chapter five


Collisions

The attraction of a city in general is that it’s where things happen. And, everyone has the right to be there and to express themselves.

A gentrifier, as quoted by Damaris Rose1

Perhaps the new gentrification of cities, as millennials decide in large numbers to move into the city rather than out of it, offers a new opportunity to desegregate housing, neighborhoods and schools. But this won’t happen automatically. It will take a change in policy and new profiles in courage.

Jesse Jackson2

Colliding Critiques: The Only Thing Worse Than the Current Situation Is the Alternative

While there are undoubtedly ample examples to substantiate the caricatures of gentrifiers, in the contemporary city we observe residents of various tenures who want to be a part of their community, understand the complexity behind that goal, and sincerely want to labour for a better future. Gentrifiers need the perspective and the tools to intelligently and respectfully participate in our communities rather than lamenting over them at arm’s length or fancying ourselves as having gone native – sneering at those who follow after us. The hopeless yet all-too-common approach of rhetorical self-mutilation over one’s harmful “gentrifilogical” footprint generates some poetic blogs and witty tweets, perhaps, but bears little fruit.

Gentrification, while indeed shaped by macro-level structural forces is, as Rose noted, “malleable, potentially, by conscious human agency.”3 It has to be, as it would cease to be without human decisions. How can we respect this structure while creating space for our agency within it? When asking the question “where do we go from here?” there are few satisfying answers in the present dialogue.

What is a proper response to these tendencies towards gentrification within the current capitalist system? When we consider the progressive lines within the literatures on hot-button topics of the twentieth century, we wonder if there is any overlap that allows for a tenable solution.4 Acknowledging our own complicated positions, we have reached a point where the tensions in bemoaning the loss of the middle class and bemoaning the reinsertion of the middle class are so intense that they need to be addressed.

In short, what did we think reinvestment in the city would actually look like? What did leaders of the 1960s believe would actually happen if the “problems” of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were “solved”?

In what follows we will contemplate more systematically the issues that were considered crises forty to fifty years ago. We chose the year 1970 as a point of comparison with the present in the cases outlined below, but there is likely a ten-year margin of error in each case. We examine three types of debates in which we observe the progressive lines of argument appearing to collide with one another: neighbourhood investment and resident mobility opportunities, cultural and social dispositions, and architecture and planning policy.

How does this collision play out? Quite literally, a scholarly conference on urban issues will feature one session highlighting a particular problem while the same thing will be posed as the solution in another session down the hall. What are the issues that elicit these colliding lines of thought? They are the very issues that define the city of our day: the equity of policing neighbourhoods with drastic racial and class differences; the ways in which our health is socially determined by the physical and social fabric of our neighbourhood; our childrens’ right to learn in schools that prepare them for society beyond their neighbourhood.5 We observe a twisting set of goals, critiques, and expectations.

Neighbourhood Investment and Resident Opportunities

In the 1970s there was a crisis of disinvestment. The pressing challenge most cities in North America and Europe faced in the mid-twentieth century was one of deindustrialized urban districts. In Detroit, for instance, the great “irony” of urban progress “was that just as attempts to provide Blacks with a greater slice of the labor market pie began in earnest, the pie shrank. Blacks made gains in occupations that became increasingly scarce in the postwar decades.”6 Retail establishments followed middle-class residents out of working-class neighbourhoods and retail chains (e.g., grocery stores) avoided poor neighbourhoods. The threat of office development following industry was real: sprawling corporate campuses were the vogue. The way to reverse disinvestment, of course, is reinvestment. In places where such reinvestment is occurring, the economic, political, and social power of neighbourhoods as places is on the rise. Corporations, small businesses, retailers, financial institutions, and residential developers are calculating urban neighbourhoods as investment worthy. McDonalds, Motorola, Allstate, and other major corporations announced that they are moving thousands of key jobs from suburban Chicago campuses to the city. At the same time some Bronzeville, Chicago, residents celebrate the announcement of the arrival in the neighbourhood of high-quality (but not particularly high-priced) local grocery chain Mariano’s. Although we can understand cynicism as to why Mariano’s would move to Bronzeville, we must be careful not to interpret all attempts by cities to bring corporate, residential development, or retail to lower-income neighbourhoods as equally and uniformly suspect. After all, to cite one example, addressing a food desert is going to involve a food retailer. We can’t, as Neil Smith noted, “condemn all regeneration strategies as Trojan horses for gentrification.”7

In the 1970s low-income residents were immobile – considered the “deprived” or the “trapped.” The trapped, as sociologist Herbert Gans wrote in 1968, were “the unhappy people who remain behind when their more advantaged neighbours move on.”8 In the 1990s one of William Julius Wilson’s “truly disadvantaged” respondents in Chicago lamented, “they want everyone to stay in their own place. That’s what society wants.”9 Sociologist Loïc Wacquant showed a parallel process unfolding in the decaying, disinvested, almost dystopian banlieus of French cities.10 The alternative to the immobility of “unhappy” residents trapped in poor neighbourhoods is a system in which residents have the mobility to relocate to better circumstances. What seemed to be innovative programs sought to help residents relocate elsewhere, commute elsewhere, or access information about job and housing opportunities elsewhere. Urban neighbourhoods were considered marginal or peripheral, and suburban real estate was prime, central, and where people wanted to be. Today, then, every departure by a once-“trapped” low-income or non-white resident out of a neighbourhood (e.g., to a suburb) cannot be considered the “banish[ment of] working-class households to peripheral locations” or, for that matter, viewed solely through the lens of freeing up land for gentrification.11 Moreover, we must note that some of the neighbourhoods or suburbs that are categorized as “peripheral” (e.g., away from the downtown, away from friends) in one literature are the very neighbourhoods that are considered “opportunity areas” (e.g., near manufacturing, near good schools) by another literature.

Cultural and Social Dispositions

In the 1970s many urban middle-class residents wanted to abandon the city. They were understood by cultural critics to be fearful, comfort-seeking, disloyal, boring, and materialistic automatons.12 The opposite of middle-class people abandoning and avoiding the city is middle-class people wanting to embrace, champion, and live in the city. Today the desire of young middle-class people to live in the city – while surely wholly subject to human biases and flaws – cannot be fully subsumed into the same suspect category as previous generations’ aversion to it. And if the aversion is to a particular type of middle-class way of life, say, middle-class “millennial culture” or the proliferation of beards, then the issue is really not about gentrification at all.

