a concise and critical history of theoretical developments in gentrification research, which are crucial to understand if we want to do anything about the myths that have followed their development. The question of definition becomes crucial, especially in light of several recent contributions that serve to hide the class character of gentrification behind the screens of “reurbanisation” and “regeneration”. As the chapter unfolds I take aim at a moving target, and draw upon the work of Elvin Wyly to trace the mutation of consumer sovereignty from analytic bedrock of the neoclassical urban economist to the guiding force of urban policy in several different societies. Here I call into question the political import of the research on middle-class gentrifiers, which has mushroomed significantly in the last fifteen years. In Chapter 2 I move from cause to effect and focus on displacement – the forms it takes, the devastation it brings, and the questionable attempts to deny its intensity or even its existence. The pathbreaking conceptual framework on displacement put forward in the 1980s by Peter Marcuse is, I argue, the way in which displacement must be considered if we are to recognise the injustice it represents and the political possibilities that issue from such injustice. In Chapter 3 I draw upon some recent contributions of immense importance (Porter, 2009; Crookes, 2011) to focus on the political saliency of emplacement, rising to the challenge set by Mindy Fullilove that “We can’t understand the losses unless we first appreciate what was there.” (2004: 20). I argue that territorial stigmatization (as conceptualised by Wacquant, 2008) and gentrification are two sides of the same coin, and that disrupting the negative way in which working class spaces and their residents are described is absolutely essential to the debate over their future. In Chapter 4 I explore the issues that lie at the core of the long-running debate on ‘neighbourhood effects’, and draw on Marxist urban theory to argue that the residential mobility programmes that are recommended by mainstream housing and urban scholars are premised on the fictitious belief that ‘mixing’ places up via gentrification will somehow be the remedy for urban disinvestment and poverty. In Chapter 5 I blast open the tenacious and constrictive ‘false choice’ of either gentrification or disinvestment by showing how the two are fundamentally dependent on each other, and that no alternative will be found to class segregation and poverty unless we ask ourselves why it is that so many urban dwellers all over the world live in such conditions. In Chapters 6 and 7 I draw upon the arguments offered in the preceding chapters to place the gentrification literature in productive dialogue with the literature on urban social movements, and consider the implications of various tactics of resistance that have been attempted in a number of different arenas of neighbourhood reinvestment. In these chapters I do not shy away from what might be construed (incorrectly) as an essentialist fantasy, that the only way to defeat gentrification once and for all is to abolish the capitalist mode of production. I strongly believe that the death of socialism (that is, socialism as understood through the eyes of Harold Pinter at the very start of this book) is another myth (one only has to look at the momentum surrounding the recent ‘Occupy’ movement to grasp the contempt in which capitalist urbanization is rightly held by so many). Throughout the book I draw upon a wealth of case material, using examples from my own research together with those from research undertaken by talented students who have worked under my supervision, and I highlight and derive analytic insight from the remarkable contributions of so many scholars who have immersed themselves in gentrifying contexts either quantitatively, qualitatively or both.

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It would be very easy to read the chapters that follow as an overlength review essay where I analyse everything that is wrong with how we think about gentrification and displacement, or even as a treatise on what is insufficient in other scholars’ work. In fact, such a reaction I have come to expect since an encounter with an American graduate student at a 2008 conference in Boston. He had read my work and approached me at the conference, wanting to discuss it at some length. As we finished our coffee conversation and made for different conference sessions he remarked, “You know, you’re actually a really nice guy.” So I have learned that my analytical indictments of establishment research output and my tendency to ‘call it as I see it’ have garnered me something of a reputation, to use the recent words of a Danish colleague, as the “critical enfant terrible of urban studies”. But I hope that what follows is seen as something affirmative, an act of composition rather than simply critique. A degree of frankness compels me to remind readers of the following: people lose their homes because of gentrification. Occasionally, for the elderly in particular (as we shall see in Chapters 2 and 3), the trauma of displacement can be so intense that people lose their lives too. With these sorry realities in mind, I hope that this book is in some way useful in fighting and dispelling the many myths surrounding a process about which so much has been written since a visionary London academic of German-Jewish origin first coined the term in 1964. If it proves in some way useful to anyone who, by the chance of birth, happenstance or ill luck, finds themselves adversely affected by the quest to profit from urban space (or if it catches the