#Debate: Whether Gentrification Is Good or Bad Will Always Be Disputed — What Matters Most Is That Residents Get a Choice

Neighborhoods that were once colorful and varied always end up looking the same after gentrification. What does gentrification actually do? How should we think about it?

"Fuck off, Google!"

In 2016, the search giant came from Silicon Valley to Berlin and found a building whose history may be five times longer than the company's own. It planned to turn the abandoned power station into a business incubator. Then it met the resistance of Berliners, who chanted slogans laced with profanity; activists occupied the building for a time. Two years later, Google gave in, handing the building to a nonprofit platform and covering the maintenance costs.

Berlin was not alone. Swedes did not want Apple opening a store at a landmark in their capital, and Italians resisted Starbucks's expansion into their country. Around the world, more and more people are wary of big companies moving into old neighborhoods.

Today this kind of urban renewal has a name: gentrification. Chain supermarkets undercut the mom-and-pop shops that have traded for decades and shut them down; middle-class newcomers willing to pay higher rents push out the sitting tenants; developers buy up plot after plot, building after building, and remodel them into modernist blocks.

The outcome looks unavoidable. When big companies, property developers, chain retailers and middle-class consumers move into a neighborhood, they bring their tastes and their spending habits with them, and the shape of the old community changes. That has raised worries — about rising rents, higher living costs, community ties broken, residents of several decades forced to move, even the wholesale destruction of local culture.

Every big city is going through it. Tokyo's Shinjuku turned from a gathering place for artists and intellectuals into a large commercial district; Barcelona drove out its low-end industries after the Olympics and became one of the world's tourist capitals; and several Black neighborhoods in New York lost the soil that once fed Black subculture as white residents poured in.

Such sharp change keeps gentrification in dispute. "Is gentrification a dirty word?" the British geographer Neil Smith asked in his 1996 book The New Urban Frontier.

Plenty of people today would answer: yes, gentrification is a dirty word.

The American director Spike Lee, born and raised in Brooklyn, spoke at a public event about what had happened to the neighborhood he grew up in: "New York has changed! Why does it take white people pouring into the South Bronx, Harlem, Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights before the amenities in those areas get any better?"

He was worked up, and used the F-word 19 times in seven minutes: "[Developers], get the fuck out! You can't just walk into a neighborhood with a cigarette in your mouth and start slaughtering Native Americans like some goddamn Christopher Columbus."

Set aside the anger in Lee's remarks and what he said is nearly identical to what Jane Jacobs argued 60 years earlier. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, the journalist turned urban-planning scholar wrote: "People who get marked with the planners' hex signs are pushed about, expropriated, and uprooted much as if they were the subjects of a conquering power. Thousands upon thousands of small businesses are destroyed, and their proprietors ruined, with hardly a gesture at compensation... Whole communities are torn apart, with a reaping of suspicion, resentment and despair."

Jacobs may have been the first scholar to insist that an intact community, one that formed on its own, is essential to keeping a city alive. Community, she believed, was crucial to how a city develops. Her opponent was Robert Moses, then New York's master planner.

Moses believed in centralized planning, assigning each part of the city a function. To tie central New York more tightly to the areas around it, he oversaw the building of bridges and elevated expressways that permanently changed the face of some of the city's neighborhoods.

The most contested of them was the Cross Bronx Expressway. It cut the Bronx in two and forced about 5,000 households to move. People later blamed that displacement for changing who lived in the Bronx: wealthier residents went north, while the South Bronx kept sliding.

Jacobs had a romantic picture of the community, and she named it the sidewalk ballet. "A little after eight, when I put out the garbage can... Mr. Halpert is unlocking the laundry's handcart, the barber has brought out his folding chair, and the building superintendent's wife is setting her child down by the curb." Students head off to school, men and women with briefcases jump into the subway or a cab, and Jacobs and the fruit vendor nod to each other. "We all know what it means: everything is fine."

She preferred that scene to office and shopping districts that stand empty outside commuting hours, and to suburbs so thinly populated you might not see another person all morning. The point of the sidewalk ballet is that everyone living in a neighborhood makes up one orderly, mutually agreeable whole. The centralized planning, the grand buildings and the single-purpose zones she attacked, she called the City Beautiful movement. Beautifying a city that way, she believed, would in the end only make it shrink, as it did in the Bronx.