Similarly, in the 1970s most twenty-somethings sought a suburban life, and this predilection was considered a problem. Urban scholars have long decried the evils of suburbia and the image of its low-cost, cookie-cutter subdivisions of post-war, aluminum-sided ranch houses and expensive post-Reagan “McMansion” communities, equally void of social capital and accidental encounters. So leaving the “conventional suburbs” either because of being “excluded from [suburban] housing markets by reason of housing prices” or because of “the difficulties ... of carrying on [their] particular living arrangements” would be an acceptable micro-level decision to the urban analyst, or so it would seem.13 In simple terms, the opposite of housing seekers looking for a suburban life is these housing seekers desiring an urban life. Yet, as this trend unfolded, progressive gentrification activists on the ground – sometimes gentrifiers themselves – suggested that new residents go back to where they came from. Perhaps the legitimacy of this sentiment is best expressed by Black Detroiter Aaron Foley, who wondered if the white gentrifiers from the suburbs had adequately compensated for “the sins of their parents and grandparents for leaving Detroit for dead.”14 We get it, of course, but we also must not fall into the trap of uniformly classifying all young, middle-class seeking of an urban life as unreflective, naïve, juvenile conquest.

In the 1970s most white ethnic, middle-class, urban residents desired not to live next to a neighbour of a different race – and this attitude was rightly considered a problem. We face the reality that the opposite of seeking racial homogeneity is pursuing racial heterogeneity. Even amid exacerbated racial tensions the fact remains that increasing numbers of young people want to live and raise their children amid racial and/or ethnic diversity. In fact, increasing numbers of people have such diversity within their own families. Robert Sampson notes that “gentrification tends to occur in neighborhoods that are relatively diverse – gentrifiers appear to want to live in neighborhoods that are not lily white.”15 Peter Marcuse adds that “racism is rejected by more and more people (although not by all) as contrary to their own experiences and values.”16 The alternative was seen as bad by sociological standards. Today the imperative by young middle-class people to live in racially diverse environments cannot now be interpreted only as an economic or cultural threat to existing residents. To the extent we agree that a desire to live together is better than a desire not to – whether we see integration as an ideal or merely an option – we need to allow for some possibility of benign integration.

In the 1970s many urban residents and potential urban residents saw the city as an unlivable place in comparison with alternatives. Many who could leave had already left in successive waves. The policies of the mid-century tended to fortify the downtown “citadel” as the few middle-class residents remaining in downtown districts sought assurances against the threat of the “ghetto.”17 As a result, much of the new construction in cities was antithetical to what influential planner Jane Jacobs was calling for during these years. There was a lack of street-level activity and a tendency towards the privatization and quasi-militarization of space. The goal of many urban leaders from as early as the 1960s through the early 1990s was to make cities livable again. The opposite of an urban fortress is urban development that seeks – however imperfect it may turn out to be in practice – to consider local vernacular, to keep the fabric of street life intact, to design with the pedestrian in mind. Today all desire for street-level vitality and amenities cannot be suspect. Efforts to make neighbourhoods more livable cannot be uniformly classified as neoliberal campaigns – with “green space” and “walkability” now uniformly interpreted as fighting words.

Urban Housing and Transportation Policy

In the 1970s most of the middle class sought an auto-centric life and scholars considered this a problem. Historian Lewis Mumford had “ridiculed Americans for arranging their lives to suit their cars, evidence to him that they had no life worth living.” Pundits chastised national and urban leaders for creating an auto-centric society and books such as Dead End, Autokind vs. Mankind, and Superhighway-Superhoax punctuated the attack.18 The alternative to an auto-centric society must be a society that privileges other modes of transportation. Today all plans for an infrastructure-oriented housing development or policies that favour pedestrian access, biking, and public transportation across entire cities – while very often legitimately suspicious when considered in light of years of public disinvestment – cannot be viewed as only thinly veiled colonization.

In the 1970s, after years of unjust legislation and practices, much lower-income, affordable housing was relegated to “hyper-ghettos,” which was considered unjust and even illegal. The development practice in large cities was to limit such lower-income housing to concentrated towers in an effort to minimize the “waste” of real estate. Urban leaders’ priority for urban problems such as poverty was containment. Capitalism will continue to produce systemic poverty as it always has. One tenable alternative to a hyper-ghetto is a neighbourhood that includes low-income and poor residents but not only low-income and poor residents. An alternative to the “vertical ghetto” housing development is smaller buildings integrated into the fabric of class-diverse neighbourhoods. Today the orientation by urban planners to “scatter” affordable housing sites and pass inclusionary zoning ordinances – while it may fail in the implementation – cannot be wholly and uniformly suspect as an aim.

Getting the Neighbourhood Back to “Normal”

Let us consider a typical case of gentrification. The neighbourhood begins with a high rate of poverty: this poverty is seen as “Time A.” And every subsequent stage is envisioned as part of the continual upgrading of the neighbourhood. This is how, by the way, the brownstones being “deconverted” back into single-family homes from rooming houses can be viewed as “hyper-gentrification,” the furthest possible departure from some imagined in principio state of conversion – which, ironically, is usually a period of class segregation.

In a material sense these buildings are being returned to their original state – “re-” – as single-family homes after being divided during a period of fear and duress. They are returning to middle-class housing after years of poor and working-class use. If the people moving into the neighbourhood in the early twentieth century had been paid a living wage and residents were able to obtain mortgages, perhaps the homes never would have been divided. This is not to state that the process of making the homes single family once again is best, proper, or just, but rather to show the obfuscation in employing a “de-” word – deconversion – in this instance. Normalizing the conversion of the Brooklyn brownstone where John lived, in which economic, political, and social duress had “put ten gallons of water in a five-gallon pail,” contributes to a narrative of a “brownstone pastoral” era of warm, vibrant segregation.19

If a neighbourhood’s devalued state is seen as a natural “Time A,” the good old days when it featured an ample amount of affordable housing for the poor and working class, then does it follow that neighbourhoods that were middle class at that “Time A” are also in a “natural” state if they are frozen as middle class? Of course not, as their middle-class status in “Time A” is also seen as something that was achieved by unjust means. In this formulation any neighbourhood that once supplied low-income housing must continue to supply the same amount, almost, it seems, in perpetuity, while – we would guess – higher-cost neighbourhoods must become more affordable. This mindset may explain why people still label as “gentrified” neighbourhoods like Chicago’s solidly upper-middle-class Lincoln Park. Two issues derive from this.

