Where Does Gentrification Come From, Why Is It Inevitable, and How Does It Produce Inequality? | Notes on Reading About Cities (Part 2)

刘质真 · 2019-05-06 · English translation

This is a books column, and what follows recommends several books about cities and gentrification. These reading notes are long, so they're published in three parts. This is the second.

Cities play an important role in our lives. Often, the city is our life itself. Everyone expresses their own understanding of the city — and in a sense, that is their understanding of life.

Think of our recommendations as an index. What we hope they convey isn't just the conclusions these earlier thinkers reached, but — as always — something that pushes our own thinking forward.

Previously: How Are We, as Human Beings, Related to One Another? | Notes on Reading About Cities (Part 1)

What is the relationship between gentrification and the new city?

I was sitting, at the time, in a fully gentrified bar in the Marais. It was run by an Australian, I was drinking a Dutch beer, and I paid in francs. Among the bar's small crowd of patrons were, besides the French, some Anglo Parisians, and a few German and Japanese tourists. On television, an American football game — a European league match — was playing, Barcelona hammering Scotland. In fact, all the players seemed to be American. There were two commentators, one Irish, one American.

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

The ordinary Saturday afternoon Neil Smith describes in Paris's Marais is a product of late-20th-century gentrification. "This gentrification of the Marais," he writes, "seems altogether familiar to us." He isn't the only one who finds it familiar — Shanghai's Tianzifang, and, a few years back, Yongkang Road and Changle Road, are scenes we know just as well.

Neil Smith defines "gentrification" this way:

As I generally use it, gentrification is a process: in inner-city neighborhoods once home to the poor and the working class, where capital once fled and the middle class once left in large numbers, private capital is now flowing back in, and middle-class buyers and renters are moving in, so that the neighborhood gets refurbished. The poorest working-class neighborhoods are being renovated; capital and the upper strata are returning — but for some, not everything that follows turns out to be welcome.

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

The word "gentrification" is said to have been coined by Ruth Glass in 1964. Logically, it should have come from the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution — and in fact, it did.

One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes — upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages — two rooms up and two down — have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. Larger Victorian houses, downgraded in an earlier or recent period and used as lodging houses or in multiple occupation, have been upgraded once again... Once this process of "gentrification" starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed.

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

Sharon Zukin, a researcher of gentrifying neighborhoods, argues that gentrification can be boiled down to a city's ABCs: art galleries, boutiques, and cafes.

These are what people chase after.

Gentrification quickly makes people feel that a once-declining neighborhood will now thrive, that a once-poor, backward place will now pay off handsomely, and that the middle class will return to the city — gentrification is unquestionably a "good thing." The gentrification of Philadelphia's Society Hill was first proposed in the 1950s, and it was held up as a particularly symbolic "great good thing."

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

Neil Smith walks us through the secret of Philadelphia's successful gentrification. A public-private organization called the Greater Philadelphia Movement led and steered the effort; it, along with a spinoff, the Old Philadelphia Development Corporation, worked together with government — chiefly the U.S. federal government and the city of Philadelphia — and private financial institutions to carry out this textbook case of urban revival.

The Greater Philadelphia Movement was founded in 1952. It was not simply a pressure group, but "largely a group of conservative but bright, honest, hard-driving businessmen who had the interests of the city they lived in at heart." Its members included Old Philadelphia's leading families, as well as corporate executives and government officials hoping to join the ruling class. The organization's goal was the full civic and fiscal revitalization of the entire city.

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

Over the following two-plus decades, city operators trying to replicate Philadelphia's success — whether private capital or government agencies — did not necessarily get the same opportunities. Philadelphia's success owed a great deal to timing: the 1950s were America's most golden postwar decade, and the possibility of "rebuilding" arrived at exactly the right moment. "At this stage, gentrification remained largely a specific set of processes within the housing market, more or less enjoying government support." It also owed a great deal to its leaders' ability to mobilize resources, which absorbed a measure of the commercial risk.

"The Ingersolls... usually led Philadelphia fashions." So the Ingersoll family was persuaded to renovate a "townhouse" of theirs in Society Hill.

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

Two things happened in the early 1970s that changed this picture. First, the media widely publicized the financial success of projects like Society Hill, encouraging other developers to invest in the redevelopment of old working-class neighborhoods — without much benefit of government subsidy, and without government stepping in to absorb all the risk. In other words, they had to use every means the free market offered to maximize the rent gap. Second, gentrification stopped being a relatively isolated process within the real-estate market and became increasingly tied to broader urban transformation.

