gentrification

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How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

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In its journey from academic jargon to popular use, the term gentrification has been stretched and pulled. In the popular press, gentrification is most often presented as the cumulative effect of the actions of individual actors—yuppies and hipsters move from the suburbs to a previously poor neighborhood and gradually change its identity. The struggles of people like Ashana Bigard are seen as collateral damage. But gentrification is bigger than that. A proliferation of hipsters, displacement, and a worsening quality of life for people like Ashana Bigard are the effects of gentrification, not its causes. Gentrification is a purposeful act, not just a trend, and so it needs a definition that recognizes the actors and actions behind it.

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I’d also add that there’s a precursor to all of these stages in which a municipality opens itself up to gentrification through zoning, tax breaks, and branding power. This preparatory phase is rarely seen or talked about because it happens so long before most people witness gentrification in action, but this stage is crucial to understanding gentrification. In New Orleans, Stage 0 was Hurricane Katrina. The city used the opportunity presented by the storm’s destruction of poor and African American neighborhoods to attract white people and investment. Gentrification in New Orleans was happening before Katrina, but the storm kicked it into high gear.

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Corbett, chastised its newsroom for the overuse of the word hipster in 2010 and its overzealous comparisons of everyplace to Brooklyn in 2014. The hipster narrative about gentrification isn’t necessarily inaccurate—young people are indeed moving to cities and opening craft breweries and wearing tight clothing—but it is misleading in its myopia. Someone who learned about gentrification solely through newspaper articles might come away believing that gentrification is just the culmination of several hundred thousand people’s individual wills to open coffee shops and cute boutiques, grow mustaches and buy records. But those are the signs of gentrification, not its causes. As geographer Neil Smith wrote in his landmark book on the topic, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, “If cultural choice and consumer preference really explain gentrification, this amounts either to the hypothesis that individual preferences change in unison not only nationally but internationally—a bleak view of human nature and cultural individuality—or that the overriding constraints are strong enough to obliterate the individuality implied in consumer preference.

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

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In 1991, the Times announced that gentrification was in retreat and “may be remembered, along with junk bonds, stretch limousines and television evangelism, as just another grand excess of the 1980’s.” A few years later, the paper declared gentrification dead and buried. But it did not die. It came back bigger, stronger, and meaner than ever. Smith called the Third Wave of gentrification “Gentrification Generalized,” marking its beginning in 1994 with no end date. In this phase, gentrification moved out from the city’s center, into parts previously untouched. Generalized gentrification meant “new restaurants and shopping malls in the central city . . brand-name office towers alongside brand-name museums, tourist destinations of all sorts, cultural complexes—in short, a range of megadevelopments.”

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Neil Smith, professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) until his death in 2012, outlined what is probably the most detailed and useful theory of gentrification and its changing shape. His work is essential to understanding how the city-killing process of today is not the gentrification of the past. Smith called Ruth Glass’s first version of gentrification the First Wave, or Sporadic Gentrification. Dating it from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, he referred to this wave as “small-scale” and “quaint,” without the backing and support of local government and financial institutions. In gentrification’s Second Wave, from the late 1970s to 1989, the process anchored itself, becoming an essential part of the city government’s master plan to take back the city from the poor, the working class, people of color, homosexuals, artists, socialists, and other undesirables.

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In the 2000s, we’ve seen that word everywhere, in the brochures and websites of luxury condos, in the real estate blogs, in the magazine articles written by intrepid middle-class pilgrims moving into the Lower East Side, the Upper West Side, Harlem, and almost all of Brooklyn. Now we know where it came from. While Koch didn’t use the word gentrification in his speech, he was talking about it. At the time, it was still a largely unknown foreign concept. Just a year earlier, the Times included it in their Weekly News Quiz: “Working-class people in London are resisting a process they refer to as ‘gentrification.’ What is gentrification?” Gentrification and neoliberalism go hand in hand, and they both became public policy in New York for the first time under Koch. This was the next phase in the long game of restoring the power of financial Elites in the city—while pushing out the Undesirables.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

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It was also positively associated with transit use and negatively correlated with sprawl, measured as the share of commuters who drive alone to work.20 In other words, gentrification is the product of the very attributes that define knowledge hubs and superstar cities. When all is said and done, acute gentrification is more a symptom of urban success than it is a general characteristic of cities and metro areas across the board. Figure 4.1: Gentrification Varies Widely by Metro Source: Map by Martin Prosperity Institute, based on data from Daniel Hartley, Gentrification and Financial Health, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, 2013. The fact that gentrification takes place mainly in superstar cities is a big part of the reason it attracts so much attention to begin with.

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Other research that builds on Freeman’s by separating the effects of gentrification on homeowners from the effects on renters found that renters in gentrifying neighborhoods faced a 2.6 percent higher risk of displacement (which is about the same as for getting a divorce), but no evidence that gentrification displaced homeowners.25 The big takeaway from this research is that the direct displacement of people by gentrification is not as big of an issue as it is made out to be, and that it is the wrong lens from which to view the effects of gentrification on poor and disadvantaged urbanites. Part of the reason is that gentrification tends to take place either in older industrial neighborhoods, where few people live anyway before the gentrification begins, or in working-class districts where homeowners benefit from the rising prices caused by gentrification, and where any renters who are displaced can afford to find comparable housing nearby.

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See John McWhorter, “Spike Lee’s Racism Isn’t Cute: ‘M——F——Hipster’ Is the New ‘Honkey,’” TIME, February 28, 2014, http://time.com/10666/spike-lees-racism-isnt-cute-m-f-hipster-is-the-new-honkey; Gene Demby, “The One Problem with Spike Lee’s Gentrification Argument,” Salon, February 27, 2014, www.salon.com/2014/02/27/the_one_problem_with_spike_lees_gentrification_argument_partner. 2. Neil Smith, New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (London: Routledge, 1996); Neil Smith, “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People,” Journal of the American Planning Association 45, no. 4 (1979); Neil Smith, “Gentrification and Uneven Development,” Economic Geography 58, no. 2 (April 1982): 139–155; Neil Smith, “Of Yuppies and Housing: Gentrification, Social Restructuring, and the Urban Dream,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 5, no. 2 (January 1987): 151–172. 3.

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

In gentrified areas the merely affluent upper middle class sell their nicely restored houses and apartments to the superrich. The British geographer Loretta Lees calls this process “super-gentrification.” But when one neighborhood after another goes upscale and new residents are not just fixing up old houses and lofts but also moving into newly built luxury condos and mom-and-pop stores are replaced by bank branches, trendy restaurants, and brand-name chains, we’re looking at more than a single trend of gentrification. Neil Smith calls this “gentrification generalized.” I think that it is really a broad process of re-urbanization, with changes that loosen the grip of old industries and their ways of life and expand the space taken up by white-collar men and women and their preoccupation with shopping and other kinds of consumption; bringing new residents, their tastes, and their concerns into the city’s mix; and creating not just an economic division but a cultural barrier between rich and poor, young and old.

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Together with dramatic decreases in the crime rate, it has encouraged middle-class people to venture into neighborhoods where they had never gone before. Race used to be considered a barrier to these changes. The recent whitening of Brooklyn, though, has expanded gentrification into working-class black neighborhoods while new immigrants as well as white gentrifiers have made other areas into an ethnic mosaic. If racial barriers still hold back gentrification anywhere, however, we would surely see their effects in Harlem, “the capital of black America.” The historical connection between race and place should be even more “authentic” there than in any neighborhood of Brooklyn. 2 Why Harlem Is Not a Ghetto Every person in this room can remember thirty years ago, when Harlem was a community with a rich past, but an ominous future—when it was a neighborhood with block after block of vacant lots and derelict apartment buildings, when it was a community that seemed to be locked into a downward spiral of abandonment and decay.

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By 2008, though, the vendors estimated that between 50 and 60 percent of their customers were not Hispanic, up to 80 percent during the weeks some of them sold at Brooklyn Flea, an outdoor swap meet held in a schoolyard in Fort Greene, before they passed the Health Department inspection and returned to their location at the ball fields.17 Some vendors think the growing number of white customers reflects the expanding gentrification of Brooklyn neighborhoods, including Red Hook. But it also reflects the vendors’ growing media presence, especially in the food blogs and wikis that began to emerge around 2003. The two trends are related, for the demographic changes of gentrification are often expressed in the bloggers’ language of cultural consumption, representing, in this case, the tastes of a new, mobile, urban middle class that seeks the experience of “authentic” food.

Hollow City by Rebecca Solnit, Susan Schwartzenberg

blue-collar work, Brownian motion, dematerialisation, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Loma Prieta earthquake, low skilled workers, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, pets.com, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, wage slave

is artist by gen- not a justification for the problems caused by the As Neil Smith writes in his study of gentrification, "The language of revitalization, recycling, upgrading and renaissance suggests that affected neighborhoods were somehow devitalized or culturally mor- ibund prior to gentrification. While this is also true that very vital working-class ized through gentrification as the insulting applied to US West. Now, as then, pioneered new middle it cities as devital- idea of 'urban pioneers' no one and lives in is as the area being In fact, the Mission has political community being erased by gentrification. But the history of gentrification is often class scorns the streets in at least.

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a sort of pre-gentrification; it con- have more economic mobility, though not necessar- more income, than character of their first youth the earlier residents and who value the existing new neighborhood. Some become community activists. Intolerance seems to arrive with affluence, and the worst thing that can be said about those in the ent influx or at least more palatable wave —especially if is that they attract the second, afflu- they're white many with the second or holding the analysts of gentrification argument has become a radicals on gentrification was some poor whites never who were first hard-working style rather it on artists, and this —have been moving into the left:, but many of the artists and raised there or arrived as adults are Latinos (blaming artists a lag of decades between the blame responsible for first commonplace.

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What's happening Western Addition Mission District, is on Divisadero just the spillover fi'om the wild Street mutation of the once a bastion of Latino culture and cheap housing, and of the formerly industrial South of Market, districts that are becoming the global capital of the Internet economy. San Francisco has been for most of and an anomaly. Soon city it will its be neither. Gentrification by driving out the poor and working chosen to give their lives 150-year existence both a refuge class, is transforming the including those over to unlucrative pursuits such as ism, social experimentation, social service. But gentrification fin above water. Below is the rest of the shark: a 13 who have art, activis just the new American economy HOLLOW 14 in which most of us thing will be ble. faster, will CITY be poorer, a few will be more homogenous and more far richer, and every- controlled or controlla- The technology boom and the accompanying housing crisis have fast- forwarded San Francisco into the newest version of the American future, a version that also is being realized in Boston, Seattle, and other cities from New York and Atlanta to Denver and Portland.

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

Environmental Protection Agency, February 2009. 7 “I woke up this morning”: Lyrics from the song “Gentrification Blues,” by Judith Levine and Laura Liben, 1982, quoted in Tom Slater, “A Literal Necessity to Be Replaced: A Rejoinder to the Gentrification Debate,” International Journal of Urban and Economic Research, March 2008, p. 216. 8 “The bear pit of gentrification debates”: Rowland Atkinson, “Gentrification, Segregation and the Vocabulary of Affluent Residential Choice,” Urban Studies, November 2008, p. 2634. 9 What is new in the past decade: See, for example, Lance Freeman, There Goes the ’Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), and Jacob L.

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We are witnessing a rearrangement of population across entire metropolitan areas. “Gentrification” is too small a word for it. As I indicated at the beginning, “demographic inversion” comes closer to capturing the scope of what is going on. Nevertheless, there are those in urban sociology who have argued for years that gentrification is the equivalent of mass displacement, and those in the same field who have denied that this is so. There is a song that goes back to the 1970s: I woke up this morning I looked next door There was one family living where there once were four I got the gentrifi-gentrification blues. The word “gentrification” was actually invented in 1963 by the British sociologist Ruth Glass to describe the “invasion” of working-class urban neighborhoods by the wealthy.

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It is because the trains would fill up with minorities and immigrants on the outskirts of the city, and the passengers left stranded at the inner-city stations would be members of the affluent professional class. In the years since 1979, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than that. A better term is “demographic inversion.” Gentrification refers to the changes that happen in an individual neighborhood, usually the replacement of poorer minority residents by more affluent white ones. Demographic inversion is something much broader. It is the rearrangement of living patterns across an entire metropolitan area, all taking place at roughly the same time.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

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The south-west was particularly affected, with rents up by 9 per cent annually; the area registered the UK’s fastest rental growth in the third quarter of 2021. Gentrification, Gentrification, Relocation As Henry noted himself, there’s a word for all of this – one that gets thrown around a lot: gentrification. As a form of redevelopment, gentrification is the opposite of sustainable regeneration; the former prioritises profit, the latter improves an area while protecting the community that inhabits it. The term gentrification was coined in 1964 by the sociologist Ruth Glass to describe change in London. In the early 1960s Glass, who had left Nazi Germany and come to the UK in 1932 to study at the London School of Economics, began writing about the changes in housing she had witnessed in her home area, Islington, in north London, which had resulted in social shifts and physical displacement.

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Glass’s writing is now largely out of print, though leading academics such as Professor Loretta Lees and Professor Mindy Fullilove continue the study of gentrification and displacement. Glass’s definition of gentrification has become the definition of the inequity sparked by estate ‘renewal’ or urban ‘regeneration’ the world over. London was and remains a petri dish for studies of dysfunctional housing markets. Glass wrote, in the introduction to her seminal book on the subject, London: Aspects of Change: One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes – upper and lower … 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 social character of the district is changed.

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And, uncomfortable as it may be to consider, the perpetrators of one type of gentrification who move in search of affordable homes are as likely to be the victims of a similar process of pricing out elsewhere. Londoners who have moved to Brighton, pricing out locals like Anthony, continue the process of gentrification, driving up prices over the heads of locals as others have done to them. In 2021, I spoke to Loretta Lees about her research. Through her work in London, she has developed a term to describe what happens when different forces of gentrification come together to make housing precarious: ‘accumulative dispossession’.

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

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Or proclaiming that people who were put off by the name SF BARF were acting as instructed. Then there was the inadvisable tweetstorm where Sonja tried to argue that one benefit of gentrification is that it justly rewards longtime homeowners for having invested on blocks that are well-located and beautiful but whose value banks and white homeowners had long refused to recognize. It was a subtle point whose subtlety she pulverized by beginning her tweetstorm with the statement: “Gentrification is what we call the revaluation of black land to its correct price.” The details were always more thoughtful than her loudest moments. When someone on Reddit asked Sonja to square her pro-development aims with anti-displacement measures like rent control, she responded that she was all in favor of rent control and did not see tenant protections as being incompatible with new building, arguing that it was possible to create one set of policies that made it punitively expensive and time consuming for investors to buy buildings and jack up the rent while simultaneously creating a second set of policies that made it financially attractive and bureaucratically easy to build on empty lots and parking garages.

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It was with this likely approval in hand that a software engineer named Vincent Woo, an enthusiastic YIMBY member, walked up to the microphone during public comment. “The only thing we can do to stem the actual tide of gentrification is to build places for rich people to live, because otherwise they’re going to do what I did—I muscled out some guys for a basement unit in the Mission,” he said. “If we don’t build units for people with money to go into, we all know what’s going to happen. They’re going to compete with the existing stock for middle income housing residents, and we know who’s going to win, the people with more money.” Woo’s comments went down in semi-infamy among anti-gentrification groups but were immediately overshadowed by Sonja, who walked to the microphone four seconds after he left it.

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Wiener’s greatest successes had been marked by neatly crafted legislation, like the affordable housing permit streamlining in San Francisco or the money/streamlining compromise at the center of SB 35, that cleaved the imperfect alliance of archetypal NIMBYs worried about views and anti-gentrification activists worried about displacement. But there was nothing careful about 827, which was designed to be a headline grabber and only brought his opponents closer. Two of the bill’s fiercest critics were a Beverly Hills city councilman named John Mirisch and a South LA anti-gentrification activist named Damien Goodmon. Mirisch described 827 as “the urban planning lovechild of Vladimir Putin and the Koch Bros.” Goodmon called it war and referred to YIMBYs as colonizers.

Big Capital: Who Is London For? by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land bank, land value tax, market design, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-truth, quantitative easing, rent control, rent gap, Right to Buy, Russell Brand, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, working poor

The same circuits of global capital are also transforming San Francisco, New York and Vancouver in North America, European cities from Berlin to Barcelona and towns and cities in the UK, from Bristol to Manchester and Margate to Hastings. This has led to a constant hum of debate about the impacts of that much misunderstood term ‘gentrification’. But this isn’t gentrification, it’s another phenomenon entirely. The flood of global capital is being allowed to reconfigure the country. ‘Gentrification’ is one of those terms, rather like ‘affordable housing’, that lost its real meaning long ago. It was first coined in 1964 by the sociologist Ruth Glass, who used it to describe the changes taking place in Islington, as middle-class families moved into old working-class homes and did them up, creating desirable Victorian residences.

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‘One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes … 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,’ she wrote. Fifteen years ago the academic Loretta Lees wrote about ‘super gentrification’ to describe the impact of the new class of finance professionals in New York and parts of London such as Barnsbury and Notting Hill Gate. Although it has always been a contested term, ‘gentrification’ adopted positive connotations associated with improving areas.

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Similarly, hopes that the new Labour Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, would stick to his manifesto commitment that estate regeneration would take place only with residents’ support were dashed when his draft good practice guide on the subject failed to include this requirement and actively discouraged giving tenants a vote, claiming there is ‘a potential reason for caution around using ballots or votes, since they risk turning a complex set of issues that affects different people in different ways over many years into a simple yes/no decision’.27 Because of the role played by central and local government in estate regeneration, for many academics the population shifts which result from it are no longer known as ‘gentrification’, but ‘state-led gentrification’. For those at the sharp end, even this change in terminology fails to define it; at an event I attended on the housing crisis in 2016, one member of the audience after another got up to say that the term ‘gentrification’ no longer covered what was happening: ‘It’s the wrong terminology for a state-sponsored demolition programme,’ one said. ‘It’s a positive term for some people which doesn’t describe what is really happening,’ said another.

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America by Jon C. Teaford

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, conceptual framework, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, East Village, edge city, estate planning, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Potemkin village, rent control, restrictive zoning, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, young professional

Moreover, artistic creation lent a touch of class to an area, no matter how poor the resident artists. At the beginning of its gentrification cycle, Seattle’s Capitol Hill district had, in the words of one observer, “developed a widely held image as a lower-class ‘Bohemian’ neighborhood where all types of behavior were observed and for the most part tolerated.”22 During the early 1970s, anti–Vietnam War activists had pioneered the resettlement of Adams Morgan in Washington, D.C.; the leading student of that neighborhood described its progressive gentrification as a shift from “counter culture” to “quiche culture.”23 Lincoln Park’s Wells Street had once been the center of Chicago hippiedom.

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Money follows money—and it’s just eating the neighborhoods alive!”31 In Seattle’s Capitol Hill district, opponents of gentrification took action, throwing balloons filled with red paint against the white walls of a chic neighborhood restaurant. In a letter to the restaurant’s owners, they expressed their antagonism to gentrifiers: “Good morning, Fat Cats. The paint on your establishment is a protest against your rich white intrusion into this poor, multi-racial community of Capitol Hill.”32 Throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, gentrification sparked sporadic battles between longtime residents and newcomers. In 1990, for example, blacks were fighting whites over the designation of the Church Hill neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia, as a historic district.

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In 1982 protesters marched from the East Village to City Hall Park, where a crowd of more than two thousand demonstrated against the city’s support for gentrification and burned the mayor in effigy.38 Tension persisted throughout the 1980s and peaked in August 1988, when the police attempted to enforce a curfew and evict homeless squatters and other “undesirables” from Tompkins Square Park in the heart of the East Village. They met resistance from what one author has described as “alarmed and outraged punks, post-hippies, [and] housing activists” who carried banners reading “Gentrification Is Class War” and chanted, “It’s our fucking park, you don’t live here!” Forty-four people were injured in the fray, casualties of a cultural clash that was evident, although less boisterous, in many American cities.39 Despite the shouts and complaints, gentrification proceeded, especially in cities with strong downtown office sectors staffed by well-paid young employees eager to avoid the commute to suburbia.

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What to Do About It, and Why It Matters More Than You Think by Matthew Yglesias

Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, gentrification, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, land reform, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, pets.com, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, statistical model, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, urban sprawl, white picket fence

But on the whole, allowing desirable places to become denser would have substantial benefits over and above those associated with reduced housing costs. The Mirage of Gentrification While my central argument is that relaxing restrictions on real estate development is key to ameliorating the problem of high rents, anti-development rules are often seen as accomplishing the exact reverse. To many, new development is the leading cause of “gentrification,” a process that evicts the working class from their homes and replaces distinctive retail with corporate conformity. To gentrification’s foes, real estate developers are public enemy number one. The observation linking real estate development to gentrification and loss of affordable housing is accurate.

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The city’s specialization as the main headquarters of American journalism and publishing seemed relatively unaffected by the sweeping technological change reshaping media. The crime drop of the 1990s that turned the city’s momentum around in the first place continued. A wave of gentrification swept through the Lower East Side, vast swathes of Brooklyn, important parts of Queens, and even Hoboken and Jersey City across the Hudson River. But while this kind of gentrification demonstrates the continuing appeal of the Big Apple, it represents only a small net increase in the population. The people moving in are largely replacing other people who are moving out as rents go up.

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When the new buildings were completed, they featured many desirable amenities (a nice new supermarket, a Starbucks, an upscale wine shop, a Target) that further enhanced the appeal of the neighborhood, leading to further demographic turnover. The story of neighborhood improvement can be somewhat inspiring, and certainly everyone applauds the many jobs that have been created in the many new businesses that now exist in the area. But, to many, the gentrification and displacement rankle. The shiny new buildings stand as gentrification’s most visible symbol. But consider the alternative. The new metro station did open. Crime in Washington, DC, steadily declined during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Adjacent neighborhoods near the U Street and Petworth metro stations attracted new residents and new businesses as part of the same Green Line phenomenon.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Locals called that process: “From.Boyle Heights to Netflix . . . and Back to the Neighborhood,” NPR. in boyle heights: Brand, “In Boyle Heights, the Signs of Gentrification Are Everywhere.” In 2017, the brilliant and funny: “Marvin Lemus,” IMDb. The core conflict: Bahr, “ ‘The Jazz Singer’ Celebrates Yom Kippur.” “gentrification is the true”: “Gentrification Is the True, Highest Form of Hate Crime!,” Defend Boyle Heights. “almost immediately”: Elliott, “This New Boyle Heights Coffee Bar Has Become a Gentrification Battleground.” “to bring community together”: “Meet Jackson Defa of Weird Wave Coffee in Boyle Heights,” Voyage LA.

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In the show, they are generally depicted as crass, rich, or foolish. In real life, gentrifiers are often seen as pure villains. Defend Boyle Heights, one anti-gentrification organization, declares that “gentrification is the true, highest form of hate crime,” which is quite a claim given the twentieth century’s history of genocide. Weird Wave Coffee, which opened in 2017 near the spot where Julian Nava warned the Brown Berets about the forthcoming police raid, “almost immediately became ground zero for the very public discussion about gentrification.” Weird Wave is an unlikely villain, with its homespun decor, octopus logo, and stated mission “to bring community together.”

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Too many cities have coasted on the prosperity of the privileged rather than on empowering the upward mobility of the less fortunate. That empowerment needs better education and fewer barriers to entrepreneurship, especially among the poor. Gentrification is often seen as a problem, but it is really a symptom of other urban woes. Urban residents of all stripes are victims of policies that artificially constrain the growth of city space. Los Angeles is the site of many gentrification battles, which is particularly sad since that sprawling city once practically stood for Latino opportunity in America. Los Angeles is not particularly dense, and it could easily handle abundant extra building, especially if the new structures were high-rises that occupied little land.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Gibson, “Bleeding Albina: A History of Community Disinvestment,” Transforming Anthropology, vol. 15:1, (2007), 3–25, http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEEDING-ALBINA_-A-HISTORY-OF-COMMUNITY-DISINVESTMENT-1940%E2%80%932000.pdf; NYU Furman Center, “Focus on Gentrification” June 9, 2016, http://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/Part_1_Gentrification_SOCin2015_9JUNE2016.pdf; Jonathan Wynn and Andrew Deener, “Gentrification? Bring It,” The Conversation, October 11, 2017, https://theconversation.com/gentrification-bring-it-82107. 47 Kevin Baker, “The Death of a Once Great City,” Harper’s, July 2018, https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrification/; Theodore Dalrymple, “The Architect as Totalitarian,” City Journal, Autumn 2009, https://www.city-journal.org/html/architect-totalitarian-13246.html; Claire Berlinski, “The Architectural Sacking of Paris,” City Journal, Winter 2018, https://www.city-journal.org/html/architectural-sacking-paris-15655.html. 48 James Heartfield, “London’s Social Cleansing,” New Geography, May 13, 2012, http://www.newgeography.com/content/002824-london%E2%80%99s-social-cleansing. 49 Ibid.; Sara Malm, “Is buying a house just a pipe dream?

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., 1978. 57 Kristian Behrens and Frederic Robert-Nicoud, “Urbanization Makes the World More Unequal,” VoxEU, July 24, 2014, https://voxeu.org/article/inequality-big-cities. 58 Richard Florida, “Mapping the New Urban Crisis,” City Lab, April 13, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/04/new-urban-crisis-index/521037/; Patrick Sharkey, “Rich Neighborhood, Poor Neighborhood: How Segregation Threatens Social Mobility,” Brookings, December 5, 2013, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2013/12/05/rich-neighborhood-poor-neighborhood-how-segregation-threatens-social-mobility/. 59 Helen Raleigh, “Gentrification Provokes a Cofee Clash in Denver’s Five Points,” Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/gentrification-provokes-a-coffee-clash-in-denvers-five-points-1513983831; Cameron McWhirter, “Atlanta’s Growing Pains Are Getting Worse,” Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/atlantas-growing-pains-are-getting-worse-1535707800; Richard Campanella, “Gentrification and Its Discontents: Notes From New Orleans,” New Geography, February 28, 2013, http://www.newgeography.com/content/003526-gentrification-and-its-discontents-notes-new-orleans; “Google abandons Berlin base after two years of resistance,” Guardian, October 24, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/24/google-abandons-berlin-base-after-two-years-of-resistance; Chantal Braganza, “Why opponents of gentrification have taken to the streets of Hamilton,” TVO, April 5, 2018, https://tvo.org/article/current-afairs/why-opponents-of-gentrification-have-taken-to-the-streets-of-hamilton; David Streitfeld, “Protesters Block Google Buses in San Francisco, Citing ‘Techsploitation,’” New York Times, May 31, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/us/google-bus-protest.html?

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Atlantic, April 19, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/04/san-francisco-city-apps-built-or-destroyed/587389/; Dave Clark, “San Francisco’s Black population is less than 5 percent, exodus has been steady,” KTVU, November 24, 2016, http://www.ktvu.com/news/san-franciscos-black-population-is-less-than-5-percent-exodus-has-been-steady. 30 Kathleen Maclay, “More gentrification, displacement in Bay Area forecast,” Berkeley News, August 24, 2015, https://news.berkeley.edu/2015/08/24/more-gentrification-displacement-in-bay-area-forecast/; Sam Levin, “‘Largest-ever’ Silicon Valley eviction to displace hundreds of tenants,” Guardian, July 7, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/07/silicon-valley-largest-eviction-rent-controlled-tenants-income-inequality; Rong-Gong Lin II and Gale Holland, “Silicon Valley homeless no longer welcome in ‘the Jungle,’” Los Angeles Times, December 3, 2014, https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-silicon-valley-homeless-20141204-story.html. 31 John Barber, “Toronto Divided: A tale of three cities,” Globe and Mail, December 20, 2007, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto-divided-a-tale-of-3-cities/article18151444/. 32 Kat Hanna and Nicolas Bosetti, “Inside Out: The New Geography of Wealth and Poverty in London,” Centre for London, December 2015, https://www.centreforlondon.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CFLJ3887-Inside-out-inequality_12.125_WEB.pdf; Rupert Neate, “Rich overseas parents buy £2bn of property to get top school places,” Guardian, September 5, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/05/wealthy-overseas-parents-london-property-private-school-places. 33 David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics (London: Penguin, 2017), 135–39. 34 Sako Musterd et al., “Socioeconomic segregation in European capital cities.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

We will not assess the merits of these arguments here, other than to point out that the fall in inner city crime has also occurred in cities like London and Sydney, which should suggest some caution in focusing too heavily on US-specific factors. Whether falling crime rates have led to gentrification, or whether gentrification has in fact driven the fall in inner city crime rates, also remains contested. Well-off residents have less to gain and more to lose from participating in crime. One study by a group of MIT economists sought to resolve this ambiguity by looking at what happened to crime rates following a public ballot in Cambridge (Massachusetts) that ended rent control and therefore brought about a rapid surge in gentrification in the area.26 The fact that the researchers found a significant drop-off in crime after the policy change lends support to the idea that gentrification could be the cause of falling crime, rather than the other way around.

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For the bobo, the mark of success is not a double-garage home in the suburbs, but a loft apartment in an inner city neighbourhood surrounded by creative types who prove their status as an enlightened member of society. Indeed, the lifecycle of gentrification in recent decades has tended to follow a predictable pattern: first comes the artists, then the real estate developers and then the professionals. This same story has played out everywhere from London’s Shoreditch to New York’s SoHo to Sydney’s Newtown. The process of gentrification is not entirely new. Ruth Glass’s 1964 work London: Aspects of Change lamented how ‘There is very little left of the poorer enclaves of Hampstead and Chelsea … The invasion has since spread to Islington, Paddington, North Kensington – even to the “shady” parts of Notting Hill.’29 In recent decades, however, the process has accelerated and extended into many inner city neighbourhoods that once provided affordable homes to those on lower incomes.

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And while increasingly unaffordable housing in cities like London is now pushing out a growing number of young people, many would rather stay. Gentrification and the Commuting Poor The Great Inversion has taken an immense toll on many of society’s most disadvantaged. As wealthy urbanites move in, the existing poor residents are pushed away. For those who happen to own their properties in gentrifying neighbourhoods, this process can create a windfall financial gain. Unfortunately, the most disadvantaged in these areas tend to be renters, who find themselves confronted with rapidly rising housing costs. While the effects of gentrification may be more muted in cases where the neighbourhood in question was once made up primarily of industrial and commercial real estate, the stock of such property has rapidly been exhausted in places like New York, Chicago and London.

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

In the United States and Europe, disputes over safety and the social infrastructure are more likely to unfold slowly and quietly, and they’re often centered in gentrifying neighborhoods where new commercial and residential developments change street-level conditions in ways that can either protect or—if they lead to displacement or heightened racial discrimination—imperil local residents. Gentrification is one of the most controversial issues in affluent urban areas, so it’s no surprise that there’s a burgeoning literature on how it affects crime rates. Unfortunately, there is not yet a clear answer. Some studies show an increase, likely because new commercial development creates new targets and opportunities for crime, while others show a decrease, often attributed to more eyes on the street. The variation suggests that gentrification plays out differently depending on the local context, and also that groups are likely to be affected by gentrification in divergent ways.

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, who allowed his staff to post signs saying “Nothing says gentrification like being able to order a cortado” and “Happily gentrifying the neighborhood since 2014” outside the company’s new shop in Five Points. Herbert thought the signs would be funny, but residents and community organizations concerned about their fate found them offensive. Some responded by vandalizing the establishment; others organized protests against both ink! and the gentrification process it represented. “I am embarrassed to say that I did not fully appreciate the very real and troubling issue of gentrification, and I want to sincerely apologize to those who understand firsthand the hardship and cultural consequences that gentrification has caused,” said Herbert in a Facebook post after the protests began.

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The coffee shop, Papachristos and his team write, became a driver and a symbol of neighborhood transition, one that would “ensure this area will soon experience rapid gentrification.” The housing project did experience a decline in homicide, but it remained far more dangerous than the areas around it. “Here, we might see a ‘positive’ effect of gentrification in the form of long-term neighborhood crime reduction,” Papachristos and his coauthors write, “but at the severe expense of the displacement of Cabrini residents.” For this reason, they are adamant that although local retail outlets may well make neighborhoods safer, gentrification imposes formidable social costs to impoverished and vulnerable people, and is by no means the ideal way to reduce crime

Bike Snob by BikeSnobNYC

book value, call centre, car-free, fixed-gear, gentrification, Kickstarter, messenger bag, safety bicycle, urban sprawl

CYCLING AND THE CITY The Gentrification of the Bicycle As a child growing up in pre-gentrification Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, I went everywhere by bicycle. My bike was in many ways the key to my neighborhood, which, at the time, was Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. This was in the ‘60s and ‘70s, before all the white people and restaurants. I really can’t underscore boldly enough the fact that I grew up in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, before it was gentrified. You could get mugged! —Jonathan Lethem For years people have been talking about “gentrification.” Basically, gentrification is when some poor, or boring, or regular, or otherwise unremarkable neighborhood experiences an influx of bars and restaurants and clubs and young people and becomes annoying.

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People debate endlessly about gentrification being a good thing or a bad thing. Pro-gents say that gentrification brings safety, and amenities (if you call high-end clothing boutiques and places that sell truffle oil “amenities”), and increases the value of the neighborhood’s real estate for everybody. Anti-gents say that gentrification raises rents, forces out people with lower incomes, and creates a breeding ground for the ever-growing Nation of Smug Hipsters. Truth be told, both the pro-gents and the anti-gents make good points. And one thing that’s become an increasingly important part of gentrification, for better or for worse, is the bicycle.

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Wells Table of Contents INTRODUCTION The bicycle, and what's so great about it PART ONE the Basics DIALING IT IN: The History of the Bicycle WHAT IS A CYCLIST, AND WHY WOULD ANYBODY WANT TO BE ONE? VELO-TAXONOMY: The Various Subsets of Cyclists GETTING THERE BY BIKE: How Cycling Changed My Life PART TWO Road Rules WHY IS EVERYBODY TRYING TO KILL ME?”: Fear, and How to Survive on a Bike CYCLING AND THE CITY: The Gentrification of the Bicycle LOOK AT ME, I’M ORIGINAL, TOO! The myth of a “bike culture” PART THREE Advanced Cycling LETTING GO: The burden of bicycle ownership TRIMMING THE FAT: The streamlining influence of cycling CORROSION OF CONFORMITY: Rules vs. fashion A BRIEF GUIDE TO ETIQUETTE FOR NON-CYCLISTS EPILOGUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION The Bicycle, and What’s So great About It As humans, we’ve invented a lot of things.

Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders by Reihan Salam

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bonfire of the Vanities, charter city, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, gentrification, ghettoisation, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, megacity, new economy, obamacare, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, two tier labour market, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor

Romano, Andrew and Garance Franke-Ruta. “A new generation of anti-gentrification radicals are on the march in Los Angeles—and around the country.” Yahoo News, March 5, 2018. www.yahoo.com/news/new-generation-anti-gentrification-radicals-march-los-angeles-around-country-100000522.html. 10. Vega, Tanzina. “Why the racial wealth gap won’t go away.” CNN Money, January 26, 2016. money.cnn.com/2016/01/25/news/economy/racial-wealth-gap/index.html. 11. Romano, Andrew and Garance Frankie-Ruta. “A New Generation Of Anti-Gentrification Radicals Are On The March In Los Angeles—And Around The Country.”