The first issue, obviously, is that surely an enduring, disinvested, low-income neighbourhood is a problem as well. At one point, as outlined above, the urban agenda focused on dealing with the trapped, deprived, and socially segregated within these neighbourhoods. The possible policy solutions to the problem involved:

It is conceivable that any one of these possible responses would elicit anti-gentrification sentiment today. And rightly so. But this reaction would not necessarily be because of any inherent weakness or malice in the policy but because of the broader context. Indeed, current macro-, meso-, and micro-level dynamics mean that any of these policies might spark middle-class in-moving or middle-class-centred development.

Gentrifier Go Home – to Where?

A related query is “where are middle-class neighbourhoods supposed to be?” – a question critics will certainly imagine us asking while whining. But what we aim to argue here is that a salient prescription can’t exclude the middle class from the solution. When “solutions” exclude any new “middle-class housing in the city, whether conversion or new build, and any shops or restaurants that the middle-classes might visit,” noted Chris Hamnett, they “lose both analytical coherence and political bite.”20

Such a view ultimately excludes “the possibility of middle-class housing outside existing [middle-class] areas.”21 In most progressive dialogues about gentrification everyone seems to agree with the broad brush strokes: everyone with too much income, too much education, too much cultural capital, too much aesthetic taste is the enemy, the problem, the gentrifier. Unless, of course, they choose to live in the suburbs or an upper-middle-class enclave in the city “insulated from local poverty, wider systemic inequalities and public squalor”; and then they are an altogether different kind of enemy.22

In fact, some say that any middle-class urban residential decision today is unjust, due to the “marginalizations, exclusions and injustices [discussed in chapter 3] that allow some people to become luxury loft dwellers while others around them experience a loss of place.”23 But then, where do we go from here? After all, questions such as “where are the middle class to be?”; “where are the poor to be?”; and “where are the rich to be?” are pieces within the same puzzle, are they not?

Gentrification researchers studying the middle-class desire for a social mix often work to expose gentrifiers who pursue such ends as insincere. Surely the scepticism about both a “social mix” and social insulation are well founded. But are there not such things as real diversity, real inclusivity, and real livability – such that using them would not require ironic quotes at each use?

We have attempted to interrogate such contradictions by asking “where did John, Jason, and Marc choose to live and why?” All of us are navigating this structural transformation together. Ruth Glass’s original ideas about gentrification fifty years ago anticipate more recent sociology, such as Molotch et al.’s general point that “within powerful macro forces of migration, people self-select.”24 Much of the gentrification dialogue rests on ignoring both parts of that statement. We ignore “macro forces” as the potential causes for a variety of local outcomes. And we dismiss agency because households are treated as static and predictable class-programmed automatons. We are left with little more than a portrayal of gentrification as a supernatural force.

Gentrifiers,” Rose warned, “are not the mere bearers of a process determined independently of them.”25 The reason this distinction matters is that the project to frame gentrification as a uniform causal mechanism of good or evil misdirects academics and policy makers from pursuing actions on the ground that can better the lives of people within urban communities. Progressive gentrification theory has sometimes displaced the potential for progressive practice.

One observer described an anti-gentrification activist to John as “that man standing on the tracks as the train approaches.” Such martyrdom for a cause is noble. Certainly, we should fight for justice by any efficacious and ethical means necessary. But then what is efficacious and ethical? And who is the identified enemy?

When such a view plays out on the street level, it is tantamount – again to use the words of political scientist Larry Bennett – to declaring war on an abstraction. We see this war on abstractions when on-the-ground activists working tenaciously to bring regulated investment to their long-destitute neighbourhoods are protested by outside agents (e.g., sociology students at the local university) coming to “protect poor people” against …

Against what? Investment? Have we come to see such actions as progressive?

John’s friend, San Diego-based community development corporation organizer Vicki Rodriguez, has experienced uninformed outside agents coming in to impede resident-led negotiations in the name of the residents’ good. She states that the current context “is no longer about how to ‘stop’ or ‘keep others out.’ It is really about empowering those community members, getting them engaged to voice their opinion and be drivers in decision making” so that “both people and places prosper.” “The reality is,” she argues, “whether people admit it or not, the change is a’coming – [we need] to ensure that longtime residents are part [of] and will experience that change.” On the ground, communities run the risk of investing resources and energy “fighting to stop something that is likely inevitable.” The ever-blunt Rodriguez counsels communities to “cut your deal”: to invest their energy and focus on getting what their community wants and being a part of the change from a position of power.

While scholars often argue that the neoliberal stance creates a false choice between gentrification and ghettoization (dubbed TINA – as in “There Is No Alternative” to gentrification), in some contexts progressives contribute to this atmosphere by looking warily at any and all investment. If anything that appears to be a social “good” on the micro- or meso-level is unmasked as deceptive when viewed through a macro-level structural view, then there can be no ethical actions by any of us. Can any project, any micro-level decision, stand up to this brand of critique?

We end where we started: wondering how the progressive perspective would respond to a middle-class resident who wants to make a responsible housing decision beyond “yuppie go home.” Go home – to where? The suburb, small town, ethnic village, ghetto, bohemia, or middle-class enclave of one’s youth? “Stay in your place” – the prevailing sentiment that Wilson’s “trapped” ghettoized respondent identified in the 1990s – hardly seems the answer. Choosing gentrification and becoming a gentrifier is not “just a matter of simple unrestrained ‘preference,’” especially when one considers “the nature of available alternatives.”26

The Gentrifier as Another Coalition Builder among Many

Throughout this book, our aim has been to delineate an approach that interrogates general understandings of gentrifiers and helps the reader to understand the location of the gentrifier within the outcome of gentrification. Oddly enough, we find ourselves in much the same place that Damaris Rose described more than thirty years ago: feeling the need to transcend expressing “sorrow and outrage about displacement” to “developing some progressive political strategies.”27

As we consider strategy, we turn to some interesting insights to be gleaned from urban planning theorist Peter Marcuse’s ideas of social actors within the city. Marcuse classifies all urban actors from an economic perspective and a cultural perspective. What is most interesting about his economic classification, perhaps, is the idea that the working class includes “white as well as blue collar workers, skilled as well as unskilled, service as well as manufacturing workers.”28 Such an inclusive understanding of the working class transcends traditional boundaries to encompass all those whose labour produces a profit for others – including “what is euphemistically called the middle class”: the gentrifier.

Marcuse then goes beyond his more traditional economic classification to divide all urban residents into types of cultural actors. Two are particularly relevant here. The alienated, to Marcuse, is anyone “of any economic class” who stands in resistance to the “dominant system as preventing adequate satisfaction of their human needs.”29 And the insecure – a term that also transcends economic group – includes anyone whose combination of life circumstances has created a crisis in her life. Such class inclusivity is rare – and refreshing.