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

Once gentrification was tied to urban transformation, fairness became an important measure to weigh. Neil Smith says: "This restructuring occurred in the wake of the political upheavals of the 1960s and the global recession of the early-to-mid 1970s. It's not just housing — employment patterns, the social relations of gender and class, and the functional division of urban space were all being reconstructed and transformed, with gentrification becoming part of that larger process."

This meant gentrification could more readily draw on global (or at least non-local) capital, and it also meant facing an entirely new population of housing consumers.

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

Gentrification breathes new life into the inner city. Along with it comes globalized capital reshaping neighborhoods, and the result is homogenization. Over time it becomes its own kind of tedium — the very moment Neil Smith described in the Marais could turn up in any gentrified neighborhood remade by globalized capital, anywhere.

Sharon Zukin uses the globalization of a piece of local cheese to describe how globalization and the market shape a neighborhood's consumer culture — and how, through marketization, placeless marketing, and dazzling "technical" explanations, a "locally rooted consumer product" gets converted into a consumption scene that could be dropped into any gentrified neighborhood on earth.

Yet gentrification's aesthetic appeal is both selective and malleable. It can be abstracted into an object of cultural consumption bearing only a thin connection to its original inner-city source. An ad for a mass-marketed new "fresh" cheese line from a Polish-owned European dairy company read: "You used to have to go to a latticini store in the Italian district to buy fresh mozzarella. The owner made this delicious white cheese fresh every day and kept it in a tub of light brine." The point is, you no longer have to go to an ethnic inner-city neighborhood to consume their heritage — international trade and mass distribution can reproduce a historic "authentic" product. The ad continues: "To capture the delicate, handmade essence of fresh mozzarella, Polly-O uses methods and equipment imported from Italy. We even package every piece of white cheese in water, to keep it moist and fresh for up to 25 days." Once supermarkets started selling fresh mozzarella, there was no more need for the latticini. The organization of consumption thus has a paradoxical effect on the inner city. Local cultural value, initially seen as one of a kind, ends up abstracted into market culture.

Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World

Zukin also uses the voice of another observer, an Italian, to discuss the "mediated" influence of consumerism.

Consumerism, like globalization, has today become a target of doubt and criticism.

Today's cultural consumption follows the lead of many mediators: artists, early adopters, and designers, who interpret desire and teach consumers that knowing how to consume is the same as knowing how to live; the producers of new service industries cater to exhausted consumers, "who yearn to temper cheap printed cotton with hand-loomed cloth." That yearning is satisfied by placing the very old (historical) side by side with the thoroughly modern (state-of-the-art). Just as a gentrified neighborhood is a repository of collective memory, it is also a site of personalized, high-tech household consumption. The rise of new tourist districts reflects a similar combination. By day we visit quaint landscapes — stately country manors, eco-museums — and by night we make ourselves comfortable at a country inn with good (French) food. The point isn't that these attractions simply exist, but that we combine both in a single act, because we crave them. "After my first trip to America," the Milanese designer Ettore Sottsass recalled placidly, "I learned that a new consumerist culture wasn't the answer. Instead, I wanted to make consumers aware that they were consuming." A shift in perspective is the critical class's chief product.

Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World

Consumerism, capital, globalization — these labels attached to gentrification are, in terms of a city's need to "expand" and "develop," a positive thing. That's also why government so often becomes a driver of gentrification. To politicians, gentrification looks like a solution: urban renewal, more jobs, a larger tax base. For the people who actually live there, things get more complicated: are the original inner-city residents being dispossessed? Does government promote fairness through the process of gentrification? Society Hill's grand old Philadelphia families, after all, live a life far removed from the "waste product" a functioning city generates.

In the New York where Lee Stringer lived, an urban legend tells of Mayor Giuliani.

...newly elected mayor Rudolph Giuliani set about consolidating the emerging revanchist city in 1994. As New York's first Republican mayor in twenty-five years, Giuliani opened his term with a coordinated assault on the homeless. According to a widely told story, a few days after taking office, a reporter pressed him on what he planned to do about a cold snap that had hit the city, citing the number of homeless people on the streets and asking what the mayor intended to do about it — "We're changing the weather," the mayor is said to have replied. In reality, though, the Giuliani administration's reach went well beyond the weather. He immediately declared it illegal for homeless people to earn money washing windshields with squeegees or to beg in the city, and launched a vicious subway poster campaign meant to shame homeless panhandlers and frighten other riders — "Don't give them money." The posters shouted: "The homeless are either shifty-eyed or thuggish-looking." Giuliani's first budget proposal called for charging the homeless "rent" for sleeping in city-run shelters, and for barring them from shelters if they refused recommended medical, drug, alcohol, or other social services.