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We see glimpses of this future in our most prosperous cities. Recently in Los Angeles, reporters Andrew Romano and Garance Franke-Ruta profiled anti-gentrification protesters, many of them second-generation Americans, who are adopting more radical methods to defend their neighborhoods, as they see it, from affluent outsiders.9 Some of their tactics seem faintly comic, such as the expletive-laced T-shirts condemning hipsters. But others involve threatening supposed interlopers and vandalizing property. One could dismiss the new anti-gentrification radicalism as hooliganism. Romano and Franke-Ruta are more sympathetic, pointing to anger and disaffection among “poorer, nonwhite millennials who tend to live in major cities,” and the soaring poverty rate among young adults with no more than a high school education, which, they note, increased threefold from 1979 to 2014.

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The same is true for only 34 percent of white families.10 This contrast between wealth and poverty is particularly pronounced in gentrifying neighborhoods. “Ultimately,” Romano and Franke-Ruta warn, “the fight over gentrification is what the fight over income inequality in America looks like up close today: a clash between the economic forces transforming our cities and a young, diverse, debt-saddled generation that is losing faith in capitalism itself.”11 The activism we’re seeing in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other hotbeds of gentrification will spread. The visible manifestations of racial inequality are inciting many young Americans of color, and will incite them further as America goes through what some are calling “the Great Wealth Transfer.”

The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure by Shawn Micallef

big-box store, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, gentrification, ghettoisation, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, knowledge worker, liberation theology, Mason jar, McMansion, new economy, post scarcity, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

That has changed, of course, even in Windsor. While the city remains defiantly attached to its manufacturing and industrial roots, it is also undergoing gentrification in its own minor key. There are hip bike shops, indie bars, bookstores run by iconoclast literary presses. There are even brunch spots where you won’t see a can of Sterno but you’ll find vegan entrées made from local Essex County produce and, yes, artisanal bacon and fair-trade coffee. Such gentrification – often seen as desirable and courted in places like Windsor – is unfolding in post-industrial cities all across the continent, from Hamilton to Pittsburgh, St.

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Authors John Joe Schlichtman and Jason Patch examine a tendency in most ‘mainstream’ and ‘critical’ urbanists to ignore their own role in gentrification and middle-class sensibility. Recounting their own stories of moving into older historic neighbourhoods not unlike Kensington Market, they write, ‘There was an aesthetic pull of “sentiment and space” to at least some of our neighborhoods: we have no desire to live in the aesthetic landscape of uniform subdivisions of postwar aluminum-sided ranches or post-Reagan McMansions nor the class homogeneity that often accompanies them.’ Throughout their article, Schlichtman and Patch aren’t arguing that the displacement caused by gentrification isn’t a serious urban problem, nor are they condemning the forces that compel middle-class people with what might as well be called a brunching sensibility.

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Throughout their article, Schlichtman and Patch aren’t arguing that the displacement caused by gentrification isn’t a serious urban problem, nor are they condemning the forces that compel middle-class people with what might as well be called a brunching sensibility. Rather, they’re simply recognizing how some of these very personal choices might be in conflict with blanket anti-gentrification arguments, and that people should consider how the fruits of gentrification can be reconciled with caring about who gets shut out. I’ve seen it myself in lefty planner and urbanist friends who get the most upset about affordable housing and hipsters but frequent the new bars and see the bands that inhabit exactly these contested spaces, driving up prices.

Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, American ideology, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, car-free, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, congestion pricing, desegregation, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, operational security, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

For this reason, city planners charged with the task of revitalizing a downtown have little choice but to encourage gentrification or resign from their job. It is sometimes helpful to investigate the source of the complaint: the cry of “gentrification” is less often sounded by citizens who fear displacement than by politicians who suspect that racial and economic integration will undermine their power base. One technique that has been used to stop gentrification is to limit the rise in tax assessments. But keeping real estate assessments down can be a real problem, as this can prevent home and business owners from obtaining building improvement loans. Once again, fighting gentrification proves counterproductive to the improvement efforts of existing residents.

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In truth, many urban neighborhoods do quite well in the absence of children. Of course, the long-term health and diversity of a city is ultimately tied closely to the quality of its schools. A more difficult issue to tackle is gentrification. At the macroscopic level, activists are justified in their fight against gentrification if it is likely to result in the displacement of tenants. But at the microscopic level of the neighborhood, fighting gentrification is tantamount to fighting improvement; revitalization will not occur without it. Indeed, the challenge faced by most center cities today is not to provide affordable housing—which they typically supply at alarming ratios, thanks to public subsidies—but to create a market for middle-class housing.

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Once again, fighting gentrification proves counterproductive to the improvement efforts of existing residents. For this reason, governments and activists must turn their attention from stopping gentrification to mitigating its negative impact. Gentrification became a dirty word because it used to occur in the absence of a safety net, and many a displaced tenant in the sixties had nowhere to go. Nowadays, that need not be the case. cn The above discussion of urban marketing and development implies something that many might find surprising: a proactive municipal government acting in the role of the developer. Rather than waiting for Gerald Hines or Hyatt to come to town, civic leaders must develop a physical vision for their city which they commit to and then actively promote.

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

By contrast, cities that are proactive in allowing urban housing development end up with lower housing costs. The real solution to the problem of gentrification is exactly the opposite of restricting new residential development. Instead of limiting new housing, innovation hubs should encourage it. If managed correctly through smart growth policies, more housing does not mean more sprawl and congestion, especially if it is concentrated in the urban core and is accompanied by an expansion of the public transit system. These kinds of progressive urban development policies can significantly mitigate the negative effects of gentrification while promoting the serendipitous urban social interactions that foster knowledge spillovers and innovation.

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Test scores increased, and not just for those children who had well-educated parents but also for children whose parents were less well educated and who had non-high-tech jobs. In the end, from the point of view of a city, gentrification is a good problem to have, because it is a sign of economic success and job growth. Dozens of decaying cities would love to have this problem. At the same time, gentrification has serious social consequences. The solution is not to discourage local job creation in the innovation sector, hoping that manufacturing jobs will magically return. The solution is to manage the process of economic growth in smart ways, to minimize the negative consequences for the weakest residents and maximize the economic benefits for all. 6.

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See also “Big push” strategy; Cluster building; Great Divergence Powell, Walter, [>] “Power couples,” and thick labor market, [>]–[>] Productivity and dropout rates, [>] in innovation sector, [>], [>] and local investment subsidies, [>] in local services, [>] as location factor, [>] rise in (post-WWII), [>] from skilled colleagues, [>] and threat of Chinese competition, [>] in tradable vs. non-tradable sector, [>]–[>] of unskilled working with better-educated, [>] and wages, [>], [>] Productivity paradox, [>]–[>] Progent, [>] Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), results of, [>]–[>] Programmers, and “offshoring,” [>] Prosper, [>]–[>] Protectionism, [>] Providence, Rhode Island, [>]–[>], [>], [>] Provo, Utah, [>], [>] Public transit, [>], [>] Quality of life and cluster building, [>]–[>] variation in, [>] See also Standard of living Q-Cells, [>] Racial integration, [>], [>] “Radical collaboration,” [>] Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>] Ralph Lauren, [>] R&D (research and development), [>]–[>] global investment in, [>] green, [>], [>], [>] (see also Solar-panel industry) knowledge spillover from, [>] (see also Knowledge spillovers) in life sciences, [>]–[>], [>] (see also Life sciences research) for Microsoft, [>] and New York City, [>] and outsourcing, [>]–[>] in pharmaceutical sector, [>]–[>] scientific, [>] social return on, [>] subsidizing of, [>], [>] under-investment in (U.S.), [>], [>] vs. variable costs, [>] Real estate prices, [>]–[>], [>], [>] and gentrification, [>]–[>] and rationing of new housing, [>] and Seattle housing policy, [>]–[>] RealNetworks, [>] Recessions, [>]–[>]. See also Great Recession Relay Aides, [>] Relocation and relocation vouchers, [>], [>]–[>] Rent, economic, [>]–[>], [>] Research. See R&D Revitalization of cities, [>], [>]–[>]. See also Cluster building; Gentrification Richmond, [>] Rochester, Minnesota, [>], [>] Rochester, New York, [>], [>] Rocky Mount, North Carolina, [>] Romania, PISA scores of, [>] Rome, [>] Roosevelt, Franklin D., [>], [>] Roth, Philip, [>]–[>] Russia, PISA scores of, [>] Rust Belt, [>]–[>], [>]–[>].

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

“New Starter Homes Hit a Dead Stop,” Bloomberg View, http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-17/new-starter-homes-hit-a-dead-stop. McBRIDE, Sarah. (2013, December 10). “Google bus blocked in San Francisco gentrification protest,” Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/10/us-google-protest-idUSBRE9B818J20131210. McCLAIN, James L. and MERRIMAN, John M. (1997). “Edo and Paris: Cities and Power,” Edo and Paris: Urban Life in the Early Modern Era, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. McGEE, Henry W., Jr. (2007). “Gentrification, Integration or Displacement?: The Seattle Story,” BlackPast.org, http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/gentrification-integration-or-displacement-seattle-story. McGEEHAN, Patrick. (2012, May 20) “More Earners at Extremes in New York Than in U.S.,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/nyregion/middle-class-smaller-in-new-york-city-than-nationally-study-finds.html.

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CALTHORPE, Peter. (2011, February 1). “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change: Urbanism Expanded,” Streetsblog SF, http://sf.streetsblog.org/2011/02/01/urbanism-in-the-age-of-climate-change-urbanism-expanded/. CAMPANELLA, Richard. (2013, March 1). “Gentrification and its Discontents: Notes from New Orleans,” New Geography, http://www.newgeography.com/content/003526-gentrification-and-its-discontents-notes-new-orleans. CAMPO-FLORES, Arian and DOUGHERTY, Conor. (2013, December 1). “Overseas Money Pours Into Miami Real Estate,” Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303332904579223863203208576.

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“Exodus to the burbs: why diehard downtowners are giving up on the city,” Toronto Life, http://www.torontolife.com/informer/features/2011/09/14/exodus-to-the-burbs-why-diehard-downtowners-are-giving-up-on-the-city/2/. PRICE, David. (2014, April 14). “Home Matters!—Seven Policies That Could Prevent Roxbury’s Gentrification,” Nuestra Communidad Development Corporation, http://nuestracdc.org/seven-policies-that-could-prevent-roxburys-gentrification/. PUROKAYASTHA, Devaprasad. (1998, May/June). “The New Technopolis,” Silicon India. PUTNAM, Robert. (2000). Bowling Alone, New York: Simon and Shuster. QUI, Jane. (2012, October 12). “Megacities pose serious health challenge,” Nature, http://www.nature.com/news/megacities-pose-serious-health-challenge-1.11495.

Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America by Charles Murray

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, centre right, correlation coefficient, critical race theory, Donald Trump, feminist movement, gentrification, George Floyd, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, invention of agriculture, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, publication bias, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, War on Poverty

They also won’t buy a home in the minority part of town unless they are pioneers initiating gentrification or are taking advantage of gentrification that is already well underway, but it would be a mistake to think they are deterred only because of crime. Widespread and voluntary residential segregation by race seems to be a fact of life around the world, no matter what the races are or what the country’s economic and political system is. In discussing the effects of crime, I am referring specifically to economic effects. In big-city America, disproportionate minority crime rates deter developers from building office space in minority neighborhoods unless gentrification is already well underway.

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But attempts to stimulate economic growth in the inner city are vulnerable to a specific, built-in opportunity for exploitation: The land occupied by the inner city really is potentially worth a lot of money if – but only if – the minority residents are replaced through gentrification. Thus big cities throughout the country have seen neighborhoods that were notorious centers of crime, drugs, and desperate poverty become fashionable, high-priced parts of town through gentrification. Property values soared. So did the availability of jobs. But this was of scant benefit to those who had lived there, few of whom had been owners of that newly valuable property and few of whom filled the new jobs.

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Real estate is typically cheaper in African or Latin parts of town than elsewhere, a factor that would ordinarily attract developers to build office space for law firms, doctors’ offices, and other businesses that would like to escape the high rentals in the European midtown. But unless it is clear that the neighborhood is near a gentrification tipping point, those lucrative rentals won’t happen, and so the office buildings don’t get built. In big-city America, disproportionate minority crime rates raise the costs of doing business for retailers of all kinds. It is often alleged that large commercial chains avoid putting stores in minority neighborhoods.

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing

East Village, forensic accounting, gentrification, global village, late capitalism, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Snapchat

Safer cities, cleaner cities, richer cities, cities that grow ever more alike: what lurks behind the rhetoric of the Quality of Life Task Force is a profound fear of difference, a fear of dirt and contamination, an unwillingness to let other life-forms coexist. And what this means is that cities shift from places of contact, places where diverse people interact, to places that resemble isolation wards, the like penned with the like. This is the subject of Gentrification of the Mind, Sarah Schulman’s extraordinary polemic, which ties the physical process of gentrification to the losses of the AIDS crisis. Her book calls on us to realise that not only is it healthier to live in complex, dynamic, mixed communities than uniform ones, but also that happiness that depends on privilege and oppression cannot by any civilised terms be described as happiness at all.

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When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive. There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings – depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage – are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

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It chronicles Delany’s experiences in the Square, and particularly in the porn cinemas of 42nd Street, like the one that appears with its declarative X in the background of the Rimbaud photo. Delany went to these cinemas often daily over a period of thirty years to have sex with multiple strangers, some of whom became deeply familiar to him, though their relationships rarely transcended the location. Delany was writing in the late 1990s, after the gentrification – the literal Disneyfication, in fact, considering the identity of one of the major investors – of Times Square; which is to say that he was writing in praise and grief at what had already been destroyed. In his thoughtful as well as practised estimation, what had been lost was not just a place to get your rocks off, but also a zone of contact, and particularly of cross-class and cross-racial contact - a site that facilitated intimacy, albeit transient, between a diverse multitude of citizens, some wealthy and some poor, some homeless, some mentally unsettled, but all soothed by the democratic balm of sex.

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones, June Williamson

accelerated depreciation, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, Donald Shoup, edge city, gentrification, global village, index fund, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, knowledge worker, land bank, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, megaproject, megastructure, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, postindustrial economy, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

But the unformalized feeders of the arts—studios, galleries, stores for musical instruments and art supplies, backrooms where the low earning power of a seat can absorb uneconomic discussions—these go into ordinary buildings.”30 While Jacobs’s observations were based on urban examples, contemporary observation of aged strip malls and shopping centers reveals the same processes of diversification and gentrification at work. Several first-ring suburbs have new immigrant communities that depend on and support this third generation of uses and would be hurt by the kind of gentrification that redevelopment would likely bring. (See Figure 4–5.) Empty big boxes have facilitated the same kind of diversification of activities and enrichment of social opportunities along suburban strips. They have been adaptively reused as churches/synagogues/ mosques, libraries, courthouses, government offices, community centers, school and university buildings, nightclubs, dinner theaters, multiplex cinemas, gymnasiums, an indoor go-cart raceway, the Spam Museum, call centers, offices, and medical clinics (one example in Savannah reused the heavy voltage from the frozen food section of a former grocery store to power an MRI scanner).31 The addition of these programs to suburban areas lacking in third places enriches their neighborhoods and adds opportunities for greater communal interaction—even without further changes to the physical context.

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Fulton, William Fuqua, Jeff FXFowle Architects Galleria District (Houston, Texas) Gamble, Michael Gans, Herbert garden apartments Belcrest Plaza gentrification infill immigrants increasing residential density through market devaluation overview Garr, Emily Garreau, Joel General Foods complex (White Plains, New York) General Growth Properties (GGP). see also Cottonwood Mall generic conventions, modification of Genesee County (Michigan) gentrification Colony Apartments cycle of Gramercy Georgia. see also Atlanta, Georgia College Park Savannah Woodstock GGP. see General Growth Properties ghostboxes Glen Cove (New York) Global Station proposal Goetz, Stephan J.

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Conversely, which are well served by transit and make sense to be targeted for densification with mixed-use housing or employment centers? Identify areas where small-scale entre-preneurial and immigrant businesses are making use of affordable rents and serving local communities. What additional re-inhabitations or corridor improvements might improve livability without spurring displacement through gentrification? Each city’s Red Fields to Green Fields proposal is unique. Miami proposes to establish a transit-oriented park system, targeting 130 of the 750 acres of greyfield sites adjacent to existing and planned transit lines—as in this regreening proposal for a Jeep dealership site along a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line.

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

Most of their residents are ill-paid workers in retail, hospitals, restaurants, childcare, housecleaning, or construction, not financial or tech employees with stock options. So, too, as inner-city public housing complexes succumb to the bulldozer, and rooming houses and SRO (single-room occupancy) buildings fall prey to gentrification, more and more low-income families are living in hotels, motels, and inns on the urban fringe or beyond it. Motels in particular, whether or not they are designated as “extended stay,” have become the default residence for a significant mass of Americans priced out of the rental and homeownership markets.25 Countless others are doubled up, reliant on the goodwill of relatives or friends with a room or sofa to spare, and who may be in need of extra cash to pay their own bills.

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In one decade, between 2007 and 2017, ticket prices increased by 50 percent, despite complaints about overcrowding and laments about “leaving behind the middle class.” In 1971, when the park opened, one-day admission for an adult cost $3.50, or $22.24 in 2019 dollars, whereas the equivalent 2019 ticket price was as much as $129.6 Given the stagnation of average American wages over the last four decades, these numbers speak to the increasing gentrification of the theme park experience. At least one commentator has pointed out that Disney “doesn’t really know the maximum price that a guest will pay for a ticket to their theme parks.”7 Nor do middlemen and hucksters know of a limit to how much prospective visitors will pay for “discounted” tickets; roadside signs advertising these kinds of dodgy deals pop up as soon as you cross the Florida state line from Georgia, hundreds of miles to the north.

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The countercharge that a head tax is a “job killer” is standard Chamber of Commerce fare, cynically masking the self-interest of its corporate members.36 Not all the blame for the housing crisis can be laid directly at the door of the big tech companies. However, they are an easy public target because it is widely believed that their high-wage employees contribute to gentrification, displacement, and rising rents in areas within commuting range of their workplaces. But what about large service industry employers like Disney? Their employees are much closer to the poverty line and experience homelessness on a routine basis. Surely addressing their housing insecurity lies within Disney’s orbit of responsibility even more than obligation for housing in Seattle and the Bay Area lies with the tech giants?

City on the Verge by Mark Pendergrast

big-box store, bike sharing, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, desegregation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, gentrification, global village, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, jitney, land bank, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, power law, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, young professional

What about other neighborhoods around the future BeltLine? What about neighborhoods that have always been relatively poor? CHAPTER 11 SOUTH BELTLINE: A SLOW DANCE TO BETTER COMMUNITIES It’s time to retire the term gentrification altogether.… The media focus on gentrification has obscured problems that actually are serious: the increasing isolation of poor, minority neighborhoods and the startling spread of extreme poverty. —John Buntin, “The Myth of Gentrification,” Slate, 2015 Mary Porter, born in 1947, grew up in the South Atlanta neighborhood, originally known as Brownsville, founded by freed slaves after the Civil War; there black residents turned back white police and vigilantes during the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906.

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The southwestern segment, he wrote, “alone solves few transportation problems.” Perhaps, however, “if the redevelopable territory associated with the Belt Line is handled appropriately, future population and employment growth on those sites will support it.” That growth would be equitable, he hoped. Elsewhere in Atlanta, he acknowledged, “the gentrification of neighborhoods by the middle class is homogenizing older communities, pushing out the resident poor.” He hoped the BeltLine would somehow mitigate such trends but suggested no methodology. At least Gravel raised the issue of affordable housing, but efforts to resolve it satisfactorily through the BeltLine would be frustrating.

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The carefully drawn TAD boundaries excluded areas with single-family homes so that potential developments would not threaten to encroach on established residential neighborhoods, including affluent Buckhead properties. According to Georgia law, the whole TAD rationale was to improve areas that were “economically and socially depressed” when viewed as a whole. That designation certainly applied to poverty-stricken, mostly black neighborhoods to the south and west. As those areas attracted growth, however, gentrification might very well push out poor residents. Deborah Scott, the African American executive director of the Georgia Strategic Alliance for New Directions and Unified Policies (STAND-UP), a new nonprofit promoting community benefits, pushed for the hiring of locals in building the BeltLine and to set aside 25 percent of the TAD bond money for “workforce” housing.* In the end, that figure dropped to 15 percent, which was supposed to pay for 5,600 affordable housing units over a twenty-five-year time frame.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

(London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 2004), 133-62. 28.Julhas Alam, “Bangladesh Garment Workers Seek Unpaid Wages as Orders Stop,” AP News, April 16, 2020, https://apnews.com/181650f23661c91c8757d85c5491c883. 29.Conrad Duncan, “Bangladesh Fire Leaves ‘50,000 People Homeless’ after Slum Destroyed in Capital of Dhaka,” Independent, August 17, 2019, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bangladesh-fire-slum-destroyed-homeless-blaze-dhaka-capital-a9063871.html. 30.United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “Sustainable Development Goals Statistics,” 2019, https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2019/goal-11/. 31.Tanner Howard, “Are Planners Partly to Blame for Gentrification?” Citylab, March 29, 2019, www.citylab.com/equity/2019/03/urban-planning-gentrification-capital-city-samuel-stein/585262/. 32.Gita Dewan Verma, Slumming India: A Chronicle of Slums and Their Saviours (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2002), xix. 33.Neil Smith, “Gentrification in Berlin and the Revanchist State,” Policing Crowds, October 20, 2007, http://policing-crowds.org/urbanization/homelessness/homeless/neil-smith-gentrification-in-berlin-and-the-revanchist-state/. 34.UN, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, International Migration Report 2017: Highlights (ST/ESA/SER.A/404), www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/publications/migrationreport/docs/MigrationReport2017_Highlights.pdf. 35.Adam Hanieh, “The Contradictions of Global Migration,” in Socialist Register 2019: A World Turned Upside Down?

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asked a caller to a conservative radio talk show on which I appeared, against my better judgment. Discussing an anti-gentrification rally planned by women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Canada, I was outlining the lived experiences of escalating displacement, homelessness, and police violence when a caller hopped on and referenced my migrant justice organizing against detentions and deportations. I was being baited, of course, but the question nagged at me for months. Anti-gentrification struggles push back against the forces of racial capitalism and the entitlement of those seeking to solidify their power, as they profit from and police neighborhoods already under siege.

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Often expressed in the colonial language of “barren land” and “frontier,” this private property relation spatially segregates the wealthy from the impoverished, illustrated by gated communities situated alongside slums and ghettos. Urban planning is dictated by developers, local tax schemes, rent extraction regulations, bylaws criminalizing poverty and street economies, and gentrification turning monuments to culture into towers of glass. Neil Smith articulates: “Gentrification has become a strategy within globalization itself; the effort to create a global city is the effort to attract capital and tourists.”33 Like EPZs bifurcating labor power, this racialized class ordering reorganizes urban space and displaces poor people by commodifying “dead capital” land that poor people live on but do not own as private property.

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

The beauty of the city was not outweighing its annoying residents. The word used to describe the insanity of the moment was gentrification, but no one knew what gentrification meant, not really, and most people did not understand what was happening. Christine was one of these people. She had lived in the city for almost two decades. She was caught up in a whirlwind of change. She had no idea what the fuck was going on. It was as if she’d been hit by one of the Ford F-150s advertised on Twitter. Gentrification was what happened to a city when people with an excess of capital wanted their capital to produce more capital while not attributing any value to labor.

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It was rocky until it wasn’t. At some point it became solid. J. Karacehennem went north. He moved into the apartment of The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, which was located on Bryant between 23rd and 24th in the Mission District, a historically Latino and working-class neighborhood which was ground zero for gentrification driven by obscene Internet wealth. The apartment sported several strange features. It was 1,000 square feet but it had no interior walls. It was one giant room. The floors were all grey masonite. The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter had installed a 15-foot tall tree into the middle of the room.

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Sometimes it feels like there are only eleven people in the world and that the rest are paste. Baby didn’t leave New York because of the rent on his own apartment. He left because all the wonderful queers were chased off Manhattan island. All the beautiful freaks. They were chased away because they had no money. Manhattan had experienced extreme gentrification. Some moved to Brooklyn. Others left the city. Baby refused to move to Brooklyn. He was too much of a snob. He chose Massachusetts because he decided to marry his long term boyfriend, a failed architect named Massimo Colletta. At the time, Massachusetts was the only place in America where gay people could get married to other gay people of the same gender.

Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy by Sudhir Venkatesh

creative destruction, East Village, gentrification, illegal immigration, public intellectual, side project, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, urban renewal, working poor

In Hell’s Kitchen, Rudy Giuliani’s ambitious cleanup had brought in tourist dollars and whirlwind gentrification. In Midtown, multinational corporations were building new headquarters. On Wall Street, the financial services sector was booming with an energy that seemed almost manic. All over the city, middle- and upper-class people were beginning a historic migration back from the suburbs. All of this was visible to the naked eye and much celebrated in the media. But people in the underground were on the move too, and these equally enormous changes seemed to be happening without comment or notice. The waves of gentrification sent thousands of underclass strivers in search of their own new markets and new places to work.

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In this sense, Hell’s Kitchen had become a sort of postmodern neighborhood, stuck between genres—just like the world music my more artsy academic colleagues admired. Once again, all this would have been a rare sight in Chicago. Gentrification and urban development took place there, to be sure. Indeed, the national program of “urban renewal” was first developed in Chicago in an effort to reclaim seedy areas. But Chicago mayors typically sent bulldozers into down-and-out neighborhoods and then resold the land for private development—sports stadiums, universities, highways. It was a rapid-fire form of social bleaching. Gentrification in New York was like an IV drip. As old buildings came down, property changed hands, creating new neighborhoods in a more organic way.

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A minority since the early 1970s, whites now made up 77 percent of all Manhattan apartment buyers, and the homes they purchased were often rehabbed rental units that once housed minorities and the working poor. The city was gentrifying at a pace that had not been seen in decades. The laborers were relegated to the outer boroughs. And with gentrification, New York was becoming a city of sharp contrasts. As Sassen wrote pointedly, 90 percent of the highest-paid professionals arriving in the new New York City were white and their conspicuous consumption and service needs were spawning entire industries, which were mostly staffed by minorities coming from distant homes.

The City on the Thames by Simon Jenkins

Ascot racecourse, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, British Empire, clean water, computerized trading, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, estate planning, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, light touch regulation, Louis Blériot, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, place-making, railway mania, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Activism has been a constant theme, and I now pass through the city like a veteran soldier, bearing daily witness to past victories and defeats. It can be elating and depressing. My interest in London’s appearance is specific and deliberate. It is for the London of all time, not the same London but the same sort of London. Battles over gentrification, poverty, schooling and public housing are real and important, but I believe urban politics should never privilege the current generation. We have a right to be heard. But the city we briefly inhabit will survive, and what matters is the city we pass on to the future. I shudder to think what generations to come will say of our handling of London’s skyline just as we shudder at what our parents and grandparents did after the Second World War.

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Conservation replaced public with private money. Large areas of central London began to change character as home owners and landlords sold to those able to spend on restoration. This was inevitably controversial, as existing residents were gradually replaced by newcomers, a process described by the sociologist Ruth Glass as gentrification. A Rent Act in 1957 had partly decontrolled rents, still leaving so-called sitting tenants with a degree of security. But there was now an incentive for landlords not just to increase rents but to induce tenants to leave, to make way for renovation and sale. The most notorious early practitioner of what came to be called ‘winkling’ was Kensington’s Peter Rachman.

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He concentrated on ousting elderly tenants and selling to West Indian and other immigrants, often profiting from overcrowding. This led to belated measures to curb such action. Rachman’s core properties, off Westbourne Park Road, were later cleared by Westminster for its Westbourne Gardens estate. As it was, gentrification soon developed a degree of self-mockery. The estate agent Roy Brooks published advertisements in the Observer promoting semi-derelict properties as ‘challenging… promising… in need of love… would suit desperate writer in search of something sordid’. Middle-class parents would profess shock at the parts of London into which their children were moving.

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

A counter argument is made by Andres Duany, who argues that we should give ‘three cheers for gentrification’ because there is ‘nothing more unhealthy’ for a city than a monoculture of poverty in its inner city neighbourhoods. Whether induced by public policy or spontaneous, he argues that once gentrification begins it is difficult to stop: ‘Its motive force is great urbanism: well-proportioned streets, a good mix of activities in useful types of buildings, and a certain architectural quality.’ (Duany 2001: 2). By contrast, he argues, one proven technique that avoids gentrification and holds down prices is to give people bad design, because gentrification is essentially a process of real estate seeking its proper value.

…

Thus, the places that revive are inherently attractive enough to be sought out by the affluent, while the places that resist gentrification are those where the housing is poorly designed or the quality of the urban space is mediocre: ‘Thus the most surefire technique for permanently preventing gentrification is to provide dismal architectural and urban design.’ (Duany 2001: 3). For Duany, the solution to gentrification is to build more new-traditional neighbourhoods, so that older neighbourhoods do not become over-valued through scarcity. Whether this would counter the effects of gentrification is doubtful given that such processes are typically spurred on by the initial low value of much dilapidated older housing stock and the attraction this holds for the types of urban pioneers required to instigate the process.

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These trends are of particular concern for urban designers because, in recent years, urban design has been accused of facilitating gentrification through physical interventions in the built environment – trends seen by many commentators as socially divisive and undesirable. Gentrification is a politically loaded term. The political right generally prefers less ideologically charged words such as regeneration, revitalisation and renaissance, which are seen as ‘natural’ processes of city development in which some displacement is inevitable and might even be desirable. For the political left, such terms are merely ciphers for ‘gentrification’. Hackworth (2002: 815), for example, defines it as ‘… the production of space for progressively more affluent uses.’

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, dark matter, Day of the Dead, digital divide, Donald Trump, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, facts on the ground, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, mass immigration, megaproject, microcredit, Milgram experiment, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, Silicon Valley, starchitect, technoutopianism, unorthodox policies, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, Washington Consensus

In The Mystery of Capital de Soto writes: ‘Without formal property, no matter how many assets they accumulate or how hard they work, most people will not be able to prosper in a capitalist society.’ But this is not what Turner was arguing. As an anarchist, he was no advocate of standard right-wing economics. And de Soto’s theory, which has been highly influential, is ultimately destructive, resulting in the inevitable gentrification that forces the poor out of the expensive inner city. Instead of the market value of housing, Turner was asserting its ‘use value’. Most significantly of all, Turner took the view, long before it was fashionable, that the slums were sites of resourcefulness and creativity. As we shall see, this was a position that would later backfire when the World Bank used it to support a neoliberal agenda that effectively relieved governments of the duty to address the housing problem at all.

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After General Pinochet ousted Allende in 1973, he handed responsibility for housing back to the private sector and banned the land invasions, forcing the existing campamentos to become denser and denser. Pinochet forcibly removed tens of thousands of families from profitable parts of the city to make way for market-driven gentrification. It was the same combination of brutal authoritarianism and liberal economics deployed by dictatorships across the continent. However, in 1979 the junta introduced the housing subsidy system that is still in use today. In the 1980s developers built around one million units speculatively, in three-storey housing blocks.

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On one level this is a non-story. Europeans moving into a few favelas in the choicest locations is of little consequence, considering that there are around one thousand favelas in Rio. And yet it is of enormous significance to the perception of these long-vilified settlements. The prospect of gentrification reveals them to be desirable real estate at last, and thus subject to the same market forces that make Rio home to some of the highest property prices in the world. This highlights an essential paradox faced by the municipality with regards to its various slum upgrading programmes: is it possible to improve quality of life in the favelas without subjecting the residents to a process that will force them out altogether?

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Lee was criticized by many for “hipster-bashing,” including African-American professor John McWhorter, who claimed that “hipster” was a “sneaky way of saying ‘honkey’” and compared Lee to television character George Jefferson. These dismissals, which focus on gentrification as culture, ignore that Lee’s was a critique of the racist allocation of resources. Black communities whose complaints about poor schools and city services go unheeded find these complaints are readily addressed when wealthier, whiter people move in. Meanwhile, longtime locals are treated as contagions on the landscape, targeted by police for annoying the new arrivals. Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics. Proponents of gentrification will vouch for its benevolence by noting it “cleaned up the neighborhood.”

…

If you’re an economic conservative, despite how ironic and sarcastic you may be or how tight your jeans are, you, my friend, are a conservative…” Lee tells me he has his own plan to try to mitigate the negative effects of gentrification, which he calls “50-50-20-15.” All employers who launch businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods should have a workforce that is at least 50 percent minorities, 50 percent people from the local neighborhood, and 20 percent ex-offenders. The employees should be paid at least $15 per hour. Gentrification spreads the myth of native incompetence: that people need to be imported to be important, that a sign of a neighborhood’s “success” is the removal of its poorest residents.

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“People” are those who can afford to view poverty through the lens of aesthetics as they pass it by. Urban decay becomes a set piece to be remodeled or romanticized. This is hipster economics. Influx of Hipsters In February, director Spike Lee delivered an impassioned critique—derisively characterized as a “rant” by U.S. media outlets—on the gentrification of New York City. Arguing that an influx of “… hipsters” had driven up rent in most neighborhoods—and in turn driven out the African-American communities that once called them home—he noted how long-dormant city services suddenly reappeared: “Why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better?

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

These stories speak not just to San Francisco or California, but to America. San Francisco isn’t a petri dish sealed off from the rest of the country. It is the product of historical forces and shaped by national and international trends. Wealth inequality is an American problem. The changing workforce, rapid gentrification, infrastructure collapse, climate change, overcrowded prisons, struggling schools, atrophied public institutions—these are problems in any city, in any state across the country. The Bay Area is an experiment in what happens when each of these problems is turned up to 11—what happens when the tech sector fuels changes in the private sector without the public sector being able to keep up—what happens when diversity and disparity combine and combust.

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MARGARET ZHAO She grew up in the Richmond, a residential neighborhood in the northeast of San Francisco, running along Golden Gate Park to the Pacific. She went to school on the East Coast, thinking she might stay there. But she returned and made her career in tech. She now lives in an old townhouse blocks from her childhood home. She is curled up on the sofa covered in blankets. The Richmond was one of the last bastions against true gentrification. I wouldn’t say it’s really working class. But it’s normal people. It’s not affluent. Not a lot of people move to San Francisco to live in the Richmond. You had a lot of families, a lot of single-family homes that people owned outright because they’d lived there a long, long time. Only recently, when I tell people that I was born here, they’re like, “Oh, wow.

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They gave every principal $100,000 conditioned on the school district not telling them what to do with it, and you can’t believe what these principals have done. You can even look at the test scores. Principals are comparing best practices. And that will spread to the rest of the city. I started this group called One City because of the gentrification issue. Believe me, everyone in San Francisco knows about it. We’re trying to say, Hey, wait a minute, this is one city, let’s all treat it like it’s one city. That’s our new mantra. Tech people, and the people in Chinatown, and the progressives, and the haters—the ones who are stopping Google buses—all of us are one.

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

But over the last few decades, the interest in those kinds of transportation-based, landscape-transforming projects largely has faded away. Elon Musk’s hyperloop plans will remain on the drawing board for the foreseeable future, and the settlement of Mars is yet farther away. Urban progress is less transformational and more a matter of making more neighborhoods look and act like the nicer neighborhoods—namely gentrification. When it comes to transportation, mostly we are hoping to avoid greater suffering, such as worse traffic, cuts in bus service, or the rather dramatic declines in service quality experienced in the Washington, DC, Metro system. I argue that the physical world matters no less today, but we are in denial about its power and relevance.

