The liberal lie about gentrification Displacement narratives are too simplistic

Gentrification is perhaps unique among purported societal wrongs in that its most vociferous critics stand at its vanguard. An almost too-pat example is Cea Weaver, the tenant advocate appointed by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, who once declared that there were no good gentrifiers and that home ownership was a “weapon of white supremacy”, only to burst into tears outside her Crown Heights apartment when the press questioned her about her mother’s $1.6-million home in Nashville. I lived with people like her my last year of college in a Lefty-run group house in West Philadelphia: we were the only white people on the block, and everything about us was different from our neighbours, from our dress to our way of speaking. It was patent that if any gentrifiers existed there, they had to be us, but my roommates didn’t fret about it because their ideology put them on the side of the people. Our Marxist or Fourierist experiment took place in a house valued at around $10,000; 25 years later, the block is mostly white, and homes there sell for up to half a million.

Similar stories can be told about Bushwick in New York, Wicker Park in Chicago, East Atlanta, and dozens of other places. In a fable that has achieved canonical status in activist circles, these once-thriving communities were abandoned for the suburbs by their racist white populations as black Americans flocked to cities in search of opportunity during the Great Migration. Negligence and decay crept in, tax bases shrank, property values collapsed, and then at some point, disillusioned by their suburban lifestyle, whites returned, buying up devalued real estate, pushing out long-term residents, and establishing cultural enclaves that failed to respect those who had been in the cities for generations.

I am simplifying, but the myth is simplistic, too — so much so that one doesn’t know where to begin dismantling it. It omits the complex history of Latin American settlement and migration patterns across the United States, and treats white and black populations as monoliths. It ignores the abundance of justifications for leaving American cities in the mid-20th century that had nothing to do with race: the cramped quarters, the filthy rivers, the unbreathable air, the corruption and crime. It overlooks the collapse of urban manufacturing, which made remaining in cities unfeasible for large swathes of the middle class. And it wilfully dismisses the massive wave of black suburbanisation that coincided with white flight and continues to this day, as documented in Andrew Wiese’s Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century.

Scholars of gentrification tend to define it parsimoniously as a rise in average incomes or real estate prices in previously depressed census tracts. The problem with the scholarly definition is that there is nothing to condemn — for all but the most obstinate, “renewal” or “revitalisation” are a cause for celebration. And so, with little evidence, the harm of “displacement” has been adduced: rising rents or property taxes that exceed the resources of people who — to use a phrase almost ubiquitous in gentrification literature — “have been there for generations”.

Opponents of gentrification presume a uniformity among populations that quite simply isn’t there: this is true for who is rich and who is poor, for who leaves a neighbourhood and who stays. The mere idea that there are neighbourhoods where people remain for generations is largely illusory: in a given two-year period, around 50% of renters will move along with 16% of homeowners, even as mobility in America has declined since the Eighties. Presumptive gentrifiers may just be poor people who look different, and those who move out are just as likely to be going somewhere better as somewhere worse — nobody knows, because the research isn’t there. What seems clear, though, is that the assumption that the poor remain stuck in a given place by intractable poverty until they can no longer afford it is not borne out by reality. In “Does Gentrification Harm the Poor?”, the economist Jacob L. Vigdor finds:

“There is no evidence to suggest that gentrification increases the probability that low-status households exit their housing unit. Poor households are more likely to exit poverty themselves than to be replaced by a non-poor household… Poverty itself is rather transitory in nature: about half of all households entering poverty in a given year will escape poverty within a year.”

Gentrification debates often project contemporary housing shortages backward, presuming that wealthy migration to cities necessarily squeezed out the poor. In doing so, they ignore the staggering population losses big American cities underwent in the 20th century, from which many have yet to recover. St. Louis today is one third as populous as it was in 1950; the same is true of Detroit and Cleveland. All three have seen a public outcry about the evils of gentrification, as have other recovering industrial cities like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. To the extent that they have witnessed upward pressure in land values, two understudied factors are likely at play: first, a new model of lower-density urbanism, with smaller family sizes and increasing numbers of people living alone, and second, capital improvements to largely dilapidated older housing stock. One hundred years ago, a newly built home provided, on average, 242 square feet per person; this number has now nearly quintupled. At the same time, home renovation expenditure has accelerated over the past two decades, and A 2006 study in Chicago , and subsequent research in 2017 estimated up to 15% of home price growth in desirable urban areas was due to renovations. And this was before the pandemic-era orgy of expenditure on open-concept kitchens, bespoke cabinetry, man caves, and wet rooms.