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

Words like "gentrification" and "urban renewal" mean positive change for the middle class — rising home values, an upgraded neighborhood, more high-end jobs to choose from. For the poor, they mean a higher cost of living, higher rents on the housing and workspaces they depend on to get by, and possibly an uncomfortable sense of exclusion — often meaning they leave the neighborhood, or move to a farther, cheaper one and take on a longer commute. Even after gentrification, low-end jobs don't disappear.

Jérôme Carcopino writes in Daily Life in Ancient Rome that although some houses in Pompeii were connected to a sewer system, "the sewer system of Roman houses is merely a myth that fires the boundless imagination of moderns." What actually carried away wastewater and sewage were not sewers, but slaves.

Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities

Even in a gleaming, gentrified new city, a huge amount of low-end service work still gets done by actual low-income workers. Yet most of the understanding and discussion of urban renewal we come across comes from the middle class itself. As beneficiaries of gentrification to some degree (at least appearing as beneficiaries during this relatively glossy phase), what the middle class needs to guard against is this: while enjoying the gains, don't lose sight of the people involved — especially when everyone's understanding of urban renewal skews toward uplifting phrases like "integrating with the world," "international metropolis," "livable city," "making the city better." If people are the ones being overlooked, if people are expendable, if people become tools — especially if some people become tools of other people — we should all stop and rethink where exactly things went wrong.

None of us finds slogans like this unfamiliar.

Just as with that Saturday afternoon in the Marais, gentrification feels so familiar to us that we've come to believe what's happening around us is also part of a global process of gentrification.

In Beijing or Shanghai, talking to shuttered storefronts, we've noticed features that look like gentrification too: the landlord won't renew the lease. That's roughly similar to the reasons Neil Smith gives for landlords reclaiming their properties.

The difference is that many of these landlords are the government, or government-affiliated institutions.

After the landlord takes back the property, we also see new storefronts, renovated in a uniform style dictated by the government — though as of now, we still don't know what new business form they'll eventually become, or rather, we haven't yet seen a successful precedent for what they'll turn into.

This could be understood as the government deliberately steering the process of gentrification — unlike Philadelphia or New York, where gentrification was driven at most by semi-official bodies but mostly by private capital. Or it could be understood as tied to broader policy limiting the population size and composition of megacities.

This is not a simple case of gentrification.

On the Question of Urban Development, Government's Role Is Not a Given

Successful gentrification brings undeniable benefits. To government, that's a temptation.

Government always presents itself as a planner. It tends to promote its agenda with slogans like "better" and "livable," which makes it look like a problem-solver. But often, the old urban chaos it claims to be fixing is actually the result of its own past policies — the problem traces back to government's own policy choices. It's close to what former U.S. President Reagan once said: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

In the history of urban development, government has far more lessons to learn from its role than experience worth summing up.

Nearly every problem discussed above has government's fingerprints on it.

Of course, we should hold on to a rational, basic judgment: the history of modern urban development isn't very long, and within the larger context of capitalism aimed at "economic expansion," it's understandable, on the whole, that the city's public function — providing fair services — has had its share of slip-ups. Every round of urban renewal — housing for low-income people (which often ends up as a slum, and then a cancer on the city), the suburban middle-class good life (which directly dismantled traditional American society, an effect still not undone today), gentrification revitalizing the inner city (a new round of dispossession of the poor by capital) — wins praise at the outset of the policy. Usually it's only after things have developed for a while that society and the public notice the problem, and often only once the problem has become entrenched and turned into a massive social issue does the city attempt a fix — which, more often than not, brings new problems of its own.

Perhaps this should be understood as the cost of human development, a price that has to be paid.

Neil Smith walks us through a standard rise-and-fall cycle for inner-city housing.

