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