attention of those who are fighting with them or for them), then it will have achieved its ultimate goal. ****************** My first real encounter with gentrification was in 1998, when I was sharing with two friends a rented house in Tooting, south London whilst finishing up my undergraduate studies. The same week as I completed my final exams, the landlord of the house knocked on the door and told us he had sold the house for a ‘packet’, which didn’t surprise me at all. One could almost smell the gentrification in Tooting at the time - I had watched rent-gaps being closed steadily on the very street where I lived. The landlord had always been prompt if we had encountered any problems with the house, and he did show considerable regret that we had to find somewhere else to live pretty quickly, but the minor upheaval created by this particular incident of displacement did make me wonder how we might have reacted and coped if we had put down roots in the neighbourhood, how we would have found somewhere else to live quickly if we had been elderly, socially isolated, or unemployed with young children, to name but a few vulnerable categories. As it transpired, we could not find anywhere else to live in Tooting, and had to migrate to the more expensive district of Clapham, where we moved into the very first flat we could find: a fairly cramped space with numerous maintenance issues and a far less competent landlord. In the midst of a few petty battles with this individual over the inadequacy of the central heating system and his failure to install a new kitchen properly (or even install it at all, for the first few weeks that we lived there), I recall thinking, “What if we were a more vulnerable category?” A concern for the welfare and the life chances of the worse-off was a product of the political awakening that constituted my education at the Department of Geography at

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Queen Mary, University of London from 1995-1998. Attending the lectures of David M. Smith, Cathy McIlwaine, Miles Ogborn and Roger Lee, among others, was an intellectually exhilarating experience. At times I felt like I was being mentally electrocuted - it was as if my brain was being geographically rewired whenever I spent time in the building (I remember my fellow students laughing at me as I practically ran to the library to track down key readings after the lectures). I can still feel the tingle of excitement running down my spine as I commuted in from south London to attend David Smith’s Geography and Social Justice lectures in my final year. My heavily annotated and dog-eared copy of his book with the same title is my most cherished academic possession. When I teach undergraduates now, I try to remember how I was taught there, to capture the same sense of wonder at intellectual discovery and astonishment at the world that my teachers conveyed every single time I encountered them. David began all his courses at Queen Mary by quoting August Losch, one of the pioneers of industrial location theory: “Our real duty….is not to explain our sorry reality, but to improve it.” I have never forgotten this lesson, and it guides how I think to this day. No work of scholarship is ever an “individual undertaking”, and I find it a great pleasure to acknowledge the comradeship and friendship of many people I am privileged to know. A few deserve a special mention. When I first approached Loretta Lees in the autumn of 1998 and asked if she would be interested in taking me on as Ph.D. student, she responded with delightful enthusiasm and worked exceptionally hard in the brutal quest to secure funding for my doctoral research, for which I will be forever grateful. She was a supportive supervisor who offered valuable theoretical, conceptual, methodological and dissemination guidance. Loretta has always engaged carefully with my ideas even when she disagreed with how I framed them, and I have learned a lot from working with her. Several of Loretta’s subsequent Ph.D. students are formidable scholars: Jennie Middleton, Gavin Brown, Scott Rogers, and the awesome theoretical and conceptual Blitzkrieg that is Mark Davidson (who in my view has written some of the very best pieces on gentrification of the last decade). Elvin Wyly is the most dedicated and versatile scholar I know – a quite brilliant geographical mind, positively radical! His scholarship is a stunning blend of elegant, politically engaging prose, statistical troublemaking, and visual treats. Since we first met at Rutgers in 2001, he has been a source of solace, encouragement, enthusiasm and inspiration, and it is an honour to know him and to continue to learn so much from him. Kathe Newman, Dan Hammel, Eric Clark and James DeFilippis are of the same ilk – brilliant scholars and wonderful souls, all of whom have taught me so much about capital flows, displacement and resistance. Like Elvin, they are wonderful examples of how to combine scientific prowess with political passion. Loic Wacquant has given much of his time to support my development as a scholar of cities – I am enormously grateful to him for the inspiration I have drawn from his beautiful writings and his amazing speaking performances, and from the occasional bombardment of e-mails! His analytical precision and intellectual energy are genuinely unparalleled and it is a treat to have encountered his remarkable mind on many occasions over the last decade. I must also thank Loic for encouraging me to form the Advanced Urban Marginality network in 2009, where it has been a pleasure to dialogue with Virgilio Borges Pereira, Justus Uitermark, Eduardo Marques, Alfredo Alietti, and Kennosuke Tanaka.