Buildings depreciate as they wear out. That runs counter to the sense we get of steadily rising capital values, but housing prices eventually settle into a stable range. The price of housing in an inner-city neighborhood reflects the value of the structure and whatever repairs have been made to it, as well as the ground rent captured by the landowner. In the first cycle of use, ground rent is likely to rise, because as the city keeps expanding outward, the value of inner-city housing, even if it does decline, declines only very slowly, so sale prices tend to rise accordingly. Eventually, housing in the neighborhood keeps depreciating, for three reasons: advances in labor productivity, obsolete floor plans, and ordinary physical wear. Once homeowners realize that prices will drop immediately unless they make repairs, they may well sell and look for a new house that's a safer place to put their money.

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

We can see this pattern everywhere: hardly anyone wants to spend much on maintaining a house they own. That accelerates the decay of both the housing and the neighborhood.

Owner-occupiers are both consumers and investors in the housing market: as investors, their main return comes from the sale price exceeding the purchase price. Landlords, meanwhile, are less willing to make repairs. "Undermaintenance is an entirely rational landlord response to a falling market." When decline sets in, property owners typically cut back on repairs for reasons of market strategy rather than lack of funds. Real-estate agents compete to talk property owners into selling at a discount, which accelerates the decline further.

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

What follows is a continuing slide in prices, landlords growing even less willing to invest, subdividing units into smaller pieces to rent to more people for greater returns, and finally, abandonment.

In white neighborhoods where prices were starting to fall, real-estate agents exploited racist sentiment, buying up houses cheaply and then reselling them at sharply inflated prices to African American, Latino, or other minority families — many of them struggling to buy their first home. Once this kind of property fraud takes hold, prices fall even further, not just because of racism in the housing market, but because the house was sold at an inflated price, leaving the new family without funds for repairs and unable to keep up their mortgage payments. As capital devalues further and landlord profits shrink, active disinvestment gradually replaces mere underfunded neglect; falling housing values and capitalized ground rents drive sale prices down still further. Even in a fully occupied building, this kind of destruction of property — through lack of maintenance, or the systematic stripping of a building to squeeze out maximum value — still drives depreciation. At this stage, destroying the property is actually a landlord strategy. It's common at this point to subdivide the structure further, carving out more rental units, hoping to extract every last bit of value (and boost profitability) in the final years. Buildings are abandoned not because they can no longer be used, but because they can no longer turn a profit. In this stage of decline, landlords sometimes even consider burning down their own property to collect a large insurance payout.

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

At almost every step of the process just described, something could have been done to check the trend toward neighborhood decline. In practice, that rarely happens — and at times, policy has actually made things worse.

Deep-seated discrimination showed up in home buying, mortgage lending, and the mortgage market itself. Climbing Mount Laurel offers a brief history of racial segregation and zoning law. In the 1920s, the real-estate industry invented new devices — "restrictive use rights" and "restrictive covenants," for example, to keep Black residents out of white neighborhoods — so that after racial discrimination was banned at the level of public policy, private, industry, and civil contractual arrangements became the main instruments of segregation.

A "restrictive use right" was a clause attached to a deed barring any subsequent sale to African Americans and other undesirable groups (Jews, for instance); a "restrictive covenant" was a contract among homeowners within a defined geographic area, under which residents all agreed not to rent or sell property to African Americans and other undesirable groups. Once most homeowners in the area had signed, the covenant took effect, and anyone within the area who later violated it could be sued in civil court.

Douglas Massey, Len Albright, Rebecca Casciano, Elizabeth Derickson, David Kinsey, Climbing Mount Laurel

Historically, the single greatest barrier to residential mobility in the United States has been race. Before the civil rights movement, religious and ethnic minorities — African Americans above all — faced institutional discrimination in real estate and the mortgage market, and were shut out of the federal loan programs meant to encourage home ownership. On top of that, discriminatory lending practices, including redlining, became institutionalized across the lending industry, systematically denying capital to Black neighborhoods. Poor Black neighborhoods were frequently targeted for demolition under urban-renewal projects, forcing residents out and into densely packed public housing that was poorly built and poorly maintained — isolating Black families by both class and race.

Douglas Massey, Len Albright, Rebecca Casciano, Elizabeth Derickson, David Kinsey, Climbing Mount Laurel

In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court declared restrictive covenants unenforceable, but the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) shrugged this off. For decades afterward, it "remained legal for individuals and institutions to refuse to rent or sell housing to members of minority groups"; only around the 1970s were these racially discriminatory practices gradually outlawed by explicit regulation. This agency, born out of the New Deal, held an accurate but deeply damaging view of neighborhoods: "the presence of a single nonwhite family in any neighborhood was enough to mark the entire neighborhood as Black." Kenneth Johnson, in Crabgrass Frontier, quotes a 1948 remark by FHA assistant commissioner Lockwood: "the FHA has never insured a mixed-occupancy housing project," because they anticipated "such a project would probably become entirely Black or entirely white in the short term."