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And the reason is that those cities are so, so expensive, at least in the parts where most productive workers are willing to live.32 Compare today to the 1950s. At that time, a typical apartment in New York City rented for about $60 a month, or, adjusting for inflation, about $530 a month. Today you can’t find a broom closet in the East Village for that amount. Even in the South Bronx there is gentrification, and some new apartments are going up for a projected $3,750 a month for a small-one bedroom abode. Many parking spaces in fact cost more than the going rate for a 1950s NYC apartment.33 Or to put that 1950s rent in perspective, the U.S. median wage at that time was about $5,000 a year, so a typical New Yorker spent as little as 10 percent of salary on rent, or perhaps even less to the extent that New Yorkers were earning more than other typical Americans.

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As we will see later, this fact has diminished their chances to enjoy some of the drivers of upward mobility, such as exposure to better schools and safer neighborhoods, just as they have been priced out of some very nice parts of Fairfax and Vienna, Virginia, as I explained earlier. In other words, income mixing is being denied to some of the groups who might benefit from it most, again mostly as a result of broader social structural forces—especially high rent due to gentrification—rather than due to explicit racism or prejudice.2 So where is income segregation happening at its most extreme? It’s basically the Amtrak corridor at the most income-segregated end of the distribution—with Bridgeport–Stamford–Norwalk, Connecticut, coming in at the top, followed by New York City, Philadelphia, and Newark to round out the top four.

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The “revolution” in goods sharing turned out to be a bust.14 Studies of Uber and Lyft show that they cause congestion, increase air and carbon pollution, and pull people off public transportation.15 These findings put the lie to the sector’s green promises. Short-term rentals are contributing to gentrification, as they lead to reductions in the supply of rental housing, rising rents, and tourist takeover of central neighborhoods.16 The platforms also raise privacy concerns. Uber execs were caught spying on critical journalists whose whereabouts they could track through their app.17 And there’s evidence that rather than leveling social differences, platforms are reinforcing them.

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We have analyzed the experiences of workers on for-profit platforms and investigated the relationship between technology and the labor process. We have studied participants’ motivations, including for making social change. Our research includes analyses of racial discrimination, social class exclusion, and gentrification. We have findings about the ratings mechanisms used by digital sites. We have explanations for why the nonprofit sites have been unable to grow like the for-profits. Appendix A includes more detail on our research methods, and throughout the book we provide references to the journal articles, book chapters, and other pieces we’ve written, most of which can be found on our project website.24 These writings include individual cases and cross-case analyses.

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He was like go through the service entrance. You mean like a poor door or something like that? They had a poor door.” (A poor door isn’t an old-style service entrance; it’s a separate, inferior door for affordable housing tenants in luxury buildings.) Phuong had been a community organizer and is highly attuned to gentrification and growing inequality. “So when I’m thrown into this rich world where I’m taking from the rich, it feels okay, but at the same time it’s like I’m losing the idea of trying to fix morals or something like that. It’s very demeaning.” Phuong’s need to earn tips also felt humiliating. One of the things he liked about his restaurant job was that he was back of house and didn’t need to be “very inauthentic to myself” to please the customer.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Los Angeles has been suffering from the general trend of increasing house prices in major cities caused by a series of factors that include the financialization of the housing market, the mass buying of housing by private equity firms after the 2008 financial crisis, and the lack of housing construction, particularly of social housing and units affordably priced for the working class. But prices increased more in areas that had greater access to transit than those that did not, leading to a form of transit gentrification that makes it more difficult for lower-income residents, particularly people of color, to remain in neighborhoods that get better transit service.17 As a result, some of those residents oppose plans to improve transit access or bike infrastructure in their communities because they are seen as symbols of gentrification—as a sign that they will be forced out of their neighborhoods as new mobility options cause prices to increase and attract higher-income people to move in.

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It is one thing to make cars and trucks safer, but it is quite another to reduce automobile usage altogether and eliminate the risks they pose in the first place. These movements successfully defeated freeways, won new environmental protections, and established new safety standards, but they failed to undo the much deeper legal and regulatory structures that were promoting the exodus to the suburbs, automotive supremacy, and the gentrification of cities to serve capital. We can build more livable and sustainable communities that address those problems, but dismantling the regime that created them requires us to understand how it got this way in the first place. Over the course of the past century, state policy has been essential to the remaking of cities for the automobile.

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There was undoubtedly positive coverage of dockless scooters as they arrived in more cities across the country, but the reaction—and coverage of it—in San Francisco was particularly negative. These were the people on the front lines of “disruption,” and after suffering through the effects of Uber on their streets, the gentrification of their neighborhoods as housing prices skyrocketed with the influx of tech workers, and all the new technological solutions being trialed by the start-ups constantly trying to find the next big idea, it seemed like residents had finally had enough. Early on, they recognized that these new companies offering dockless bike and e-scooter options, which collectively became known as micromobility, were not simply trying to get people to adopt a new service, but were staking a claim to some of the little remaining public space in the city, and residents were not going to let it go without a fight.

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture by Taylor Clark

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edmond Halley, fear of failure, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, McJob, McMansion, Naomi Klein, pneumatic tube, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, tech worker, The Great Good Place, trade route

One might ask if the company is really causing all of this, or if Starbucks is just smart enough to piggyback onto a community at the right time. In other words, is Starbucks the horse pulling the gentrification cart, or, as the Brookings Institution researchers imply, is it merely a symptom of gentrification already in progress? No one contests that a Starbucks can give a neighborhood a more boutiquey, affluent appearance, but for the most part, the company’s stores seem to be an effect of gentrification, not a cause. Though Starbucks has sometimes cooperated with the basketball star Magic Johnson to open coffee-houses in historically blighted urban areas, it generally targets communities that are either well-off or going in that direction.

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When residents resist Starbucks’s advances, they do so out of worry over a unique set of local effects: changing neighborhood character, soaring property values, increasing tourism and traffic — in short, things we usually group under the touchy concept of “gentrification.” To some, the company is inextricably linked with this controversial phenomenon; a 2001 Brookings Institution report on the topic even listed the arrival of Starbucks stores as a sign of gentrification in progress, along with new art galleries, music clubs, and businesses that offer valet parking. Locals also chafe at the idea that Starbucks will bulldoze its way into their neighborhood no matter what anyone says, and they fear that any cash spent at the chain will stream back to its corporate headquarters, sucking the community dry.

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Two useful books for understanding the opposition to large chains are Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2002); and Stacy Mitchell, Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Business (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006). For a very thorough discussion of gentrification, see Maureen Kennedy and Paul Leonard, Dealing with Neighborhood Change: A Primer on Gentrification and Policy Choices, April 2001, which is available at the Brookings Institution Web site: http://www.brookings.edu. Page 150. J. K. Dineen, “Starbucks Sparks Battle in Japantown,” San Francisco Examiner, May 17, 2005. Page 150, footnote. Patricia Sellers, “Starbucks: The Next Generation,” Fortune, April 4, 2005.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

Little wonder the tone of our politics has shifted so markedly from hope to nostalgia.37 Unlike during the early Industrial Revolution, today’s poor are not intentionally being displaced. Instead they are being silently priced out of their homes. They are falling victim to creeping gentrification, or what Spike Lee, the American film-maker, calls ‘the motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome’.38 In the US they call this reverse white flight, as the offspring of the suburban well-to-do reclaim the downtown wards and boroughs their parents and grandparents fled in the post-war era. The term gentrification was coined by Ruth Glass, a British academic, who was commenting on an early version of the trend in 1960s London. Today, no single London borough has a working-class majority.

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_r=0>. 35 Frank Newport, ‘Fewer Americans identify as middle class’, Gallup, 28 April 2015, <http://www.gallup.com/poll/182918/fewer-americans-identify-middle-class-recent-years.aspx>. 36 Michael Young, ‘Down with meritocracy’, Guardian, 28 June 2001, <https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment>. 37 I elaborate this point in my column ‘The end of American meritocracy’, Financial Times, 8 May 2016, <https://www.ft.com/content/c17d402a-12cf-11e6-839f-2922947098f0>. 38 Joe Coscarelli, ‘Spike Lee’s amazing rant against gentrification: “We been here!”’, New York Magazine, 25 February 2014, <http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/spike-lee-amazing-rant-against-gentrification.html>. 39 Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class – and What We Can Do About It (Basic Books, New York, 2017), p. 132. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., p. 191. 42 Ibid., p. 159. 43 Mark Muro and Sifan Liu, ‘Another Clinton-Trump divide: high-output America versus low-output America’, Brookings, 29 November 2016, <https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2016/11/29/another-clinton-trump-divide-high-output-america-vs-low-output-america/>. 44 I draw this insightful point from Richard C.

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Richard Florida calls them the ‘new urban Luddites’, who exploit an ‘enormous and complex thicket of zoning laws and other land use regulations’ to keep the others out. Tyler Cowen has coined a new acronym to replace Nimbys (Not in My Backyard): Bananas (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything).50 Such risk aversion breeds its own failure. So deeply rooted is gentrification that Richard Florida has now modified his widely acclaimed thesis about the rise of the creative classes. Cities are becoming too successful for their own good. Until recently, he believed they would be the engine rooms of the new economy, embracing the diversity necessary to attract talent. That has certainly happened.

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida

Abraham Maslow, active measures, assortative mating, back-to-the-city movement, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, Celebration, Florida, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, edge city, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, extreme commuting, financial engineering, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, invention of the telegraph, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-work, power law, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, World Values Survey, young professional

And finally, there is the continued outward movement to the exurbs and edge cities, which are organized around highway interchanges, business parks, and shopping malls.4 But confounding this trend is the worldwide urban shift as well as a significant back-to-the-city movement. A powerful wave of gentrification has swept urban areas, bringing loft housing, condo conversions, historic preservation, new restaurants, retail outlets, and nightlife back to city neighborhoods. Some even predict that this trend may soon recede, as housing becomes less affordable for the very groups that powered the gentrification in the first place. Alan Ehrenhalt dubs this “the demographic inversion.”5 One of the many upshots of these two competing movements, according to leading demographers and political sociologists, is a new “sorting” of population by values, culture, and politics.

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The article notes that sociologists and policy makers have long thought of artists, designers, musicians, and writers as urban pioneers—economic cure-alls who stimulate local economies and drive up neighborhood real estate values with their presence. Regional economist Ann Markusen and her colleagues call this phenomenon the artistic dividend.14 Similarly, sociologists have shown how gentrification, frequently set in motion by artists, creatives, and gays, pushes up urban housing prices. Mellander and I probed all of these factors and more in our study. We looked closely at the effects of high-tech industry, human capital, high-paid workers and occupations, wages and incomes, and artist, bohemian, and gay populations.

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Once a magnet for immigrants, working families, and the older poor, they are now attracting twenty- and thirty-somethings drawn mainly by proximity and housing prices. Unfortunately urban mosaics, almost by definition, are neighborhoods in flux. They teeter between poverty and disrepair on the one hand, and total gentrification, which eliminates their diversity, on the other. Another option is one I call the hipster haven. With just the right combination of city grit and posh, hipster havens tend to attract a relatively affluent crowd—that doesn’t want to appear too affluent. Music scenes, nightclubs, and coffee shops pop up everywhere in their wake, as older residents either cash out or are pushed out.

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Airbnb, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Burning Man, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, context collapse, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, full employment, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, Minecraft, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Port of Oakland, Results Only Work Environment, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Snapchat, source of truth, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, union organizing, white flight, Works Progress Administration

* * * — JUST A DAY before reading Vivrekar’s thesis, I had seen the film Blindspotting at an old Oakland theater in Grand Lake. Daveed Diggs (of Hamilton fame) and the poet Rafael Casal, both of whom grew up in the East Bay, wrote and starred in what is essentially a virtuosic poem on the gentrification of Oakland. In the film, Diggs plays Collin, a young black man in the last days of his yearlong probation after prison, and Casal plays Miles, his hot-tempered white friend from childhood. Tantalizingly close to a year without incident, Collin struggles emotionally after witnessing a white police officer gun down a black man running and yelling, “Don’t shoot!”

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It happens much earlier, in Johansson Projects, a small gallery downtown. Collin and Miles are visiting a middle-aged photographer who makes portraits of Oakland residents. As the camera zooms in on each portrait, bringing the eyes of each subject into focus, the photographer tells Collin and Miles that this is his way of fighting gentrification: by presenting viewers with the faces of the people being pushed out. Then, seemingly out of the blue, he asks Collin and Miles to stand and look at each other without speaking. Initially sheepish, the two oblige, and what follows is a long, weird, magical moment. The camera cuts back and forth, but we can have no idea what each is seeing in the other.

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Spatial proximity has everything to do with it, since the urban experience is a state of tension maintained against the instinct to disperse: It would be possible for this encounter not to last if the constancy of external constraints did not maintain it in a constant state in the face of the temptation of dispersion, did not literally impose its law of proximity without asking men for their opinion; their society thus emerges behind their backs, so to speak, and their history emerges as the dorsal, unconscious constitution of this society.4 * * * — THE DAY AFTER I saw Blindspotting at the theater near my apartment, I was walking around Lake Merritt, thinking about the role I might be playing in gentrification by having moved to the place I did, when I did. As if on cue, a group of local elementary school children came up to me, each holding a clipboard, and announced in a businesslike fashion that they were doing a project about Oakland and wanted to ask me some questions. The first one was seemingly straightforward: “How long have you been part of this community?”

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, David Graeber, deindustrialization, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Murray Bookchin, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, precariat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, special economic zone, the built environment, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, urban planning, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche, Works Progress Administration

Th e primary means by which it is appropriated in urban contexts is, of course, through th e extraction ofland and property rents. 20 A community 78 R E B E L C I T I ES group that struggles to maintain ethnic diversity in its neighborhood and protect against gentrification may suddenly find its property prices (and taxes) rising as real estate agents market the "character" of their neighborho o d to the wealthy as multicultural, street-lively, and diverse. By the time the market has done its destru ctive work, not only have the original resid ents been dispossessed of that common which they had created (often being forced out by rising rents and property taxes), but the common itself becomes so debased as to be unrecognizable. Ne ighborhood revitalization through gentrification in South Balt imore displaced a lively street life, where people sat on their stoops on warm summer n ights and conversed with neighb ors, with air- conditioned and burglar-proofed houses with a BMW parked out front and a rooftop deck, but with no one to be seen on the street.

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When all manner of social movements came together at the US Social Forum in Atlanta in June 2007, to take another example, and decided to form a national Right to the City Alliance (with active chapters in cities such as New York and Los Angeles), in part inspired by what the urban social movements in Brazil had accomplished, they did so without for the most part knowing Lefebvre's name. They had individually concluded after years of struggling on their own particular issues (homelessness, gentrification and displacement, criminalization of the poor and the different, and so on) that the struggle over the city as a whole framed their own particular struggles. Together they thought they might more readily make a difference. And if various movements of an analogous kind can be found elsewhere, it is not simply out of some fealty to Lefebvre's ideas but precisely because Lefebvre's ideas, like theirs, have primarily arisen out of the streets and neighborhoods of ailing cities.

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Not only were the central cities in revolt. Trad itionalists increasingly rallied around Jane Jacobs and sought to counter the brutal modernism of Moses's large-scale projects with a different kind of urban aesthetic that focused on local neighborhood development, and on the historical preservation, and ultimately gentrification, of older areas. But by then the suburbs had been built, and the radical transformation in lifestyle that this betokened had all manner of so cial consequences, leading fem i­ nists, for example, to proclaim the suburb and its lifestyle as the locus of all their primary discontents. As had happened to Haussmann, a crisis b egan to unfold such that Moses fell from grace, and h is solutions came to be seen as inappropriate and unacceptable towards the end of the 1 9 60s.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

And it was a stark manifestation of what Quintard Taylor, the chronicler of Black Seattle, had warned of when he published his history of the community in 1994: “Racial toleration is meaningless if people are excluded from the vital economic center and relegated to the margins of the urban economy.” Gentrification and displacement were hardly unique to Seattle—longtime residents were being pushed out of neighborhoods in winner-take-all cities across the country, in Austin and Boston and Brooklyn. But in the Central District, as perhaps only also in San Francisco, the transformation had become so complete that the term “gentrification” no longer really sufficed to capture what had happened. In gentrifying neighborhoods in other cities, one could see friction between old and new, between classes and races.

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Regional inequality was making parts of the country incomprehensible to one another—one world wracked with painkillers, the other tainted by elite-college admission schemes. It was making it difficult to settle on nationwide programs that could apply across such wildly disparate contexts—in one set of places, the housing crisis was about blight and abandonment, while in the other, it was all about affordability and gentrification. Inequality between regions was also worsening inequality within regions. The more prosperity concentrated in certain cities, the more it concentrated within certain segments of those cities, exacerbating long-standing imbalances or driving those of lesser means out altogether. Dystopian elements in cities such as San Francisco—the homeless defecating on sidewalks in a place with $24 lunch salads and one-bedroom apartments renting for $3,600 on average; high-paid tech workers boarding shuttles to suburban corporate campuses while lower-paid workers settled for 200-square-foot “micro-apartments” or dorm-style arrangements with shared bathrooms or predawn commutes from distant cities such as Stockton—were a feature of both local and national inequality.

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Which was what made it all the more surreal to him and Sara that they had ended up where they had. This job wasn’t paying enough, which was one reason, though most definitely not the only reason, why they had landed at Gateway. But Todd had a job. He’d had many jobs. At present, he was making cardboard boxes. * * * Like gentrification in coastal cities, postindustrial decline in the Midwest was too often cast in terms lacking scale and context. Seen from afar, it was a relentless and monolithic deterioration. Seen close up, there were gradations and plateaus. Fatalism fell away, and one could discern the responsibility of specific decisions and political and economic actors.

Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage

Bullingdon Club, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, deskilling, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, moral panic, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, old-boy network, precariat, psychological pricing, Sloane Ranger, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, very high income, winner-take-all economy, young professional

It includes also perhaps the very earliest and best-known example of post-industrial gentrification in London in St Katherine’s Dock, a very exclusive set of converted warehouses around what is now a marina),10 and would also extend to the exclusive Barbican development. But then there is a sharp decline into King’s Cross, Bow and Elephant and Castle before we ascend to the respectability of the 8-kilometre-distant band, which encompasses areas of historic wealth such as Chelsea and Holland Park, with long-established areas of gentrification in Notting Hill and Brixton.11 There follows a drop of over £10,000 in mean incomes in just 10 kilometres, at the 18-kilometres mark, which embraces outer, working class boroughs such as Enfield, Southall, Dagenham and Croydon, another place, interestingly, fighting back in 2013 on two fronts against ‘crap’ and ‘chav’ town labels.

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The inner suburbs of Didsbury, Cheadle and Chorlton-cum-Hardy have also undergone major revival in recent years. While Didsbury and Cheadle constitute solidly middle class suburbs and have had high status for many decades, Chorlton has undergone massive gentrification, which has seen it transformed from a predominantly working class area with a sizeable Irish migrant population in the 1960s to its current bohemian social formation of coffee shops and pricey restaurants.15 It is interesting to note the emergence of a new centre of gentrification around multi-cultural Levenshulme, immediately to the east of the eschewed Moss Side. This is another area of modest Victorian terraces and larger Edwardian semis, traditionally a working class area, but it is now in a similar process of class transition as young professionals with families who cannot afford the cost of housing in established areas like Chorlton move in.

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For further information on these complex geographies, see Niall Cunningham and Ian Gregory, ‘Hard to Miss, Easy to Blame? Peacelines, Interfaces and Political Deaths in Belfast during the Troubles’, Political Geography, 40, 2014, 64–78. 13. Gary Bridge, ‘The Space for Class? On Class Analysis in the Study of Gentrification’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 20(2), 1995, 236–47; Tim Butler, ‘People Like Us: Gentrification and the Service Class in Hackney in the 1980s’, unpublished PhD thesis, Open University (1991); Jon May, ‘Globalization and the Politics of Place: Place and Identity in an Inner London Neighbourhood’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 21(1), 1996, 194–215. 14.

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud

autonomous vehicles, call centre, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, garden city movement, gentrification, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, manufacturing employment, market design, market fragmentation, megacity, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, rent control, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

The scarcity, combined with the environmental quality, induced by regulations has created a continuous process of gentrification. Traditionally, the arrondissements5 located in the western and southern parts of the city were considered bourgeois, while the arrondissements to the east and north were considered working class. In 2016, the entire area within Paris municipality is becoming bourgeois. The distinction is now between type of bourgeoisie: “old bourgeois” like the sixteenth arrondissement or “bourgeois-bohemian” like the nineteenth or twentieth. This massive gentrification is a direct result of the land use regulations that restrict the construction of additional floor space while making Paris more attractive.

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Middle- and low-income households who were traditionally living in the eastern and northern arrondissements are obliged to progressively move out toward the suburbs outside the municipal boundary, limiting their access to transportation and jobs in the city center. The municipality of Paris is attempting to slow down gentrification by purchasing apartments in old buildings and renting them below their market value to middle-income households. However, the impact of such rearguard action against gentrification is very limited because of its high cost. The restrictions on building height in Paris have therefore contributed to shaping the city in a way that was not part of the regulations’ objectives. Paradoxically, regulations, aimed at freezing the building envelope of the city as it was at the end of the nineteenth century, have resulted in two large spatial changes.

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In the case of Paris, it would be possible to calculate the cost of height regulations but much more complex to calculate the benefits that are mostly aesthetic. Every Parisian is aware of these nonquantifiable benefits and, so far, is willing to pay their costs. However, the gentrification that progressively will prevent low- and middle-income households from living in the municipal boundary is a much more serious social problem. No amount of social housing with below-market rents, as promoted by the municipality, could reverse meaningfully the gentrification trend. In this book, I have often compared markets versus design. In Paris, the opposition between the two concepts is clear. There is a very large market demand for floor space in Paris municipality.

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

At the local level, municipal planners should follow a similar framework and use all available policy levers to ensure a fair distribution of income-restricted housing across neighborhoods, prioritizing its construction in high-opportunity areas. LOCKING IN EQUITY Gentrification is complicated. Over the past decades, middle- and upper-income households have surged back into cities en masse. With insufficient housing construction in high-opportunity areas—largely a function of zoning—many have filed into historically low-income neighborhoods, from Bed-Stuy to Boyle Heights. On the one hand, this has helped to expedite the revitalization and desegregation of cities, even improving outcomes for those low-income residents who stay in place.13 On the other hand, gentrification has raised understandable fears over the displacement of communities as rents and home prices rise.

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This is different from the previously discussed Mount Laurel program, in which the state actually undertakes the Rube Goldbergian task of allocating how much housing each municipality must build over a specified period; under the Chapter 40B program, if income-restricted units don’t account for 10 percent of the stock in any given municipality, its provisions are automatically triggered. 13. Quentin Brummet and David Reed, “The Effects of Gentrification on the Well-Being and Opportunity of Original Resident Adults and Children,” United States Census Bureau, July 2019, https://www.census.gov/library/working-papers/2019/adrm/data-linkage-gentrification-effects.html. 14. Emily Hamilton, “Inclusionary Zoning Hurts More Than It Helps,” Mercatus Center Policy Brief, September 2019, https://www.mercatus.org/publications/urban-economics/inclusionary-zoning-hurts-more-it-helps. 15.

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In gentrifying contexts, in particular, CLTs should play an active role in buying up what’s called naturally occurring affordable housing—or housing that’s affordable simply by nature of being old—and managing it subject to formal income restrictions. When it comes to CLTs, Houston might once again serve as a useful model. According to the Dallas Federal Reserve, Houston is undergoing a wave of gentrification, with incomes surging in historically low-income neighborhoods near downtown.16 In response, back in 2018, the Houston City Council granted the Houston Community Land Trust an initial endowment of $1 million with a goal of building or converting 1,100 trust homes within five years.17 Working in conjunction with the Houston Land Bank—tasked with managing vacant, abandoned, and dilapidated properties—development is already under way: as of 2020, the Houston CLT has developed 21 homes at a median sale price of $75,000, well below the citywide median of $240,000.

White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa by Sharon Rotbard

British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, continuation of politics by other means, European colonialism, gentrification, global village, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, megastructure, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Peter Eisenman, The future is already here, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal

Details of government assembly, 11 Tishrey 1949 – October 4, 1949: The Annexation of Jaffa to Tel Aviv (with gratitude to Tzvi Efrat). 163. For a detailed analysis of the later developments in Jaffa and the special manners in which worldwide gentrification processes work within the Andromeda Hill project, see Roy Fabian and Daniel Monterescu, ‘The “Golden Cage”: Gentrification and Globalization in the Andromeda Hill Project, Jaffa’, Theory and Criticism (Teoria Ubikoret) (Issue 23, Autumn 2003, guest editor: Ronen Shamir), pp. 141–178. 164. In a recent study, Or Aleksandrowicz claims that in spite of various attempts made following the war, by several parties who tried to leave the false historical impression that the military operations resulted in the total annihilation of Manshieh neighbourhood, the eradication of Manshieh was the result of a premeditated plan that had almost no relation to the damage caused by the military actions.

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The new open areas and the remaining old buildings spread throughout the city, which had survived the Etzel’s assault, provided a picturesque and exotic décor which, after a few years, began to gradually draw in tourists and artists. In time, Jaffa’s old port and the Ajami neighbourhood would become the target of real-estate speculation and gentrification would threaten to wipe Palestinian Jaffa off the map once and for all.163 Eventually, Jaffa’s heritage was conquered as well. A detailed account of the different urban planning policies employed in Jaffa and its satellite villages since May 1948 could quite easily fill a library. Today, the city stands as an encyclopaedia of ruins, a dictionary of destruction.

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In order to encourage Tel Aviv’s seafront hotels and luxury residential strip sprawling southwards (thus finally bridging the empty gap between Jaffa and Tel Aviv), Jaffa’s entire northern part, where Manshieh neighbourhood had been located, was redefined as a leisure and tourism zone. Jaffa’s Turkish railway station, occupied for more than half a century by the IDF, was restored and recycled as an open-air, gated luxury shopping mall. All over Jaffa’s city centre, as well as around the Jaffa port and in the Adjami neighbourhood, the city’s gentrification by gated luxury projects such as that of Andromeda Hill has been spreading on various scales. The port was refurbished and let to shops, restaurants and art galleries; the flea market neighbourhood became a restaurant quarter. The Palestinian Jaffa population, divided between religions and clans, is gradually constrained to emigrate to Israel’s Arab slum hinterland in ‘mixed’ cities such as Ramla and Lydia.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

In the absence of major public engineering works to mitigate the risks of vertical slum living on perilous slopes, the challenge is to fund and sustain pro-poor adaptations and upgrades in building quality, infrastructure, flood protection, and urban design – as well as other key improvements such as potable water supplies, transportation, education, health services, public security, waste disposal and proper sewerage. The challenge, though, as we shall see, is to organise such so-called ‘upgrade’ programmes in ways that avoid the very real risks that shanty settlements will simply become exclusionary sites of gentrification. Such processes tend to force out the very people who first made the tenuous claim on the right to the city, as real estate speculators move in to commodify the spectacular views and newly improved accessibility and infrastructure. Vertical Appropriation In Caracas a further verticality of improvised living has occurred in the downtown area, demonstrating other links between vertical high-rise structures and informal occupation.

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Too often, it is linked to a wider process of aggressive, militarised ‘pacification’ which, while reducing drug and gang crime, works to signal the formal ‘civilising’ of often demonised favelas. In the process, favelas – or at least those in strategic and desirable locations adjacent to richer, tourist zones of the city – are opened up as prime real estate markets and to a whole suite of new ‘legal’ market laws. Often this shift signals spirals of eviction, gentrification, the imposition of dramatic increases in rents and service charges, and the in-migration of professionals increasingly priced out of the adjacent ‘formal’ city. Such risks have been especially prominent in the favelas adjacent to the tourist city within Rio’s build-up to host both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.

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To Glaeser, there is a simple solution to the contemporary impasse combining extraordinary rates of urbanisation, rapid population growth, a predilection for conserving large swathes of older, lower housing stock and crises in the supply of affordable urban housing. Such a situation, he argues, means that there is little choice but to build up, to build high and to build quickly. Asserting that gentrification and spiralling house prices in many cities are squeezing out lower income groups – an undeniable problem – Glaeser argued that ‘growth, not height restrictions and a fixed building stock, keeps space affordable and ensures that poorer people and less profitable firms can stay and help a thriving city remain successful and diverse.’

Paint Your Town Red by Matthew Brown

banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial exclusion, G4S, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, housing crisis, hydroponic farming, lockdown, low interest rates, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, new economy, Northern Rock, precariat, remote working, rewilding, too big to fail, wage slave, working-age population, zero-sum game

When the council ignored the community’s misgivings, and the community’s own ideas for regeneration, in order to push through a risky and unpopular deal, grassroots Labour party members responded by deselecting pro-HDV councillors as candidates ahead of 2017’s council elections, in favour of those who had expressed opposition. The local elections duly saw the elected Labour group swing against the HDV proposals and their eventual scrapping.15 Events in one London borough brought to a head the unease felt in many areas at the role of local authorities in gentrification and lack of public consultation over outsourcing and the selling-off of local assets, and the frequently close links between councillors and property developers, which leads to suspicions of corruption and cronyism in allocating council contracts. Even looked at on its own terms, the history of outsourcing to private companies like Capita or Carillion is one of inadequacy, ineptitude and failure.16 The flaws in these traditional approaches have both popularly discredited councils and restricted attempts to take models of regeneration in new directions.

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Newham, a borough in East London, has the most diverse population in the entire country, with 72.5% of the borough’s residents in the BAME category and over 100 languages spoken. Nonetheless, the problems that Newham faces are not dissimilar to those faced elsewhere, including insecure employment and stagnant wages compounded by a lack of affordable housing. Newham residents have identified the rapid gentrification reshaping the borough as a particular problem, and one that exacerbates existing racial and class inequalities. While London’s large multinational corporations may create jobs that bring workers to settle in areas like Newham, despite them often commuting to work outside the borough, these jobs are rarely accessible to existing local residents, who end up priced out as local rents and house prices rise while wages fail to keep pace.

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Because of this, Newham has undertaken one of the most ambitious and multifaceted approaches to improving the lives of its residents through a host of community wealth-building initiatives while also ensuring that existing laws designed to protect and improve the quality of life are fully enforced. Rather than continuing previous models of regeneration which concentrate on gentrification, Newham’s council views social justice as the key determinant of progressive local authorities, and its strategy attempts to prioritise the expressed concern of residents with local services and housing. In Newham, 50% of homes are in the private sector, and tenants have seen rents rise by 56% between 2012 and 2019, something which has contributed significantly to the fact that nearly 50% of the residents in the borough live in poverty.

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream by Christopher B. Leinberger

addicted to oil, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, big-box store, centre right, commoditize, credit crunch, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, Ford Model T, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, walkable city, white flight

More unintended consequences will certainly emerge as walkable urbanism expands. LACK OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING The greatest negative, unintended consequence of walkable urbanism is the lack of affordable housing. As the desire increases for walkable urban housing, many places are experiencing rapid gentrification. Gentrification has many positive aspects, including increasing the tax base; improving physical structures, amenities, and services; and initially creating mixedincome neighborhoods after years of being only lower income. However, many of these areas become largely unaffordable for middle and lower income residents.

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Many well built buildings, such as mansions on Spring Garden Boulevard in north Philadelphia, high-end apartment buildings on Georgia Avenue in Washington, D.C., and substantial homes in the Adams section of Los Angeles near the University of Southern California, were written down in value significantly and often divided into low-income apartments. This option has all but disappeared due to gentrification. In addressing the issue of affordable or workforce housing, it is important to understand that new production must be subsidized; the only question is by whom. Developers are faced with rapidly increasing construction costs, due to the inflationary pressure on construction materials due to demand from India and China, and the sharp rises in land prices driven by the demand for walkable urbanism.

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The number of ways to finance affordable housing is nearly unlimited if you know where appreciating land values will be; it is precisely where the land is appreciating that there is a need for affordable housing—a perfect match. Government decisions on transportation and zoning help direct this growth. Techniques mentioned above, particularly value latching, use gentrification to pay for affordable housing.6 WHAT TO DO WITH OBSOLETE DRIVABLE SUB - URBAN HOUSING As discussed in chapter 5, Arthur C. Nelson of Virginia Tech forecasted that owners of between 1 million (optimistic assumptions) and 22 million (probable) large-lot single-family homes in existence in 2000 will have a hard time finding buyers by 2025, due to changing demographics and development patterns outlined in this book.7 Yet for now, drivable suburban development continues to be built due to legal codes, subsidies, financial standards, and developer know-how.

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Trading on the commons is a contradiction when the interests of those trading on the commons are incompatible with those who tend the commons. Cultural commons may not be scarce resources that can be used up, like fish stocks, but they can still be degraded by certain kinds of commercial activity. Gentrification is an example. Harvey writes, A community group that struggles to maintain ethnic diversity in its neighborhood and protect against gentrification may suddenly find its property values (and taxes) rising as real estate agents market the “character” of their neighborhood to the wealthy as multicultural, street-lively, and diverse. By the time the market has done its destructive work, not only have the original residents been dispossessed of that common which they had created (often being forced out by rising rents and property taxes), but the common itself becomes so debased as to be unrecognizable.41 Capital demands uniqueness as it demands homogenization.

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But of course our presence is a mixed blessing: too much tourism can erode the very things that make Trastevere so atmospheric and special—especially when those things are the “authentic” life of the locals—raising the cost of living, and putting pressure on property prices. In the end, as tourists you have to hope that the city of Rome and the neighborhood itself find ways to balance the various pressures acting on the place where they live. Not surprisingly, Trastevere does have conflicts over gentrification and the impact of tourism. Here’s a story from last September.42 In 1956 a cinema opened in Trastevere called Cinema America, and it was a feature of the area until it closed, sometime around 2000. In 2004 it was bought by a new set of owners who decided to tear it down and replace it with a parking lot and some apartments.

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Now I don’t know Martin and have made no effort to talk to him, because this is not really about Martin; it’s about Airbnb, and the gap between the idealized “regular people” they present and the reality of multiple-property owners. It’s the gap between their message of caring for neighborhoods and the reality of gentrification driven by uncontrolled tourism, which they are playing a big part in accelerating. Airbnb’s true business in Trastevere is eroding the very qualities that make the district appealing, and it’s exactly the kind of business that the locals of Trastevere are protesting. 4. On the Move with Uber There is one sector of the Sharing Economy that is bigger than ­accommodation, and that’s transit, and specifically ridesharing.

Lonely Planet Pocket Hamburg by Lonely Planet

gentrification, low cost airline, three-masted sailing ship

Its centrepiece is Lange Reihe: so much of what’s good about St Georg happens along this street or not far away. Running through it all like a thread is a real sense of community. Walk Facts Start Hansaplatz; X Hauptbahnhof-Nord End Bar M&V; X Hauptbahnhof-Nord Length 1km 1Hansaplatz The general gentrification of St Georg has even affected its somewhat seedy central square, the Hansaplatz. Completely renovated in 2011 and fully pedestrianised, the square’s centrepiece is its fountain. Completed in 1878, it shows important figures in Hamburg’s past, including Emperor Constantine the Great and Charlemagne, and is surmounted by a figure showing the might of the Hanseatic League. 2Café Gnosa With its abstract art and in-house bakery, Café Gnosa (%040-243 034; www.gnosa.de; Lange Reihe 93; mains €7-14; h10am-1am) draws an affable gay and straight crowd.