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David Ley, a towering figure in the study of gentrification (and in human geography more generally) has been exceptionally encouraging since we first met in 2001, and it was most gratifying to have such a major scholar engage with my work and nominate me for the interdisciplinary Peter Wall Visiting Junior Scholar fellowship scheme at UBC in Vancouver, July 2003. I encourage anyone to read his foundational papers on Vancouver’s gentrification, and his 1996 magnum opus on the subject, if they want to encounter the very essence of scholarship: rigorous, painstaking, relentlessly insightful, and beautifully written. Damaris Rose was also one of the first major scholars to take an interest in what I was doing, and her many essays and infectious enthusiasm for the city where she lives have been a delight to experience. It is difficult to express the depth of my gratitude to Neil Smith, the most important living analyst and critic of gentrification, and an awesome presence whenever I see or hear that word. Put simply, without Neil, we would not understand this process like we do, or have the analytic fortitude to fight back. He always responds to my e-mails with wisdom and wit, and has reassured me that my perspective does matter, and is needed. Neil Brenner has been a mentor, supporter and comrade – without his encouragement, I never would have sent my 2006 “Eviction” article to any journal. It was Neil who encouraged me to work my ideas into a book for this SUSC series, and who fended off some surprising resistance to the proposal I wrote from certain IJURR stalwarts. Neil teamed up with the equally formidable intellects of Margit Mayer and Peter Marcuse to invite me to a very special conference in Berlin in November 2008, which gave me the platform I needed for a deep engagement with Peter’s foundational 1980s work on displacement. Margit and Peter are both wonderful models of political passion and civic engagement. When I was trapped in a policy studies department at the University of Bristol from 2003-2008, I was fortunate to have the friendship of Adrian Kay, Marsha Henry, Paul Higate and Gary Bridge (who is the very essence of a rock in a hard place). Without those four talking me out of it, I would have left academia. My brilliant colleagues in the Human Geography Research Group at the University of Edinburgh provide such a contrast (collegiality, empathy, laughter) to what I felt every day at Bristol – thank you all for tolerating my occasional rants about performance assessment, audit, “impact”, and so on. Emily Brady, Jan Penrose and Charlie Withers are particularly generous with their time in terms of the intellectual and career guidance they provide. It has been my great fortune to learn from some talented and dedicated students over the last decade, and to watch them engage with my ideas and thoughts in various settings (lectures, seminars, dissertation research, etc). A few certainly stand out: Ntsiki Anderson, Karen Johnston, Emma Street, Jenny Preece, Dominic Wright, Ian Kemp, Isobel Bruun-Kiaer, Pamela Turner, Joe Silverman, Garrett Morgan, Minante Botha, Katarina Korytkova, Svenja Timmins. I am very privileged to serve as supervisor for graduate students working on these issues, and I would like to thank Paul Kirkness, Hamish Kallin, Yannick Sudermann, Junxi Qian and Daniel Yunpeng Zhang for sharing their insights, and for their amazing patience and understanding as I struggled to juggle supervision duties with all the other duties that come with working in the neoliberal juggernaut of madness that is the British higher education sector. There is a long list of comrades and friends with whom discussion on cities and especially gentrification and displacement has been indispensable to my development

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as a scholar: Kate Swanson, David Manley, Libby Porter, Kate Shaw, Lee Crookes, Chris Allen, Matthias Bernt, Andrej Holm, Mathieu van Criekingen, Robert Ross, Stephen Steinberg, Gordon MacLeod, Colin McFarlane, Annick Germain, Marie-Helene Bacque, Yankel Fijalkow, Geoff DeVerteuil, Jon May, Chester Hartman, Jamie Peck, Kirsteen Paton, Gerry Mooney, Alex Law, Catharina Thorn, Justus Uitermark, Alan Walks, Martine August, David Hulchanski, Jan Willem Duyvendak, Bob Lake, John Western, Sophie Bond, Lynn Staeheli, Carolyn Whitzman, Anna Richter, Paul Watt, Stuart Hodkinson, Sarah Glynn, Henrik Larsen, Anders Lund Hansen, Ricardo Duques Calvache, Bob Catterall, Winifred Curran, Nick Dahmann. I hope I haven’t forgotten anyone. My parents and my sister have always been so interested in and supportive of anything that I do in my life – together with their unconditional love, a son and a brother could not ask for more. Finally, I must thank Sara and Zach (and our many pets!) for joy, love and patience, and for somehow tolerating my forgetful and absent-minded self. The little home we have made for ourselves in the tranquil anonymity of an East Lothian village is a daily reminder of the things that really matter, and of the absolutely necessity of place and love for human existence.