The FHA did indeed push the housing market in a direction unfavorable to minorities and the inner city; its policies fueled segregation by both income and race in the suburbs. The federal government may have been the first to embrace the market's own discriminatory attitude. Before, discrimination had been private and individual; the FHA advocated segregation and made it national policy. Entire urban districts were declared unsuitable for mortgage insurance; as late as 1966, for instance, the FHA had not insured a single mortgage in Camden or Paterson, New Jersey, two declining industrial cities. This withdrawal of capital often made it hard to sell housing in a neighborhood, so vacant homes would often sit empty for months, sending prices plunging.

Kenneth Johnson, Crabgrass Frontier

After World War II, the American economy boomed, and so did the real-estate market, but that boom owed itself mainly to "improved highways, lower property and income taxes, and loan guarantee programs" — the poor never really shared in these gains. Providing housing for this group struck many people, intuitively, as a form of government offering fair services. But the result wasn't that at all — it produced more slums instead.

Public housing was supposed to be a replacement for the slum. Instead, it slowly became the slum's successor. As politicians choked off funding, public housing fell into disrepair year after year — broken windows, clogged pipes, elevators growing more decrepit by the day. Out front, sewage outlets sat open in broad daylight, and uncollected garbage piled higher and higher. Anyone who could move out did, leaving behind only the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. Before long, public-housing communities were mired in chaos and violence. Take St. Louis: the famous Pruitt-Igoe housing project was dynamited on live television in its eighteenth year. Why? Because the place had grown so frightening that even police wouldn't go near it. Across the country, the wrecking ball and dynamite also came for other infamous public housing projects — Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, Atlanta's McDaniel-Glenn Homes — lifeless developments that had cast a long shadow over segregated, depopulated corners of American cities. Given how these projects had turned out, blowing them up was not only cheaper, it was arguably more humane. It's the same logic as saying, "something so unspeakable happened in that house, we might as well just bulldoze it."

Matthew Desmond, Evicted

Even though city management always stumbles along, gentrification still looks to government like a "new opportunity" — correcting past mistakes may be one reason, but the bigger reason is that urban development seems like a road that can't be avoided.

Of course, just as unavoidable is the fairness problem that never quite gets solved.

In the early 1980s, when Harlem came into the sights of New York's city government, "on the one hand, it sat right next to one of the most expensive rental markets in the world; on the other, despite that proximity, capital flight from Harlem through most of the twentieth century had left its rents and land values pitifully low." Neil Smith wrote: "The 2.5-mile, two-subway-stop distance from Midtown to Harlem represented, by the 1980s, about the steepest rent gradient people could imagine."

Being so close to the city center — arguably the center of the world — meant neither government nor capital lacked the urge to redevelop it. The only obstacle was Harlem's original residents.

According to 1980 census data, only 262 households in central Harlem had annual incomes above $50,000. Across the whole of Manhattan, no more than 1,800 Black households earned above $50,000; across all of New York City, no more than 8,000. This meant that any African American looking to renovate and rebuild Harlem would have to rely heavily on people from outside New York. So no matter how it was dressed up, if gentrification depended, from the start, purely on Harlem residents "upgrading" their own housing, it could never sustain itself.

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

Far from being Black Harlem's own "consumption upgrade," it was clear that Harlem's Black residents could only end up as victims of gentrification — no matter how many pleasant words government and capital used when they talked about its "benefits."

We're left to conclude that for residents of central Harlem, gentrification is a Catch-22, leaving them stuck either way. Without private repair and reconstruction, the neighborhood's housing will keep deteriorating; but with it, a large number of central Harlem residents will end up homeless, unable to profit from better, pricier housing. They will be gentrification's victims, not its beneficiaries. To date, neither New York City's Reinvestment Strategy nor any other plan has accounted for this possibility; no one has even acknowledged, in any strategy for developing central Harlem, that this kind of homelessness might result.

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

When Harlem became a target for gentrification, Neil Smith says, it showed just how much deeper the meaning of the gentrification process had grown since the 1970s. "Harlem, in upper Manhattan, is a leading symbol of Black culture, celebrated both in the United States and internationally; at first glance, it seemed like the last place that could ever become a target for redevelopment." He cites, with a certain wonder, the headline of a report at the time in Germany's Der Spiegel:

"Oh, baby, damn, how did this happen?"