Peter Marcuse’s argument for this particular understanding of urban politics is through the lens of philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s 1968 subfield-defining essay, “The Right to the City,” in which Lefebvre expressed that “the right to the city is like a cry and a demand.”30 Marcuse notes that the “cry” and the “demand” often come from different groups and that “it is a combination of the deprived and the discontented” who will most effectively organize for the right to the city. Recent social mobilizations attest to this belief.31

In our experience, when educated, discontented young people return home from a community meeting to protest the location of a café in a gentrifying neighbourhood, they are either walking only a few blocks from the disputed café or headed to another gentrifying neighbourhood. And this fact does not impugn their sincerity. Undoubtedly, some gentrifiers have both economic and cultural “needs and desires in common with those they now compete with,” and potentially they will “work together to develop housing alternatives.”32 To borrow the words of sociologist Alvin Gouldner, this is a “card that history has presently given us to play.”33

Sounding very much like the pope in the opening of chapter 1, Marcuse outlines a “crisis” that “comes from a system that both necessarily produces gross material inequality and at the same time produces gross insecurity and emotional discontent and distortions.”34 The cry against such a system can come from the “aspiration of those superficially integrated into the system and sharing in its material benefits, but constrained in their opportunities for creative activity.”35 The current order has left them “unfulfilled in their lives’ hopes” and perhaps even feeling “guilty” for their level of material success.36 This discontented group is coming “up against the same constraints,” in fact, as those who are deprived of economic benefit: a “one dimensionality [that] eats away at their humanity.”37

Certainly, as Marcuse admonishes, in the political context of a zero sum game, the demands that emerge from material or legal deprivation must have priority over the cries of the alienated. But this does not diminish either. Both are entitled to the “fuller life to which the alienated aspire”; both have a valid claim on the “broader right to what is necessary beyond the material to lead a satisfying life.”38

As we see it, claims for material demands and for a fuller life can and should – must, even – coexist within urban politics. Of course, one could interpret Marcuse’s cry/demand notion as calling for the “cry” of hipster poets to express the “demand” of the oppressed, who are too busy working two jobs to do it themselves. This would be a disingenuous response to what Marcuse is describing. His classifications actually supply us with the tools to interpret a very common – and messy – contemporary phenomenon: what we might call the gentrifier who is against gentrification.

Gentrification is not unique among phenomena for having more dire consequences for the poor. It is oversimplified to view “gentrification and displacement in ‘pure’ class terms” even if indeed “the effects of this process are sharply delineated across class lines.”39 It is not productive to interpret gentrification as merely a form of violence against the poor.40 Nor is it accurate to assume that all gentrifiers share a similar class of origin or even a similar current class position. Finally, it is not fruitful to assume that gentrifiers are inherently culturally disconnected from long-time residents. Needs may be similar, preferences may be similar, aspirations may be similar: it is most essentially resources (e.g. income, wealth, networks of assistance) that differentiate the gentrifier’s impact.

The promise of forums, coalitions, alliances, movements, and assemblies that include both the demand “by those deprived of basic material and existing legal rights” and the cry of an “aspiration for the future by those discontented with life as they see it around them” is often derailed and splintered. As a result, opportunities to “claim the right to the city for all deprived and alienated” are missed.41 We believe that we stand at a crossroads, one at which a potential for coalitions could be either realized or missed completely.

Most neighbourhoods experiencing gentrification have leaders and organizations that are attempting to resist it, control it, or best position themselves for it. Interestingly, some of these organizations are composed of early gentrifiers – on whom the ironies are sometimes lost, by the way – who do not want to see the neighbourhood change any further. But others are made up of residents who preceded the gentrification and are experiencing great turmoil and upheaval around their neighbourhood’s transformation.

It will be messy when such organizations – the former usually composed fully of “gentrifiers” and the latter usually composed fully of “non-gentrifiers” – try to partner with one another. Similarly, it can be messy for an individual gentrifier to partner with the latter “old-timer” type of organization to develop a unified vision for the neighbourhood that includes, for example, preserving the units of affordable rental housing that still exist, developing new (truly) affordable housing within the gentrification, and advocating for innovative supportive housing for people without shelter. Foley acknowledges the prickliness of such collaboration in a long-steeped racial system like Detroit’s: “So what do you do? White people in Detroit think everything can be solved with conversation. So you bring your blackness to the table, and you still have to play by new rules: be black, but not too black to scare them away, but black enough that they can see you’re being black.”42 Determining how to make such a table work or, for that matter, working to align very separate and distinct tables might be the best possible outcome in our present era. What would be the outcome if each faction within the debate ignored the others and allowed powerful development coalitions, with resistance divided and conquered, to continue unabated with their own vision for the city?

The pieces are not in place for the slowing of gentrification. There are middle-class people who want to live in cities – some like “us” and others different from “us” – and cities want and need a broad, stable tax base. Especially in countries with less integration of national, state/provincial, and local governments, this local tax base is needed to provide funding for public schools, parks, housing, and infrastructure (although all are supplemented with higher-level funds).

The issue of whether politicians use a city’s growing tax base justly or unjustly must be kept separate from the fact that cities need a tax base. Not to offer our critics an easy lob, but indeed there still are many cities and neighbourhoods that wish they had the problem of middle-class in-migration. “We are competing with other cities in the global economy,” said an exasperated Chicago Alderman Walter Burnett in a community meeting in John’s neighbourhood. “We want our share,” he explained to the room of gentrifiers resisting what they classified as gentrification.43 Burnett’s ward has long required him to mediate between long-time residents and gentrifiers – and still does – but he now finds himself also mediating between gentrifiers and high-density luxury developers.

What remains true in this moment is that urban economies are still creating low-skilled, lower-pay service jobs, especially within downtown office buildings and gentrified neighbourhoods, “and the people who fill these jobs need to live in low-cost housing that is conveniently located in inner-city neighborhoods.”44 But the same reasoning applies to the low-skilled jobs, including those in the manufacturing sector, that still exist in the periphery of major metropolitan areas. A diversity of housing must be (or must continue to be) available here as well. As a result, it is becoming increasingly limiting to think about a city without thinking of its broader region.

Two Common Approaches to Gentrification: Neoliberal and Ameliorative

“Gentrifier,” as we have argued, is a structural position enacted when particular personal choices coincide with particular structural tendencies – tendencies that are embedded in accumulations of neighbourhood injustices and in contemporary global capitalism itself. Such tendencies may have lain dormant in places such as Detroit, Lille, and Manchester, just as they manifested in places such as New York, Paris, and London. As gentrification later materialized in the former places, however, it bore remarkable similarities to its earlier manifestations. This is why it is useful to study something like gentrification from the vantage point of social science – there is a clear structural pattern here. Even so, context is everything.