While Jacobs was drawing the city as she thought it should be, a British scholar across the Atlantic coined the word "gentrification." In 1964, the sociologist Ruth Glass described it this way in a book about the changes under way in London:

"One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been taken over by the middle class. Shabby flats — usually two rooms up and two down — had their leases expire, and working-class tenants were replaced by middle-class ones... Once this process of gentrification starts, it goes on rapidly, until all or most of the original working-class tenants are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed."

Her wording gives away her judgment. But as a Marxist, Glass looked at gentrification mainly through class. The fight over urban space was, to her, a form of class struggle. From that angle it is hard to imagine the middle-class picture of the city that Jacobs stood for merging with Glass's Marxist critique — yet the two theories, built on entirely different ground, fit together remarkably well.

On urban renewal, Jacobs stressed big capital and the remaking of space through buildings. Glass stressed the movement of people: when people with more economic power move into a neighborhood, they disrupt its native culture. What each describes as the result is the same — an existing community destroyed — but the mechanisms differ, and Jacobs's capital and Glass's population complement each other, opening gentrification up to readings from both physical space and cultural space.

As a sociologist, Glass offered more rigorous observation and analysis, filling in the insights Jacobs had drawn from her own life. In return, the romance Jacobs gave to community made Glass's analysis of gentrification fit the tastes of the middle and even the upper classes — the people who actually control public discourse today.

All of this folded Jacobs's vision of the city into the language of gentrification, which soon spread as a popular theory in sociology and urban studies. By Smith's own account, when he came from Scotland to the United States in the 1970s to study gentrification, he still had to explain to people what the word meant. Ten years later everyone was talking about it. "The language that had built up around gentrification seemed unstoppable."

The meaning of the word changed a great deal in the process. Glass had meant only to point out what was happening in London's property market; Smith now holds that gentrification can be defined as a much broader change in the urban landscape, one that hides class conflict underneath.

Both Jacobs and Glass were critical of gentrification from the start. They looked at different sides of it, but both noted that gentrification cannot happen without existing residents being torn out of their homes and moved.

Big developers, chains and the middle class bring more money in, and rents go up. Even when developers and governments use neither administrative orders nor force to push existing residents out, those residents are likely to leave anyway because they cannot pay the rent. That is the moral case against gentrification: however you look at it, driving people out of their own homes is nothing to be proud of.

That worry sat at the center of the Berlin protests against Google. Housing prices in Berlin have risen 120 percent since 2004; last year, of 150 major cities worldwide, Berlin was the only one where prices rose more than 20 percent in a year. Figures from Guthmann Estate, a local agency, show that almost nothing is left in Kreuzberg below 2,000 euros per square meter. In January last year, when the lease on a local bakery, Filou, ran out, neighbors who feared the shop could not pay the new rent took to the street and started the Gloreiche neighborhood initiative to save a bakery that had been with them for 20 years.

Recent scholarship confirms that Berliners' anxiety applies elsewhere in the world too. Researchers at UC Berkeley and UCLA went through decades of studies and concluded that gentrification does push up rents in a neighborhood. Chain retailers may lower what residents pay to live, but overall Walmart and other retailers cut the number of jobs and business openings across a neighborhood and hold down retail wages.

And, as Glass described, gentrification sharply changes who lives in a neighborhood. The internet industry that took off in the 1990s pulled large numbers of technical workers to the American West Coast, into the pendulum commute between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. As rent controls came in, many landlords pulled out of the rental market and served notice on their existing tenants; the tech elite always found a way to stay.

Census figures show that between 1990 and 2010 San Francisco gained 2,000 white residents, 32,000 Asian residents and 13,000 Hispanic residents, while its African American population fell by 18,000. People under 35 arrived at a net 7,500 a year; people over 36 left at a net 5,000 a year.

The other charge against gentrification is that it destroys the cultural atmosphere of a place. People like to sum it up as ABC. In one version that stands for Art gallery, Boutique and Cafe. In another it stands for Alcohol, Bike and Coffee. Either way, what gentrification leaves behind is always the same look.

Scandinavian interiors are popular around the world; people are keen on artists like Yayoi Kusama and Yoshitomo Nara, and everyone knows what Arabica beans taste like. That is largely because gentrification caters to the middle class, and the middle class has been shaped by post-globalization consumerism, so their tastes are much alike — or at least never stray far from the line companies have drawn.