Neil Smith's The New Urban Frontier opens with an anti-gentrification uprising in New York.

On the evening of August 6, 1988, a riot broke out in Tompkins Square Park, a small patch of green in New York's Lower East Side. It ran on into the night, with police lined up on one side and, on the other, an unlikely coalition of anti-gentrification protesters, punks, tenant advocates, park squatters, artists, Saturday-night revelers, and Lower East Side residents. The city had tried to impose a 1 a.m. curfew on the park, aiming to drive out the growing number of homeless people living or sleeping there, the punk kids blasting boom boxes deep into the night, and the drug dealers and buyers using the park as a marketplace. The riot was a response to this policy of harassment. Many local residents and park users also had mixed feelings about the policy: they believed the city was trying to tame the park to help along the gentrification already well underway in the Lower East Side. "Gentrification Is Class War!" read the largest banner in the Saturday-night march to keep the park open.

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

Gentrification Is Inevitable

Critics of suburban sprawl, who love the inner city, argue that gentrification itself is beyond reproach.

The most important condition to keep in mind is this: "If the situation ultimately drives renters out, then gentrification's opponents are right to rise up and fight it" — otherwise, the case against it is never strong enough.

At the neighborhood micro-level, opposing gentrification is no different from opposing urban progress; without an influx of the middle class, there's no urban revival. Thanks to government subsidies, affordable housing is already growing at an astonishing rate. So the real challenge facing most city centers today isn't providing affordable housing, but figuring out how to create a housing market that works for the middle class. After all, a city can't prosper if its residents can't even pay taxes. So planners working on downtown revitalization projects really have only two options: encourage gentrification, or quit. When faced with complaints, it's more useful to dig into their real roots: some opposition to gentrification does come from city residents afraid of being pushed out, but more of it comes from politicians — worried that racial and economic integration among city residents will erode their own political base.

Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation

Gentrification looks ugly — or carries the potential for ugliness — largely because of certain "dirty ingredients" baked into it, ingredients that in turn are largely tied to the wrong role government plays in the process. Some of the reasons behind this are almost naive, like underestimating the difficulties that might arise. Of course, not having to answer for those difficulties is probably also a significant factor.

Resisting gentrification runs counter to the efforts of existing residents to help their city develop. So government and activists alike need to shift their attention away from opposing gentrification and toward reducing the harm it causes. Gentrification came to be seen as a dirty word because it used to happen without any safety net, which is how so many displaced households in the 1960s ended up homeless. Times have changed, and things look different today.

Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation

Peter T. Leeson, the American economist known for his work on rational-choice theory, has said that policymakers shouldn't let "best" become the enemy of "good" — and in the least-developed countries, where governance options are severely constrained, "best" shouldn't even be allowed to become the enemy of "adequate." That logic offers cover for acting on a policy that can never be perfect, and gentrification is often carried out on the strength of exactly this kind of rational-choice reasoning. Still, though Speck and his co-authors stay optimistic about gentrification, they specifically flag where the trouble lies:

There is one form of gentrification that should always be resisted: government-imposed, speculative gentrification. In this version, the municipality tries to rebuild the city center by intensifying its zoning. But that drives up property taxes, forcing out existing residents and businesses. At the same time, the resulting high land prices actually end up blocking development, because the new zoning is written for massive projects whose development risk only big developers can absorb. The result: one project finishes every five years, and that single project has to meet the entire real-estate need for the following five years. Americans seem to accept this form of development as an unavoidable reality: half the city sitting empty, and giant projects standing alone in remote, isolated spots like spaceships. But look at our neighbors to the north, and you'll see it doesn't have to be this way. In Vancouver and Toronto, it's not unusual to see new large buildings inserted among old two- and three-story buildings. The difference lies in tax policy — they allow large-scale development without punishing existing small property owners with high taxes.

Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation

"Half the city sitting empty, and giant projects standing alone in remote, isolated spots like spaceships" — that line feels more like a warning about the state of Chinese cities today.

The most typical case, here, is the gentrification of Daowai District in Harbin.

By 2018, the whole neighborhood had ground to a halt: the original owners and tenants had left, most of the houses stood more dilapidated and precarious for being unoccupied, and the streets, cut through by subway construction, looked even more desolate.