In some cases a low-income neighbourhood is quite strong: crime is relatively low, people are relatively healthy, and housing is affordable. Such a neighbourhood offers a source of affordable housing with a robust community fabric. Yet its sustained attractiveness to the middle class could disrupt this situation. It would make sense for a government – even from the vantage point of maximizing efficiency – to protect such a neighbourhood from mass in-moving now rather than have to invest in subsidized housing later when housing prices double.

In other cases a low-income neighbourhood has fallen off the table of city priorities and off the map of all but those who live there. Such neighbourhoods – often with high crime, low-performing schools, and meagre retail offerings – are a product of disinvestment and perhaps the negligence of the city leaders that perpetuated it. The implicit goal of these leaders is containment: to limit to its boundaries the ill effects of the neighbourhood’s issues. This neighbourhood can be the site of a double injustice when the government organizes huge swathes of cheap land for developers to create a “clean slate” for gentrification-minded real estate investment with no concern for the existing residents. There is often a general public will for such a reboot of a delinked neighbourhood that most voters don’t think much about anyway except for the images portrayed in the evening news. Such sentiments will be heightened in times when the issues of the contained area spill beyond it, met by dismayed expressions of “this type of thing just isn’t supposed to happen here.”

As we think about these different types of contexts, we can classify general responses that cities, neighbourhoods, and gentrifiers might have to gentrification. Peter Marcuse has suggested dividing policy into three categories: neoliberal, ameliorative, and transformative.45 We consider the first two before ending the chapter with a longer discussion of transformative policy.

In what Marcuse calls the neoliberal approach, gentrification is celebrated. If the market is a wild beast, it is one that we should merely ride, submissive to its power and respectful of its outcomes. We seek to feed the beast and ensure its health, but we would never harness it, as then its power would be diminished. If the “market” is now privileging certain areas, let us facilitate its work. If it is de-privileging cities or entire regions, then we should let them die and people should move from them. In this approach, states and provinces fight one another with weapons such as lower taxes; cities and their adjoining suburbs pillage one another for investments by firms that have already chosen the region they share; and cities compete in luring gentrifiers.

On the city level, are attractive buildings or well-positioned properties in a gentrifying neighbourhood being economically underutilized – are they beneath their “highest and best use”? Then the neoliberal policy response is to offer building preservation incentives or use “quick take” laws and eminent domain to upgrade properties in order to increase their value. In this approach the views of resistant long-time community members can be seen as naïve and backward, riled up by instigators: “They just don’t understand all of the dynamics at play and we don’t have time to explain it. Can’t they see this is better for everyone?”

On the individual level, the neoliberal orientation considers only one’s own household. Every household seeks to maximize its position. In regard to educational options, this may mean owning a huge, century-old, stately home in the “gritty” inexpensive neighbourhood with an underperforming neighbourhood school while renting an apartment in the neighbourhood zoned for an over-performing school. Doing so will maximize the household’s well-being. The family’s large home has the potential for appreciation, and its cheap price means that there will be a large budget for a gut renovation. Renting an apartment for the purposes of school documentation is cheaper than private school fees, and after a few years the rules may allow the child to stay at the school, enabling the household to give up the apartment.

The family might not feel comfortable in the neighbourhood where their home is: its residents may seem unfamiliar and the level of crime might be of concern. But they can ignore all of these factors, basing much of their social life elsewhere until the neighbourhood catches up with what they think and hope it will be. Using our multi-tool, we can see how such a household is privileging the monetary, practical, and aesthetic facets of a home-buying decision and downplaying all of the other more nuanced facets such as amenity and authenticity. When it comes to community, they are looking for a community of newcomers. They do not require flexibility because they have the resources to use multiple “home” neighbourhoods to meet their needs.

The ameliorative approach does not seek to change any of the underpinnings of the market-based or neoliberal approach. However, it does seek to compassionately mitigate some of the pain that the market causes. In this orientation the market is still a wild beast whose power is too valuable to tame, but there is an acknowledgment that – to adapt a cliché – the bull will break some of the china in the shop. While the neoliberal approach may go so far as to see the wild beast’s actions as essentially just, an ameliorative approach consciously recognizes that part of accepting the benefits of the beast’s power is to concede that its actions can lack human compassion and therefore must be cleaned up. This approach might be seen as making a bargain that in exchange for some regulation of the housing market’s worst effects (e.g., ensuring shelter), the beast can wreak havoc (e.g., transform the fabric of a person’s neighbourhood.).

Such an approach would not support the use of government funds to foster resident-centred reinvestment in a neighbourhood when that neighbourhood does not offer the promise of an immediate return. However, feeling compassion for the residents who are “trapped” there, such an orientation may have a policy that would offer more motivated (and thus “deserving”) residents a voucher to move to an area with more opportunity, to subsidize their transportation to travel to a job there, or to send their kids to a better school an hour away. Such an approach might seek to ameliorate the effects of the dearth of work by offering, say, free meals for kids at school. Ameliorative policies may subsidize the development of regional transportation as a way of conceding that some places will simply never offer opportunity (e.g., for safe play, for work, for education) and offering transportation for residents to access places that do.

Ameliorative policies such as voucher-based rental subsidies do not by definition disrupt the workings of the market system (i.e., the powerful beast) but rather seek to empower the resident as a consumer within the mechanisms of the system. They often do not help a resident in a disinvested neighbourhood to overcome other impediments such as access to information about where to best utilize the vouchers, so voucher users often wind up in neighbourhoods much like the ones they left. An ameliorative approach would be hesitant to tamper with the supply of affordable housing. Therefore, the fact that few landlords in high opportunity areas have any incentive to accept such vouchers also leaves voucher holders limited to areas of limited opportunities. Housing vouchers, of course, also help to support the continued growth of the mortgage industry and the financialization of mortgages, because recipients utilize their voucher on a housing unit owned (and likely mortgaged) by a private party.

On the micro-level, an ameliorative approach – like a neoliberal approach – would suggest that gentrifiers need not necessarily consider the sustainability of their household decisions for the larger community. Policy related to disinvested neighbourhoods can be seen as a form of charity, the redistribution of resources on behalf of the deserving or not-so-deserving down-and-out that is the responsibility of civil society. Like the neoliberal approach, the ameliorative approach assumes that most urban injustice results from particular urban communities losing a fair competition for resources. Social welfare exists to assist those who lost that fair competition.