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(Museum for Art & Trade; %040-428 542 732; www.mkg-hamburg.de; Steintorplatz 1; adult/child €12/free, after 5pm Thu €10; h10am-6pm Tue-Sun, to 9pm Thu; XHauptbahnhof-Süd) Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe | BILDAGENTUR-ONLINE/JOKO/ALAMY © 1Segelschule Pieper BOATING MAP GOOGLE MAP Hire your own boat for rowing or paddling (sailing requires a certificate). The calm on the water amidst the city and the views are a delight. (%040-247 578; www.segelschule-pieper.de; An der Alster; h10am-9pm Apr–mid-Oct; XHauptbahnhof-Nord) The Gentrification of St Georg This neighbourhood, made up of large 19th-century apartment blocks for Hamburg’s upper-middle classes, hit a nadir in the 1970s when thoughtless postwar reconstruction combined with a massive influx of drug dealing and prostitution to give it a very sleazy reputation. Things are much gentrified now (look out for the great shops and cafes), and the facelift has even affected St Georg’s central square, the Hansaplatz.

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. (%040-3573 5166; www.mon-le-bon.de; Koppel 76, entry via Lange Reihe 87; mains €14.50-27; h5-11pm Tue-Sun; XHauptbahnhof-Nord) 5Cox MODERN EUROPEAN €€€ MAP GOOGLE MAP Behind its opaque glass doors, this upmarket bistro with fluted columns and period decor was part of the original vanguard of St Georg’s gentrification. Its changing menu of dishes reflects seasonal foods and influences from across the continent. (%040-249 422; www.restaurant-cox.de; Lange Reihe 68; mains lunch €10-18, dinner €17-26; hnoon-2.30pm & 6.30-10.30pm Mon-Fri, 6.30-10.30pm Sat & Sun; XHauptbahnhof-Nord) Drinking St Georg does late nights as well as any other inner-urban Hamburg neighbourhood, with an excellent scattering of cocktail bars, clubs and wine bars.

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

This required the withdrawal of the state from social provision and the gradual dismantling of the regulatory environment that had been constructed in the early 1970s (such as environmental protection). New forms of niche consumerism and individualised lifestyles also suddenly appeared, built around a postmodern style of urbanisation (the Disneyfication of city centres coupled with gentrification), and the emergence of social movements centred around a mix of self-centred individualism, identity politics, multiculturalism and sexual preference. Capital did not create these movements but it did figure out ways to exploit and manipulate them, both in terms of fracturing hitherto important class solidarities and by commodifying and channelling the affective and effective demands associated with these movements into niche markets.

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Traditionalists increasingly rallied around the urbanist Jane Jacobs, who had very distinctive ideas as to what constituted a more fulfilling form of everyday life in the city. They sought to counter sprawling suburbanisation and the brutal modernism of Moses’ large-scale projects with a different kind of urban aesthetic that focused on local neighbourhood development, historical preservation and, ultimately, reclamation and gentrification of older areas. Feminists proclaimed the suburb and its lifestyle as the locus of all their primary discontents. As happened to Haussmann, a crisis began to unfold such that Moses-style urbanisation (as well as Moses himself) fell from grace towards the end of the 1960s. And in the same way that the Haussmanisation of Paris had a role in explaining the dynamics of the Paris Commune, so the soulless qualities of suburban living played a role in the dramatic protest movements of 1968 in the USA.

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They are pulled down and in their stead shops, warehouses and public buildings are erected. It is depressing to think that all of this was written in 1872. Engels’ description applies directly to contemporary urban processes in much of Asia (Delhi, Seoul, Mumbai), as well as to the contemporary gentrification of, say, Harlem and Brooklyn in New York. The making of new urban geographies inevitably entails displacement and dispossession. This is the ugly mirror image of capital absorption through urban redevelopment. Consider the case of Mumbai, where 6 million people are considered officially slum dwellers, settled on land for most part without legal title (the places where they live are left blank on all maps of the city).

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

South Los Angeles is a 50-square mile area that drops below Highway 10, hugging midcity LA. It used to be known as South Central, but in 2003 the area was rebranded by the city council. Some say the current proliferation of “Sell your house for CA$H” signs and the expansion of the Expo and Crenshaw light-rail lines presage a wave of gentrification to come. Taking the bus from Skid Row to South LA, I am reversing Monique Talley’s daily commute from the Pathways shelter to the DWC. The two neighborhoods have a deeply entwined history. Alameda Street runs like an aorta from Union Station through downtown, along the eastern edge of Skid Row, under the freeway, and then south through Vernon, Watts, and eventually into Compton.

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The neighborhood is home to the two largest public housing complexes in Los Angeles: Nickerson Gardens and Jordan Downs. Nevertheless, it has the most crowded housing in the United States. Many working-age Black men in South LA who lost their jobs during the 1980s deindustrialization found their way to Skid Row. In the last decade, the trend has reversed. The rise in aggressive policing and gentrification pressures downtown have pushed many unhoused people into South LA. But the area has meager resources with which to respond. It has less than half as many shelter beds and one-seventh the number of permanent supportive housing beds as downtown. Yet, according to a 2008 report by Services for Groups, downtown and Skid Row received $1,132 in grants per homeless person per year while South LA received only $607.

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As a result, they lose their housing, their documents, their few possessions, and are passed over for social services. “It’s like the guy that’s homeless on this block is just being recycled,” said Dogon. “He’s got to do all that nonsense again.” Key to the neighborhood’s survival was the strategic grassroots plan to “keep Skid Row scary.” In the face of gentrification and intensified surveillance and policing, that strategy is beginning to fail. With the creative class attempting to claim downtown Los Angeles, pressure to recuperate Skid Row for the wealthy means increased pressure to make its poor inhabitants manageable. Coordinated entry and other high-tech tools make the behavior of the unhoused more visible, trackable, and predictable.

San Francisco Like a Local by DK Eyewitness

back-to-the-land, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bottomless brunch, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, Kickstarter, Lyft, messenger bag, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, tech bro, tech worker, uber lyft, young professional

Yuppies live it up in the area’s slick bars and restaurants before they settle down and start families in Cow Hollow. {map 5} The Mission Historically Latino, the city’s hippest area is a colorful commotion of protest art, palm trees, and trendsetting food and drink spots. Sadly, since the dot-com boom of the 90s, gentrification has cast a shadow over the area, forcing many residents to move elsewhere. {map 4} Nob Hill Okay, the nickname “Snob Hill” might not paint this patch in the best light, but there’s little doubt it’s freakin’ gorgeous. Old-money San Francisco lords it over the rest of the city from Nob Hill, where cable cars rumble up steep streets with dazzling bay views.

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Books are filed under topics like “Anarchism and Class War,” and weekly events discuss the likes of a nuclear-free future. » Don’t leave without giving a donation – small or large – to help this Bay Area landmark to keep selling literature to the masses. g Book Nooks g Contents Google Map DOG EARED BOOKS Map 4; 900 Valencia Street, The Mission; ///smug.casual.whips; www.dogearedbooks.com This bookstore survived Valencia Street’s gentrification thanks to its dedicated regulars, who consider this satisfyingly stuffed store a comforting glimmer of the literary San Francisco that once was. There’s a bit of everything among the new and used, but expect special attention to the obscure. Handwritten signs split shelves into offbeat interests, such as “Druids, Drugs, and Secret Societies.”

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g Public Art g Contents Google Map MISSION MURALS Map 4; Balmy Alley, The Mission; ///blind.notes.prove; www.precitaeyes.org The colorful protest murals daubed across the Mission’s buildings and alleyways aren’t just great art – they’re essential to understanding the district. The neighborhood’s talented Latin-American muralists paint about where they’ve come from and the challenges they face in San Francisco: Balmy Alley alone has memorable pieces about the Salvadoran civil war and ongoing gentrification. New works are being added all the time, so trips to hot spots such as Clarion Alley are rarely the same twice. » Don’t leave without admiring the Women’s Building on 18th Street. Its five-story exterior is covered in murals of powerful females, from a Puerto Rican revolutionary to a Palestinian peacekeeper.

Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer

affirmative action, business cycle, call centre, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, game design, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, immigration reform, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, market bubble, McMansion, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, place-making, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional

Another lesson from the earlier programs is that the large-scale clearance of slums tears apart viable communities and displaces long-settled residents, and so has to be avoided. Physical blight is not to be treated by extensive surgery. Yet neighbourhood improvements and gentrification in centrally located areas raise rents and lead to the gradual displacement of the poor. This is the policy dilemma of revitalizing deprived neighbourhoods: such programs improve living conditions but drive out poor residents. In market developments, the gentrification of neighbourhoods also leads to similar results. From the perspective of responding to ethno-racial diversity, revitalizing programs are guided by the needs of the local population mix.

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The unionization of garment workers is supplemented by support for owners and improvement of the neighbourhoods’ infrastructure and zoning.67 New York’s Chinese economy is based on relatively low value-added production. In the 2000s China’s investments abroad are beginning to filter down to the Chinese economy in New York. Chinese banks and overseas investors are turning to real estate development, particularly in the gentrification of Manhattan’s Chinatown.68 New York as a tourist destination has contributed to the upgrading of Chinese restaurants and the revitalization of the historic Chinatown. In the Los Angeles area, clusters of “industrial parks, warehouses, shopping centres and multifunctional office structures” have complemented the growth of Chinese residential suburbs.69 These economic nodes are niches of ethnic business activities that are either being vacated by the larger economy or are new fields just opening up, particularly computer industries, high-tech manufacturing, or consulting services.

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They colour social relations within ethnic and racial communities. Multiracial and multi-ethnic urban areas are affected by various processes of social differentiation, ranging from stratification, clustering, and concentration and to the structures of inequality, namely, segregation and polarization, ghettoization, and gentrification.8 Cities differ in terms of the prevalence and scope of these processes. Family, Neighbourhood, and Social Relations Where one lives is an entry point into the social life of a place. From a home a network of social relations radiate out; from casual but regular contacts with store operators, daycare workers, teachers, and neighbours to intimate and persistent relations with friends, relatives, and co-workers.

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

In Paris, the first half of the twentieth century saw a similar shift in the north-east arrondissements from being areas which were dominantly working class to areas which were homogeneously working class. What we call ‘gentrification’ is much more than artist-trendies colonizing colourful neighbourhoods, media-trendies following in their wake, attracting digital billionaires still struggling with pimples who price out both the natives and the first pioneers. Gentrification is more fundamentally a process by which the bottom 70–75 per cent of an urban population becomes vulnerable to expulsion by the top quarter of people in a city, either through raised rents or by poor homeowners being seduced into selling out.

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Madame Q and her colleagues have put real money into basic materials, and the workmanship is excellent; this care appears in outside tree plantings as well, which are dug and drained properly.24 ‘Creative destruction’ is the theory often cited to describe what has happened in places like Shanghai. The phrase comes from the economist Joseph Schumpeter. Core investing is a good example of what he had in mind in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy: a property like Nehru Place is bought, perhaps levelled flat and built anew, or its people are swept away by gentrification; something new is created which is more profitable. ‘Creative Destruction’, he declares, ‘is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.’ In the Schumpeterian view, the Communist Party would ironically be the instrument of animating this essential capitalist fact.

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Renovation of the existing shikumen has meant expulsion of the people who once made it a living cité. The gentrifying twenty-somethings who eagerly sought out the shikumen as cool places to be wanted to live in the symbolic aura, but not in the presence of its former gritty, ‘real people’ residents. The familiar, twinned sins of gentrification and expulsion have been laid at the door of the urbanist Richard Florida, whose book on the creative classes became, twenty or so years ago, the bible for a new idea of the city. In a dynamic city, the young, the entrepreneurial, the organically minded should rule, and the old, the tired and the dutiful should fade away.

Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area by Nick Edwards, Mark Ellwood

1960s counterculture, airport security, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, period drama, pez dispenser, Port of Oakland, rent control, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, transcontinental railway, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Local AfricanAmerican leaders successfully resisted government plans to rebuild that concrete eyesore; the broad, street-level Nelson Mandela Parkway has replaced it, thereby removing the physical justification for the “other side of the freeway” stigma once linked to the place. Now the neighborhood is a magnet for artists and skate punks from across the Bay, who revel in its dirtcheap rents and open spaces – indicating that the first signs of its surprisingly tardy gentrification are finally afoot. One area where gentrification has been well under way for years is the district of Emeryville, effectively the northern portion of West Oakland. Though still gritty in parts, many of the old warehouses here have been converted into artists’ lofts and studios in an ongoing real-life workshop to transform the area into a glitzy design centerpiece.

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North Beach was the breeding ground for a number of big-league baseball players (most notably Joe DiMaggio) in the first half of the 1900s; by the 1950s, it had become the home of several Beat poets, thanks to its then-cheap housing and plentiful manual labor on the waterfront. In recent years, North Beach’s original blue-collar character has been largely eroded by gentrification; even so, it retains an easy, worn-in feeling, and its sloping residential streets and vibrant main drags are ideal for routeless wandering. No longer coastal, the sunny neighborhood would be better known as North Valley, sitting as it does in the cleft between two of San Francisco’s most prominent hills, Telegraph and Russian.

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The stretch of Taylor Street around Turk and Eddy is especially unpleasant, day or night, although you should be safe as long as you keep your wits about you and don’t mind vagrants asking you for money. There are signs, though, that the neighborhood is changing: for one, waves of Pakistani and South Asian immigrants have begun transforming the neighborhood by establishing numerous cheap restaurants. At its upper edge, gentrification has bled down from tony Nob Hill, and realtors have taken to calling the northernmost portion (in a glorious double entendre) the Tendernob. The area’s oddball name has never been definitively explained. One tale is that nineteenth-century police were rewarded with choice cuts of steak for serving a particularly perilous tour of duty here.

The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World by Rahm Emanuel

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, carbon footprint, clean water, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lyft, megacity, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

If we’re not careful, what we are left with in these cities with unaffordable rent and housing problems is a very rich upper class and a very poor lower class, with no one in between and no bridge on which to traverse that gap. Gentrification is a serious issue. It is a little secret that no one talks about much when it comes to the dropping rates of crime in our cities. Yes, the revival and reclamation of downtowns and neighborhoods and better policing and better data and general prosperity have been the main drivers in the drop in crime. But gentrification—filling formerly impoverished neighborhoods with more affluent residents—has also played a role. However, the displacement that comes with gentrification is a big problem. New York’s High Line has caused higher rental rates in its surrounding neighborhood, pushing out people and businesses and restaurants that had been there for decades.

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Chicago, like all great modern cities, had finally moved on from its industrial polluting past. But this was a big deal to me for more reasons than that. Chicago is my hometown. Its people are my neighbors. The well-being of the residents of Little Village and Pilsen is, in a real way, the well-being of our city. The Pilsen neighborhood is now facing a new challenge: gentrification. The desirability of the neighborhood has changed significantly. * * * Every idea, every project, and every program we undertook during my time as mayor had a single abiding focus: to make the lives of the people of Chicago better than the day I became mayor and to leave them better prepared to make the most of their future.

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The former residents, some of whose families had been there for generations, are being pried out. A similar change is happening in Ukrainian Village and Pilsen, two Chicago neighborhoods. The challenge mayors face is to create and foster the economic engine that is development, but to do so without rampant displacement. We’ve tried what I call “managed gentrification” or “development without displacement” in some Chicago neighborhoods, such as Pilsen, providing assistance on mortgages for residents and making sure we keep some affordable housing in the mix. The results thus far, though, have been far from perfect. I have studied this problem for decades now, and I have yet to see an effective policy.

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America by Angie Schmitt

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, car-free, congestion pricing, COVID-19, crossover SUV, desegregation, Donald Trump, Elaine Herzberg, gentrification, global pandemic, high-speed rail, invention of air conditioning, Lyft, megacity, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, wikimedia commons

“The solution . . . involves paying more attention and respect to the expert, local knowledge and informed judgment of people with intimate familiarity of the conditions on the ground,” they wrote.27 Less than one-fourth of Native Americans live on reservations, however, so other factors are also likely at work. Native people who live in cities face many of the same types of discrimination as black and Hispanic residents. Increasingly, gentrification may be contributing to the disparity as well. Gentrification Research has shown, for example, a connection between bike infrastructure and displacement. According to a 2019 University of Colorado study, cities that had aggressively added protected bike lanes from 2000 to 2012 saw dramatic reductions in traffic fatalities of all types, but a large portion of the safety improvements could be explained simply by changing demographics.28 In other words, the cities that were adding a lot of bike lanes were getting whiter—an average of 10 percent whiter—and white people are simply less likely to be killed in traffic than people of color.

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Suburban areas like Cobb County, Georgia, and Oakland County, Michigan, that were once homogenous and wealthy have become progressively more racially and economically diverse since the early 1990s. These places and their streets, almost without exception, were not designed to accommodate people walking or relying on transit. In addition, gentrification in major US cities may also be contributing to the problem. Demographic groups that are less likely to own cars—black and Hispanic people—are being pushed into more hostile environments on the suburban fringes, places that lack sidewalks and streetlights. This problem is especially pervasive in expensive coastal metros like Seattle that offer some of the best conditions for pedestrians—at least for those who can afford to live within urban neighborhoods.

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By 2018, Clayton County was 69 percent black.26 It had been 75 percent white just a generation before in 1990. “During the ’90s, Clayton County goes from a suburb that’s white and becomes a place where many black people move to for the ideal suburban life,” said King Williams, an Atlanta-based writer and documentary filmmaker whose work explores gentrification in Atlanta, “but also many who are poor as well.” Those who moved to Clayton County in later waves of growth were less likely than their predecessors to have a car. Today, about 22 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty line.27 Now it is suburban counties like Clayton, Gwinnett, and Cobb where pedestrians are increasingly getting killed, said Flocks.28 The county has been held up by national news outlets as an example of the difficulties presented by the suburbanization of poverty.

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing by John Boughton

British Empire, deindustrialization, full employment, garden city movement, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Leo Hollis, manufacturing employment, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Russell Brand, starchitect, systems thinking, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, young professional

This is the Boundary Estate, Britain’s first council estate, opened in 1900. It remains a small working-class redoubt but around 40 per cent of its homes were purchased under Right to Buy and most of those later sold on. The defences of this little island of social housing have been breached, firstly by gentrifi-cation and, more recently, by corporate money. New battle-lines are drawn out along Calvert Avenue, between the surviving old-fashioned corner shops and community laundry on the one hand and the boutique coffee shops, organic grocery and artisan workshops on the other. Once the area was a place the wealthier classes avoided.

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Dunning JP (not a left-wing firebrand), took the view that ‘the whole of the property in this Borough should come under the control of the local authority’.40 Practical drivers were powerful too. In general, it was clear that slum clearance and rebuilding (which tends to reduce density) did little to increase the overall housing stock. In some inner London boroughs, notably Islington and Camden, municipalisation was a pre-emptive to the gentrification threatening to price out working-class renters as the early ‘knockers-through’ arrived to convert the run-down terraces to middle-class des reses. Islington acted early and boldly, ‘buying up, at very low cost, streets at a time’ until the council found itself landlord of whole swathes of Victorian and Georgian squares and terraces; an estimated 3,000 properties by March 1975.41 Across England, some 25,600 homes were municipalised in 1974–5.42 The expense of the policy, however, sat uncomfortably with a Labour government seeking to rein in public expenditure.

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Southwark Council has promised to build 11,000 new council homes through these mechanisms by 2043. But, in practice, the conclusion that poor people have been deliberately displaced to make way for more affluent newcomers and that truly affordable housing has been sacrificed for commercial profit seems inescapable. The charge of state-led gentrification here – and elsewhere – is a persuasive one. The irony, not unusual to the process, is that the Aylesbury has been blighted by regeneration or, at least, by the drawn-out and disruptive saga which commonly accompanies it. The added irony – though some might claim this as a success for the social regeneration heralded as an integral element of the NDC programme – is that the estate has improved by some measures even as its physical environment deteriorated.

Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions by Christian Lander

car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, David Sedaris, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Slavoj Žižek

27 Marathons 28 Not Having a TV 29 ’80s Night 30 Wrigley Field 31 Snowboarding 32 Veganism/Vegetarianism 33 Marijuana 34 Architecture 35 The Daily Show with Jon Stewart / The Colbert Report 36 Brunch 37 Renovations 38 Arrested Development 39 Netflix 40 Apple Products 41 Indie Music 42 Sushi 43 Plays 44 Public Radio 45 Asian Fusion Food 46 The Sunday New York Times 47 Liberal Arts Degrees 48 Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops 49 Vintage 50 Irony 51 Living by the Water 52 Sarah Silverman 53 Dogs 54 Kitchen Gadgets 55 Apologies 56 Lawyers 57 Documentaries 58 Japan 59 Natural Medicine 60 Toyota Prius 61 Bicycles 62 Knowing What’s Best for Poor People 63 Expensive Sandwiches 64 Recycling 65 Coed Sports 66 Divorce 67 Standing Still at Concerts 68 Michel Gondry 69 Mos Def 70 Difficult Breakups 71 Being the Only White Person Around 72 Study Abroad 73 Gentrification 74 Oscar Parties 75 Threatening to Move to Canada 76 Bottles of Water 77 Musical Comedy 78 Multilingual Children 79 Modern Furniture 80 The Idea of Soccer 81 Graduate School 82 Hating Corporations 83 Bad Memories of High School 84 T-shirts 85 The Wire 86 Shorts 87 Outdoor Performance Clothes 88 Having Gay Friends 89 St.

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Europe/Australia form the base level, then Asia, then South America, and finally the trump card, studying abroad in Tibet. Then there is the conversation killer of studying abroad—Africa. If you studied in Africa, it is usually a good idea to keep it quiet; it will remind white people that they were too scared to go and they will feel bad. Use this only in emergencies. 73 Gentrification In general, white people love situations where they can’t lose. While this is already true for most of their lives, perhaps the safest bet a white person can make is to buy a house in an up-and-coming neighborhood. White people like to live in these neighborhoods because they get credibility and respect from other white people for living in a more “authentic” neighborhood where they are exposed to “true culture” every day.

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Though few can afford well-known artists, white people harbor dreams of somehow being able to afford the work of young artists before they become famous. This is the same way they feel about indie rock. But unlike music, buying into the right young artist will yield both respect and financial gain, perhaps the two things most beloved by white people (see #73, Gentrification, for further evidence). But again, even the practice of buying actual art will elude many young white people. So they are left with only one recourse: the gift shop. A white person in a modern art museum gift shop is not comparable to a kid in a candy store. They’re more like a drug addict in the evidence room.

Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass by Darren McGarvey

basic income, British Empire, carbon footprint, deindustrialization, do what you love, Donald Trump, gentrification, imposter syndrome, impulse control, means of production, side project, Social Justice Warrior, universal basic income, urban decay, wage slave

Staring up at the solitary tower block of Norfolk Court, in the Gorbals, it’s hard to imagine that this unsightly structure, which now imposes like an unwelcome guest on its newly gentrified surroundings, was once pitched as a New York style skyscraper that would revolutionise social housing. The term ‘gentrification’ simply means people with more money than you, but not more money than people with money, are being invited to set up shop in your area on the cheap, in the hope that their presence will lift you a little out of the gutter. When you’re sitting in an artisan café called Soy Division, in the middle of a slum, and there is a toddler named Wagner eating tofu off the floor, that’s gentrification. It’s the new word for regeneration, or rather, it’s the gentrification of regeneration. Today we are about to witness another aspect of gentrification, namely, the practice of getting rid of any evidence that the community is working class.

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But, as it turned out, the new centre would be named ‘Silverburn’ – perhaps a tongue-in-cheek reference to the trolleys that used to line the banks of the river. Silverburn, a fictional consumer village superimposed on our now deformed landscape, would serve the shopping needs of people from the suburbs with disposable incomes, who could now visit our scheme without ever knowing (or having to say) they were in Pollok. Gentrification is cool when you’re watching from a safe distance, but when it’s your cultural history that is being dismantled, it leaves a sour taste in the mouth. This new consumer cathedral, where many local people would go to earn and spend their money, would soon become the talk of the town in a way Pollok could only have dreamed.

The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

You can sample locally made food and buy snappy duds in hip Williamsburg and Greenpoint, wander the brownstone-lined streets of Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights, view cutting-edge exhibits at the Brooklyn Museum, ride a rickety roller coaster and soak up the old-world charm of Coney Island or hit Central Park’s counterpart, activity-filled Prospect Park. Soho fire escapes Top 5 architectural neighbourhoods Fort Greene This well-preserved Brooklyn district has kept its look through gentrification, not least because it holds some of the borough’s nicest nineteenth-century brownstones. Harlem Some of the most beautiful residential architecture in the city, exemplified by blocks of brownstones and other styles south of 125th Street, and developments farther north like Strivers’ Row and Hamilton Heights.

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The cemetery is almost always locked, but try to peek through one of the gates – you may recognize the view from a scene in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (one of the few parts of the movie actually shot here, even though the film was set in Little Italy). changing times on the Bowery The current gentrification of this wide thoroughfare is just the latest of many changes over the years: the street takes its name from bouwerie, the Dutch word for farm, when it was the city’s main agricultural outlet through the centre of Manhattan. In the nineteenth century, it was flanked by music halls, opera houses, vaudeville theatres, hotels and middle-market restaurants, drawing people from all parts of Manhattan – including opera lover Walt Whitman.

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Flower Market The area around West 28th Street is Manhattan’s Flower Market – not really a market as such, more the warehouses and storefronts where potted plants and cut flowers are stored before brightening offices and atriums across the city. The district, which has atrophied against a tide of gentrifications, still manages to surprise, its greenery bursting out of the drab blocks in a welcome touch of life. West 28th Street’s historical background couldn’t be more at odds with its present incarnation: from the mid-1880s until the 1950s, the short block between Sixth Avenue and Broadway was the original Tin Pan Alley, where music publishers would peddle songs by the likes of Irving Berlin and George Gershwin to artists and producers from vaudeville and Broadway.

Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States by Bernadette Hanlon

big-box store, classic study, company town, correlation coefficient, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, feminist movement, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, McMansion, New Urbanism, Silicon Valley, statistical model, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, transit-oriented development, urban sprawl, white flight, working-age population, zero-sum game

In a capitalist market, there are always winners and losers. Currently, the losers are inner-ring suburbs, and the winners are outer suburbs. In certain locations, inner-ring suburbs have become a devalued urban form where aging housing stock is devalued and reinvestment is slow to occur. In his analysis of gentrification in the city, Neil Smith (1996) suggests that innercity properties were devalorized or devalued because of the reallocation of capital to the suburbs. In a similar manner, aging housing stock in the postwar suburbs is devalued as these suburbs lose out to edge-city development and the revitalization of housing in central city neighborhoods.

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Already vulnerable because of their aging and outdated housing stock, inner-ring suburbs in a sense are groomed for racial and ethnic transition. Old postwar suburbs, vulnerable to decline, have become the new home of different minority groups, particularly those coming from other countries. Immigrants, bypassing the cities, are clustering in the most affordable suburbs and transforming them in the process. With the gentrification of inner-city neighborhoods and the development of high-end suburbs on the outer fringe, the inner ring has become the only affordable place left to go for many minority groups. Racial and ethnic discrimination is also a fundamental issue. Neil Smith, Paul Caris, and Elvin Wyly (2001) warn against blaming demographic shifts on the decline of inner-ring communities.

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Four perspectives on urban hardship. Political Science Quarterly 104 (3): 483–508. Negrey, Cynthia, and Mary Beth Zickel. 1994. Industrial shifts and uneven development: Patterns of growth and decline in U.S. metropolitan areas. Urban Affairs Quarterly 30 (1): 27–47. Neidt, Christopher. 2006. Gentrification and grassroots: Popular support in the revanchist suburb. Journal of Urban Affairs 28 (2): 99–120. Nicolaides, Becky. 2002. My blue heaven: Life and politics in the working class suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920 to 1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nicolaides, Becky, and Andrew Wiese, eds. 2006.

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

The national media has gotten very interested in the pathologies of cities that have become too expensive. There is extensive, frequent coverage of the interlocking crises of affordability, homelessness, and gentrification in the big cities of the Northeast and the West Coast. These are real problems (and we’ll do a whole chapter on them) but they are more limited in their scale than a lot of media narratives suggest. A larger set of cities is suffering from systematic disinvestment. And their poor neighborhoods are suffering not from gentrification and displacement, but from the ongoing departure of people with the means to flee. That’s what leads to metro areas where existing houses are worth less than what it would cost to build a brand-new one.

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But San Francisco itself is incredibly expensive, and the city has placed sharp curbs on the expansion of office space in part to try to keep the housing market under control. “Tech buses” that take workers from residential parts of the city to Silicon Valley office parks have become flashpoints for social conflict; homelessness is rising amid the thriving regional economy; and conflicts around gentrification have become endemic. Some of this can and should be solved by simply building more homes and more transportation infrastructure. But what’s particularly maddening about the Bay Area’s conflicts over big tech’s relentless expansion is that so many American cities would benefit enormously from the arrival of thousands of well-paid office workers.

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This phenomenon generates an endless stream of hot takes—Governing magazine asked in the winter of 2018, “Why are so many people moving out of the Northeast”* and catalogued a bunch of possibilities—but it’s essentially a mechanical requirement. A lot of people would like to live in New York City—if they didn’t, it would be cheap—but if the city and its inner suburbs make it hard to build new homes, then each newcomer needs to replace someone who is leaving. On the left this frequently manifests itself as anxiety about “gentrification,” and the villains are said to be upscale white professionals. On the right, it’s immigrants staging a “great replacement.” In both cases, however, the real villain is bad housing policy. There’s nothing wrong with a city being a desirable place to move to—that means you’re doing something right—it’s the sense that newcomers can’t be housed in new buildings that drives all the problems.

Lonely Planet Pocket Berlin by Lonely Planet, Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, messenger bag, Peter Eisenman, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

Once inside the plush jet-black boutique, sift through clothes by Palais Royal, Rich Owens, Tuesday Night Band Practice, Cheap Monday and other fashion-forward labels. (www.apartmentberlin.de; Memhardstrasse 8; 11am-7pm Mon-Fri, noon-7pm Sat; U-Bahn Weinmeisterstrasse) Ampelmann trinkets at Ampelmann Galerie LONELY PLANET IMAGES © JÜRGEN HENKELMANN/IMAGEBROKER © Kreuzberg Creeping gentrification aside, Kreuzberg is still Berlin’s hippest quarter, a bubbly hodgepodge of tousled students, aspiring creatives, shisha-smoking Turks and a global swarm of neo-Berliners. Spend a day searching for street art, soaking up the multiculti vibe, scarfing a shwarma, browsing vintage stores and hanging by the canal, then find out why Kreuzberg is also known as a night-crawler’s paradise.

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Once making headlines for its high crime rate and poor schools, this multicultural district just south of Kreuzberg is now Berlin’s latest frontier of hipness. Also known as Kreuzkölln, it has seen an explosion of trash-trendy cafes, bars and art and performance spaces with a thriving DIY ethos. Come now for a delightful off-the-beaten-track experience. Turbo-gentrification may be waiting in the wings. Cafe Jacques A favourite with off-duty chefs and local foodies, Cafe Jacques ( 694 1048; Maybachufer 8; mains €10-16; dinner) infallibly charms with flattering candle­light, warm decor, fantastic wine and a French and North African– inspired menu. Reservations de rigeur.

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Neuköllner Oper Definitely not your upper-crust opera house, the Neuköllner Oper ( 688 9070; www.neukoellneroper.de, in German; Karl-Marx-Strasse 131-133), in a refurbished pre-war ballroom, has an actively anti-elitist repertoire ranging from intelligent musical theatre to original productions to experimental interpretations of classic works. JOHN FREEMAN/LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Friedrichshain Rents may be rising and gentrification unstoppable, but for now there’s still plenty of partying to be done in this student-heavy district. Soak up the socialist vibe on Karl-Marx-Allee and revel in post-reunification euphoria at the East Side Gallery before finding your favourite libation station(s) around Boxhagener Platz. Wrap up the night with a dedicated dance-a-thon in a top techno club.

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

The language of ‘occupation’ makes sense for the occupation of the privately owned Zuccotti Park on Wall Street. But this language of ‘occupation’ will not inspire participation in Detroit and does not make sense for Detroit. From the original theft of Detroit’s land by French settlers from Indigenous nations, to the connotations of ‘occupation’ for Detroit’s Arab communities, to the current gentrification of Detroit neighborhoods and its related violence – ‘Occupation’ is not what we need more of. We will, however, participate in creating anew out of what remains in Detroit today. Detroit’s participation in the ‘Occupy Together’ actions must grow out of Detroit’s own rich soil. It cannot be transplanted from another city’s context.

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They said this to me in an Atlanta park that the occupiers shared with a hundred homeless black men. A caucus of the occupation in Atlanta aims to broaden the occupation to the long-term and everyday concerns of black Atlanta by putting forth an ‘occupy the BeltLine’ strategy. Atlanta’s BeltLine project is a greenwashed gentrification project, a massive publicly financed real-estate scam that steals 10-figure property-tax revenues from schools and city services over the next 20 years to build upscale yuppie residences and shopping, and pay corporate welfare to favored banksters and lawyers. Atlanta also has a mass transit system that is forced to pay its own way with no help from the state.

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Atlanta also has a mass transit system that is forced to pay its own way with no help from the state. Although mostly black Fulton and DeKalb counties paid for its multibillion-dollar infrastructure over a generation, its further development is being dictated by business interests openly hostile to the transit needs of Atlanta’s working poor. Gentrification isn’t just the scourge of black urban communities nationwide. It’s the core ‘economic development’ model for urban America. If occupying public spaces with human bodies is a tactic that works for white hipsters in the middle of town, why can’t it work elsewhere, with them AND with us? Why can’t it work with the abandoned and foreclosed properties in our neighborhoods?

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

In Cairo, for example, the more advantaged poor buy pirated land from farmers, while the less advantaged squat on municipal land; the poorest of the poor, however, rent from the squatters.85 Likewise, as urban geographer Alan Gilbert observed of Latin America in 1993, the "vast majority of new rental housing is located in the consolidated self-help periphery rather than in the centre of the city."86 Mexico City is an important case in point. Despite a Model Law of the colonias proletariat which sought to ban absentee ownership, "poaching," and speculation in low-income housing, the Lopez Portillo government (1976—82) allowed slum-dwellers to sell their property at market rates. One result of this reform has been the middle-class gentrification of some formerly poor colonias in good locations; another has been the proliferation of petty landlordism. As sociologist Susan Eckstein discovered in her 1987 return to the colonia that she had first studied fifteen years earlier, some 25 to 50 percent of the original squatters had built small, 2-to-15-family vecindades which they then rented to poorer newcomers.

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Yet within five years, according to Berner, "all the original dwellers had left because their lots had been sold to wealthy families."9 The failures were so embarrassing that the World Bank retooled the program to focus instead on sites-and-services provision in resettlement areas outside metro Manila. These remote locations discouraged gentrification, but at the same time were hated by the poor because of their distance from jobs and services. At the end of the day, Berner says, the World Bank's heroic exertions in Manila left most of the targeted slums "as congested and dilapidated as ever."10 In Mumbai, another highly acclaimed World Bank laboratory, slum upgrading on a massive scale (affecting 3 million people) was promised, but the results were again nugatory.

