Gentrification​

If theres anything to take away, its that gentrification means so many things to so many different people - with differing interests, yet most of the time, good intentions.  Instead of thinking about gentrification as a collection of personal decisions made by a group of affluent gentrifiers, I urge you to think about the reality: gentrification is a process which results from larger developments in our culture and in our economy.  

 

The shifting American economy has transformed the sort of business done in the United States, which has resulted in the expansion of many service oriented, high skill industries like technology, digital media, finance, etc.  These jobs, which require human capital as opposed to physical capital, are located in cities, and attract young, relatively high skilled college graduates towards them.  When paired with other shifting cultural and demographic preferences, we see a growing "back to the city" movement - which drives urbanization on a large scale throughout our country.  The first large scale development to understand in regards to gentrification is that more people today are moving to cities than yesterday, which challenges cities and their occupants to make way for the population influx.

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Having gained an understanding of what motivates people to move to cities, we need to know why newcomers move to gentrifying neighborhoods.  While more difficult to categorize, we can say with certainty that urbanization drives up the price of central-city real estate, and challenges newcomers to find housing they can afford (even if they are employed in service oriented, thriving industries!). When they look outside of the central city for affordability, new residents of cities demand access to public transportation, comfortable living space, and economic activity.  

 

Without a doubt, there is also an element of lower and middle class city neighborhoods that feel diverse and local, which, at best, is appreciated by young, liberal college graduates, and at worst, is romanticized and exploited. There are certainly some arrogant videos and articles on the internet written by affluent college graduates who claim to have "discovered"quality ethnic restaurants or neighborhood districts as if they hadn't already existed to serve the local populace.  In both cases, this intangible element plays some role in attracting city newcomers to gentrifying areas.

 

We see these trends in Brooklyn, a borough of New York City which has become an economic eco-system of its own, complete with a diverse array of local and commercial businesses, industry, public transportation, and transformed livable space.  City planners and real estate developers take advantage of these trends to make way for more affluent newcomers, expand the tax base, and make money; while, at the same time, existing residents have mixed feelings (some positive, some negative), and often resist change.

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Regardless of if neighborhood stakeholders resist, encourage, profit from, or lose because of change, we know that successful efforts on behalf of it almost never benefit the poor and vulnerable residents who are at risk of displacement. There are very few actions that can be taken to curb gentrification, and I believe this is what makes it so painful.  Gentrification doesn't just mean someone potentially loses a home, for if it did, it wouldn't be as contested as it is.

Instead, I believe gentrification led displacement is more representative of widening social gaps in American society, which rears its ugly head in minority districts of American cities as it does in depressed regions of the American Midwest.  The difference in cities is that gentrification brings with it tangible cultural changes - Halal butchers and African markets close and get replaced with Cocktail bars and Tapas restaurants, and indigenous populations get displaced; while in the depressed midwest, it means factories shut down and close their doors forever.

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Since race is so tied up with class in American society, it is easy for those hurt by gentrification to fight it as what it looks and feels like: an invasion of home by unfamiliar and alien people who clearly have more economic and social power. But fighting gentrification this way, and by saying things like "Brooklyn is Not For Sale!" or "Developers Get Out!" is completely ineffective.  In fact, fighting gentrification as gentrification will never work, because gentrification is just a symptom of a much larger problem in American society: crippling, growing inequality and an inability to get lower and middle class people involved in the economy.

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In the short term, governments should continue to provide housing subsidies to long-term residents with stagnant wages who are confronting drastically increasing housing costs.  However, relying on this as a solution would be silly - housing affordability impacts everyone, not just those at the very bottom. Similarly, using zoning laws strategically to create increases in housing supply that aren't just reserved for buyers and renters of luxury real estate can absorb some of the increasing demand and price of real estate, and should be paid attention to closely by policy makers.  However, this, too, is unsustainable in the long term, as it will be unable to keep up with the pace of private real estate investment activity, and there is not enough space in cities like New York to create affordable housing for everyone.

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When the majority of the growth taking place in the American economy is happening in cities, and that growth is accruing to more affluent, highly skilled college graduates, it really is no wonder that less educated, less affluent residents of cities are losing relative economic ground; while at the same time, midwestern workers who lost their jobs due to shifting industry are losing ground as well.  

 

So while I can't solve gentrification, I can say with confidence that nobody trying to solve gentrification by fighting developers, incoming residents, or city planners will be able to solve it either.  In fact, fighting any issue related to economic inequality is hard to do with a narrow scope - there needs to be a focus on the bigger picture.  Gentrification, and other social issues like it aren't the cause of the problems in American society, rather, they are evidence that serious cracks in our system exist.  When greater percentages of lower and middle income inhabitants of city neighborhoods can no longer afford to live there, they can't just pick up and move somewhere else - because there is nowhere else to go.  

 

At present, the true societal, or external costs of our exclusive economic market system isn't recognized by the market itself, which is evidenced by large scale gentrification led-displacement, falling labor market participation rates, falling democratic participation rates, and social unrest in all corners of American society.  Indeed, when growing numbers of people do not participate in our economy and in our democratic institutions, we can't just call them lazy; we have to be realistic about calling out the failure of our market system.   

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Capitalism is, and has always been, a major driver of wealth and prosperity in American society.  It is why America has long been a world leader in ingenuity, industry, and opportunity.  But, to be reasonable and fair, we must also be skeptical of capitalism while we praise it, and recognize how it can lead to the creation of market failures - where losses caused by the system aren't compensated by the system itself.  In fact, the great economic thinkers of history who theorized capitalism would be a terrific system to spur development and prosperity warned that it would create winners and losers, and would only work if winners compensated society for the costs that a system like capitalism imposes.  This arrangement wasn't just proposed to suggest charity, rather, it was emphasized to promote stability - an aspect of American society that seems to be under threat.  

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Further, if more people are able to realize that issues like gentrification are the result of poor economic outcomes in the lower quintiles of American workers, there exists opportunities for activists concerned with gentrification to ally politically with other groups of Americans who have been unable to substantially create wealth in the current economic landscape.  Those most affected by changes in the American economy have moved further to extreme ends of the political spectrum instead of coming together in the middle, which strikes me as odd, seeing as though a united American populace has always been entrepreneurial about finding solutions to our most pressing economic and social problems.  Perhaps we need to worry less about what our political allies and enemies look and think like, and worry more about how we are similar and can help one another.

 

Of course, fighting economic inequality is a long term solution, and I don't know how to do it.  The purpose of this conclusion isn't to dismiss gentrification as unsolvable because of how complicated it is; instead, it is to encourage those individuals concerned about it to add it to the growing list of reasons we need to tackle growing inequality and the failures of our market system.

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