Where Do We Go from Here? Grappling with Transformative Visions

In an ameliorative approach the role of government is merely “filling in the gaps” resulting from “the inadequacies of a private market,” and the market is understood to be “the basic, presumed original, and default instrument to regulate the economy.”46 In the transformative approach – like the ameliorative approach – the power of the wild beast is acknowledged, as is the fact that it makes a mess of the china shop. But rather than ameliorating or “cleaning up” the less-than-humane effects of the beast, the transformative approach seeks to harness the beast.

At times this may mean that the economic power of the beast is sacrificed for another more desirable goal. Through a transformative lens, democratic government is seen “as the legitimate, most efficient, and desirable tool” for setting social priorities. The market, now harnessed, plays “a subservient role.”47 This does not mean that such an approach sacrifices economic prosperity: in fact, often the approach holds that such an emphasis on social priorities – that is, a tamed beast – is the path to greater long-term prosperity. After all, the expenses of amelioration and functions such as policing are highest in a polarized landscape of “have” and “have not” neighbourhoods.

While the idea of employing such an orientation towards all arenas of life might seem Pollyannaish to some, we would note that it would be an ample step, at least on the city level, to recognize that certain societal goods should be viewed in this way – as too vital, too economically important, and too human to be governed solely by markets. Such items are to some extent human rights: a right to shelter, a right to learn, a right to safety, a right to health, and a foundational right to democratic participation in the neighbourhood’s future. The more equally funded and evenly distributed are amenities such as well-conceived and vibrant schools, libraries, parks, community centres, sidewalks, bike lanes, grocery stores, and participatory community organizations, the less they are seen as demanding a premium home price or – for low-income residents – possessing a threat of displacement.

Of course, such development will not happen simultaneously in all neighbourhoods. What it means in practice is that it can be difficult to assess a particular leader’s motives and orientation. So, for instance, early efforts of city leaders to incentivize the development of full-service grocery stores in food deserts could be interpreted as either a neoliberal “big boom” project presaging the razing of the neighbourhood for gentrified development or the beginning of a truly transformative orientation to locate such resources in proximity to every city resident – thereby decreasing their scarcity and resulting value as an amenity. Most often, injustice is found not in the plan, but in the implementation.

One foundational transformative policy that leaders at higher levels of government or at the city level can implement is the capping of property taxes when they become too high a proportion of household income. Such policies, sometimes called circuit breakers, mean that homeowners would not lose their home due to property tax increases far surpassing their household income. A second tool that state- or city-level leaders can utilize relates to limiting the degree to which developers can convert the housing stock from rental to owner-occupied. Doing so requires some nuance, of course, as not all owner-occupied housing excludes low-income buyers and not all rental housing includes low-income renters. The key is to ensure that current renters have enforced rights and that the pool of rental housing remains substantial.

Another transformative housing policy on the city level is an inclusionary zoning measure that requires all newly approved housing developments of a certain size (i.e., number of residential units) to offer some affordable housing. This can ensure that as the fabric of the future city is built, it has an affordable component woven into it. It will not happen, though, if the requirement merely phases out after a few years, so that units become market rate after being occupied by one household. Such a measure, then, should be firm. It should be firm, also, so that a housing developer is unable to dodge it merely by paying an “in lieu” fee into a pool for the purpose of keeping the higher-income development homogeneous. In such cases, the developer builds the affordable housing in a less costly, devalued neighbourhood at a later date. Such an approach keeps more affordable and more costly housing segregated.

Sometimes, however, community leaders from more devalued neighbourhoods prefer this alternative as part of their larger development vision for their community. These leaders have in mind constituents who cherish and enjoy their community, residents for whom the idea of moving to a luxury tower with a massage proprietor in the ground floor is more preposterous than alluring. Off-site, in-lieu-funded, affordable housing, then, should neither be the norm nor be uniformly interpreted as a negative.

A related foundational transformative approach is regional collaboration in governance. If metropolitan leaders take a “fair share” approach to affordable housing in an entire region, for instance, it will have a transformative effect on a metropolitan area’s class segregation. Regional transportation networks may be ameliorative in some respects in that they help people to travel an hour for good amenities in response to a lack in their own neighbourhood. However, excellent regional transportation systems and transit-oriented development (TOD) or building high densities of housing near rail stations can be an integral component of a transformative approach that sees each place (be it a small municipality, a large neighbourhood, or an area of town) within a metropolitan area as a viable part of the collective. A resident may travel to one part of the region for her desired retail offerings, another for her daughter’s desired park, and a third for her desired community organization or congregation – not out of desperation but because her mental map of the region encompasses its entirety. In addition, as households consider moves to places within a region that they had not previously considered, transportation networks ensure that they remain linked with the rest of the region.

For instance, the lower-income Black household moving from a formerly disinvested Black neighbourhood to a more resourced municipality in order to be near the head of household’s job will benefit most when transportation networks allow friends and family from the old neighbourhood to visit. One Black woman in Chicago moved her family to a near north suburb, where 1 per cent of residents are Black, for better schools and other amenities. She noted that “the move was difficult – her kids miss their friends,” her church is forty-five minutes away, and her “own friends who use public transit never come out to visit, because it’s so difficult to get to.”48

In theory, affordable regional transportation assuages such tensions. If this family had lived within a building developed with the principles of transit-oriented development, she would have easy access to the suburban rail system and, by connection, the Chicago “L” train system. (Alternatively, the suburbs Oak Park, Evanston, and Skokie are actually on the city’s L system itself.) The family would be more connected to the urban fabric. However, a regional approach to governance over time also transforms the metropolitan fabric by developing such affordable housing in areas where it had not existed previously. As that happens, it is not difficult to imagine once-isolated families being accompanied by people with whom they have more in common – households that may have been similarly limited by affordability.

Yet this is where the transformative approach finds itself in a “can’t win for losing” scenario.