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Thus in Istanbul, as Caglar Keyder notes, "in the inflationary environment of the 1980s, real estate became the highest-profit sector ... where political corruption, capitalist development and international finance intersected."48 In Ankara smart money flowed into the booming market for converting slums into upscale apartment neighborhoods. The central locations of older gecekondus, explains planner Ozlem Dtindar, made them irresistible targets for renewal and gentrification by large-scale developers who alone "had the political influence and financial power to solve the very confusing ownership problems in the gecekmdu areas."49 In the Arab world, as Janet Abu-Lughod has long stressed, oil revenues and overseas earnings flow not into production "but into land as a capital 'bank.'

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

In an age of climate change, these are qualities that urban planners are trying to build into today’s cities. Gentrification Europe and America have learned from past mistakes and accepted that slum clearance is not the only answer to what used to be termed ‘urban blight’. When it comes to urban renewal today, incremental revitalisation is the approach favoured by planners. Gentrification can also play an important, though controversial, role. Gentrification refers to the way a working-class area is gradually colonised by the middle classes. It is said to have begun in Philadelphia in the 1950s, when wealthy people moved back into the riverside area of Society Hill, restoring the once grand eighteenth-century houses.

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In 1836, Charles Dickens noted how as an area of London became more middle class, its ‘old tottering public-house’ was converted into ‘spacious and lofty “wine-vaults”’, with its name displayed in gold-leaf lettering.87 One result of gentrification is the displacement of poor communities. Local families can no longer afford to live in an area newly popular with affluent buyers. Within a few years the character of an area can change radically. Traditional shops and businesses are replaced with new high street franchises reflecting the change in demographics. Although many regret this, James Howard Kunstler defends gentrification, seeing it as part of a continuing cycle of urban decline and regeneration. Without gentrification, he asks, ‘how would any city neighbourhood escape the fate of an ultimate slide into slumdom?’.

The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

When FDR Drive was constructed in the 1950s, the Seaport’s decline was rapid, but beginning in 1966, a private initiative rescued the remaining warehouses and saved the historical seaport just in time. Today, the Seaport is a mix of attractively restored buildings and ships with fairly standard mainstreet stores and cafés: a fair slice of commercial gentrification was necessary to woo developers and tourists. The Seaport Museum and Paris Café Housed in a series of painstakingly restored 1830s warehouses, the South Street Seaport Museum, 12 Fulton St (April–Oct Tues–Sun 10am–6pm, Nov–March Fri–Sun 10am–5pm all galleries; Mon 10am–5pm Schermerhorn Row Galleries only; $10; seniors and students $8; $5 children 5–12; 61 TH E F INANCIAL DI S TRI C T | South Street Seaport 62 South Street Seaport T 212/748-8600, W www.southstseaport.org), offers a spread of refitted ships and chubby tugboats (the largest collection of sailing vessels – by tonnage – in the US), plus a handful of revolving maritime art and trades exhibits, a museum store, and info about the now-gone Fulton Fish Market.

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Today only eight flophouses remain, and these mostly cater to Chinese laborers at the southern end of the Bowery. The street runs north from Chatham Square in Chinatown to Cooper Square in the East Village, where it is increasingly lined with smart, contemporary buildings (see p.97). Yet the current gentrification of this wide thoroughfare is just the latest of many changes over the years: the street takes its name from bouwerie, the Dutch word for farm, when it was the city’s main agricultural supplier. In the nineteenth century it was flanked by music halls, opera houses, vaudeville theaters, hotels, and middle-market restaurants, drawing people from all parts of Manhattan – including opera lover Walt Whitman (see box, p.223).

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The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Sugrue, Thomas J.

affirmative action, business climate, classic study, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, jobless men, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, oil shock, pink-collar, postindustrial economy, Quicken Loans, rent control, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Is Detroit destined for obsolescence, or will it reinvent itself and, in the process, reinvent urbanism? Will Detroit’s transformation come from the top down, from downtown redevelopment or will it come from grassroots mobilization? Should the city reinvent itself as a haven of creative and artistic production? Will the city’s islands of gentrification spread? What will happen to the city’s working-class majority? Some planners, reformers, and public officials argue that the first step to Detroit’s revitalization is “right sizing” the city. Advocates of this approach assert that it is simply impossible to provide services to a shrinking population spread throughout a city that, at its peak, housed nearly 1.3 million more residents.

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Urbanist Richard Florida, who made his reputation by arguing that the key to urban revitalization is a city’s ability to attract and retain a “creative class,” has been particularly influential in Detroit. The city’s boosters point to the revival of the once-bleak Midtown neighborhood, the rise of a thriving arts and cultural scene in the city, the gentrification of Corktown and a few blocks of Michigan Avenue near the abandoned Michigan Central Station, and the conversion of long-abandoned downtown skyscrapers into lofts. Most of those new residents are white.27 However small in number, Detroit’s newcomers are both optimistic and messianic. They see Detroit as the Brooklyn of the prairies or, even more ambitiously, the next Berlin.

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The Hudson-Webber Foundation launched the 15×15 Program, “to attract 15,000 young, talented households to Greater Downtown Detroit by 2015.” Another nonprofit, Challenge Detroit, leveraged support from major employers and launched a fellowship program to recruit about thirty emerging leaders from around the world to Detroit each year.28 The sense that gentrification, creativity, and youthful talent are the ticket to Detroit’s rebirth is one manifestation of what urbanists call the neoliberalization of the city, namely the faith that market-based solutions are more rational and efficient than democratic processes: the reliance on the private sector to provide what were once public services such as education, sanitation, and housing, and the creation of a “favorable business climate,” by weakening of labor power and workplace regulations as well as reducing taxes to attract capital.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

In an intangibles-rich economy, businesses and workers are attracted to cities, where they can exploit synergies and gain from spillovers. But although cities are economically more productive than ever, they are not delivering for all their inhabitants. The wage premium that less skilled workers get for moving to cities has evaporated. The price of real estate in cities rises and rises, and concerns about gentrification grow. In addition, there is a growing gap between thriving cities and the rest of the country, particularly between cities and “towns,” a term that in British political discourse has come to mean poorer, usually postindustrial conurbations with fewer than two hundred thousand inhabitants. Inhabitants of towns tend to be older, whiter, less educated than city dwellers, more alienated from the establishment, and keener on populist politics.

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Those lucky enough to own their own houses or apartments block new development because it could reduce the price of their own home, either by causing congestion and disruption or simply by reducing its scarcity value. Poorer city dwellers block new developments because they often involve replacing cheaper, older housing with newer, less affordable stock (“luxury apartments”), displacing poorer residents and disrupting existing communities, without increasing housing supply enough to lower prices—in short, gentrification. Rich and poor alike tend to be sceptical that national governments will provide sufficient new infrastructure and services to meet the needs of an increased population, even though in theory a larger population should be able to afford to pay for it.12 But the problems of thriving cities in an intangibles-rich economy pale in comparison with those of smaller towns and declining cities with little intangible capital.

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NIMBYism is common. Richer voters who own houses don’t like to see their neighbourhoods spoiled by excessive development—and because their houses are often their most valuable assets, and perhaps even their retirement plans, they do not want to take risks with it. Poorer voters who rent don’t like to see gentrification change their neighbourhoods beyond recognition, especially when it threatens to price them out of the market. Stopping development and blocking planning applications is the bread and butter of local politics. The strategy of managed decline for poorer cities is even crazier. In most countries, politicians are expected to deliver for the geographical constituency that elected them; saying “You’ll be better off if you move to the city” is not acceptable.

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

Even in cities lacking any elevated freight lines or air rights transfer scheme, it seemed like there was always someone in the room who wanted to add a High Line. However, the project’s thrill faded when the rapid gentrification of the surrounding neighborhood became apparent. All the new towers were luxury housing, with a typical apartment selling for millions of dollars. The air rights transfer scheme did not force developers to create affordable housing. It had accelerated gentrification, displacing lower-income residents. Even New York’s iconic hot dog vendors couldn’t compete with the better-capitalized vendors in applying for vending spots along the park.35 The legacy of the High Line is even more at risk at its final stretch, Hudson Yards, where the selling of air rights created a luxury high-rise cluster of new magnitude to almost unanimous criticism.

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They saw it as the largest example of “lights-out London”—the dark and mostly empty homes throughout the city bought by foreign investors. Adding fuel to the fire, the Shard rose beside some of the poorest wards of the city. The tower could raise prices and squeeze Londoners out of the market, potentially pushing a tide of gentrification from the Thames to the south. But it was already too late! The tower was completed in 2013. Near the Gherkin, in the city’s heart, it heralded even more skyscrapers. The historic district of the City of London, with the height restrictions now eased, became prime real estate. This epicenter of finance, bounded on the south by the River Thames and on the north by the old Roman wall, measures only slightly larger than one square mile.

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FIVE: The Rules That Shape Skylines: London 1.Jill Jonnes, Eiffel’s Tower: The Thrilling Story Behind Paris’s Beloved Monument and the Extraordinary World’s Fair That Introduced It (London: Penguin Books, 2009). 2.Alexandra Lange, “Seven Leading Architects Defend the World’s Most Hated Buildings,” New York Times, June 5, 2015. 3.Markus Moos, “From Gentrification to Youthification? The Increasing Importance of Young Age in Delineating High-Density Living,” Urban Studies 53, no. 14 (2016): 2903–20. 4.Paul Swinney and Andrew Carter, “London Population: Why So Many People Leave the UK’s Capital,” BBC News, March 18, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/. 5.Goldman Sachs Investment Research, “Millennials Coming of Age,” 2015, accessed February 24, 2021, https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/archive/millennials/. 6.Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 26–27. 7.Nadine Moeller, The Archaeology of Urbanism in Ancient Egypt: From the Predynastic Period to the End of the Middle Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 8.Aristotle, Politics, Book 2, Section 1267b, trans.

The London Compendium by Ed Glinert

1960s counterculture, anti-communist, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Brixton riot, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nick Leeson, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, union organizing, V2 rocket

St John Street The main street leading from Smithfield to the Angel was until the mid nineteenth century the last leg of the journey for cattle and sheep being taken from the farms of Middlesex and Hertfordshire to the Smithfield livestock market and later became the home of scores of dingy workshops and offices. It now contains a number of smart restaurants and bars that have opened since the gentrification of the area in the 1990s. (iv) Finsbury The land north of Clerkenwell Green was a fen belonging to St Paul’s Cathedral which was drained in the seventeenth century when gravel was laid down and houses built around the London terminus of the New River, the canal cut through from Hertfordshire to bring water to the capital.

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The building was converted into the Riverside arts centre in 1974 and, though occasionally used for television, it is best known for its repertory cinema. Thames Wharf, Rainville Road. Offices for Lord (Richard) Rogers’s architectural practice and also home of the River Cafe, the renowned restaurant run by his wife, Ruth, and Rose Grey. FULHAM, SW6 One of London’s most popular inner suburbs since 1960s gentrification, it is separated from Hammersmith by Parrs Ditch, a tributary of Stamford Brook. Fulham Football Club Perennial under-achievers, now owned by Harrods’ proprietor Mohamed Al Fayed, Fulham used to play in the most pleasant location of any of London’s football clubs, Craven Cottage, built on the site of a property of that name which burned down in 1888, but moved out in 2002.

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The Second World War destroyed much of the area, tearing apart communities and wiping away streets, houses, schools, shops and factories, and though the decimated landscape gave the authorities the chance of creating an improved East End, the opportunity was wasted and the landscape was blighted with socially divisive housing and shambolic estates. The closure of the docks and the decline of its attendant industries in the 1970s led to further impoverishment and the dereliction of vast tracts of land – problems that have been only partly alleviated by the recent gentrification of Wapping and Spitalfields. (i) Mile End A humdrum district between Whitechapel and Bow, Mile End is named after the first milestone eastwards from the City, which stood near the corner of Mile End Road and Stepney Green, a mile from the old Roman gate to the City (Aldgate), where in 1381 marchers from Kent and Essex allied with Wat Tyler’s rebellion against the poll tax met the fourteen-year-old king, Richard II, and where 200 years later Henry VIII’s bowmen practised.

The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub

Anton Chekhov, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, fear of failure, gentrification, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, plutocrats, price mechanism, rent control, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

And I am not inclined to sentimentalize New York’s decline, or that of the other old American cities. I did not like Times Square in 1985, when I used to work there. I did not share the view that predatory street people were its authentic citizens, or that the proposed renovation constituted a kind of unholy “gentrification.” I cheered Mayor Giuliani as he spoke of the dangers of “defining deviancy down,” and as he declared war against New York’s pernicious street culture. I believe deeply in civility—perhaps a great deal more deeply than did our famously uncivil mayor. And so as I walked through the Times Square that was a-building, I felt the magnitude of the achievement, and I felt it as a reclaiming of abandoned urban territory— even as, at the very same moment, I felt the pang of loss, the loss of specificity, of locality, of eccentricity, of the micro-villages that were no more and never would be again.

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These were the tangible elements that produced the intangible phenomenon that went by the name “Times Square.” Hardy told the group’s board that the committee’s goal was “to counter the argument that you have to abolish Times Square in order to clean it up.” The group would accept neither preservationist absolutism nor annihilating gentrification. The Municipal Art Society now began a crafty and relentless public relations campaign. In March 1984, the MAS staged a competition to design a replacement for the Times Tower—an event that proved architects were a great deal fonder of that misbegotten building, and thus of the degraded urban texture surrounding it, than were George Klein and Philip Johnson.

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The “street culture” of the new 42nd Street consists of pavement dwellers like Ayhan and Ivan, and the middle-aged Chinese ladies who glumly peddle their photographs of the Flatiron Building and the World Trade Center, and the great tides of pedestrians passing this way and that, and also the visitors who roost long enough to be described as loiterers. And that population consists largely of black teenagers. This is a peculiar irony, for critics of 42nd Street redevelopment described it at the time, and have continued to describe it, as a gentrification process designed to erase the street’s minority population in order to lure back white professionals. If you ask kids, they will tell you that 42nd Street is a good place to pick up girls, that you can hang out for free as long as you don’t mind being moved around by cops, that you can see a movie at the AMC 25 and then have a cheap meal at Applebee’s—just what William Kornblum, the principal author of the Bright Light study, said that kids had been doing back in the 1970s.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

To begin with, it is not independent of the exchange values of surrounding houses. If all the houses around me are deteriorating or people of ‘the wrong sort’ are moving in, then my house value is very likely to fall even though I keep it in tip-top shape. Conversely, ‘improvements’ in the neighbourhood (for example, gentrification) will increase the value of my house even though I myself have invested nothing. The housing market is characterised by what economists call ‘externality’ effects. Homeowners often take action, both individual and collective, to control such externalities. Propose building a halfway house for released criminals in a ‘respectable’ neighbourhood of homeowners and see what happens!

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High rents and housing costs, excessive charges by credit card companies, banks and telephone companies, the privatisation of health care and education, the imposition of user fees and fines, all inflict financial burdens on vulnerable populations even when these costs are not inflated by a host of predatory practices, arbitrary and regressive taxes, excessive legal fees and the like. These activities are, moreover, active and not passive. The actual or attempted expulsion of low-income and vulnerable populations from high-value land and locations through gentrification, displacement and sometimes violent clearances has been a long-standing practice within the history of capitalism. It unites those residents of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas subject to evictions, the former occupants of self-built housing in Seoul, those moved through eminent domain procedures in the United States and the shack-dwellers in South Africa.

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If there are no particularly unique features to hand, then hire some famous architect, like Frank Gehry, to build a signature building (like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao) to fill the gap.6 History, culture, uniqueness and authenticity are everywhere commodified and sold to tourists, prospective entrepreneurs and corporate heads alike, yielding monopoly rents to landed interests, property developers and speculators. The role of the class monopoly rent that is then gained from rising land values and property prices in cities like New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai, London and Barcelona is hugely important for capital in general. The gentrification process that is then unleashed is, worldwide, a critical part of an economy based as much on accumulation through dispossession as on creating wealth through new urban investments. In cultivating monopoly power, capital realises far-reaching control over production and marketing. It can stabilise the business environment to allow for rational calculation and long-term planning, the reduction of risk and uncertainty.

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, dark matter, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Joan Didion, late capitalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, medical malpractice, neurotypical, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, transatlantic slave trade, traumatic brain injury, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

The immediacy with which these images appeared froze the imaginary of the Bronx in a distant past, while in the present none of this was true anymore, and maybe—to appropriate the words of the late mayor Ed Koch, whose tenure oversaw some of the Bronx’s most profound civic neglect—“nothing ever was the way you think it was.” What I could see was that the Bronx was happening. It was lively. It was dignified. It had depth and beauty in a way that so much of the rest of the city had been drained of, its social and cultural riches fleeced by gentrification. I sat on the train and looked out the window, and I saw a beautiful, dynamic municipality, and I wondered—though I could have wagered a guess—why I didn’t know anything about how the Bronx rebuilt itself. I siphoned this question into a piece of writing that I could use to help me figure it out.

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And in the announcements, the pastor rallied for everyone to join the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition in an upcoming march against an urban planning initiative that threatened to develop the dense, vibrant neighboring district of Jerome Avenue into commercial and luxury housing. There was going to be a town hall, followed by three weeks of marches. I wondered at that moment about the connection, held fast and translucent as fishing line, between the presence of my white body in the Bronx and these particular attempts at gentrification. I felt my tailbone shift on the cold, hard plastic of the stacking chair as the congregation moved into a time of praise. The freestanding projection screen filled suddenly with song lyrics drawn from the Old Testament prayer of Jabez. Then a gospel melody sounded from the keyboardist. “Enlarge my territory,” everyone sang, in unison.

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Woodlawn was chock-full of current and former IRA members and other people involved in the Irish freedom movement, who had been living in the multiracial Northwest Bronx for generations, and who had opened bars like the Jolly Tinker where the angel-woman told Sweeney about New Day, many of whom eventually became racist cops. Fascist dreams and utopian dreams are not infrequently indistinguishable at first, but their differences are much easier to catch when those dreams are playing out on the public stages of our cities. The spiritual fight against something like urban renewal or gentrification (or other forms of fascism masquerading as progress) is a fight against forgetting the difference. These days New York City seems to be living out the dreams of the very rich and very powerful—like a gated community that you earn your way into, or struggle bitterly to survive on the margins of, as though it has always been this way, and only ever will be.

City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World by Catie Marron

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, do-ocracy, fixed-gear, gentrification, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, plutocrats, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning

Though conceived as a concert of buildings, the ateliers of the Place Royale were built by individual speculation, and it soon became apparent to the twenty-four actual investors, in a manner eerily contemporary, that they were worth more as residences than as manufacturing spaces. The by now familiar process of gentrification, in which the well-off take over what was once meant for artisanal industry, in this case was collapsed into a single generation. Soon the fourth face of the square was filled in, while the central exercise space was gated and grilled and used for public ceremonials, royal marriages, and occasions.

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I have often thought of Istanbul as the bridge in between, theoretically connecting the two worlds but, in practice, not quite belonging in either, unwelcome anywhere. Anyone who visits Istanbul today will notice that in several areas the city resembles a massive construction site. In the last decade it has undergone radical transformation and gentrification. Initially, many people supported the growth, happy to see the megacity attracting foreign investors and global capital. Some of its lost cosmopolitanism was also restored. Expats and migrants arrived, visitors from ex-Soviet republics, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Balkans. An important LGBT movement flourished, organizing gay parades.

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WHEN THE GREAT SIXTEENTH-CENTURY OTTOMAN ARCHITECT Sinan would start building a new mosque, he would make sure both the design and the project were in harmony with the city’s history and the city’s spirit. Sinan was meticulous about his work. At times I cannot help but feel that had Sinan been alive today, and had he seen this untrammeled construction and chaotic gentrification in his beloved city, he would weep. Still, Byzas’s dream city is a gem. Even though the seagulls that fly above our heads are seeing a changing cityscape year by year, the beauty and resilience inherent in the city is here to stay. LAM YIUK FEI GI News/Getty Images, artist Davide Martello brought his self-made grand piano to Taksim Square and played for 14 hours alongside the protestors SZE TSUNG LEONG Tiananmen Square, Beijing, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York TIANANMEN SQUARE, BEIJING: IN SEARCH OF HEAVENLY PEACE Evan Osnos TO FOREIGNERS, TIANANMEN SQUARE HAS ONE MEANING.

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life by Colin Ellard

Apollo 11, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, classic study, cognitive load, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, Dunbar number, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Lewis Mumford, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, megastructure, mirror neurons, Mondo 2000, more computing power than Apollo, Oculus Rift, overview effect, Peter Eisenman, RFID, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, sentiment analysis, Skinner box, smart cities, starchitect, TED Talk, the built environment, theory of mind, time dilation, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen

The supermarket, forming the centerpiece of a larger development called Avalonbay Communities, and including an expensive set of condominium apartments, occupies an entire city block of East Houston Street, stretching from the Bowery to Christie Street. Given the long history of protest against the seemingly unstoppable forces of gentrification in New York and many other great world cities—a struggle that has been at play in one form or another for as long as capitalism has existed—it isn’t surprising that the local residents of the Lower East Side did not take the development lying down. For the well-off, the abundant availability of high-quality organic and non-GMO foods was a welcome addition to the neighborhood, but for the majority of people living in this part of New York, many of whom had roots going back for many generations to New York’s immigrant beginnings, the scale of the new store, selling wares that few of them could easily afford, was seen as a symbolic affront to the historical values and traditions of this part of the city.

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For the well-off, the abundant availability of high-quality organic and non-GMO foods was a welcome addition to the neighborhood, but for the majority of people living in this part of New York, many of whom had roots going back for many generations to New York’s immigrant beginnings, the scale of the new store, selling wares that few of them could easily afford, was seen as a symbolic affront to the historical values and traditions of this part of the city. When I conducted research at the site in 2012, my interest in the building, though perhaps connected to the tumult over gentrification, was more pedestrian—and literally so. On my first visit to the location, undertaken to plan a series of psychogeographic studies in collaboration with New York’s Guggenheim Museum, I was mostly interested in how this gigantic megastructure, plopped into a neighborhood more commonly populated with tiny bars and restaurants, bodegas, pocket parks, playgrounds, and many different styles of housing might influence the psychological state of the urban pedestrian.

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See also attention fractals, 38–40 Freud, Sigmund, 69 Friedman, Bill, 96 frontal cortex, 20, 103, 134, 169 Fuller, Buckminster, 75 functionality, 120, 219–21 gambling, 93–98 gaming, 75–76, 177–78, 184–85 Gehl, Jan, 109, 110 Gehry, Frank, 134 gender body language by, 177 gambling preferences by, 98 urban safety and anxiety thresholds by, 144–45 genericization adaptivity and, 123–24 economics and, 119–20 functionality and, 120 of homes, 119–20 marketing and, 120–21 smart city development and, 213–16 technology and, 121–22, 123–24 of urban spaces, 120–24, 213–16 genetics, of anxiety, 131–32 gentrification, 107–11 geocaching, 205 geofencing, 129 geometry animism of movement over, 57–59 curve preference, 57, 95–96, 102, 134–35 fractals, 38–40 geotextiles, 55 geotracking data mining and, 208–11, 222–23 emotional responses, 210–11 fitness, 104, 210 for museum exhibits, 91 open data in, 222 shopping habits, 103–5 social stress points, 128–29, 209–10 for virtual reality amusement parks, 86 Germany, 23–24, 56, 62 Giuliani, Rudy, 140 Gladwell, Malcolm, 101 global positioning system (GPS).

Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City by Tony Roshan Samara

conceptual framework, deglobalization, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, illegal immigration, late capitalism, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, structural adjustment programs, unemployed young men, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, working poor

Typically, policing as a development issue has been understood in the context of political development at the national level and the reform of authoritarian, corrupt, and otherwise inadequate criminal justice institutions in transitioning societies. The debates here revolve around the question of the role that policing can play in helping or hindering democratic transition.44 However, much of the recent work on gentrification, urban renewal and revitalization, and urban security has rescaled these debates, examining the role of policing in what we might call transitioning cities.45 As central agents of neoliberal development and security governance, organized around the management and suppression of insecurity, police are better understood in the context of their role in policing underdevelopment than in facilitating the transition to democracy.

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Broken-windows policing was itself conceived of originally not simply as a law enforcement Children in the Streets╇ ·â•‡ 69 strategy but as part of a more comprehensive development strategy for inner-city neighborhoods in the United States and the United Kingdom that explicitly linked revitalization to a certain form of security.42 Revitalization, in turn, is defined along fairly explicit class lines that are often expressed most noticeably in debates around gentrification. A 1987 article from Urban Land magazine sums up neatly the basic dynamics of this process, and while it does not address the issue of policing directly, the role of law enforcement is not difficult to deduce. In a statement on sociospatial governance that could have come directly from the Partnership in 2000, N.

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This page intentionally left blank Notes Introduction 1.╯Zama Femi, “Gang Wars Take Heavy Toll on Cape Matrics,” Cape Argus, December 29, 2006. 2.╯Matt Medved, “Cops to Fight Gangsterism in Primary Schools,” Cape Argus, May 29, 2007. 3.╯A’eysah Kassiem, “Crime Wave Engulfing Schools,” Cape Times, May 18, 2007. 4.╯Aziz Hartley, “Rasool Unveils Plan to Fight Gangs and Drugs,” Cape Times, May 23, 2007; Candes Keating, “High-Risk Schools to Get Top Security Measures,” Cape Argus, February 8, 2007. 5.╯Rafaella delle Donne, “City’s Heart Is Hardening, Say Homeless,” Cape Argus, July 15, 2007. 6.╯Tony Roshan Samara, “Development, Social Justice and Global Governance: Challenges to Implementing Restorative and Criminal Justice Reform in South Africa,” Acta Juridica (2007): 113–33. 7.╯David McDonald, World City Syndrome: Neoliberalism and Inequality in Cape Town (London: Routledge Press, 2007). 8.╯James DeFilippis, Unmaking Goliath: Community Control in the Face of Global Capital (New York: Routledge, 2003); David Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler B. 71 (1989): 3–17. 9.╯Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996); Gordon MacLeod, “From Urban Entrepreneurialism to a ‘Revanchist City’? On the Spatial Injustices of Glasgow’s Renaissance,” Antipode 34, no. 3 (2002): 602–24 . 10.╯Throughout the book I will use the basic racial categories employed by the Census: black African, coloured, Asian, and white.

Paris Revealed by Stephen Clarke

clean water, gentrification, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, rent control, sexual politics, trade route

The 2nd Until about fifteen years ago, this was an area of fascinating contrasts. The Sentier was still full of clothes workshops, while the newly pedestrianized area around the rue Montorgueil was attracting all sorts of intellectuals and their families, just metres away from the rue Saint-Denis, where prostitutes stood in every doorway. Now gentrification is almost complete—the Sentier is getting lofted up, rue Montorgueil has changed from a street market into a hipsters’ food court where you can get mango sushi, and the prostitutes are being squeezed out. The only time you can see residents en masse is on a Sunday morning, when the buggy brigade come out to buy their baguette and grab a coffee before the sushi fans arrive.

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The hôtels particuliers (urban mansions) were soot-blackened and falling down. This was why the city felt free to unleash the wave of destruction that gave us Les Halles (in the 1st), the Centre Pompidou (known by Parisians as Beaubourg) and the hideous modern Quartier de l’Horloge.* These days, post-gentrification, the Marais’ surviving buildings are all spruced up and it’s almost impossible to identify any residents, except perhaps for the second-home Americans on café terraces on a Sunday morning and the parents watching their toddlers play in the small public gardens. The area does attract some easily spotted Parisian groups, though—gays (along the rue des Archives, where I once heard a little girl ask her dad, ‘Papa, why does that princess have a moustache?’)

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After Haussmann, these distinctions disappeared. The new buildings were posher, with people of similar (mainly middle) class on every floor except the ground (still for shops and businesses) and the top, which was now reserved for the chambres de bonne or maids’ rooms. It was the beginning of the gentrification that has steadily evicted the poor from all but the far reaches of the city’s outer arrondissements. Haussmann did some good works—he created large ‘English-style’ parks—Monceau, Montsouris, and the Buttes-Chaumont. He laid out the Champs-Élysées, and built the Gare de Lyon and Gare de l’Est.

Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup by Andrew Zimbalist

airline deregulation, business cycle, carbon footprint, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, longitudinal study, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, selection bias, Suez crisis 1956, urban planning, young professional

The aim being to erase the city's working class memory, by demolishing popular and cooperative centers, old social housing and factories…and the total absence of any sustainability objectives…. In no building project…were any ecological criteria or sustainability standards implemented.9 Barcelona's new urban zones were redeveloped with improved public services and, in some cases, direct access to the sea. These parts of the city became gentrified, and hand in hand with gentrification came higher prices. Higher prices meant that lower-income people had to relocate, and, more generally, plans for public housing were underfulfilled.10 One study noted the following impacts: —Strong increases in the prices of housing for rent and for sale (from 1986 to 1993 the cumulative increase was 139% for home sale prices and nearly 145% in home rentals) —A drastic decrease in the availability of public housing (from 1986 to 1992 there was a cumulative decrease of 5.9%) —A gradual decrease in the availability of private houses for rent (from 1981 to 1991 the cumulative decrease was 23.7%)11 Thus, like the experience with mega-events elsewhere, hosting the games in Barcelona was accompanied by a redistribution of living standards to the detriment of lower-income groups.12 Finally, it is noteworthy that Barcelona made a major investment to host the 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures.

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The Brazilian GDP, which grew at close to 6 percent per year during 2000–10, slowed to a 2 percent rate during 2011–13. Meanwhile, inflation accelerated from the 3–4 percent range during 2000–10 to around 6 percent during 2011–13, and as the World Cup approached in 2014, prices rose at a still faster clip. Housing prices spiked even faster. While gentrification is appealing to some, it means unaffordable housing to others. It is a pattern familiar to mega-events, as land becomes scarcer and demand often rises. According to the Knight Frank Global House Price Index, the rate of increase in home prices in Brazil during 2012 was the third highest in the world.

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According to a 2007 study performed for the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the British Parliament's House of Commons, “No host country has yet been able to demonstrate a direct benefit from the Olympic Games in the form of a lasting increase in participation.”93 The goal to regenerate development in East London, to create thousands of new jobs, and to reduce poverty also has encountered difficulties. It is always possible to change the character of some micro-neighborhoods by displacing lower-income with higher-income groups. Such gentrification has necessarily occurred to a degree with the billions of dollars of new investments in pockets of East London. Such a process, however, is simply relocating, rather than producing, wealth. In assessing the changes brought to East London from the games, Gavin Poynter comments that East London got a stadium it didn't need, more four-and five-star hotels it didn't need, and additional high-rise, high-priced developments it didn't need.

Berlin by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, indoor plumbing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Skype, starchitect, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

To the north is the Scheunenviertel, the old Jewish quarter, anchored by the Hackesche Höfe (courtyards) and jammed with bars and restaurants, leading galleries and urban designer boutiques. Oranienburger Strasse is the most tourist-intensive strip here, but the side streets yield plenty of authentic experiences. To truly experience Berlin, though, you need to venture off the tourist grid. North of Mitte, largely residential Prenzlauer Berg may be fully in the grip of gentrification but is a joy to explore thanks to a vibrant café culture, sparkling 19th-century townhouses lining leafy avenues, a bevy of owner-run boutiques and an edgy bar scene. South of Mitte, Kreuzberg is one of Berlin’s most diverse and vibrant neighbourhoods. The eastern section is the hub of the city’s vast Turkish population and the place to get low-down and dirty in the bars and clubs along Schlesische Strasse, Oranienstrasse and around Kottbusser Tor.

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Alas, after reunification, the western suburbs almost instantly lost their edge as the adventurous avant-garde moved on to the artists’ squats and crumbling tenements formerly trapped behind the Wall. Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg have since mutated into posh enclaves of models, media professionals and trust-fund bohemians and not even Friedrichshain is immune to gentrification if the impending Mediaspree development is any indication. But still, compared to the spunky rebel-child character of the ‘Wild East’, the city west gives off the self-satisfied air of middle-aged burghers happy with the status quo. Experimentation is elsewhere. * * * top picks CHARLOTTENBURG & NORTHERN WILMERSDORF Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche Kurfürstendamm Museum für Fotografie/Helmut Newton Sammlung Neuer Flügel Story of Berlin * * * But Berlin demands that you keep up, or else.

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Although the fall of the Wall catapulted the area from the city’s edge to its centre, hipper types bypassed it in favour of the equally derelict – but somehow more enticing – districts in the former East Berlin. More recently, though, the trend seems to be reversing, if rising rents and a steady influx of an unconventional creative class are any indication. For now, though, mainstream gentrification is – thankfully – a long way away. * * * top picks KREUZBERG Bergmannstrasse Jüdisches Museum (opposite) Mauermuseum * * * Thanks to its large Turkish population, eastern Kreuzberg is also nicknamed ‘Little Istanbul’. Though aesthetically unappealing (ie ugly), the area around Kottbusser Tor (Kotti, for short) brims with shisha cafés, footpath grocers, döner shops and giggling Turkish gals, their jet-black hair tucked under colourful scarves.

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

Black Lives Matter, gentrification, Kickstarter, off grid, place-making, sexual politics, Snapchat

“This is what happens when white people come into an area and make it tame,” Kyazike shouted above the music. “Gentrification.” I nodded sadly. “What?” Kyazike asked before downing the remaining half a glass of champagne. I leaned over and repeated what I’d said in her ear, my voice straining over the buzzing EDM. Kyazike gestured that we go outside, so we got up and walked to the smoking area and stood huddled under a heater. She kissed her teeth. “Rah. Gen-tri-fi-ca-tion, yeah?” She sounded the word out. “So gentrification is the reason I’ve wasted my makeup?” She looked at me. “And I wore my best shoes.” “I didn’t want to come here, you’re the one who chose it!”

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“I’ve let work slip so much lately, and there are serious things going on in the world that need reporting and the Daily Read doesn’t seem to be doing it.” “Like what?” Darcy asked. “Um, like the killings of unarmed black men and women in their droves at the hands of police, here and in the U.S., mass gentrification, modern-day slavery? Obviously?” “I don’t really see anything about that, really.” “Yeah, of course you don’t, Darcy. I was thinking that I could start pitching ideas to Gina?” “That’s a good start,” Darcy agreed, nodding heavily, her hair falling around her face. “I worked really hard to get this job, really fucking hard, and I feel like I’m spunking it all away,” I said.

Corbyn by Richard Seymour

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, first-past-the-post, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, land value tax, liberal world order, mass immigration, means of production, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, Snapchat, stakhanovite, systematic bias, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, working-age population, éminence grise

Canterbury, having been Conservative since the Great War, was won by Labour. Kensington, including the richest residents in the country, was swallowed in a vengeful blood-red wave across London as its forgotten working-class constituents took revenge on an atrocious Tory MP. The Labour candidate, an anti-gentrification activist, would later demonstrate why she was elected with her angry, passionate response to the horrific Grenfell fire, which consumed dozens of working-class residents. Portsmouth, a Tory–Liberal marginal, went Labour, as the party showed surprising strength across the South and South West.

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According to studies by Loughborough University, the course of the election campaign saw a definite shift away from Brexit as the number-one issue.4 It would be glib to reduce Labour’s appeal entirely to a class-populist one, not least because class is so critically tied to other social distinctions, such as race, gender, and generation. The effects of precarious employment and low wages, of welfare cuts and the marketisation of the university system, are all borne disproportionately by the young. The lethal effects of poor housing and gentrification, as Grenfell tragically showed, are disproportionately borne by ethnic minorities and migrant populations. And Corbyn was swimming with the generational tide on a whole range of issues, from trans rights to Trident. The younger generations are, to put it crudely, less impressed by flags, authorities, and men with guns.