Once the government settles on a plan to renew the inner city, the first thing it does is clear out the original residents; what follows is usually the longer, harder job: drawing new capital into the inner city to complete the redevelopment. But along the way, government and developers disagree on floor-area ratios; the old neighborhood's entire landscape gets wiped out; and the district can only truly come back to life once the developer has finished attracting new tenants. Over this long process, it's uncertain whether the local economy will grow enough to absorb enough new businesses; the high land costs created by the enormous upfront relocation expense further restrict which new businesses can even come in; and what draws the most criticism is that, even setting aside any moral problem with swapping a poor inner city for a new wealthy enclave, it's an open question whether enough wealthy people will actually move in...

Even setting aside a declining "Rust Belt"-style city like Harbin — even in flush, well-funded Beijing, the damage done a few years ago to the streetscape along Liangguang Road, after the redevelopment of the southern part of the city, still hasn't been resolved in terms of commercial vitality. And a new round of clearances has already begun in the traditional inner city to the north (the old Dongcheng and Xicheng districts)...

We'll return to the question of inner-city renewal in China later — its problems run far more complicated than anything Europe or America has faced.

Gentrification is often reduced to a conflict between the poor and the middle class. On the surface that seems right, but what's really worth examining is the force standing behind the middle class: is its goal eliminating poverty, or eliminating the poor — driving them out?

If you set aside the means and only talk about a harmonious end goal, then every dictator in history was a great man — Baron Haussmann in Paris, Mussolini's on-time trains, or, as we mentioned earlier, Giuliani, who claimed he could change the weather.

The kind of gentrification Jeff Speck and his co-authors stress must be resisted — government-imposed speculation — together with a general wariness of government-driven gentrification, are both about guarding against public services going astray. Once mistakes take hold and accumulate, their purpose curdles into something ugly; and because government commands such powerful propaganda and enforcement capacity, the result, in the end, corrupts the whole of society.

Urban segregation policy is not just a cold, hard fact of life — it's an endless social war. In this war, the state constantly intervenes in the name of "progress," "beautification," even "social justice for the poor," redrawing spatial boundaries to protect the interests of landowners, foreign investors, elite property owners, and middle-class office workers. As in 1860s Paris, under Baron Haussmann's feverish rule, urban development kept striving to maximize both private profit and social control at once. The scale of contemporary displacement is enormous: every year, thousands, even millions, of the poor — legal tenants and squatters alike — are forcibly evicted from Third World settlements. The result is that the urban poor become wanderers, "temporary transients in a state of permanent transience." Like the sans-culottes driven from their old neighborhoods by Haussmann, they are "sick of the massacre... this trick in the hands of a tyrant." They also rage at the old language of modernization that defines them as "a drag on humanity" (as in the 1970s, when Dakar authorities expelled 90,000 residents from peripheral slums in the center of the city).

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums

After Zimbabwe's thoroughly corrupt 2005 election, President Robert Mugabe turned his fury on the street markets and shantytowns of Harare and Bulawayo, where the poor had voted overwhelmingly for his rival, the Movement for Democratic Change. In early May, under the sinister banner of clearing out "trash," the purge began with police raids on 34 of the city's flea markets. One officer publicly told his men: "As of tomorrow, I want a report on my desk of how many people we've shot. The president is fully behind this operation, so there's nothing to be afraid of. You should treat this as a war." The police obeyed. A week later, police began demolishing shacks in newly developed areas that housed Movement for Democratic Change headquarters, and in former Mugabe-era slums like Chitungwiza and Ndzedzoni. Meanwhile, west of Harare, in the greater Hatcliffe area, police evicted thousands of shantytown residents who had settled there in the early 1990s, after an earlier "cleanup" campaign carried out ahead of a state visit by Queen Elizabeth. By mid-July, more than 700,000 slum dwellers — officially termed "trash" — had been evicted, and anyone who tried to resist was shot on the spot, whipped, or arrested. A UN investigation found that "the victims spanned an extremely wide range, especially widows, single mothers, children, orphans, the elderly, and the disabled."

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums

Strictly speaking, Mugabe's story has nothing to do with urban renewal or gentrification — it's simply a strong government punishing dissent.

Still, it's worth returning to Lee Stringer's question: how are we, as human beings, related to one another?

Otherwise we risk forgetting what we set out to do in the first place.

Cover image from the film Paris, je t'aime, via Douban.

Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.