One right-leaning critique suggests that a regional approach to housing – one that offers a diversity of housing types and price levels everywhere – is left-leaning social engineering and would provoke the flight of the affluent, who never signed up for such neighbours. As one Detroit pundit mocked, such an approach employs “both the federal Treasury and the federal club to coax Americans into neighborhoods planned by bureaucrats to perfectly reflect the nation’s diversity,” concluding that “efforts to coerce economic diversity in housing almost always end up destroying neighborhoods.”49

A common left-leaning counterargument to this charge would be that if every neighbourhood had its “fair share” of affordable housing, its “social mix” sweet spot, no place would experience the type of influx that would prompt a NIMBY approach – indeed, one report suggests that the twenty-unit building that the family above moved into was developed “without a peep of objection.”50 Such a policy is intentionally “inclusionary” as opposed to previous policies that were intentionally “exclusionary.” The outcome of such a policy, this counterargument goes, should be celebrated in a housing system long characterized by discrimination and segregation because, as these families move, they break up the common conception of these areas – in this case, as being solely for white and middle-class residents. In fact, the neighbourhood from which the family moved may also be beginning the process of gentrifying – thus breaking up the enduring segregation of that neighbourhood as well.

As we further consider a transformative regional approach, we will take a moment to note that the facets of our multi-tool, as we have said, are not inherently “middle class” – nor are they explicitly “urban.” This is why Damaris Rose commented in 1984 that “it remains to be seen to what extent redesigning existing suburbs might change the current preference ... for inner city living.”51 A few years later, Ruth Glass noted that the urban, suburban, and rural have “have lost some of their differentiating features.”52 These types of inquiries underlie urbanist Roger Keil’s insightful exploration of the diversity of contemporary “suburbanisms” around the world.53

One Washington, DC, would-be gentrifier, urbanist Amanda Kolson Hurley, talks about her neighbourhood in suburban Silver Spring, Maryland, where she can “walk to places serving Salvadorian, Ethiopian and Dominican food. Buses come every five minutes. They’re packed – our neighborhood has the same density as San Francisco. As a non-Hispanic white person, I’m in the minority, and I’m used to hearing Spanish and Amharic as much as English.”54 Hurley covers many facets of our multi-tool here, explaining – in our jargon – how her facets were addressed more effectively in the DC suburbs than in DC proper. Today, some would-be gentrifiers are moving to suburban areas and small towns precisely because those places are becoming more open to multi-family development centred upon transportation lines, more diverse by race and ethnicity, and more attuned to the kinds of community amenities that young professionals look for. A move to the suburbs might actually be motivated by the desire for a more inclusive life.

This change is occurring at the same time as some gentrifying neighbourhoods are losing some of these same perceived strengths. Hurley talks about a visit to a Toronto farmer’s market where she felt wooed once again by aesthetics of the landscape: “handsome old buildings with old bones, urban fabric that’s become fine-grained over time.” But the suburban cosmopolitanism of her own Silver Spring neighbourhood (not unlike that found in suburban Toronto) made her experience in Toronto – observing “white people buying Ontario-grown beets” and the “skinny-jeaned barista … pedaling hard to power a coffee grinder” – seem a bit narrow.55

In an insightful essay “self-identified Black gentrifier” and urban thinker Dax-Devlon Ross discussed his fatigue with his gentrifying West Harlem neighbourhood. Despite being weary, however, he never imagined leaving what he viewed as the “epicenter of coolness, culture, and creativity.” “The origins of my own dark image of suburbia trace back to the Peanuts gang,” Ross quips in his rich and nuanced reflection.56 But on a whim one day, he decided to just take a drive out of the city for a break.

“Frankly, I was shocked by the diversity. There were people of color and from different ethnic backgrounds everywhere we went,” he explained. “As we drove from one town to the next it occurred to me that maybe I was the one out of step.” As he explored the towns of Rockland County, Ross ultimately concluded that he had allowed his image of the “city to evolve into the great multicultural melting pot” while keeping “the suburbs in a whitebread straightjacket.”57 He notes, significantly, that his insistence on maintaining a “shoebox” in the city was no more enlightened than a previous generation’s “rush to the suburbs.”

Urban sociologist Herbert Gans noted in 1968, in fact, that the suburbs were little more than a “highly visible showcase for the ways of life” of young people with a certain modicum of resources. What we were seeing in 1968 suburbs, said Gans at the time, “could have been found among new suburbanites when they still lived in the city” – in other words, there is little that is essentially “urban” or “suburban.”58 Ross notes here that urban gentrification, like the post-war suburban vogue, is partly an artefact of the way it supported a young, middle-class way of life. In the same way, some of the same multi-tool facets that structured moves to gentrified urban neighbourhoods can also precipitate moves to suburban (or even rural) contexts.

What is the larger social significance? Well, to oversimplify, if every place “gentrifies,” then really no place gentrifies. And, for that matter, if every place has affordable housing, then no place is the place for “low-income housing.”

The distribution of amenities and infrastructure that are in the interests of the collective, but not necessarily in the selfish interests of any one individual, can be effectively executed only at higher levels of government. Few middle-income suburbs have placed “recruiting lower-income residents” and “inclusionary zoning” on their town hall docket. Yet the damage was done with intention and can be undone only with intention.

Some, as we have seen, label this a left-leaning line of thinking: that every small community should aspire to be a microcosm of the larger society. To make the issue more complicated, though, there is a common, even-more-left-leaning, progressive retort. This line of thought suggests that “scattering” low-income families is actually a right-leaning social engineering plot that seeks to hide away poor families in order to dilute them as a political block, immerse them in middle-class practices, protect them from negative role models of their old community, and then raze and redevelop their old neighbourhood as prime space for middle-class use. (And when a scattered neighbourhood has a particular racial, ethnic, or other identity, there is a related cultural critique that a bastion of cultural production is lost.)

Forms of segregation did occur, this left-leaning position would argue, and communities have formed in response. There is no time machine. Our response to the past, then, cannot merely be to “undo” the resulting communities, uprooting them as if they never formed. Why? To meet some revised (white) middle-class dream of a just society? Macro-level “engineering” obfuscates how any societal transition – including those ultimately deemed a success – chews up lives in the gears of change.

“They suggested Dagenham, which I’ve never even been to,” said a London woman who was being advised to relocate, as her affordable East End housing was transitioned to market rate. She found on line that Dagenham has a high population of the far right group, the English Defence League (EDL). “Yeah, please. I’m mixed race, I really want to take my mixed race daughter to live somewhere I don’t know which is full of EDL.” She considered her current neighbourhood. “I’ve got friends in the East End I’ve had since I was 12,” she said, “and I’m 37 now, I’m not going to suddenly just make those new relationships overnight.” “It’s not the same as if you’ve got money, you can just say, ‘oh, I don’t like it’ after 2 months and come home.”59

Her home, the Balfron Tower near the twenty-five-year-old Canary Wharf financial district, already had benefited from centrality and amenities. The neighbourhood was stable and not in pressing need of any intervention. However, the building – designed by architect Ernö Goldfinger – was in need of renovation. In a gambit familiar to urban researchers and activists (e.g., recall “smelling a rat” from chapter 3), the tenants were offered the opportunity to move back into Balfron Tower upon its renovation or to live in newly constructed affordable housing elsewhere. Yet eventually, in a form similar to other renovation schemes, once the residents were out of the tower, they were told that there had been a change in plans: the units would actually be sold as market-rate flats.