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When the Right and centre can no longer seriously claim to offer ‘opportunity’ to underemployed and precarious workers, Labour offered workers’ rights, a cradle-to-grave free education service, and investment to create jobs. When ‘aspiration’ is no longer plausibly championed by the Tories; when home ownership is increasingly out of the question even for professionals like teachers, nurses, and junior doctors; when landlords drive up rents for ever dingier properties with impunity and oligarchs drive gentrification, Labour offered to build council homes, control rents, bring back housing benefits for the young, and impose new minimum habitation standards. In this, Labour was addressing the problems of twenty-first-century Britain, something that was already clear in Corbyn’s 2015 leadership bid, but was largely ignored by his oblocutors.

Pocket New York City Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Cornelius Vanderbilt, East Village, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, ghettoisation, machine readable, messenger bag, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, starchitect, the High Line, urban renewal, walking around money

Then hit up Village Vanguard (Click here) or Blue Note (Click here) for some jazz tunes, or try the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre (Click here) if you’re looking for laughs. Day Three As the local youngsters are crawling back to their shoebox apartments after a raucous night out, make your way to the Lower East Side ­Tenement Museum (Click here) to learn about life in the area long before gentrification. Pair your visit with the New Museum of Contemporary Art (Click here) if you’re in search of mind-bending art at the other end of the spectrum. Head up to the East Village for lunch at one of the area’s many street-side cafes, then explore the city’s punk rock roots along St Marks Place (Click here), before swinging through Union Square (Click here) to catch the flurry of pedestrians and the popular Union Square Greenmarket (Click here).

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(St Marks Pl, Ave A to Third Ave; N/R/W to 8th St-NYU, 6 to Astor Pl) 2 New Museum of Contemporary Art Gallery Offline map Google map Any modern-day museum worth its salt has to have a structure that makes as much of a statement as the artwork inside. The New Museum of Contemporary Art’s Lower East Side avatar accomplishes just that and more with its inspired design by noted Japanese architecture firm SANAA. The Lower East Side has seen its fair share of physical changes over the last decade as the sweeping hand of gentrification has cleaned up slummy nooks and replaced them with glittering residential blocks. The New Museum punctuates the neighborhood with something truly unique, and its cache of artistic work will dazzle and confuse just as much as its facade. ( 212-219-1222; www.newmuseum.org; 235 Bowery btwn Prince & Rivington Sts; adult/child $14/free, 7-9pm Thu free; 11am-6pm Wed & Fri-Sun, to 9pm Thu; N/R to Prince St, F to 2nd Ave, J/Z to Bowery, 6 to Spring St) 3 Lower East Side Tenement Museum Museum Offline map Google map No other museum humanizes NYC’s colorful past quite like the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which puts the neighborhood’s heartbreaking but inspiring heritage on full display in several recreations of turn-of-the-20th-century tenements.

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The store’s decor is unadulterated by design decoys, letting shoppers focus solely on the beautifully crafted wares. ( 212-673-8601; www.chcmshop.com; 2 Bond St btwn Broadway & Lafayette St; B/D/F, M to Broadway-Lafayette St, N/R to 8th St-NYU, 4/6 to Bleecker St) 57 John Varvatos Clothing, Shoes Offline map Google map Set in the hallowed halls of former punk club CBGB, the John Varvatos Bowery store is either a grievous insult to rock history or a creative reconfiguration of the past – ­depending on which side of the gentrification aisle you happen to stand on. The store goes to great lengths to tie fashion to rock and roll, with records, ’70s audio equipment and even electric guitars for sale alongside JV’s wares. ( 212-358-0315; 315 Bowery btwn 1st & 2nd Sts; noon-9pm Mon-Sat, to 7pm Sun; F/V to Lower East Side-2nd Ave, 6 to Bleecker St) 58 Moo Shoes Shoes Offline map Google map Socially and environmentally responsible fashion usually tends to entail certain sacrifices in the good-looks department.

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

Not only are there increasingly more impoverished people living in the suburbs, but the number of neighborhoods with extreme levels of poverty – census tracts with poverty rates of 40% or more – doubled between 2000 and 2010, with America’s suburbs experiencing the greatest amount of that growth.6 Simultaneous with the rise of suburban poverty is the gentrification of urban neighborhoods. As well-located urban land values rise once more, the value of the improvements on those properties also goes up. This is a mechanism that historically created new wealth, but it no longer works that way. Zoning codes established for the rapid replication of the auto-oriented development pattern were also applied to urban neighborhoods.

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., 28 city infrastructure necessary for, 115 productivity of, 134–138, 143–144 Efficiency, designing for, 174–176 Ehrenhalt, Alan, 116 Empire State Building (New York, New York), 129 Employment, in productive places, 133 England, 83 Expenses, and revenues, 41–44 Extended family, 200–201 F Failure, slow, 110–115 Failure to Act (ASCE report), 65–67 Family, extended, 200–201 Fannie Mae, 92 Farmers, risk management strategies of, 83–84 Federal Funds Rate, 97 Federal government: debt for, 186 impact of infrastructure on, 79 Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 89, 92 Federal Reserve, 99 Feedback, in local governments, 173–174 Ferguson, Missouri, 93, 114 FHA (Federal Housing Administration), 89 Financial status, local government's understanding of, 190–191 Finished states, neighborhoods built to, 21–23 “First ring” suburbs, 94 Form-based codes, 193–194 Fragile systems, 4 Franchises, productivity of, 133–134 Freddie Mac, 92 Future, predicting needs for, 19–20, 120–121 G Gaps, in cities, 160–163 Garcia, Anthony, 158 Gas tax, 75 Gawron, Stephen, 161 Gehl, Jan, 8 “General Theory of Walkability,” 206 Gentrification, of urban neighborhoods, 117 Goals, of individuals vs. communities, 40–41 Goland, Carol, 84 Gold reserves, 94 Gold standard, as basis for trade, 90 Government debt, 96–100 Government policies, prioritizing traffic, 29 Great Depression, 87–89, 191 The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City (Ehrenhalt), 116 Great Society, 93 Growth: economic stability and focus on, 100–102 in municipalities, 50–57 as objective of local governments, 176 wealth vs., 102–104 H Haidt, Jonathan, 208, 209, 215 Hardship, response to, 172–174 Hasidic Judaism, 213–214, 217 Hemingway, Ernest, 4 Henwood, Doug, 79 Hierarchies, in local government, 174–176 Highland neighborhood (Shreveport, Louisiana), 220 Highland Park (Shreveport, Louisiana), 220 High land values, 27–30 High Point, North Carolina, 161 Highway bypass corridor, 134–138 Hollander, Justin B., 8, 9 Homeless shelters, xi Homes, changing, 20 Hoover, Herbert, 87 Horizontal expansion, in California, 197 Housing: in California, 197–198 post-war changes in, 92 preference for single-family, 144–145 Housing authority, 178t How to Live in a World We Don't Understand (Taleb), 59 Human habitats, 1–14 as complex, adaptive systems, 3–4 in North America, 1–3 spooky wisdom in, 5–10 as systems that are complicated, 11–14 Hunter-gatherer existence, 58 Hurricane Katrina, 102–103 Hurricane Rita, 102–103 I Illusion of Wealth: and constant maintenance, 152 human response to, 57–60 Illusion of Wealth phase of development, 143 Improvement to Land (I/L) Ratio, 25, 25f, 117 Improvement value, 23–25, 25f Incentives, to fix problems, 113 Income taxes, 72 Incremental changes, implementing, 122–123, 156–157 Incremental growth, 15–35 and complex, adaptive systems, 168 complex vs. complicated buildings in, 20–23 constraints on, 164 and founding of cities, 15–20 good and bad development in, 34–35 and high land values, 27–30 and neighborhood renewal, 23–27 private and public investment in, 30–34 in traditional habitat development, 2 Infill projects, 160 Infrastructure, 63–81 accounting for, 70–71 and American Society of Civil Engineers, 65–67 calculating returns on investment for, 67–69 Congressional Budget Office on, 78–80 development of, 30–34 as investment, 41–42 in modern development, 32 and municipalities, 44–50 perception of need for more, 63–65 ratio of private to public investment in, 129–130 real return on investment, 74–78 secondary effects of, 72–74 Infrastructure Cult: development of, 65–67 paper returns calculated by, 69 Insolvency, 187–192 Interstate highway system, 92 Investment(s), 147–170 barbell investment approach, 148–150 capital, 171–172 conventional vs. strong towns thinking about, 185–186, 186t in filling gaps in cities, 160–163 impact of regulations on, 194 infrastructure as, 41–42 little bets, 150–160 low-risk investments with steady returns, 150–155 prudent constraints for, 164–168 public and private, 30–34, 31f, 32f returns on, see Return on investment in Suburban Retrofit, 168–169 Italy, walking in, 203–204 J Jacobs, Jane, 8, 101–102 Japan, 76 Jimmy's Pizza, 161–162 Job creation, 49, 72–73 Johnson, Neil, 12, 13 Junger, Sebastian, 216–217 K Keynes, John Maynard, 88 Keynesian economic policies, 88 Krugman, Paul, 63, 78 Kunstler, James, 110–111 L Lafayette, Louisiana, 101, 141–144, 151 Landau, Moshe, 213–214, 217 Land value: in declining suburbs, 113 and interstate highway project, 92 and neighborhood renewal, 23–25, 25f in neighborhoods with different types of properties, 165–167, 165f, 166f and suburban development, 27–30 Learning, from previous local investments, 187 Legacy programs, 173 Lifestyle choices, 202, 205–206 “Lifestyle enclaves,” 208 Little bets, 16–18, 150–160 Local economy: as basis for national economy, 101–102 national vs., 103 Local government: changes in, to maintain economic stability, 105–106 debt taken on by, 113–114 funded by state government, 95 impact of infrastructure on, 79–80 profit run by, 37–38, 147 relationship of state and, 198 Long declines, 110–115 “Long emergency,” 110–111 Long Recession of the 1870s, 77 Los Angeles, California, xi Lovable places, 10 Low-risk investments, with steady returns, 150–155 Lydon, Mike, 158 M Maintenance: ability to keep up with, 109 cash-flow debt to cover, 188–192, 188f–190f of development projects, 52–57 of infrastructure, 46–49 need for constant, 151–154 in place-oriented government, 180–183 required for single-family homes, 112 Maintenance department, 179t Manhattan, New York, 24 Martenson, Chris, 108 Meaning, life of, 212–218 Middle class, 92, 93, 144–145 Milan, Italy, 164 Mills Fleet Farm, 134–137 Minicozzi, Joseph, 138–140, 161 “Minnesota Miracle,” 95 Mixed-use neighborhoods, 163, 169 Modern city development: as high-risk investments, 149 as lead by pubic investment, 34–35 productive places in, 131–134 Modern Monetary Theory, 99 Mortgages, during Great Depression, 88–89 Mouzon, Steve, 10, 113 Muskegon, Michigan, 161 N National Association of Home Builders, 136 National economy, local vs., 103 Natural disasters, 102–103 Neighborhoods: abandonment of, 109–110 built to finished states, 21–23 changing in post-war era, 92–93 community living in, 202–203 decline of, 113 gentrification of urban, 117 mixed-use, 163, 169 renewal of, and incremental growth, 23–27 responses to improvements in, 158 structured around religions, 214 in transition sections of Detroit, 118 Neighbors, being involved with, 202–203 New Deal economics, 87–88 New Orleans, Louisiana, 102, 182 Nixon, Richard, 94 Noncritical systems, 182 O Oak Cliff neighborhood (Dallas, Texas), 159 Obama, Barack, 63 Obesity, among Pacific Islanders, 58–59 Options Real Estate, 160 Orange County, California, xi–xii Order, chaos vs., 121–122 The Original Green (Mouzon), 10, 113 Oroville dam (California), 182 Oswego, New York, 152 Oswego Renaissance Association, 152 P Pacific Islanders, 58–59, 183–185 Paper returns on investment, 67–69 Paradox of Avarice, 104 Paradox of Thrift, 88, 104 Pareidolia, 8–9, 9f Parks department, 178t Party analogy, 34–35 A Pattern Language (Alexander), 8 Pension funds, 56–57, 70, 98 Pequot Lakes, Minnesota, 44–46 Perception, of need for more infrastructure, 63–65 Personal preferences, 144–145 Peru, 84 Place-oriented government, 171–198 and confirmation bias, 183–186 designed for efficiency, 174–176 focus on broad wealth creation by, 176–180 maintenance as priority for, 180–183 and regulations, 192–194 response to hardship by, 172–174 subsidiarity in, 195–198 understanding of debt by, 186–192 Political differences, 207 Pompeii, Italy, 5–10 Post-war boom: and economic stability, 91–93 modern city development established in, 12 Power, subsidiarity principle and, 196–198 Prayer of Saint Francis, 218 Prioritization, of maintenance, 180–183 Private development, 40 Private investment: private to public investment ratio, 129–130 public and, 30–34, 31f, 32f Private sector (businesses): response to economic hardship in, 172–173 small, see Small businesses Problem solving, 13–14 Productive places, 125–146 downtown vs. edge of town, 134–138 in past, 125–127 and personal preferences, 144–145 productivity calculations for, 128–130 return on investment, 141–144 traditional vs. modern development in, 131–134 value per acre, 138–141 Productivity, calculations of, 128–130 Project teams, 179–180 Property taxes, 49 Property value, 23–25, 25f Public health, and walking neighborhoods, 205 Public investment: private and, 30–34, 31f, 32f private to public investment ratio, 129–130 returns required for, 147 Public safety department, 179t Q Quality-of-life benefits, 187 Quantitative Easing, 99 R Railroad companies, 77 Rational decision making, 107–123 about failing development systems, 115–120 about long declines, 110–115 within complex, adaptive system, 120–123 and lack of single solution, 107–110 Real return on investment, 74–78 Redevelopment, financial productivity after, 131–134, 139–140, 139t Redundant systems, 182 ReForm Shreveport, 219, 220 Regulations: from place-oriented government, 192–194 and subsidiarity principle, 195–198 Repealing regulations, 192–193 Republican Party, 209 Request for proposal (RFP), 50 Residents, learning concerns of, 156–157 Resources: assumption of abundance of, 12–14 wasted, in modern development, 19 Retreats, strategic, 108–109 Return on investment, 141–144 calculating, for infrastructure, 67–69 for capital projects, 171–172 in cities, 44 and debt taken on by local governments, 187 low-risk investments with steady, 150–155 paper, 67–69 real, 74–78 social, 78–79 Revenues, and expenses, 41–44 RFP (request for proposal), 50 The Righteous Mind (Haidt), 208 Risk management strategies, 83–85 Roaring Twenties, 87 Roberts, Jason, 159 Roosevelt, Franklin, 87, 88 Rotary International, 203 S St.

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., 103 Local government: changes in, to maintain economic stability, 105–106 debt taken on by, 113–114 funded by state government, 95 impact of infrastructure on, 79–80 profit run by, 37–38, 147 relationship of state and, 198 Long declines, 110–115 “Long emergency,” 110–111 Long Recession of the 1870s, 77 Los Angeles, California, xi Lovable places, 10 Low-risk investments, with steady returns, 150–155 Lydon, Mike, 158 M Maintenance: ability to keep up with, 109 cash-flow debt to cover, 188–192, 188f–190f of development projects, 52–57 of infrastructure, 46–49 need for constant, 151–154 in place-oriented government, 180–183 required for single-family homes, 112 Maintenance department, 179t Manhattan, New York, 24 Martenson, Chris, 108 Meaning, life of, 212–218 Middle class, 92, 93, 144–145 Milan, Italy, 164 Mills Fleet Farm, 134–137 Minicozzi, Joseph, 138–140, 161 “Minnesota Miracle,” 95 Mixed-use neighborhoods, 163, 169 Modern city development: as high-risk investments, 149 as lead by pubic investment, 34–35 productive places in, 131–134 Modern Monetary Theory, 99 Mortgages, during Great Depression, 88–89 Mouzon, Steve, 10, 113 Muskegon, Michigan, 161 N National Association of Home Builders, 136 National economy, local vs., 103 Natural disasters, 102–103 Neighborhoods: abandonment of, 109–110 built to finished states, 21–23 changing in post-war era, 92–93 community living in, 202–203 decline of, 113 gentrification of urban, 117 mixed-use, 163, 169 renewal of, and incremental growth, 23–27 responses to improvements in, 158 structured around religions, 214 in transition sections of Detroit, 118 Neighbors, being involved with, 202–203 New Deal economics, 87–88 New Orleans, Louisiana, 102, 182 Nixon, Richard, 94 Noncritical systems, 182 O Oak Cliff neighborhood (Dallas, Texas), 159 Obama, Barack, 63 Obesity, among Pacific Islanders, 58–59 Options Real Estate, 160 Orange County, California, xi–xii Order, chaos vs., 121–122 The Original Green (Mouzon), 10, 113 Oroville dam (California), 182 Oswego, New York, 152 Oswego Renaissance Association, 152 P Pacific Islanders, 58–59, 183–185 Paper returns on investment, 67–69 Paradox of Avarice, 104 Paradox of Thrift, 88, 104 Pareidolia, 8–9, 9f Parks department, 178t Party analogy, 34–35 A Pattern Language (Alexander), 8 Pension funds, 56–57, 70, 98 Pequot Lakes, Minnesota, 44–46 Perception, of need for more infrastructure, 63–65 Personal preferences, 144–145 Peru, 84 Place-oriented government, 171–198 and confirmation bias, 183–186 designed for efficiency, 174–176 focus on broad wealth creation by, 176–180 maintenance as priority for, 180–183 and regulations, 192–194 response to hardship by, 172–174 subsidiarity in, 195–198 understanding of debt by, 186–192 Political differences, 207 Pompeii, Italy, 5–10 Post-war boom: and economic stability, 91–93 modern city development established in, 12 Power, subsidiarity principle and, 196–198 Prayer of Saint Francis, 218 Prioritization, of maintenance, 180–183 Private development, 40 Private investment: private to public investment ratio, 129–130 public and, 30–34, 31f, 32f Private sector (businesses): response to economic hardship in, 172–173 small, see Small businesses Problem solving, 13–14 Productive places, 125–146 downtown vs. edge of town, 134–138 in past, 125–127 and personal preferences, 144–145 productivity calculations for, 128–130 return on investment, 141–144 traditional vs. modern development in, 131–134 value per acre, 138–141 Productivity, calculations of, 128–130 Project teams, 179–180 Property taxes, 49 Property value, 23–25, 25f Public health, and walking neighborhoods, 205 Public investment: private and, 30–34, 31f, 32f private to public investment ratio, 129–130 returns required for, 147 Public safety department, 179t Q Quality-of-life benefits, 187 Quantitative Easing, 99 R Railroad companies, 77 Rational decision making, 107–123 about failing development systems, 115–120 about long declines, 110–115 within complex, adaptive system, 120–123 and lack of single solution, 107–110 Real return on investment, 74–78 Redevelopment, financial productivity after, 131–134, 139–140, 139t Redundant systems, 182 ReForm Shreveport, 219, 220 Regulations: from place-oriented government, 192–194 and subsidiarity principle, 195–198 Repealing regulations, 192–193 Republican Party, 209 Request for proposal (RFP), 50 Residents, learning concerns of, 156–157 Resources: assumption of abundance of, 12–14 wasted, in modern development, 19 Retreats, strategic, 108–109 Return on investment, 141–144 calculating, for infrastructure, 67–69 for capital projects, 171–172 in cities, 44 and debt taken on by local governments, 187 low-risk investments with steady, 150–155 paper, 67–69 real, 74–78 social, 78–79 Revenues, and expenses, 41–44 RFP (request for proposal), 50 The Righteous Mind (Haidt), 208 Risk management strategies, 83–85 Roaring Twenties, 87 Roberts, Jason, 159 Roosevelt, Franklin, 87, 88 Rotary International, 203 S St.

Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Low-income residents have few prospects in economically declining cities, but their options are also worsening in more dynamic urban areas. Despite the fact that their labor often keeps these cities running, lower-income people find it increasingly difficult to survive as better-off residents are drawn there. They find a shrinking supply of available housing because of the transformation of existing rental units into condos, the gentrification of formerly working-class and immigrant neighborhoods, and community resistance to building new affordable residential projects. Meanwhile, working people’s wages have stagnated as their rents continue to climb. The result is a severe national crisis. Increasing numbers of Americans are “rent-burdened.”

…

IBA worked closely with the Madison Park architect John Sharratt on the design, secured seed money from a local Episcopal church and sizable grants from the federal and state governments, and sold three hundred units to the Boston Housing Authority to help support the lowest-income renters.87 In the 1980s, the momentum created by all this South End neighborhood housing activism carried over to a successful campaign to demand jobs for local, particularly minority, residents and the allocation of retail space for community-oriented stores in the newly planned Copley Place retail-hotel-office complex at the border of the Back Bay and the South End, adjacent to the Prudential Center.88 By the end of urban renewal, the dogged, demanding struggle of the South End lower-income community had forced the BRA to make concessions, much as eventually had happened in Charlestown. As a result, the South End that emerged out of the turbulent 1960s and 1970s was, despite the relentless pressures of gentrification, a surprisingly diverse neighborhood, given its proximity to downtown and affluent Back Bay. Private homes and condos continued to skyrocket in price, but they existed alongside a substantial amount of subsidized housing such as Tent City and Villa Victoria, still tenant-managed under the IBA and employing fifty residents.

…

Ironically, considering the intense conflict between the BRA and the community, the South End perhaps more than any other Boston neighborhood came to embody the mixed class and racial profile that Logue desired, though little provision was made for the single residents of lodging houses from pre–urban renewal days. They had few advocates in the New South End. The community’s success in fending off total gentrification did not escape Mel King. In fact, rather than condemn the urban renewal of the South End out of hand, King instead credited it with successfully mobilizing the less privileged in the area and ultimately providing a channel through which the community could negotiate with the city for greater resources.

Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by James Bloodworth

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Berlin Wall, call centre, clockwatching, collective bargaining, congestion charging, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, Greyball, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, low skilled workers, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, post-truth, post-work, profit motive, race to the bottom, reshoring, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, working poor, working-age population

Sooner or later, my first passenger would be digitally waving me down for a ride. I stared intently at the glowing blue orb which pulsated on the map, and I waited. 18 I got my first pick-up on Ladbroke Road in Notting Hill, W11. This is an area of London which epitomises the phenomenon known as ‘gentrification’, whereby run-down urban areas are transformed by the arrival of affluent residents en masse. Nearby Portland Road has gone from being a slum where as recently as the sixties properties were sold for £10,000, to one of the most desirable places in London where properties sell for millions. I was already familiar with the area, having been drinking several times at the Earl of Lonsdale pub nearby, a peculiarly old-fashioned place which might have appeared in one of Patrick Hamilton’s pub novels of the 1930s.

…

.: These Poor Hands 23, 149, 190 courier firms 211, 215, 217, 223, 236, 244–7, 250, 256, 257 Cwm, Wales 147, 148, 187, 190, 195, 196, 197 Cwmbran, Wales 143 Daily Express 124–5 Daily Mail 66, 134, 188 Dan (bicycle courier) 248, 249 Dangerfield, George 72 Davies, Idris 148–9 Gwalia Deserta (Wasteland of Wales) 148 ‘The Angry Summer’ 174 debt 62, 69, 146, 151, 153 Deliveroo 215, 217, 223, 250, 256, 257 democratic socialists 192 Department for Work and Pensions 133 Dickens, Charles 29, 205, 210, 249; Hard Times 138–9 Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) 88–90, 109–10, 214 Dorothy (housemate of JB) 203, 204–5 DriveNow 217 Dropit 217 Eastern Europe, migrant workers from 11, 13, 15, 21, 24, 26–7, 30, 32, 33, 34, 45, 57, 61–2, 75, 114–16, 128–9, 154, 203–4, 260–1 see also under individual nation name Ebbw Vale, Wales 147, 149, 154; legacy of de-industrialisation in 187–200 Elborough, Travis 93 emergency housing 96 employment agencies 1, 16, 19, 20, 23, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 56, 65–6, 70, 72, 73, 82, 86, 127, 130, 158, 189, 194 see also under individual agency name Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) 248 employment contracts/classification: Amazon 19–20, 53, 58 care sector 87–8, 107–8, 116 Uber 214–15, 222, 229–35, 243, 245, 250–2, 257 zero-hours see zero-hours contracts employment tribunals 38, 229–30, 243–4 English seaside, debauchery and 92–3 Enterprise Rent-A-Car 214 ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) programmes 115–16 European Economic Community (EEC) 195 European Referendum (2016) 61, 195–6 Evening Standard 208, 241 Express & Star 59–60 Fabian Society 109 Farrar, James 229–31, 232, 233, 234, 236, 238, 240, 241–2, 250, 254, 255–6 Fellows of the Academies of Management 17 Fernie, Sue 182 financial crisis (2008) 1, 2, 45, 125, 195, 209 Flash (former miner) 165–8, 170, 171–2, 174, 175, 176–8, 179, 188, 196 Fleet News 246 Foot, Michael 149 football 56, 58, 92, 94, 97, 98, 126, 135, 169 fruit picking 61 FTSE 123, 262 Gag Mag 122 Gallagher, Patrick 246 Gary (homeless man, Blackpool) 96–104, 105 Gaz (Gag Mag seller, Blackpool) 122 GDP 146 General Election (2015) 109 General Strike (1926) 148, 149, 173 gentrification 219 Geoff (former miner) 189, 190, 191, 193 ‘gig’ economy 2, 208–10, 217–18, 232, 236, 242, 243–4, 248, 249–50, 252, 257 see also Uber Gissing, George: New Grub Street 64 GMB union 36 grammar schools 261 Guardian 5, 235 Hamstead Colliery, Great Barr 169 Hazel (home carer) 110–11, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119 Heller, Joseph: Catch-22 235–6 Hemel Hempstead 54, 70 Henley, William Ernest: ‘England, My England’ vii Hoggart, Richard: The Uses of Literacy 45 home care worker (domiciliary care worker): Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks 88–90, 109–10 employment contracts 87–8, 107–8, 116, 118, 120 length of home care visits 108–9, 110 local authority budget cuts and 107–10 MAR (Medication Administration Record) sheets 114, 115 migrant workers as 114–16 negligent 86–7 privatisation of social care and 106–8, 109 recruitment 82–4 ‘shadowing’ process 88, 109–10 societal view of 106 staffing crisis 85–6, 119 suicide rate among 100 typical day/workload 110–14, 118 unions and 88 view job as vocation 86–7 wages/pay 107–8, 117, 118–19, 159 Home Instead 119 homelessness 95–105, 138, 187, 208 hostels 95, 96, 101, 102 housing/accommodation: Amazon workers, Rugeley 20–2, 24–6 Blackpool 80, 124, 137–8 buy-to-let housing market 24 emergency housing 96 homelessness and 95, 96, 101, 102, 137–8 hostels 95, 96, 101, 102 inability to buy 62 landlords and 12, 21, 24, 39, 67, 69, 95–6, 137–8, 164, 204, 206, 258 London 203–8 migrant workers and 20–2, 24–6, 197–8 social housing 62, 206 Swansea 124, 150 housing benefit 96, 137–8, 248 immigration 26–7, 61, 115–16, 128–9, 144, 193, 197–9, 236, 259–61 see also migrant workers indeed.co.uk 83–4 independent contractors 209, 248, 251–2 Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) 230, 257 inequality 18, 73, 123, 125, 207–8, 226, 238, 262, 263 inflation 2, 122 job centres 19, 96, 133–6, 139–40, 156, 158 Joe (housemate of JB) 22 John Lewis 23, 83 Joseph Rowntree Foundation 70, 159 June (call centre employee) 181–2, 183, 184 Kalanick, Travis 215, 228, 229, 233, 235 Kelly, Kath 66 Khan, Sadiq 256 Koestler, Arthur: The God that Failed 228 Labour Party 7, 57, 59, 61, 109, 144, 149, 150, 173, 174 Ladbroke Road, Notting Hill, London 219 Lamb, Norman 109 Lancashire Evening Post 104–5 landlords, private 12, 21, 24, 39, 67, 69, 95–6, 137–8, 164, 204, 206, 258 Lea Hall Colliery, Staffordshire 31–2, 54, 55, 56, 57 Lea Hall Miners’ Social Club, Staffordshire 55, 56, 74 Len (step-grandfather of JB) 143–4 Lili (London) 203–4 living wage 1, 85, 160, 246 Lloyd George, David 172 loan sharks 151, 156 local councils 104–5, 164 London 201–57 accommodation/housing in 65, 203–8, 218 gentrification in 219 ‘gig’ economy in 208–57, 263 homelessness in 95 migrant labour in 205–6, 213, 239 wealth divide in 207–8, 238 London Congestion Charge 254 London Courier Emergency Fund (LCEF) 247 London Metropolitan Police 90 London, Jack 205 low-skilled jobs, UK economy creation of 153 Lydia (Amazon employee) 70 Macmillan, Harold 3 manufacturing jobs, disappearance of 59, 139 Marine Colliery, Cwm, Wales 190 Mayhew, Henry 4, 205 McDonald’s 52, 68, 83 Merkel, Angela 196 Metcalf, David 182 middle-class 6, 39, 51, 67, 68, 69, 72–3, 74, 75, 149, 178, 205, 258, 259, 260, 262, 263 migrant labour: Amazon use of 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22–7, 30, 32, 33, 34, 44, 45, 46, 51, 53, 57, 61–2, 65, 71–5, 258, 260–1 care home workers 114–16 ‘gig’ economy and 203–6, 213, 239 restaurant workers 154 retail sector and 128–9 Miliband, Ed 109 mining see coal mining Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) 173 Miners’ Strike (1984–5) 3, 174–7 minimum wage 1, 7, 55, 62, 84, 107, 108, 118, 135, 155, 159, 173, 189–90, 209, 212, 235, 236, 245, 250, 262 Morecambe, Lancashire 137–8 Morgan family 156–8 Morgan, Huw: How Green Was My Valley 147 Moyer-Lee, Jason 257 National Coal Board (NCB) 54, 170, 171 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) 108 National Union of Miners (NUM) 174, 176 New York Times 222 NHS (National Health Service) 106, 108, 247 Nirmal (Amazon employee) 45–6, 51 Norbert (Amazon employee) 71–5 nostalgia 3, 60, 93–4, 216 Nottingham 2, 151–2 objectivism 228 oil crisis (1973) 122–3 Oliver, Jamie 154 Orwell, George 56, 169 Palmer, William 29 pay see wages and under individual job title and employer name payday loans 156 PayPal 216 Pimlico Plumbers 251–2 platform capitalism 215 PMP Recruitment 19, 189–90 Poland, migrant workers from 128–9, 130, 135, 197–8 ‘poor, the’ 145 Port Talbot, Wales 166, 176, 190, 196 ‘post-truth’ discourse 199 ‘post-work’ world 165 poverty: Blackpool and 132, 137 class and 4 darkness and 96 diet/weight and 137 ease of slipping into 5 Eastern Europe and 26 monthly salary and 156 as a moral failing 188–9 press treatment of 66–7 time and 67 working poor living in 194 Preston, Lancashire 100, 105, 138–9 private school system 123 progressive thought 262 Public Accounts Committee (PAC) 107 Putin, Vladimir 71 Rand, Ayn 228–9, 235, 236; The Fountainhead 228, 229 recession (2008) 1, 45, 104, 121, 125, 156 ‘regeneration’ 55, 60–1, 146 rent-to-own 157–8 retirement, working in 58–9 Reve, Gerard: The Evenings 160 Robin (Cwm) 196, 197 Rochelle (home care worker) 117–19 Romania, migrant workers from 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22–7, 32, 44, 46, 51, 53, 61, 65, 71–5, 203, 206, 258 Ron (former miner) 170, 195 Royal London 59 Royal London pub, Wolverhampton 71 Royal Mail 151 Rugeley, Staffordshire 28–35 Amazon distribution centre in 11–76, 79, 86, 119, 127, 128, 159, 258 decline of coal mining industry in 31–2, 54–6, 57, 169 disappearance of manufacturing jobs from 54–63 high street 28–35 immigration and 30–4, 193–4 Tesco and 58–9, 62–3 Scargill, Arthur 175 scientific management theories 17 Scotland Yard 90 self-employment: ’gig’ economy and 214–15, 222, 229–30, 234, 243–4, 245, 246, 249, 250–1 increase in numbers of workers 2, 209 ‘independent contractors’ and 209, 248, 251–2 Selwyn (former miner) 175, 178, 179, 263–4 Senghenydd, Glamorgan pit explosion (1913) 169–70 Shelter 104 Shirebrook Colliery, Derbyshire 55 Shu, William 250 Silicon Valley, California 210, 232 Sillitoe, Alan: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 2, 3, 94 Sky Sports News 126 social democracy 3, 263 social housing 62, 206 socialism 7, 56, 131, 144, 148, 149, 173 social mobility 58, 199, 261 South Wales Miners’ Museum, Afan Argoed 166, 196 South Wales Valleys 141–200 accommodation in 150, 197 Amazon in 145–6 beauty of 148 call centre jobs in 153–64, 180–6 coal industry and 143–4, 147–9, 165–79, 180, 188, 189, 190–1, 193, 195, 196 immigration and 197–9 JB’s family history and 143–4 legacy of de-industrialisation in 187–200 nostalgia and 147 radical history of 149–50 see also under individual place name ‘spice’ 95 Sports Direct 55 squatting 96, 99 steel industry 176, 180, 188, 189, 190, 196–7 Steven (housemate of JB) 124, 126, 127–31 Stoke-on-Trent 58–9 suicide 99–100 Sunday Times 175 ‘Best Companies to Work For’ 154 Rich List 125 Swansea, Wales 145–6, 150–2, 154–64, 176, 178, 197, 205 Tata Steel 190 tax 65, 69, 70, 118, 146, 158, 159, 163, 164, 212, 229, 244, 246, 248, 251, 255 Taylor, Frederick W.: The Principles of Scientific Management 17 Tesco 35, 57, 58–9, 62–3 Thatcher, Margaret 122, 123, 146, 174–5, 193, 207, 263–4 Thorn Automation 57 Thorn EMI 59 trade unions: Amazon and 36 B&M and 130, 131 call centres and 160, 181, 184–5, 186 care sector and 88 coal industry decline and 55–6, 173, 174, 263–4 decline of 2, 3, 35 ‘gig’ economy and 230, 257, 261 objectivism and 228 oil crisis (1973) and 122 Thatcher and 123, 174, 193, 263–4 Wales and 144, 149 see also under individual union name Trades Union Congress (TUC) 173 transgender people 40–1 Transline Group 19, 20, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 65–6, 86 Transport for London (TFL) 211, 212–13, 214, 233, 254, 256 Tredegar Workmen’s Medical Aid Society 247 Trefil, Wales 149 Trump, Donald 7 Uber 207, 211–57 ‘account status’ 221 clocking in at 218 corporation tax and 229 customers 221, 222, 226–7, 237–41, 244, 257 driver costs/expenses 214, 217, 233, 241, 246, 253–5 driver employment classification/contract 214–15, 222, 229–35, 243, 245, 250–2, 257 driver hours 221, 226, 230, 232, 233, 236, 246, 253, 255 driver numbers 211–13, 233–5 driver wages/pay 212, 218, 221, 229–30, 235, 236, 237, 240, 241, 244, 246, 252–5 employment tribunal against (2016) 229–34 flexibility of working for 213–14, 218, 230–3, 248, 250–1 James Farrar and see Farrar, James migrant labour and 213, 236 ‘Onboarding’ class 224–5, 238, 241, 256 opposition to 215–17 philosophy of 228–9, 235, 236 psychological inducements for drivers 222–3 rating system 225–7, 232, 238, 239, 243, 253 rejecting/accepting jobs 221–2, 224–5 ride process 219–21 surge pricing 237, 238, 253 TFL and 211, 212–13, 214, 233, 254, 256 Travis Kalanick and see Kalanick, Travis UberEATS 256 UberPOOL 225, 240–2, 253, 255–6 UberX 212, 225, 240, 241, 255 VAT and 229 vehicle requirements 214 unemployment 2, 32, 36, 62, 121–3, 132, 138, 148, 157, 172, 178, 179, 189–95, 199, 218 Unison 88, 108 Unite 55, 160 United Private Hire Drivers 230, 257 university education 3, 6, 61, 62, 123, 150–1, 152, 153–4 USDAW 130–1 Vettesse, Tony 138 Vicky (care sector supervisor) 86, 87 Wade, Alan 121, 123–4 wages: Amazon 18, 19, 37–9, 42–3, 65–6, 68, 69, 70, 159 call centre 155–6, 158–60, 164, 180 care sector 107–8, 117, 118–19, 159 living wage 1, 85, 160, 246 minimum wage 1, 7, 55, 62, 84, 107, 108, 118, 135, 155, 159, 173, 189–90, 209, 212, 235, 236, 245, 250, 262 Uber 212, 218, 221, 229–30, 235, 236, 237, 240, 241, 244, 246, 252–5 wage stagnation 2 see also under individual employer, job and sector name Wealth and Assets Survey 207–8 wealth inequality 18, 73, 123, 125, 207–8, 238 Wells, H.

