Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies

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Unfortunately, these kinds of changes are often portrayed as a natural evolution of city space, rather than as the result of deliberate policy making and sets of choices by powerful actors. We conflate the idea that cities change (of course they do!) with the idea that neighborhoods are inevitably taken over by wealthier, whiter residents. This is so dangerous, in my opinion, because it means that many people don’t question the nature of these changes or stop to ask who is really benefitting. It also means that even for those of us concerned about gentrification, we can end up feeling defeated because it seems like it’s an unstoppable force. What does gentrification look like? Can we even agree that it is a process that replaces one community with another? It is a question of class? Or of economic opportunity? Who does it affect the most? Is there any way to combat it? In Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies(Verso, 2022), Leslie Kern travels from Toronto, New York, London, Paris, and San Francisco and scrutinises the myth and lies that surround this most urgent urban crisis of our times. I became interested in gentrification through another kind of feminist question. I’m from Toronto, and in the early 2000s, there was a massive condominium construction boom. A lot of the marketing hype proclaimed that young women were snapping up condos and finding liberation in a footloose urban lifestyle. This was wrapped up in a very Sex and the City inflected cultural moment that linked sexual freedom, consumption, and an urban lifestyle. But any good feminist killjoy had to ask: were condos really furthering women’s emancipation? To answer that question I had to learn about gentrification and its place in long histories of urban transformation.

But if gentrification is not inevitable, what can we do to stop the tide? In response, Leslie Kern proposes a genuinely decolonial, queer- feminist anti-gentrification. One that demands the right to the city for everyone and the return of land and reparations for those who have been displaced. It won’t be a surprise to regular readers of this newsletter that I love this challenge to openness and reconsideration — and I also love the section that follows, in which you walk readers through where the work of anti-gentrification begins, and what it looks like. How did you conceive of this section, what sections seem to be resonating with people, and what parts of this work do you struggle with yourself? First observed in 1950s London, and theorised by leading thinkers such as Ruth Glass, Jane Jacobs and Sharon Zukin, this devastating process of displacement now can be found in every city and most neighbourhoods. Beyond the Yoga studio, farmer's market and tattoo parlour, gentrification is more than a metaphor, but impacts the most vulnerable communities.Gentrification is natural. Neighborhoods change overtime. Different groups move in and out, businesses change hands, land uses shift. But just because change is normal doesn’t mean it’s natural. What drives middle-class residents into working-class and minority communities? What policies, economic forces, and cultural dynamics propel these changes? What makes it profitable and desirable? The answers lie everywhere from city zoning practices to historic redlining and racial segregation policies to a capitalist system of private property where housing is an investment and an asset. There may be a wide array of forces that encourage gentrification, but they are all human-made.

So I guess my question is: when there’s a housing shortage, how can cities alleviate that without contributing to gentrification? In 10 succinct chapters, Kern defines and outlines the current arguments surrounding gentrification while focusing on the inability to adequately discuss it with each other or within communities. Each chapter contains solid examples of where, when, and why gentrification is appearing in communities, and what the impact is on each respective group. The impact of gentrification on race, class, gender, age, and Indigenous peoples are astutely explored…A first class analysis and tool kit.” A sweeping and fluid new book on gentrification. Kern expertly weaves theory, concepts, and up-to-date debates about gentrification together, making it accessible not only to urban scholars but to general readers too. A superb book I would have liked to have written but didn't. A must-read for anyone interested in gentrification."Drawing on research from Buenos Aires, Chicago, Toronto, and other cities, Kern documents neighborhoods in the process of change and those that have stopped or reshaped gentrification. She lucidly explains modern feminist and urban theories and brings fresh insights and a measure of hope to a vexing social issue. [A] searing yet inspirational polemic."

Gentrification, we read there, “often begins with influxes of local artists looking for a cheap place to live, giving the neighborhood a bohemian flair,” which then “attracts yuppies who want to live in such an atmosphere, driving out the lower income artists and lower income residents, often ethnic/racial minorities, changing the social character of the neighborhood.” This is not at all bad as a definition, but it is also interesting for how it suggests something important about gentrification today—namely, that gentrification is a phenomenon people notice. Once a sociological abstraction, it has been assimilated into city dwellers’ ordinary awareness of the urban landscape. Can you tell us a bit about how you became interested in/obsessed with the discipline of geography — whose broad scope a lot of people don’t really understand — and your specific research interests within it?

Soon architects and urban planners in the United States were also discussing gentrification, frequently putting the term in quotation marks and flagging it as an imported neologism. So it was treated by The New York Times upon its first appearance in 1974 and for the first few years afterward. By early 1979, a Times columnist risked casual mention of “a Harvard Business School graduate putting his money in gentrification instead of pork bellies,” with reasonable confidence that readers would know the word; in the 1980s, it was in frequent use throughout the paper. Perhaps the clearest sign of its full incorporation into the vernacular came when an entry defining gentrification was posted to the Urban Dictionary, a crowdsourced reference mainly covering slang and idioms, with special attention to innovations in profanity. You write, in the conclusion, that “openness to different ways of thinking about and practising our relationship to the city and all of its human and nonhuman inhabitants is necessary.”

You’re absolutely right that a lot of theory and research (inside and outside academia) is drawn from a small number of almost exclusively global north cities in the UK, western Europe, and the US. Toronto isn’t really an exception to that rule, but it is the place that my interest in gentrification began. Perhaps the Toronto and other Canadian examples help counter the idea that Canada is an egalitarian, multicultural, socialist utopia, a national and international myth that I’m always eager to dispel. Ultimately, I think that the story of gentrification could be explored starting from almost any city in the world. In the book, I tried to include a wide range of international examples that illustrate both the predictability and unique local flavor of gentrification across all continents (but not Antarctica. Yet). This was also important because we need to gather as many stories, strategies, and tactics for resistance as possible.

Gentrification is all about class. Class is right there in the name: The “gentry” take over and transform neighborhoods with their wealth and status. Working-class communities are objects of gentrification because the real estate is cheap and the profit potential is high. However, in many places, these conditions are created because of racist housing and immigration policies that “ghettoized” non-white communities and prohibited investment in those places. Today, the “working class” being displaced includes high numbers of women-headed households, recent immigrants, and racial minorities. Gentrification’s biggest winners are those who control the development and real estate industries, a group that is mostly white and male. It is no longer adequate to say that “gentrification is about class.” Inspired by the likes of Jane Jacobs and Sharon Zukin, urban scholar Leslie Kern proposes an intersectional way at looking at the gentrification crisis amid our current economic climate, based on class, race, gender, and sexuality." I’ve found that so much writing for broader audiences on the geography of urban spaces is really rooted in a handful of urban spaces — New York, Paris, London, maybe Chicago (thinking specifically of William Cronin’s Nature’s Metropolis ) and Los Angeles. What’s gained by rooting this book in Toronto?