This hits hard at the local cultures that formed before globalization sped up. The urban scholar Sharon Zukin analyzed six distinctive New York neighborhoods in her book Naked City. Harlem was once a famous Black neighborhood, the very place where today's most popular hip-hop and street cultures were born, yet in recent years the "Harlem renaissance" has meant oligarch developers, luxury brands and modern chain supermarkets. "Everyone is pushing Harlem to stop being the minority enclave it once was and to look more like every other Manhattan neighborhood."

You can find the same worry in any gentrified neighborhood. Airbnb hosts in Shanghai are happy to say their rooms sit in the French Concession, because it sounds romantic and upscale, and they need not give a thought to the colonial history behind the phrase. In Hong Kong, Kennedy Town has drawn more and more foreigners and tourists since the subway reached it, though it used to be thought of as Hong Kongers' back garden.

Zukin calls this cultural content authenticity: what each generation living in a neighborhood takes to be original, combined with the new things they keep making as they live there. Authenticity, she believes, is what every city should hold on to as it grows, both to protect cultural variety and out of respect for each culture.

Evicting residents and destroying local culture make up the two lines of today's criticism of gentrification. Behind both is one concern: protecting what the original community is entitled to. As Zukin sees it, behind a city's authenticity lies a right to the city, and that is a human right. "This right grows out of residents' long-term dwelling, use and habit."

Only by treating it as a right can you answer the many defenses of gentrification. People often cite research by Lance Freeman, an urban scholar at Columbia University, showing that in gentrified neighborhoods the poverty rate can fall from 30 percent to 12 percent within a decade. Low-income residents also gain from falling crime. Academic work on how gentrified neighborhoods fare in the long run is still thin, but some findings do suggest that, in economic terms, gentrification may bring a neighborhood real benefits.

Others argue that the Berliners' resistance to Google does not hold up. The neighborhood Google tried to move into was once a thriving industrial area; it became a center of contemporary art, electronic music and underground culture only after industry there declined. Which Berlin Berliners want is not clear even to them. This runs straight into the trouble with defining authenticity that Zukin identified: a neighborhood's culture is always in motion, and it is essentially impossible to say in substance which culture is that neighborhood's authentic one.

In fact, the idea of a right points at another thing at the core of city life. It suggests that how people live in a neighborhood and the choices they make are the very mechanism that constitutes the neighborhood, and the city. That may also be why Jacobs's romantic picture of the block is so appealing. Her sidewalk ballet is the best description there is of how people deal with one another inside a community.

Since people live there, they should have the right to take part in that exchange and to build the living space they want through it. At that level, whether gentrification is good or bad is not simply a matter of what residents gain or lose. The test is whether residents have enough say in deciding their own future.

In Naked City, Zukin describes a case in which a city and its residents worked something out to their mutual benefit, and the key to it was the back-and-forth and the compromise between the two sides.

In 2008, IKEA opened a store in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Next to the popular Scandinavian furniture was a ballfield ringed with food carts. Most of the vendors were Latino immigrants who had come to the United States over the previous decades, and together they had made a distinctive food community built around Latin American cooking. South America and Scandinavia seemed to coexist easily. Zukin wrote: "In a way, through pupusas and Swedish meatballs, consumer culture is turning [Red Hook] from urban wasteland into destination."

IKEA and the vendors were not without conflict. Zukin suggests that the city's attempt in 2007 to clear the ballfield vendors out through licensing was "perhaps no coincidence." But in the end, with help from the press, the Red Hook Food Vendors Association, which the vendors organized themselves, reached an agreement with the city. The city would shelter them, on condition that they meet the health standards set by the relevant departments. Zukin called it a large achievement: "The Red Hook food vendors would win the city's sanction for their right to put down roots here."

This is exactly what the gentrification of many cities lacks. Governments take back land by decree and redevelop it; big developers use money to make residents move; the middle class floods a block in search of a particular cultural atmosphere. Residents are the weaker party, with nothing to set against developers' capital and the power of government planning, so they are the ones sacrificed. The heat Berliners showed in protesting Google seems to come from exactly that: anger that, as the people who live there, they were not taken into account at all.

At bottom, if we treat the city as a public space, then the city's own problems are public problems, and solving public problems depends on a mechanism that brings in everyone concerned to state their views, argue, and persuade one another. Only then can we find a compromise that meets everyone's needs.

Long cover image/WikiMedia

Cover image/Pixabay