Claims of social engineering by the right and the left are worth exploring. Poor residents in homogeneous neighbourhoods should not be relocated in the name of a utopia – a supposed utopia of the left in which all races and creeds live on the same block or a supposed utopia of the right in which prime urban land is freed up for its highest and best use. It is vital to note that at this moment right- and left-leaning views do indeed share a considerable overlap when it comes to their potential for displacing the poor. This is a double injustice when we consider – as we did in chapter 3 – the degree to which it was social engineering that segregated many urban, poor neighbourhoods to begin with. The “social problems” that current policies seek to address are often at least partly the effects of previous policies.

At its foundation, a transformative approach to housing and community development policy must respect the reality of this conundrum by assigning much greater agency to local community politics, either empowering or forming community organizations, councils, or boards. The refrain “we’ve seen this before” is laden with local expertise as to how to avoid past injustices being reincarnated on the same soil. When local communities have increased control over processes such as neighbourhood planning and neighbourhood policing, a city’s plans are not only less threatening in that there is greater potential for current residents to benefit, but such grounded plans are also more sustainable.

In the absence of a grass-roots level of government, communities work to gain this type of control using various tools. One such tool is a community benefits agreement, a contract between one or more community organizations and a developer. Such agreements set particular standards of community benefits (e.g., the training and employment of long-time residents) for a particular development (e.g., a grocery store) in order to mitigate its community impact (e.g., the displacement of smaller retailers.) Another tool that local leaders can use to maintain local control is a right-to-purchase policy that allows a current tenant of a building or a non-profit developer the ability to purchase a property before it can be sold to a for-profit developer. Such a non-profit corporation might use a third tool, a community land trust, to hold properties on behalf of a community. A purchaser of a property within that trust owns the building, then, but not the land that it is on.

A community land trust removes the land from the harsh fluctuations of speculation and resulting economic displacement. Despite its benefits, however, it also prevents a housing owner from profiting from a sharp increase in land values because the household does not own the land. Of course, the downside is that if a low-income property owner had owned the land, it might have banked a great deal of equity and, upon sale of the property, wealth.

Brooklynite D.K. Smith’s questioning of Spike Lee comes to mind here: are we now asking households excluded from generations of property-related wealth building to give up such wealth for some perceived greater good of their community? After all, as Loretta Lees et al. state, “the fundamental question is always this: who gets to profit” from the increased value of a property?60 Some argue that the low-income homeowner creating wealth is the ultimate justice.

The pro-land-trust retort would suggest that this “poor homeowner example” is misleading: the low-income household would have been more likely to rent from a landlord who would have evicted the household, sold the house, and banked the profit. Then, after the displacement, generations of households would be excluded from owning or renting the property due to its value. This is an important argument, one that must take place on the neighbourhood level between the multiple organizations, the mechanisms of government, and the residents who have a stake in the answer. What works for Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant might not be what works for London’s East End – and may be completely irrelevant to Houston’s Third Ward or Winnipeg’s West Broadway.

Closing Thoughts

The current dialogue on gentrification has not produced an environment conducive to understandings of place that are insightful, inclusive, and actionable. We know that our invitation for more complexity runs the risk of being interpreted as justifying indifference to the material realities of gentrification or leaving the wide range of ethical, political, and personal contradictions of the gentrifier unattended. Yet we make the invitation nonetheless; we believe it is the only way forward. A truly transformative approach must transcend the “good/bad,” “conquerors/conquered,” “embrace/fight” Manichaeism of the contemporary discourse, offering a more complex understanding of the issues surrounding gentrification.

In working to move past such simplistic dichotomies, cultural thinker Wendell Berry shared his ideas of exploitation and nurture, suggesting that these terms “describe a division not only between persons, but also within persons.”61 Urban geographer Eric Clark brought Berry’s ideas into the gentrification discussion and for good reason.62 Within debates about urban community it is important to keep in mind that “we are all to some extent the products of an exploitative society,” as Berry admonished, “and it would be foolish and self-defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp.”63

The neoliberal approach fosters exploitation, but exploitation can exist in a transformative approach as well. Plans for public transportation in transit deserts, for grocery stores in food deserts, for racial integration within homogeneity, for better schools within a deteriorating education system – all can be exploitative in practice. But each can also nurture community and place.

Berry’s terms highlight motives and goals, rather than the nuts and bolts of policy. The exploiter’s motive is efficiency, he explains, the nurturer’s motive is care. The exploiter’s goal, he continues, is maximizing exchange value and profit, while “the nurturer’s goal is health.” The exploiter’s wish is to “earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible.” While the exploiter’s service is on behalf of “an institution or organization,” the nurturer serves community and place.”64

Community control is important in a context in which forces seem to be conspiring for community exploitation. However, there must be “nurture circuit breakers” (e.g., zoning measures) to ensure that community control is not used to exclude particular populations or particular agreed upon land uses such as affordable housing. What makes gentrification bad is not that people want an active street life, strong social capital, a diverse community, and financial security for their family. Activists of all stripes (e.g., in health, housing) fight for such characteristics in disinvested communities. Anyone who seeks to live on an empty street in a homogeneous community that provides a tenuous situation for their family may rightly be questioned. No: what makes middle-class-driven or middle-class-centred reinvestment bad is when it occurs within a structure of exploitation that makes it a zero-sum game, one in which residents are isolated enough from each other to implicitly consent to such a system – a structure in which both community and democracy deteriorate. A nurturing, transformative approach incorporates a fair and sustainable balance of land uses in everyone’s backyard.

In this short volume we have not outlined a specific path forward, but instead sought to illuminate the place we strongly believe it must begin. We have worked to highlight the historical and contemporary factors that create and sustain gentrification. We have offered a range of tools and terminology to help contextualize and organize our understanding of gentrification and gentrifiers. Perhaps most important, we have modelled a process of looking inward, reflecting on our own narratives, ideologies, identities, and practices. Our economic and political conundrums demand a cultural shift. We hope to see local communities move away from shared, self-defeating caricatures of “gentrifiers” and “native” residents and – in so doing – become more equipped to seek common ground, navigate more ethical personal choices, negotiate sound policy decisions, and choose nurturing engagements in civic life.

Let’s get started.