If gentrification retains its hold on the progressive imagination, much of the blame lies with unscientific intuitions about who belongs in a given place that cannot really be instituted as policy unless we’re willing to impose a North Korea-style internal passport regime. It’s not that I’m unsympathetic to the anti-gentrifiers’ sentiments: at the gut-feeling level, everyone knows our cities have changed, and it hasn’t all been for the better. It’s hard to say where the pendulum should come to rest between the grit and grime of, say, Seventies New York and the 2020s playground for the rich, but we can admit that character is a real thing, and when a city becomes unaffordable, much of that character goes away. Besides, I’m with the anti-gentrifiers in my heart; I’d like to hand-pick my neighbours, too. No more would I be forced to watch the effortful excretions of dainty dogs on my morning walk, before their owners scoop up their disjecta in a biodegradable bag; gone would be the parents wheeling double strollers into drinking dens and narcotising their untrained children with inane videos on iPads turned up loud enough to wake the dead. Men wouldn’t be allowed to jog in spandex leggings, their genitals scrunched up like butcher’s leavings. There’d be more movie theatres and fewer omakase joints, and some kind of red-light district, because everything’s getting too sanitised nowadays. I do understand, though, that mine are the fantasies of a crotchety would-be despot and not a responsible member of a polity.

For some time, the Right has attached blame for housing prices on regulation, and in obedience to the dogma of the wisdom of the market — despite the many unwise choices the market keeps making — they’ve advocated for increased supply until prices fall and demand is met. Lately, this idea has caught on among the bien-pensant sort-of Left as part of Ezra Klein’s asinine “abundance agenda”. Surely more construction is needed; surely, onerous regulations raise prices; but pandemic-era wage increases, years of quantitative easing, and surging costs of materials mean $300,000 is now the lower bound for new construction in many places. For renters in popular cities like Austin, a boom in multi-family construction has brought some relief, but prices remain significantly higher than they were just a few years before, and no developer is interested in driving them down much further. Even mobile homes, once a last resort for the poor, have become painfully expensive for many as private equity firms, often with government backing, have begun investing in them (Frank Rolfe, founder of Mobile Home University, quips in one of his courses that owning a manufactured home park is like having “a Waffle House where the customers are chained to the booths”, because so few tenants can afford to leave). This isn’t gentrification, but plain old-fashioned greed, a word not enough heard nowadays but hopefully primed for a comeback.

Those interested in the disappearance of housing for the poor and less well-to-do should look around for a long out-of-print book, Brian D. Boyer’s Cities Destroyed for Cash. Boyer details how government programmes nominally intended to help the poor in the Sixties and Seventies led to a massive transfer of inner-city real estate into the hands of banks and speculators; the dereliction much of this property fell into set the stage for later waves of building fever and the present-day affordability crisis. It is possible that government intervention will do a better job today, but signs aren’t encouraging. As “affordable housing” has become a watchword for politicians, many have imposed requirements for its construction on new developments; but hundreds of municipalities allow builders to avoid these mandates by paying an in-lieu fees that go into housing authorities’ budgets, where their real effects on housing supply are minimal. Rent control is back in fashion, but its benefits are equivocal: it’s a blessing for those fortunate enough to receive it, but produces major negative externalities, driving up market-rate rents, discouraging investment, and lowering property tax revenues.

There is another point widely ignored, but expressed pithily by Canadian blogger Michal Durand-Wood: “Housing isn’t meant to be affordable.” For decades, homebuying has been seen as an investment, not just in America, but in many other countries as well; government policies have encouraged it, zoning laws have insulated it, and entire economies have grown dependent on it. But the nature of a good investment is that it goes up in value, and as this happens, affordability necessarily declines. The enemies of gentrification may advocate for blowing this system up, but it turns out many poor people think otherwise — unsurprisingly, since around 40% of poor households own their homes. This struck me particularly on seeing a recent story in The Philadelphia Inquirer about a stalled proposal to build affordable housing in Strawberry Mansion, a rough neighbourhood even in a city of rough neighbourhoods, with 37% of its residents in poverty and a violent crime rate four times the national average. The fairly modest initiative — 57 units in total, including a 21-unit senior living facility — raised the ire of a community organisation that compared it to the 1857 Dred Scott decision declaring African-Americans non-citizens, and with an important deadline missed, the project is effectively dead. Opposition mentioned the threat of density, laughable in an area littered with vacant homes and rubble. More likely, local owners don’t want their precarious home values threatened by affordable developments at a time when the real estate market there has come to life after decades of stagnation.

In the end, the gentrification debate appears yet another manifestation of the American public’s ineradicable Goldilocks disposition. People want better neighbourhoods, but don’t want to pay the higher taxes that might fund improvements, and spurn the wealthier newcomers who can do so. They want their own home values to rise indefinitely, but the prices of the homes they hope to move to should remain flat. And why not? In 2020, we wanted crime to drop while reducing arrests and letting more people out of jail; we don’t want to be fat, but we don’t want to diet, so we’ve got an injection instead, and since we don’t like needles, either, our Danish drugmaking friends have obliged us with a pill (maybe if they threaten to take it away, Trump will give up on conquering Greenland). Boomers grouse about the national debt, but will tolerate no cuts to their entitlements to leave something over for their children and grandchildren, and increasingly, they’re even turning against the immigrants whose labour is the only plausible path to keeping Medicare and Social Security afloat. My own homebuying advice, then, is to get a place with a view, because watching our national incoherencies play out in real time will never cease to be engaging.

---