…

.: These Poor Hands 23, 149, 190 courier firms 211, 215, 217, 223, 236, 244–7, 250, 256, 257 Cwm, Wales 147, 148, 187, 190, 195, 196, 197 Cwmbran, Wales 143 Daily Express 124–5 Daily Mail 66, 134, 188 Dan (bicycle courier) 248, 249 Dangerfield, George 72 Davies, Idris 148–9 Gwalia Deserta (Wasteland of Wales) 148 ‘The Angry Summer’ 174 debt 62, 69, 146, 151, 153 Deliveroo 215, 217, 223, 250, 256, 257 democratic socialists 192 Department for Work and Pensions 133 Dickens, Charles 29, 205, 210, 249; Hard Times 138–9 Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) 88–90, 109–10, 214 Dorothy (housemate of JB) 203, 204–5 DriveNow 217 Dropit 217 Eastern Europe, migrant workers from 11, 13, 15, 21, 24, 26–7, 30, 32, 33, 34, 45, 57, 61–2, 75, 114–16, 128–9, 154, 203–4, 260–1 see also under individual nation name Ebbw Vale, Wales 147, 149, 154; legacy of de-industrialisation in 187–200 Elborough, Travis 93 emergency housing 96 employment agencies 1, 16, 19, 20, 23, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 56, 65–6, 70, 72, 73, 82, 86, 127, 130, 158, 189, 194 see also under individual agency name Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) 248 employment contracts/classification: Amazon 19–20, 53, 58 care sector 87–8, 107–8, 116 Uber 214–15, 222, 229–35, 243, 245, 250–2, 257 zero-hours see zero-hours contracts employment tribunals 38, 229–30, 243–4 English seaside, debauchery and 92–3 Enterprise Rent-A-Car 214 ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) programmes 115–16 European Economic Community (EEC) 195 European Referendum (2016) 61, 195–6 Evening Standard 208, 241 Express & Star 59–60 Fabian Society 109 Farrar, James 229–31, 232, 233, 234, 236, 238, 240, 241–2, 250, 254, 255–6 Fellows of the Academies of Management 17 Fernie, Sue 182 financial crisis (2008) 1, 2, 45, 125, 195, 209 Flash (former miner) 165–8, 170, 171–2, 174, 175, 176–8, 179, 188, 196 Fleet News 246 Foot, Michael 149 football 56, 58, 92, 94, 97, 98, 126, 135, 169 fruit picking 61 FTSE 123, 262 Gag Mag 122 Gallagher, Patrick 246 Gary (homeless man, Blackpool) 96–104, 105 Gaz (Gag Mag seller, Blackpool) 122 GDP 146 General Election (2015) 109 General Strike (1926) 148, 149, 173 gentrification 219 Geoff (former miner) 189, 190, 191, 193 ‘gig’ economy 2, 208–10, 217–18, 232, 236, 242, 243–4, 248, 249–50, 252, 257 see also Uber Gissing, George: New Grub Street 64 GMB union 36 grammar schools 261 Guardian 5, 235 Hamstead Colliery, Great Barr 169 Hazel (home carer) 110–11, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119 Heller, Joseph: Catch-22 235–6 Hemel Hempstead 54, 70 Henley, William Ernest: ‘England, My England’ vii Hoggart, Richard: The Uses of Literacy 45 home care worker (domiciliary care worker): Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks 88–90, 109–10 employment contracts 87–8, 107–8, 116, 118, 120 length of home care visits 108–9, 110 local authority budget cuts and 107–10 MAR (Medication Administration Record) sheets 114, 115 migrant workers as 114–16 negligent 86–7 privatisation of social care and 106–8, 109 recruitment 82–4 ‘shadowing’ process 88, 109–10 societal view of 106 staffing crisis 85–6, 119 suicide rate among 100 typical day/workload 110–14, 118 unions and 88 view job as vocation 86–7 wages/pay 107–8, 117, 118–19, 159 Home Instead 119 homelessness 95–105, 138, 187, 208 hostels 95, 96, 101, 102 housing/accommodation: Amazon workers, Rugeley 20–2, 24–6 Blackpool 80, 124, 137–8 buy-to-let housing market 24 emergency housing 96 homelessness and 95, 96, 101, 102, 137–8 hostels 95, 96, 101, 102 inability to buy 62 landlords and 12, 21, 24, 39, 67, 69, 95–6, 137–8, 164, 204, 206, 258 London 203–8 migrant workers and 20–2, 24–6, 197–8 social housing 62, 206 Swansea 124, 150 housing benefit 96, 137–8, 248 immigration 26–7, 61, 115–16, 128–9, 144, 193, 197–9, 236, 259–61 see also migrant workers indeed.co.uk 83–4 independent contractors 209, 248, 251–2 Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) 230, 257 inequality 18, 73, 123, 125, 207–8, 226, 238, 262, 263 inflation 2, 122 job centres 19, 96, 133–6, 139–40, 156, 158 Joe (housemate of JB) 22 John Lewis 23, 83 Joseph Rowntree Foundation 70, 159 June (call centre employee) 181–2, 183, 184 Kalanick, Travis 215, 228, 229, 233, 235 Kelly, Kath 66 Khan, Sadiq 256 Koestler, Arthur: The God that Failed 228 Labour Party 7, 57, 59, 61, 109, 144, 149, 150, 173, 174 Ladbroke Road, Notting Hill, London 219 Lamb, Norman 109 Lancashire Evening Post 104–5 landlords, private 12, 21, 24, 39, 67, 69, 95–6, 137–8, 164, 204, 206, 258 Lea Hall Colliery, Staffordshire 31–2, 54, 55, 56, 57 Lea Hall Miners’ Social Club, Staffordshire 55, 56, 74 Len (step-grandfather of JB) 143–4 Lili (London) 203–4 living wage 1, 85, 160, 246 Lloyd George, David 172 loan sharks 151, 156 local councils 104–5, 164 London 201–57 accommodation/housing in 65, 203–8, 218 gentrification in 219 ‘gig’ economy in 208–57, 263 homelessness in 95 migrant labour in 205–6, 213, 239 wealth divide in 207–8, 238 London Congestion Charge 254 London Courier Emergency Fund (LCEF) 247 London Metropolitan Police 90 London, Jack 205 low-skilled jobs, UK economy creation of 153 Lydia (Amazon employee) 70 Macmillan, Harold 3 manufacturing jobs, disappearance of 59, 139 Marine Colliery, Cwm, Wales 190 Mayhew, Henry 4, 205 McDonald’s 52, 68, 83 Merkel, Angela 196 Metcalf, David 182 middle-class 6, 39, 51, 67, 68, 69, 72–3, 74, 75, 149, 178, 205, 258, 259, 260, 262, 263 migrant labour: Amazon use of 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22–7, 30, 32, 33, 34, 44, 45, 46, 51, 53, 57, 61–2, 65, 71–5, 258, 260–1 care home workers 114–16 ‘gig’ economy and 203–6, 213, 239 restaurant workers 154 retail sector and 128–9 Miliband, Ed 109 mining see coal mining Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) 173 Miners’ Strike (1984–5) 3, 174–7 minimum wage 1, 7, 55, 62, 84, 107, 108, 118, 135, 155, 159, 173, 189–90, 209, 212, 235, 236, 245, 250, 262 Morecambe, Lancashire 137–8 Morgan family 156–8 Morgan, Huw: How Green Was My Valley 147 Moyer-Lee, Jason 257 National Coal Board (NCB) 54, 170, 171 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) 108 National Union of Miners (NUM) 174, 176 New York Times 222 NHS (National Health Service) 106, 108, 247 Nirmal (Amazon employee) 45–6, 51 Norbert (Amazon employee) 71–5 nostalgia 3, 60, 93–4, 216 Nottingham 2, 151–2 objectivism 228 oil crisis (1973) 122–3 Oliver, Jamie 154 Orwell, George 56, 169 Palmer, William 29 pay see wages and under individual job title and employer name payday loans 156 PayPal 216 Pimlico Plumbers 251–2 platform capitalism 215 PMP Recruitment 19, 189–90 Poland, migrant workers from 128–9, 130, 135, 197–8 ‘poor, the’ 145 Port Talbot, Wales 166, 176, 190, 196 ‘post-truth’ discourse 199 ‘post-work’ world 165 poverty: Blackpool and 132, 137 class and 4 darkness and 96 diet/weight and 137 ease of slipping into 5 Eastern Europe and 26 monthly salary and 156 as a moral failing 188–9 press treatment of 66–7 time and 67 working poor living in 194 Preston, Lancashire 100, 105, 138–9 private school system 123 progressive thought 262 Public Accounts Committee (PAC) 107 Putin, Vladimir 71 Rand, Ayn 228–9, 235, 236; The Fountainhead 228, 229 recession (2008) 1, 45, 104, 121, 125, 156 ‘regeneration’ 55, 60–1, 146 rent-to-own 157–8 retirement, working in 58–9 Reve, Gerard: The Evenings 160 Robin (Cwm) 196, 197 Rochelle (home care worker) 117–19 Romania, migrant workers from 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22–7, 32, 44, 46, 51, 53, 61, 65, 71–5, 203, 206, 258 Ron (former miner) 170, 195 Royal London 59 Royal London pub, Wolverhampton 71 Royal Mail 151 Rugeley, Staffordshire 28–35 Amazon distribution centre in 11–76, 79, 86, 119, 127, 128, 159, 258 decline of coal mining industry in 31–2, 54–6, 57, 169 disappearance of manufacturing jobs from 54–63 high street 28–35 immigration and 30–4, 193–4 Tesco and 58–9, 62–3 Scargill, Arthur 175 scientific management theories 17 Scotland Yard 90 self-employment: ’gig’ economy and 214–15, 222, 229–30, 234, 243–4, 245, 246, 249, 250–1 increase in numbers of workers 2, 209 ‘independent contractors’ and 209, 248, 251–2 Selwyn (former miner) 175, 178, 179, 263–4 Senghenydd, Glamorgan pit explosion (1913) 169–70 Shelter 104 Shirebrook Colliery, Derbyshire 55 Shu, William 250 Silicon Valley, California 210, 232 Sillitoe, Alan: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 2, 3, 94 Sky Sports News 126 social democracy 3, 263 social housing 62, 206 socialism 7, 56, 131, 144, 148, 149, 173 social mobility 58, 199, 261 South Wales Miners’ Museum, Afan Argoed 166, 196 South Wales Valleys 141–200 accommodation in 150, 197 Amazon in 145–6 beauty of 148 call centre jobs in 153–64, 180–6 coal industry and 143–4, 147–9, 165–79, 180, 188, 189, 190–1, 193, 195, 196 immigration and 197–9 JB’s family history and 143–4 legacy of de-industrialisation in 187–200 nostalgia and 147 radical history of 149–50 see also under individual place name ‘spice’ 95 Sports Direct 55 squatting 96, 99 steel industry 176, 180, 188, 189, 190, 196–7 Steven (housemate of JB) 124, 126, 127–31 Stoke-on-Trent 58–9 suicide 99–100 Sunday Times 175 ‘Best Companies to Work For’ 154 Rich List 125 Swansea, Wales 145–6, 150–2, 154–64, 176, 178, 197, 205 Tata Steel 190 tax 65, 69, 70, 118, 146, 158, 159, 163, 164, 212, 229, 244, 246, 248, 251, 255 Taylor, Frederick W.: The Principles of Scientific Management 17 Tesco 35, 57, 58–9, 62–3 Thatcher, Margaret 122, 123, 146, 174–5, 193, 207, 263–4 Thorn Automation 57 Thorn EMI 59 trade unions: Amazon and 36 B&M and 130, 131 call centres and 160, 181, 184–5, 186 care sector and 88 coal industry decline and 55–6, 173, 174, 263–4 decline of 2, 3, 35 ‘gig’ economy and 230, 257, 261 objectivism and 228 oil crisis (1973) and 122 Thatcher and 123, 174, 193, 263–4 Wales and 144, 149 see also under individual union name Trades Union Congress (TUC) 173 transgender people 40–1 Transline Group 19, 20, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 65–6, 86 Transport for London (TFL) 211, 212–13, 214, 233, 254, 256 Tredegar Workmen’s Medical Aid Society 247 Trefil, Wales 149 Trump, Donald 7 Uber 207, 211–57 ‘account status’ 221 clocking in at 218 corporation tax and 229 customers 221, 222, 226–7, 237–41, 244, 257 driver costs/expenses 214, 217, 233, 241, 246, 253–5 driver employment classification/contract 214–15, 222, 229–35, 243, 245, 250–2, 257 driver hours 221, 226, 230, 232, 233, 236, 246, 253, 255 driver numbers 211–13, 233–5 driver wages/pay 212, 218, 221, 229–30, 235, 236, 237, 240, 241, 244, 246, 252–5 employment tribunal against (2016) 229–34 flexibility of working for 213–14, 218, 230–3, 248, 250–1 James Farrar and see Farrar, James migrant labour and 213, 236 ‘Onboarding’ class 224–5, 238, 241, 256 opposition to 215–17 philosophy of 228–9, 235, 236 psychological inducements for drivers 222–3 rating system 225–7, 232, 238, 239, 243, 253 rejecting/accepting jobs 221–2, 224–5 ride process 219–21 surge pricing 237, 238, 253 TFL and 211, 212–13, 214, 233, 254, 256 Travis Kalanick and see Kalanick, Travis UberEATS 256 UberPOOL 225, 240–2, 253, 255–6 UberX 212, 225, 240, 241, 255 VAT and 229 vehicle requirements 214 unemployment 2, 32, 36, 62, 121–3, 132, 138, 148, 157, 172, 178, 179, 189–95, 199, 218 Unison 88, 108 Unite 55, 160 United Private Hire Drivers 230, 257 university education 3, 6, 61, 62, 123, 150–1, 152, 153–4 USDAW 130–1 Vettesse, Tony 138 Vicky (care sector supervisor) 86, 87 Wade, Alan 121, 123–4 wages: Amazon 18, 19, 37–9, 42–3, 65–6, 68, 69, 70, 159 call centre 155–6, 158–60, 164, 180 care sector 107–8, 117, 118–19, 159 living wage 1, 85, 160, 246 minimum wage 1, 7, 55, 62, 84, 107, 108, 118, 135, 155, 159, 173, 189–90, 209, 212, 235, 236, 245, 250, 262 Uber 212, 218, 221, 229–30, 235, 236, 237, 240, 241, 244, 246, 252–5 wage stagnation 2 see also under individual employer, job and sector name Wealth and Assets Survey 207–8 wealth inequality 18, 73, 123, 125, 207–8, 238 Wells, H.

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik Deboer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Flynn Effect, full employment, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, income inequality, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Own Your Own Home, phenotype, positional goods, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Florida, school choice, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, trade route, twin studies, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

As the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat put it, elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class … in the modern meritocratic culture, … unacknowledged mechanisms preserve privilege, reward the inside game, and ensure that the advantages enjoyed in one generation can be passed safely onward to the next.10 So contemporary progressive college graduates rail against gentrification but increasingly live in neighborhoods the poor can’t afford; decry social conservatism but marry in high rates, divorce less frequently than the norm, and rear children in very traditional ways; and speak out about inequality while in their busy go-getting and relentless pursuit of greater achievement they leave the lower classes further and further behind.

…

See zero-sum game gaps achievement and performance gaps gender gaps Obama on education gaps racial achievement gaps wage gaps Gates, Bill Gattaca (film) gender achievement gap gender essentialism gender wage gap genetic assortative mating genetics and achievement gaps and Flynn effect Genome-Wide Association Study and parenting and pseudoscientific racism Three Laws of Behavioral Genetics twin and adoption studies and Wilson effect See also behavioral genetics Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) Gentleman’s C gentrification genuine socialism gifted student programs globalization and collegiate arms race and knowledge economy and neoliberalism Goldin, Claudia “good life,” the Gottfredson, Linda GPA, high school graduation rates college high school and loosening of standards and moral choice and selection bias and special-needs students of women Great Recession Great Society liberals Green, Thomas Hill Greene, Jay P.

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Hacker, Andrew The Math Myth Harden, Kathryn Paige Harlem Children’s Zone Harrington, Michael Harris, Judith Rich The Nurture Assumption Harvard University Hayes, Chris Twilight of the Elites Head Start health insurance Medicare for All single-payer health insurance helicopter parenting Heritage Foundation high schools elite high schools and employment GPA graduation rates high school under socialism Hunter College High School (New York) San Diego Metropolitan Career and Technical High School standardized tests as screening mechanism and winning in contemporary capitalist society housing gentrification socialized housing zoning humanities Hunter College High School (New York) Hurricane Katrina In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (Degler) ignorance, veil of definition of and meritocracy and morality immigrants and immigration and alt-right “immigrant advantage” income inequality inconspicuous consumption influencers Instagram intelligence and IQ and behavioral genetics and Cult of Smart heritability of intelligence as polygenic trait myth of equal inherent ability and nature-nurture debate and neoliberal capitalism new socialist vision of and “race realism” SNPs and heritability of intelligence and Wilson effect See also talent international students iPads IQ.

Frommer's Irreverent Guide to San Francisco by Matthew Richard Poole

Bay Area Rapid Transit, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, game design, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, old-boy network, pez dispenser, San Francisco homelessness, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Torches of Freedom, upwardly mobile

Grab a bag of the addictively crisp and thick fried potatoes—perhaps with chipotle rémoulade or balsamic mayo—and wash it down with Belgian ale. 56 DINING The “Valencia corridor”... Depending on who you talk to, the recent infusion of upscale restaurants on Valencia Street is either the best thing that has happened to the food scene in years or one more nail in the gentrification coffin that is burying San Francisco’s funky neighborhood culture alive. Either way, the area’s newest sleek, chic eateries are a wet dream for interior designers and food critics alike. Take BART or a cab to 16th Street and walk up Valencia to 24th, pop into alleys and side streets, and stop wherever the notion strikes you.

…

It’s tough to go wrong in this eight-block stretch, from an authentic Spanish-Basque tapas feast at Ramblas Tapas Bar to an antidotal bite of Japanese fast-food at We Be Sushi. Ramblas is just one stop on the neighborhood’s fantastic tapas tour (see “Tantalizing tapas,” below), but it was voted best in the Bay Area by the Bay Guardian. For the record, the building that houses Ramblas is a perfect example of the gentrification of the Mission District—it was formerly an appliance repair shop. Firecracker is still a hot spot for northern Chinese cuisine (see “Some like it hot,” later in the chapter). Tantalizing tapas... Cities everywhere have gone a bit mad for those little Spanish tidbits that are more than an appetizer but less than a main dish.

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Another enormous party warehouse is 1015 Folsom—three levels, a full-color laser system, and a gigantic dance floor make for an extensive variety of dancing venues, complete with a 20- and 30-something gyrating mass who live for the DJs’ pounding house, disco, and acid-jazz music. Each night is a different club that attracts its own crowd, ranging from yuppie to hip-hop. Or cab out to 30th and Mission streets—beyond the reach of the gentrification district—and squeeze onto the dance floor at Club Malibu, where the largely Hispanic crowd grooves to terrific live salsa bands and DJs spinning Latin rhythms. Cool cocktail lounges... The lounge scene in the Mission District has made it one of the hippest neighborhoods in America, according to the Utne Reader.

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

Look around, this is clearly a happy, vibrant, and safe place, that’s incredibly well integrated with the local community.” In many ways however, it might actually be community integration that poses the biggest threat to the PRSC. Stokes Croft has always been a controversial street anyway—a vein of bohemian gentrification that runs through St Paul’s, an area that has traditionally been dominated by South Asian and West Indian families. It’s been a conflict for years, but the PRSC seems to be making the situation worse. From talking to just a handful of people at random, it was clear there were strong tensions in the neighbourhood.

…

In some ways it’s great—I separate out my creative work here in the studio, where I’ve got no internet, from my admin and shipping work, which I do when I go home on my wired connection. But it means I can be slow to deal with customers’ inquiries, which has led to some problems.” I put all this to Manaan—is there not a danger that the Croft is actually just becoming another form of gentrification, foisting itself upon unwilling surrounding communities? “I don’t think so,” he says. “We try and work very hard with local communities, and we’re always checking and monitoring exactly where the perimeter is, and finding ways to make it tighter and more accurate. This is an experiment, we freely admit that—it’s not perfect.

…

At least for a while, before the tides turned again and it became the wall of a prison, a tomb. It hadn’t been called the 5102 when they built it, it was Avon House—the main offices for now-long-defunct regional authorities. It had sat derelict for years before being reborn as city-center apartments, part of that first wave of turn-of-the-century artisan gentrification that swept along Stokes Croft like floodwater, staining the buildings with graffiti and coffee bars as it receded. And then, later, as Stokes Croft had grown beyond just being a street and had become a place, for Anika the 5102 had become not just a symbol, but home. She honestly hadn’t been sure, as she’d emerged from the shadows of the Bearpit, that it would even still be there.

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Croix, “Brazil Strives for Economic Equality,” Rio Times, 7 February 2012. http://riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/rio-business/brazil-strives-for-economic-equality 230 Bill Worley, “Brazil Saw More Violent Deaths Than in Civil-War-Torn Syria, Report Says,” Independent, 29 October 2016. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/brazil-deaths-violent-crime-syria-police-brutality-report-brazilian-forum-for-public-security-a7386296.html 231 Eduardo Marques interview with Darrell Bricker. 232 Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 233 “Brazil Slum Dwellers Shun Home Ownership, Fearing Gentrification,” Reuters, 3 February 2017. http://www.voanews.com/a/rio-slum-favela-home-ownership-gentrification/3705588.html 234 Interview with Darrell Bricker, conducted on a confidential basis. See also: Dom Phillips, “How Directions on the Waze App Led to Death in Brazil’s Favelas,” Washington Post, 5 October 2015. 235 Ipsos is one of the private sector funders of the drop-in center. 236 Leticia J.

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It confirms a person’s citizenship, gets them an ID, and makes it possible to participate in the formal economy and receive the limited government services that exist in Brazil.232 The Brazilian government, following the recommendations of the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, has in some cases granted property rights to favela dwellers, who make up about 20 percent of the urban population. However, critics contend that this simply leads to gentrification as developers purchase and redevelop the properties, pushing the poor to the extreme edges of the city, making it harder for them to get to work or access services.233 One thing Brazilians will tell you about favelas without hesitation is that they are dangerous places. As one local noted, “You need to watch your GPS when you’re driving in São Paulo because sometimes it will pick a route that goes through a favela.

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

This may be good news for property owners and city coffers, but it is a disaster for renters. For example, a new light-rail line through Seattle’s Rainier Valley has attracted lots of new investment—but it has also begun to squeeze out people of color. New York City’s celebrated High Line Park has caused lightning-fast gentrification: the cost of residential property within a five-minute walk of the park more than doubled during the eight years straddling the park’s opening in 2009. No wonder these measures are viewed with suspicion. In a reversal of the last century’s prevailing trend, wealthy people are increasingly colonizing inner cities while poor people and new immigrants are pushed to the suburban fringes.

…

Some of the less wealthy who still manage to occupy a place in the connected city understand the relationship between amenities and affordability. In Berlin, activists succesfully prevented the BMW Guggenheim Lab from staging three months of free events in the gritty district of Kreuzberg, knowing it would speed up gentrification in the area. In my own neighborhood in East Vancouver, the renovation of a public park in 2010 prompted organized protests by people who were worried that the spruced-up green space would cause nearby rents to rise. The fear is justified: the forces of supply and demand have helped make housing in some of the world’s most livable cities—such as Vancouver and Melbourne—the least affordable.* So any sincere effort to build the fair city must also confront the unfairnesses wrought by markets and geography.

…

The Woodward’s block’s street edges may be disappointingly bare, but inside that block is a grand public atrium through which the entire spectrum of neighbors pass and occasionally mingle, while students take shots at the basketball hoop at its heart. Woodward’s has proved so convivial that it has accelerated gentrification in the area, but it has done so while locking two hundred affordable homes in place. It’s not enough to nudge the market toward equity. Governments must step in with subsidized social housing, rent controls, initiatives for housing cooperatives, or other policy measures. I don’t want to stray beyond the scope of this book—which is about design rather than social policy—but I must acknowledge that such mixing rarely happens if governments don’t step in to smooth the way.

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

Twenty-five percent of Angelenos don’t even own cars. And the city’s future is going to be even more Hispanic and Asian American—both groups with fewer hang-ups about transit, and more prone to settle near rail stations, than white Angelenos. At the same time, the districts undergoing the most rapid gentrification, like Koreatown, Westlake, and Echo Park, are both multiethnic and transit proximate. The best way forward might involve looking backward, and from this perspective transit-oriented development is a return to the kind of place Los Angeles originally hoped to become. The city still retains traces of this ideal.

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Even Denmark’s crown prince Frederik is regularly photographed ferrying his youngest son around in a Nihola bike. “You can easily carry three children in a cargo bike, and a week’s worth of groceries,” said Lindholm, as we pulled to the curb in the back-streets of Vesterbro, a working-class district undergoing rapid gentrification. Outside a six-story apartment building, a pink fiberglass shelter in the shape of an automobile took up a parking spot that would normally have been occupied by a car. A pilot project of the municipal bike program, the shelter, which looked something like a Studebaker spun out of cotton candy, was divided into flaps that could be lowered and locked to provide secure overnight parking for four cargo bikes.

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And my favorite, spelled out in outsized fridge-magnet-like letters on a whitewashed wall: “If you were here / I’d be home now.” One day, I rented a bike and pedaled around Old City, Northern Liberties, and Fishtown, the evocatively named river wards that march north up the Delaware from Center City.* These old working-class neighborhoods have undergone a gentle gentrification in recent years. Philadelphia has long been plagued by “black eyes,” the estimated 40,000 vacant properties, most of them boarded-up row houses, that dot the city; but as architecture critic Inga Saffron has written, you can now walk for an hour in any direction from City Hall without encountering any significant blight.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

He left with a bang, yelling: “The only good DAC is a dead DAC!” Wild applause erupted. Oakland is one of the most diverse cities in the country. It’s also home to a violent, often unaccountable police department, which has been operating under federal oversight for over a decade. The police abuse has been playing out against a backdrop of increasing gentrification fueled by the area’s Internet boom and the spike in real estate prices that goes along with it. In San Francisco, neighborhoods like the Mission District, historically home to a vibrant Latino community, have turned into condos and lofts and upscale gastro pubs. Teachers, artists, older adults, and anyone else not making a six-figure salary are having a tough time making ends meet.

…

Teachers, artists, older adults, and anyone else not making a six-figure salary are having a tough time making ends meet. Oakland, which for a time was spared this fate, was now feeling the crush as well. But locals were not going down without a fight. And a lot of their anger was focused on Silicon Valley. The people gathered at city hall that night saw Oakland’s DAC as an extension of the tech-fueled gentrification that was pushing poorer longtime residents out of the city. “We’re not stupid. We know that the purpose is to monitor Muslims, black and brown communities and protesters,” said a young woman in a headscarf. “This center comes at a time when you’re trying to develop Oakland into a playground and bedroom community for San Francisco professionals.

…

Thanks to a tip from a local activist, I had gotten wind that Oakland had been in talks with Google about demoing products in what appeared to be an attempt by the company to get a part of the DAC contract. Google possibly helping Oakland spy on its residents? If true, it would be particularly damning. Many Oaklanders saw Silicon Valley companies such as Google as being the prime drivers of the skyrocketing housing prices, gentrification, and aggressive policing that was making life miserable for poor and low-income residents. Indeed, just a few weeks earlier protesters had picketed outside the local home of a wealthy Google manager who was personally involved in a nearby luxury real estate development. Google’s name never came up during the tumultuous city council meeting that night, but I did manage to get my hands on a brief email exchange between a Google “strategic partnership manager” and an Oakland official spearheading the DAC project that hinted at something in the works.3 In the weeks after the city council meeting, I attempted to clarify this relationship.

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

Examples include workers being laid off at a local factory and activists or politicians speaking out on behalf of residents of a working-class neighborhood who feel threatened by economic develop- 9781442202238.print.indb 122 2/10/11 10:46 AM Tarnished Metal Frames 123 ment, such as the construction of a Walmart supercenter (a type of retail outlet known in media and commercial parlance as “big box”). As with other forms of episodic framing, many of these media representations do not look at the larger structural issues that produce such problems, focusing primarily on the outrage of the unemployed or people displaced by gentrification. By contrast, business articles in major newspapers often refer to the working class as “organized labor,” whereas reporters on the political beat describe its members as “blue-collar workers” who live in “working-class neighborhoods.” Similarly, television shows that focus on working-class home life emphasize workers’ humble origins, lack of taste, proletarian lifestyle, and disgust with their jobs.

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The framing of stories about the use of public space and how it affects the middle class often incorporates issues of race and class. In one incident, police harassed a group of African American friends as they stood on a corner, drinking beer. Another group—white customers at a restaurant with an outdoor patio—were drinking wine, but they were not bothered. According to one analyst, middle- and upper-middle-class gentrification “can redefine some activities. . . . The actual activity is not necessarily changing—people outside drinking alcohol—but the context is different and one is proscribed and one is not.”127 It may initially appear a wide jump to shift to media framing of articles about homeless shelters, but victimization of the middle class is a recurring theme in this type of story as well.

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Low, Behind the Gates, 11. 123. Jonathan Yardley, “Book Review: Behind the Gates,” Washington Post, May 8, 2003, CO2. 124. Low, Behind the Gates, 10–11. 125. Bradford McKee, “Fortress Home: Welcome Mat Bites,” New York Times, January 22, 2004, F1. 126. McKee, “Fortress Home.” 127. Sewell Chan, “Is Gentrification Transforming the City’s Public Spaces?” New York Times, August 14, 2007, http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/is-gen trification-transforming-the-citys-public-spaces/?scp=1&sq=is%20gentrification%20 transforming%20the%20city’s%20public%20spaces&st=cse (accessed August 8, 2010). 128. Leslie Eaton, “From Middle Class to the Shelter Door: In a Trend, New Yorkers Face Poverty after Last Unemployment Check,” New York Times, November 17, 2002, A37. 129.

Who Are We—And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? by Gary Younge

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, call centre, David Brooks, equal pay for equal work, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, feminist movement, financial independence, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, Steven Levy, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey

But while the Right seems like the natural home for those who guard the notion of the never-changing identity, it can just as easily find its home among the liberal Left—the peddlers of purity and authenticity who will point to the matriot’s nurturing impulses or the rhythms of Africa that run through the black diaspora’s soul. Nor is it just the Right that is wont to frame change as undesirable per se. The Left will often approach issues such as gentrification with similarly problematic arguments. A familiar charge, particularly in poor black areas, is that wealthy white people are moving in and changing the character of the neighborhood. While this is often true, it is not, in itself, a particularly strong argument against gentrification. There is no principle one could advance as to why an area should remain black and poor. Indeed, many of the areas that are black and poor today were rich and white yesterday and may well be black and poor again.

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Taken at face value, complaints about white people moving into an area and changing its character are not essentially different in their logic from complaints about African-Americans moving into and changing an area’s character—even if the motivations for and consequences of those fears are quite different. That does not mean that gentrification is a good thing or an unimportant trend. But the issue is not whether an area looks different demographically and is changing economically but the extent to which the people who live in that area feel ownership over the changes that are taking place as opposed to being marginalized in their own communities or, worse still, forced out of them.

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, antiwork, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, emotional labour, feminist movement, gentrification, hiring and firing, immigration reform, independent contractor, informal economy, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, new economy, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, precariat, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, The Chicago School, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, women in the workforce

In fact, Marilyn Stewart, its president, officially refused to even comment.25 Change Begins, From the Outside In Two longtime community organizations in Chicago weren’t waiting for the teachers’ union to sort out their internal affairs or opinions at the end of a decade of massive disruptions in the lives of Chicago’s students, parents, and teachers. The first to take action was the Chicago Coalition of the Homeless (CCH), which attempted to thwart the charter plan, or at least stall it, by filing suit in Circuit Court in September of 2004, generating headlines as they linked the effort to privatize schools to broader gentrification and the demolition of Chicago’s public housing. Two months later, ACORN (under the leadership of Madeline Talbot, a longtime, successful community organizer in Chicago); Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE); and the Kenwood-Oakwood Community Organization (KOCO), a direct-action organization founded in 1965 by religious and community activists, started a fight-back, bringing hundreds of parents and students to a CPS board meeting to protest the plan to close all but two of their twenty-two neighborhood schools.

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By late 2007, these teachers had formed a citywide study group on the closings, inviting other teachers to join through informal activist networks.28 The Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) Forms Evolving out of the study group, whose first collective read in 2008 was Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine,29 two more important groups were developed: the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), inside of the Chicago Teachers Union, and soon after that the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), a CORE-inspired coalition created with community-based organizations to fight school closings, gentrification, and racism.30 The Shock Doctrine had just been published, and Klein was shaping an analysis about mass school closures, capitalism, and racism. According to Kristine Mayle, a middle and elementary school special education teacher and currently the CTU’s elected financial secretary, “We were going to neighborhood groups and saying, Look, we are talking about little human beings, about kids; we are teachers and you are our natural allies; we can’t do this alone.”31 With each school closing, the ranks of teachers frustrated and angered were growing.

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He was a student activist all through college, working with Students Against Sweatshops and on anti–Iraq War efforts, campaigning against the UI mascot (an Indian chief), and working for increased minority student recruitment. When he returned to the Chicago area to finish his university years, he got involved in anti-gentrification campaigns around campus, working with the Pilsen Alliance, the neighborhood group that later allied with the teachers against school closings. Potter became a history teacher and, like Sharkey, a union delegate turned serious union activist when his school (Englewood High) was threatened with a closure.

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made by Tom Wilkinson

Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, double helix, experimental subject, false memory syndrome, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Google Glasses, housing crisis, Kitchen Debate, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, megacity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, nudge theory, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, starchitect, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration

Most impressively, it promised ‘the participation of organised society . . . in all stages’, undertook to rehouse displaced citizens near their original homes, and pledged to institute zoning regulations that would maintain affordable housing and thus prevent displacement caused by gentrification. But as Osborn concludes: Despite the incredible promise of Morar Carioca in theory . . . in practice, the programme’s name has been used so far by local authorities only to undertake authoritarian and unilateral, often arbitrary, interventions in Rio’s favelas. In the historic trajectory of ‘to remove or to upgrade’, the current city government has arrived at a third contradictory path with Morar Carioca: a proclamation of upgrading but a practice that emphasises home removals, both through overt demolition and enabling of gentrification.6 Seen from a larger economic perspective, however, this policy is far from contradictory.

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It’s just a new way of capital stealing value created by people: slums are built by the poor without state oversight, during which time gangsterism and lawlessness are allowed to prevail, then once development has reached a certain pitch these settlements are ‘pacified’ or invaded by the state in preparation for a different kind of gangsterism, the real estate market. These days government attitudes to slums tend away from aided self-help and towards gentrification – slum clearance by stealth. Those who profit from Rocinha’s urbanisation will not be its current inhabitants, most of whom rent and will therefore not benefit from schemes recognising the legal rights of slum property owners, but their landlords, who live in Ipanema and Leblon. Aided self-help is no longer necessary: the poor have in most cities completely developed the peripheries, and it only remains for capitalists to confiscate the value they have created.

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016 by Stewart Lee

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, call centre, centre right, David Attenborough, Etonian, gentrification, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Livingstone, I presume, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, pre–internet, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Fry, trickle-down economics, wage slave, young professional

The political class live in a west London playground no longer sullied by the unsightly poor, who have been ousted by housing-benefit cuts and rent hikes. But where have they gone? And can the Right’s sudden and conspicuous consumption of Byron burgers be mere coincidence? Check Byron’s progress on Google Maps and you’ll see the shaped-meat retailer’s eastern push follows the line of London’s gentrification, and the enforced economic exodus of its underclass, in a microcosmic reflection of national trends towards the disappearance of the dispossessed. The crushed-beef chain’s surge into once neglected areas like Hoxton and Tower Hamlets, while welcomed by venal estate agents looking for evidence that their patch is up and coming, is bad news for indigenous people.

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Chelsea types, in their pink trousers and yellow jumpers, are coming, displacing ordinary people, even as they themselves are ousted from the verdant pasture of their own west London homelands by the property power of Russian mafia and wealthy Arab Spring escapees. New Byron branches in Manchester and Liverpool reflect similar spurts of gentrification. The rich are eating at Byron in places where the poor once ate at Chicken Cottage, a name I will appropriate for my rural retreat when I too am finally displaced from the capital. The food-press spin on the Old Etonian Tom Byng’s company is that it represents a kind of credible indie alternative to the corporate McDonald’s and Burger King chains.

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In my first few years in London, doing temp jobs in the day and open spots at comedy clubs late in the evenings, I made all sorts of odd small-hours friends that I never see now: a “techno-pagan” of Indian parentage; a man I never saw sober who could recite whole Herbert Huncke poems; a woman on acid who everyone thought must be crashing in the shared house’s sitting room at someone else’s invitation, but who it turned out no one really knew; and PJ, who ate light bulbs, and who may or may not have been Terry Scott’s cousin and Ben Dover’s stunt double. I miss those days. From 1989 to 1991 I lived in Finsbury Park, decades before it began to show signs of gentrification. I’d get home late from unpaid stand-up try-out spots, and it was hard to hold down a day job. At the end of my street, outside a hardware shop on Tollington Park, was a contraption so unusual that each night, in a state of adrenaline-driven imbalance, I would find myself staring at it in the small hours in bleak fascination.

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland by Ali Winston, Darwin Bondgraham

affirmative action, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ferguson, Missouri, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden Gate Park, mass incarceration, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Port of Oakland, power law, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra

Vazquez’s pockmarked face and pronounced scarring on the left side of his profile made him easily recognizable. Stocky, muscular, built as solid as a football running back, he was well known in the community as a crooked officer with a penchant for random violence. Vazquez had spent the 1990s patrolling East Oakland, a vast expanse of neighborhoods far from the nascent gentrification of downtown and West Oakland. His abusive behavior came to the attention of one sergeant, Ricardo Orozco, who kicked Vazquez out of his squad because, too, many of his prisoners showed signs of having been slapped, kicked, punched, and choked. Vazquez also failed to show respect for commanding officers.

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The predominantly African American area, made up of single-family homes and two-story apartment buildings, had come to be dominated by the expanding footprint of Children’s Hospital. White families, UC Berkeley graduate students, punks, and hipsters had also moved into the area in a process of gentrification fueled by speculative landlords and realtors intent on making a killing by flipping houses and charging exorbitant rents. It was 2007, the height of the real estate bubble. Gary King Jr., a twenty-year-old Berkeley native whose family had moved to the neighborhood in 2002, walked out of East Bay Liquors at the corner of MLK and Fifty-Fourth Street, holding a soda and bag of chips.

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Decentralized and guided by an anarchistic approach to politics that encouraged a multiplicity of demands, tolerance for diverse ideologies, and a thirst for direct action, Occupy spread to smaller cities and towns that were not hubs of the financial system. By fall 2011, Oakland was well into a cycle of raucous, occasionally violent “Anticut” street demonstrations organized by the anarchist collective Bay of Rage. The actions, which focused on Oakland’s gentrification, library budget cuts, and a hunger strike in the Pelican Bay supermax prison over solitary confinement, piggybacked on the 2009 anti-austerity student movement and the Oscar Grant movement. This mixture of movements against economic injustice and police brutality coalesced in front of Oakland City Hall on an overcast October afternoon.

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

assortative mating, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BRICs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, income inequality, iterative process, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Mason jar, means of production, NetJets, new economy, New Urbanism, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit maximization, public intellectual, Richard Florida, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the long tail, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Veblen good, women in the workforce

—Steven Shapin, “Paradise Sold,” New Yorker, May 15, 2006 Beyond the renovated industrial lofts of downtown Los Angeles, through the rapidly gentrifying Echo Park and the already hipsterized Silver Lake is Glassell Park. While much of East LA is going the way of Silver Lake and Los Feliz, Glassell Park is rarely mentioned in the gentrification discussion. This is partially due to the lingering gang activity, and persistent reputation for crime (whether accurate or not). The area also lacks parks, cafés, bookstores, and the other sort of amenities that the young, urban creative types seek out. Physically, it lacks the interesting architecture of downtown, the natural beauty of the West Side’s oceanfront, and the hills and bohemian art scene of the East Side.

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This rise in urban consumption is the result of an influx of elites—particularly wealthy members of the aspirational class—moving back into cities and cities, which in turn, cater to their needs and desires. To be clear, urban centers are not just nodes for the upper-income members of the aspirational class; cities are intensely desirable to all the world’s economic elite. Record-breaking apartment sales and rapid gentrification of once gritty neighborhoods are reported in newspaper headlines from New York to London to Berlin. The pushing out of dive bars and affordable housing for the influx of new condos and luxury retail is a standard trope in the twenty-first-century metropolis. In the building of this elite utopia, Western capitalist cities have become cultural and economic universes unto themselves.

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Yardley, J. (2013, May 22). Report on deadly factory collapse in Bangladesh finds widespread blame. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/world/asia/report-on-bangladesh-building-collapse-finds-widespread-blame.html. Yoon, H., & Currid-Halkett, E. (2014). Industrial gentrification in West Chelsea, New York: Who survived and who did not? Empirical evidence from discrete-time survival analysis. Urban Studies 52(1), 20–49. doi:10.1177/0042098014536785. Young, M. (2014, March 9). SOMA: The stubborn uncoolness of San Francisco style. New York Magazine. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/news/features/san-francisco-style-2014-3/.

Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The lack of affordable housing around Boston is due in no small part to the influx of biotech firms and other corporations who are drawn to, courted by, and sometimes lease land from universities like MIT. At the campus protest, it was pointed out that MIT’s lowest-paid workers are hit hardest by these programs of gentrification and displacement. They’re pushed to live farther away from campus while being denied benefits available to employees higher up on the university’s hierarchy. FIGURE 2.2  Protest on MIT campus against the university’s Schwarzman College of Computing, February 28, 2019. Universities’ contributions to displacement and gentrification are neither coincidental nor new. They continue a long history of North American universities—particularly the major ones who now facilitate AI’s rebranding—acting as “land-grabbing, land-transmogrifying, land-capitalizing machines.”51 From the University of California to MIT, the very formation of many American universities was enabled by land grants based on expropriated indigenous land.

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Since then, universities have become full-fledged real estate agents that continue to accrue lands and displace those who stand in the way. According to a group advocating for affordable housing in Massachusetts, local universities such as MIT “operate as for-profit real-estate developers that are looking to maximize profits … their profits lead to gentrification and displacement of long-term residents, especially people of color.”52 The universities’ pursuit of land, like Blackstone’s, is global. Thus Harvard, MIT’s partner in charting the “ethics and governance of AI” and the world’s richest university, owns not only hotels in the Boston area (where workers, predominantly migrant women, face abusive conditions) and vineyards in California and Washington state (where Harvard’s practices jeopardize access to water) but also timber plantations in New Zealand (Harvard’s so-called Timber Empire) and farmlands in South Africa, South America, Russia, and Ukraine.53 By one estimate, Harvard has spent about one billion dollars on farmlands.

Migrant City: A New History of London by Panikos Panayi

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Brixton riot, call centre, Charles Babbage, classic study, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, financial intermediation, gentrification, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, immigration reform, income inequality, Londongrad, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, multicultural london english, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Shamima Begum, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

Popular Music Heritage and British Bhangra Music’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, vol. 20 (2014), pp. 343–55. CHAPTER 12 1. Greater London Authority, The World in a City: An Analysis of the 2001 Census Results (London, 2005), pp. 19, 70–1. 2. Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, Gentrification of London: A Progress Report, 2001–13 (London, 2016), makes no mention of race or ethnicity, a gap which exists in all literature on London gentrification. 3. Kirsty Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution: Émigrés in London, 1789–1802 (Basingstoke, 1999). 4. Alice Bloch, The Migration and Settlement of Refugees in Britain (Basingstoke, 2002). 5. Donall MacAmlaigh, An Irish Navvy: The Diary of an Exile (originally London, 1964; Cork, 2018, reprint). 6.

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Although Bangladeshis had become the most significant ethnic group here by 2011, making up 32 per cent of the population, followed by white British (31 per cent), all minority ethnic groups made up 55 per cent of the population of the area including Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, black ethnic groups, those of mixed race and Irish.170 Although by this time gentrification had begun to occur, meaning the arrival of new populations, both white and other ethnic groups.171 By the beginning of the twenty-first century Tower Hamlets had become the London borough that comprised the third-largest percentage of ethnic minorities amongst its population, with 57.1 per cent – behind Brent (70.8) and Newham (66.2).

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They proceeded to transform, literally, the face of the capital, whose peak population size of 1939 did not return until the second decade of the twenty-first century, by which time more white flight had taken place while the areas of origin of international settlers had diversified even further. Gentrification of the inner city has not significantly changed the ethnic make-up of the capital since the end of the twentieth century, because no clear evidence has emerged to demonstrate the ethnicity and nationality of those moving into areas originally inhabited by the white working classes and then reconfigured by the post-war settlers.2 To return to the concept of success brings success, this manifests itself in two ways in terms of the demographic history of London.

Lonely Planet London City Guide by Tom Masters, Steve Fallon, Vesna Maric

Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, Crossrail, dark matter, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, double helix, East Village, Edward Jenner, financial independence, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, James Bridle, John Snow's cholera map, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, Nelson Mandela, place-making, Russell Brand, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, young professional

* * * top picks SOUTH LONDON Battersea Park Battersea Power Station Brixton Market Imperial War Museum (left) Lambeth Palace (opposite) * * * Clapham has long been the flag-bearer for South London style, with upmarket restaurants and bars lining its High Street since the 1980s. Attention has started to focus more recently on Battersea, with its magnificent park and the announced conversion of the monolithic Battersea Power Station. Kennington has some lovely streets lined with Georgian terraced houses, so it can only be a matter of time before the gentrification of ‘Little Portugal’ – its southern extension of Stockwell – begins. Lambeth can boast both the episcopal seat of the Church of England and one of London’s finest museums. Return to beginning of chapter LAMBETH The name Lambeth translates as ‘muddy landing place’, attesting to the fact that this, like nearby Waterloo, was largely marsh land and polder dams until the 18th century.

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A generation later the honeymoon period was over, as economic decline and hostility between the police and particularly the black community (who accounted for only 29% of the population of Brixton at the time) led to the riots in 1981, 1985 and 1995. These centred on Railton Rd and Coldharbour Lane. Since then the mood has been decidedly more upbeat. Soaring property prices have sent house-hunters foraging in these parts, and pockets of gentrification sit alongside the more run-down streets (see opposite). Return to beginning of chapter BATTERSEA & WANDSWORTH Against the looming shell of the Battersea Power Station, this area southwest along the Thames was a site of industry until the 1970s. Now its abandoned factories and warehouses have been replaced by luxury flats.

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The diversity of the people and the clubs is the best thing – there’s something for everyone: gay book clubs, gay jazz clubs and even gay choirs. But more importantly the gay scene (particularly the more alternative side of it) manages not to ghettoize itself too much – everyone remains welcome. …and the worst? The gentrification of traditional gay places such as Soho is sad to see, as are the high prices in some bars and the nonacceptance of women and straight people in some more mainstream gay bars and clubs. And how does the lesbian scene fit into that? It’s strange – for years lesbians kept themselves very separate from the male gay scene and then the two began to converge much more, which was a welcome breath of fresh air.

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb

Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork

But in 1992, for no obvious reason that sociologists could put their finger on, it peaked, and over the next couple of years it started to turn down. A number of hypotheses were subsequently put forward: improving economic conditions, the gentrification of inner-city neighbourhoods, lower alcohol consumption, the removal of lead from petrol. But none of them quite stacked up. When the Global Financial Crisis happened, for example, the crime rate didn’t go up. And in areas where there was little or no gentrification the rates still went down. In 2012 a team lead by Professor Jonathan Klick from The University of Pennsylvania put forward another hypothesis. What Klick’s team had noticed was that the downturn in the crime rate correlated very closely with the uptake of mobile phone usage.

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

It’s not long before the new world starts looking a lot like the old one. If financial maximization was merely making the radio boring and turning every movie into a sequel now in IMAX and 3-D, it would be almost funny. But these forces are changing more than just music and movies. They’re even changing our neighborhoods. GENTRIFICATION At the corner of Second Avenue and First Street in the Lower East Side of New York City stands a TD Bank. An advertisement hangs in the window: “My perfect Saturday would be banking on Sunday.” Inside are rows of cubicles where bankers can meet customers. But not many people come into this location.

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The values that made New York City, and the Lower East Side, what it was and sometimes still is—the autonomy and freedom it provided, the creativity it allowed, the communities people built—were pushed aside in favor of financial value. We walk by the chains and think nothing of them. They’re just part of the landscape. But they’re more than that. They’re evidence of how our values have changed. THE MALL Gentrification in cities gets headlines, but what happened and is still happening to small towns and rural communities like the one I’m from is arguably even more devastating. I’m talking, of course, about shopping centers and shopping malls. The rise of the mall, we’re told, was a perfect confluence of events.

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, crack epidemic, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, jitney, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, moral panic, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, phenotype, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

I feel it myself, for example, walking through Washington, D.C., or Brooklyn, where gentrification has blown through like a storm. And I feel it not just because of the black people swept away but because I know that “gentrification” is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy, is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years, and these new urbanites living off of that interest are, all of them, exulting in a crime. To speak the word gentrification is to immediately lie. And I know, even in my anger, even as I write this, that I am no better.

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle

augmented reality, clean water, climate anxiety, climate change refugee, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, decarbonisation, digital map, Donald Trump, energy transition, four colour theorem, gentrification, Google Earth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, longitudinal study, McMansion, off-the-grid, oil shock, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, smart cities, tail risk, Tipper Gore, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, Yom Kippur War, young professional

There are not enough houses in California—this is an incontrovertible fact, and it was true long before the Tubbs Fire ignited in October of 2017. Over the previous fifty years the state’s housing shortage had created a complex web of social and economic crises, forcing thousands of people onto the streets even as rapid gentrification tore through cities like San Francisco. There were already millions of people in the state who did not have a home or who were struggling to afford the homes they did have, and the victims of the Tubbs Fire now joined them in a desperate scramble for affordable shelter. California’s population more than doubled between 1960 and 2010, surging from fifteen million to thirty-five million and making the Golden State into the world’s fifth-largest economy.

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The transition might not always be smooth, of course: members of the Fond du Lac band of Chippewa near Duluth worry that the “climate solution [could] end up in our cultural and spiritual genocide” if people rush to the area and push out those who have lived there for generations. There is potential in any climate haven for another phenomenon that Jesse Keenan has studied: “climate gentrification,” or housing displacement that results from a place being too appealing from a climate perspective. There’s not much evidence of this happening in the north so far, but if thousands of young people decided to put down roots in Cincinnati or Buffalo, it’s a safe bet that many low-income residents would soon see significant upticks in rents and property taxes.

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Some Transplants and City Officials Think So,” WVXU, January 26, 2021. have lived there for generations: John Sutter, “As people flee climate change on the coasts, this Midwest city is trying to become a safe haven,” CNN, April 12, 2021. too appealing from a climate perspective: Mario Alejandro Ariza, “Is Climate Change Gentrification Really Happening in Miami?” New Tropic, May 17, 2017. beneath amber-tinted sludge: Nic Wirtz, and Kirk Semple, “Guatemala Rescuers Search for Scores of People Buried in Mudslide Caused by Eta,” New York Times, November 7, 2020. swept them away to their doom: Ron Brackett, “Dozens Dead as Eta Triggers Catastrophic Flooding, Landslides in Central America,” Weather Channel, November 5, 2020.

Rough Guide DIRECTIONS Dublin by Geoff Wallis

Celtic Tiger, Columbine, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine

Simple, stylish contemporary bistro just off Castle Street, 1/4/08 6:41:36 PM 165 P L A C E S The southern outskirts FINNEGAN’S offering everything from linguini with smoked chicken to Thai green seafood curry in the evening, basic dishes such as fish pie and homemade burgers for lunch, and brunch on Saturday and Sunday. handy for the DART station and tastefully smartened-up to reflect the neighbourhood’s gentrification, but offering traditional hospitality and a fine pint of Guinness. Jack O’Rourke’s Pubs and bars Finnegan’s Railway Rd, Dalkey. Dalkey’s watering-hole of choice, 03 Places Dublin 61-184.indd 165 15 Main St, Blackrock. Not just a comfortable place to admire your purchases from the adjacent market, but a purveyor of estimable Guinness and extremely good-value meals. 1/4/08 6:41:40 PM 166 The northern outskirts P L A C E S J^[dehj^[hd ekjia_hji The northern outskirts from Glasnevin across to Howth hold an astonishing diversity of attractions, some of which can easily be combined on the same excursion.

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A large force dispatched by Henry VIII dispels the rebellion, and direct rule is imposed by the appointment of Leonard Grey as Lord Deputy of Ireland. 1592 Trinity College is founded by Elizabeth I as a university for the sons of the Protestant gentry. 1649 A coalition army of Irish Catholics and Royalists is routed by Dublin’s Parliamentarian garrison at the Battle of Rathmines. 1742 Handel’s Messiah is premiered in Dublin. 1757 The Wide Streets Commission is created to encourage the city’s gentrification. The peak period of Georgian housebuilding follows and during the subsequent decades City Hall, the Four Courts and the Custom House are erected, as well as the western frontage of Trinity College. 1791 The Society of United Irishmen is founded by middleclass Protestants in Belfast, but soon attracts wider support for its demands for democratic reforms and Catholic emancipation. 12/24/07 12:35:51 PM C H R O NO L O G Y 214 1793 After England declares war on France, French aid is sought for Irish independence and a Dublin barrister, Theobald Wolfe Tone, is dispatched to Paris to seek military support. 1798 A major Irish rebellion is brutally suppressed by the English.

Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About the Great Good Places at the Heart of Our Communities by Ray Oldenburg

Celebration, Florida, gentrification, Jane Jacobs, land bank, market design, New Urbanism, place-making, Ray Oldenburg, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, The Great Good Place, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city

By failing to maintain its vacant buildings, UIC succeeded in creating an appearance of blight in the neighborhood. The city aided UIC by neglecting its garbage collection service. This enabled UIC to qualify the neighborhood for Tax Increment Financing (TIF), an urban public finance arrangement that encourages gentrification and displacement. Mayor Richard M. Daley uses TIF as his primary development tool. With TIF, the city is able to issue bonds to finance construction, which are to be paid back over the course of decades through increases in real estate taxes. When UIC decided to expand its campus into the Maxwell Street neighborhood, the city awarded it with $55 million in TIF.

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The group named itself the Maxwell Street Coalition and used the Levine Hillel Center and a community development corporation in the nearby Mexican Pilsen neighborhood for meetings and to seek funding. Many Pilsen residents feel that UIC’s encroachment in nearby Maxwell Street will accelerate gentrification (higher rents, higher taxes, and the accompanying displacement) in Pilsen as well. This fear is based on UIC’s collaboration with private developers to build luxury town houses on its border. The current UIC campus was built on top of the first Mexican immigrant neighborhood in Chicago. After they were forced out of their homes by UIC in the 1960s, many of them migrated to the nearby Pilsen neighborhood.

The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism by Kyle Chayka

Airbnb, Blue Bottle Coffee, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Mason jar, offshore financial centre, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, undersea cable, Whole Earth Catalog

I had to agree; Judd’s work never looks as good as when it’s in his own spaces and part of a total work of art. Over the decades art itself has become a commercializing force in the wider economy. Richard Florida’s Creative Class theory, circa 2002, made it common knowledge that artists are on the front lines of reviving urban spaces—a process also known as gentrification. SoHo was the classic example. Judd and so many other artists demonstrated how factory loft living could be cool, giving postindustrial space a veneer of cultural capital that later made it possible for developers. Frank Gehry’s famous Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened in 1997, a structure of arcing steel waves that became one of the largest museums in Spain, though the city was small.

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Interieur (Meyer), here cultural appropriation, here Deep Listening, here De Maria, Walter, here, here See also The New York Earth Room (De Maria) design, good, characteristics of, here Dia Art Foundation, here, here, here, here, here digital minimalism, here, here, here, here Dilworth, Bill, here Duchamp, Marcel, here, here, here, here Eames, Charles and Ray Case Study House No. 8 (1949), x, here just-rightness as design principles of, here keys to interpretation of, here Eastman, Julius author at performance of works by, here as combative outsider, here and deeper minimalism, here, here, here efforts to preserve music of, here life of, here, here messiness of compositions by, here, here offending of Cage, here pushing of Minimalism’s limits, here works by, here, here, here Elgin, Duane, here, here emptiness (absence) aggressive forms of, here and blandness, here as characteristic of ambient music, here as characteristic of minimalism, here deeper Minimalism and, here De Maria’s Earth Room as, here difficulty of describing in words, here Japanese aesthetic of, here, here, here, here appeal in current social crisis, here as co-creation of West and Japan, here, here coexistence with drama of life, here Japanese rock gardens and, here postwar influence of, here of judgment, Minimalist art and, here, here of Minimalism, difficulty of describing, here of Minimalist art, here, here, here, here, here, here of minimalist homes, as oppressive, here See also The Glass House (Johnson, 1949); Judd, Donald; mu (sunyata); silence Eno, Brian, here ephemerality, aesthetics of, here See also ikebana; mono no aware existentialism, here Finch, Julie, here, here Flavin, Dan, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Florida, Richard, here “form follows function” aesthetic, here Foster, Norman, here “Four Organs” (Reich), here 4'33" (Cage) absence of judgment demanded by, here author’s recreation of experience of, here and Buddhist mu (sunyata), here and Deep Listening, here as emancipatory space, here performance at Maverick Hall, here, here process leading to, here Francis of Assisi (saint), here, here Fried, Michael, here, here furniture music of Satie, here The Gateless Barrier (Mumon Ekai), here gentrification artists and, here of Marfa, Texas, here of SoHo, here, here, here Glass, Philip, here, here The Glass House (Johnson, 1949), here author’s visits to, here described, here, here, here, here design of, here, here elitism of, here, here as exercise in narcissism, here nighttime experience in, here oppressiveness of, here preservation of, here problems with design, here as site of cultural experimentation, here surrounding structures by Johnson, here Gregg, Richard, here, here Gropius, Walter, here Heian-period Japan, here and allure of retreat to monkish life, here beauty-based culture of, here, here Buddhism and, here, 1 84–86 competitive materialist culture of, here shadow and ambiguity in literature of, here Heidegger, Martin, here, here, here, here Hildyard, Daisy, here historical origins of minimalism asceticism, here purpose of search for, here Stoicism, here, here voluntary simplicity movement, here Husserl, Edmund, here, here IKEA, here, here, here, here ikebana and aesthetics of ephemerality, here, here Nishitani on, here iki author’s examples of, here definition of, here Kuki on, here, here, here space of reconciliation provided by, here International Style, here iPhone infrastructure supporting, here self-conscious minimalism of, here, here Japan association with minimalism, here, here and exceptionalism, here, here Lost in Translation on, here minimalism as reaction to vulnerability, here nationalism in, here, here optimization of things in, here Tokyo, described, here, here U.S. nuclear bombing of, here See also Buddhism, Zen; Heian-period Japan; Kyoto; Meiji-period Japan Japanese art and aesthetics contemplative state induced by, here influence on U.S., here, here, here shadow and ambiguity in, here, here, here, here and tokonoma, here, here see also ephemerality, aesthetics of; ikebana; mono no aware; rock gardens in Kyoto Jesus, here Jobs, Steve, here, here, here Johnson, Philip appearance of, here and Bauhaus International Style, here on inadequacy of language, here Japanese influence on, here Judd and, here keys to interpretation of, here life and career of, here, here as minimalist, here and New York office buildings, here politics of, here, here See also The Glass House (Johnson, 1949) joy, sparking of, as ownership criterion, here Judd, Donald, here on art, here, here artists admired by, here attacks on critics of Minimalist art, here background of, here on beauty, here as best-known Minimalist artist, here Buddhist influence on, here career as art critic, here, here children’s preservation of works by, here context, importance to works, here, here death of, here as designer of works, here, here dislike of Minimalist label, here family of, here 15 Untitled Works in Concrete, here, here first solo show as beginning of Minimalism, here, here furniture designed by, here, here on inadequacy of language, here Japanese influence on, here, here keys to interpretation of, here lack of meaning in work of, here last projects of, here and Minimalist evocation of technocratic authority, here 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum, here politics of, here prominence in 1960s New York, here on specificity in art, here, here Judd, Flavin, here, here, here Judd, Rainer, here, here, here, here Judd compound, Marfa, Texas, here author’s visit to, here, here, here and Bilbao effect in Marfa, here buildings purchased, here, here choice of Marfa, here cluttered minimalism of, here courtyard of, here as creation of Judd’s self, here preservation of, here reasons for move to, here, here Judd gallery/loft at 101 Spring Street, here artworks displayed in, here design of, here preservation of, here and SoHo neighborhood, here Kondo, Marie, here background of, here as brand, here as Japanese import, here and minimalism as therapy, here, here as minimalist guru, here minimalist predecessors of, here Netflix series of, here potential criticisms of, here principal commandment of, here various editions of books by, here KonMari Method, here erasure of individual differences in, here rigidity of, here as simple one-step procedure, here Kuki, Shūzō author’s admiration for, here author’s visit to grave of, here death of, here embrace of randomness, here and German National Socialism, here life and career of, here, here, here nationalism of, here, here, here philosophical concerns of, here, here, here “The Structure of Iki,” here, here, here Kyoto author’s room in, here, here, here coldness toward strangers, here described, here, here Kuki’s grave in, here Philosopher’s Walk in, here, here rock gardens in, here, here Kyoto School, here, here, here Land Art movement, here Leach, Mary Jane, here, here “less is more” minimalist motto, here, here, here, here Light and Space movement, here longing for less, minimalism as, here Lost in Translation (2003 film), here Löwith, Karl, here, here Martin, Agnes commercialization of, here documentary on (2002), here Guggenheim exhibition of, here, here, here Japanese influence on, here keys to interpretation of, here life and career of, here, here as Minimalist, here soothing effect of paintings by, here, here values and meanings in works of, here, here, here visions and voices guiding work by, here works of, described, here writings by, here Meiji-period Japan and forcible opening to West, here and isolationism vs. influence, here Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Millburn, Joshua Fields, here, here minimalism appeal of, here, here, here, here association with foreign, here author’s encounter with, here, here as combination of opposites, here commodification of, here as cultural trend/brand, here definition of, here, here as economic necessity, here, here emphasis on individual taste, here growth in 1970s, here intolerance inherent in, here as longing for unrealizable authenticity, here motives for adopting, here, here, here and myths of enlightened simplicity, here and oppressiveness of aesthetics-based society, here popular-culture forms, blandness of, here, here potential criticisms of, here qualities characteristic of, here (See also emptiness; reduction; shadow; silence) as reaction to consumerism, here, here, here, here, here, here as reaction to cultural anxiety, here rewards of, here, here as self-definition, here as therapy, here, here See also architecture, minimalist/modernist; art, Minimalist; music, Minimalist; visual style of minimalism minimalism, deeper forms of acceptance of ambiguity in, here, here and aesthetics of ephemerality, here biographical approach to, here characteristics of, here, here coexistence with drama of life, here giving up control in, here in music, here quality without a name found in, here search for, as author’s goal, here as shedding of belief systems to engage directly with reality, here as viable way of living, here the Minimalists (Millburn and Nicodemus), here, here mono no aware, here, here mu (sunyata), here Kuki and, here Ryoan-ji rock garden and, here Mumon Ekai, here, here Murasaki Shikibu.

Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over the World by Thomas Feiling

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Caribbean Basin Initiative, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, drug harm reduction, gentrification, illegal immigration, informal economy, inventory management, Kickstarter, land reform, Lao Tzu, mandatory minimum, moral panic, offshore financial centre, RAND corporation, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, trade route, upwardly mobile, yellow journalism

In 1983, Mayor Ed Koch launched Operation Pressure Point in a determined attempt to put a dent in drug-selling operations on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The police ensnared drug dealers in ‘buy and bust’ operations, and the building and fire departments worked together to condemn and bulldoze abandoned buildings. Pressure Point was deemed a great success in Manhattan, where it paved the way for the gentrification of the Lower East Side, but the pressure the authorities exerted only pushed heroin and cocaine users and their dealers across the Hudson River into Brooklyn, where many of New York’s recent immigrants lived. ‘I started copping at Alphabet City, on the Lower East Side,’ Robert, a cocaine user from Newark, New Jersey, told drug ethnographer Rick Curtis.17 ‘When Operation Pressure Point started, the boys told me things had moved over to Williamsburg.

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Instead, drug markets have become more discreet, integrating themselves further into local communities as the police have regained control of the streets. Today, most drugs in most markets are sold through closed systems: drug sales are less likely to be conducted on street corners or in drug-houses, and more likely to be arranged by mobile phone, with runners making deliveries to private houses. The gentrification of inner-city neighbourhoods proceeds apace in cities across the United States, but the appearance of sobriety is deceptive, as a bar worker in New York City’s Lower East Side attested. ‘There’s richer people living in this neighbourhood, where ten years ago you still had the arty farty freaks who could sort of afford to live here.

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Cited in Curtis, ‘Crack, Cocaine and Heroin: Drug Eras in Williamsburg, Brooklyn 1960–2000’, p. 60. 12. Rick Curtis, ‘The New York Miracle: Crime, Drugs and the Resurgence of Gangs in the 1990s’, unpublished. 13. Interview conducted in 2001, cited in Rick Curtis, Travis Wendel and Barry Spunt, We Deliver: The Gentrification of Drug Markets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (Washington DC: National Institute of Justice, 2002), p. 51. 14. Interview conducted in 1997, cited in Curtis, Wendel and Spunt, op. cit. 15. John Hagedorn, The Business of Drug Dealing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, 1998. 16.

Lonely Planet Cape Town & the Garden Route (Travel Guide) by Lucy Corne

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, load shedding, Mark Shuttleworth, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, retail therapy, Robert Gordon, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Add a clutch of art galleries and some stylish guesthouses and it really is one of the loveliest towns in the Cape. 1Day Trips & Wineries Franschhoek LANZ VON HORSTEN/GETTY IMAGES © Cape Town’s Top 10 Bo-Kaap 8Painted in vivid colours straight out of a packet of liquorice allsorts, the jumble of crumbling and restored heritage houses and mosques along the cobblestoned streets of the Bo-Kaap are both visually captivating and a storybook of inner-city gentrification. A stop at the Bo-Kaap Museum is recommended to gain an understanding of the history of this former slave quarter. Also, try Cape Malay dishes at one of the area’s several restaurants, or stay in one of the homes turned into guesthouses and hotels, including the lovely, antique-filled Dutch Manor. 1City Bowl, Foreshore, Bo-Kaap & De Waterkant Bo-Kaap DALCHEMIST/GETTY IMAGES © Cape Town’s Top 10 Surfing along the Garden Route 9The Garden Route is known for its outdoor pursuits on both land and sea.

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Public Art A red house on Long St and a regularly changing set of art installations on Sea Point Promenade – just some of the new sculptures in Cape Town. Zeitz MOCAA Until the Thomas Heatherwick–designed museum opens in the Waterfront's former grain silos in 2017, there's a pavilion where you can view part of this outstanding collection of Southern African art. Woodstock Rising The edgy inner-city suburb continues its uneven gentrification with the success of the Woodstock Exchange, Woodstock Co-op and arty new backpackers Wish U Were Here. Langa Quarter Aiming to bring vibrant arts and cultural life to a section of South Africa's oldest planned township. Also check out the new theatre at the Guga S'Thebe Arts & Cultural Centre.

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Salt Circle ArcadeSHOPPING CENTRE ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; 19 Kent Rd, Salt River; gKent) Among the retail options to hunt out here are the secondhand bookshop Blank Books (www.blankbooks.co.za), the owner of which writes the local blog www.ilovewoodstock; Miyu (www.miyuhomeware.com) for quality crafts and interior design; and Beerguevara (www.beerguevara.com) for craft beer ingredients and courses. Food trucks gather in the central courtyard. WOODSTOCK'S GALLERIES Spurring on Woodstock's gentrification has been a crack team of commercial galleries. All put on interesting shows and there's no pressure to buy. South African Print GalleryARTS ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; www.printgallery.co.za; 109 Sir Lowry Rd, Woodstock; h9.30am-4pm Tue-Fri, 10am-1pm Sat; gDistrict Six) Specialising in prints by local artists – both well established and up-and-coming – and likely to have something that is both affordable and small enough to fit comfortably in your suitcase for transport home.

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

That some areas have been transformed is a fact; that this can make some British people feel uncomfortable is as obvious a statement as saying that if large numbers of foreigners suddenly moved into a few districts of Ho Chi Minh City, the local people would likewise feel uncomfortable. It’s ironic that often the same type of person who decries middleclass ‘gentrification’ of a working-class area, and who understands how the working class might not exactly embrace such change, is often quick to criticize people who are uneasy about the ways in which immigration can alter a neighbourhood. ‘Gentrification’ is sometimes even called ‘social cleansing’, while immigration is termed ‘diversification’. What is almost always true is that many of those using these terms are less affected by them than those living on the spot.

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar