Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies

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Kern is a wonderful writer, and this compelling, important, and highly original intervention in the gentrification debates is a staggering tour de force. At once a devastating critique of the limitations of established perspectives on gentrification and a convincing plea for an intersectional approach, this book offers sparklingly clear analysis and numerous possibilities for political action. Anyone who reads it will never forget it Tom Slater, author of Shaking Up the City: Ignorance, Inequality, and the Urban Question

Leslie Kern proposes an intersectional way at looking at the crisis that seek to reveal the violence based on class, race, gender and sexuality. She argues that gentrification is not ‘natural’. That it cannot be understood in economics terms, or by class. That it is not a question of taste. That it can only be measured only by the physical displacement of certain people. Rather, she argues, it is an continuation of the settler colonial project that removed natives from their land. Gentrification today is rising rents and evictions, transformed retail areas, increased policing and broken communities. Perhaps some of this emerged from my own struggle with feeling helpless. I’ve been living in a small town for over a decade, disconnected from many of the movements that I’m passionate about. I worried I was little more than an armchair commentator. Deepa Iver’s idea of social change ecosystems involving many different yet equally important roles helped me reframe my contributions. I wanted to include it in the book so that readers who didn’t necessarily see themselves as frontline, direct action warriors could conceive of roles for themselves, whether as storytellers, a caregivers, builders, healers, and more. I hope people come away with a little more hope, and a little more clarity about how they might be a part of building a different city and a different world. The last chapter, then, moves beyond a critique of what gentrification scholarship has been missing to lay out affirmative principles for what an intersectional anti-gentrification politics might look like. It also offers a “baby steps” approach for those who might not have any idea how to get started. So far, people really seem to appreciate this section. They put down a book about a pretty heavy, depressing topic feeling a glimmer of hope and seeing themselves as part of the solution. So I guess my question is: when there’s a housing shortage, how can cities alleviate that without contributing to gentrification?

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Gentrification is not inevitable if city lovers work together to turn the tide. Kern examines resistance strategies from around the world and calls for everyday actions that empower everyone, from displaced peoples to long-time settlers. We can mobilize, demand reparations, and rewrite the story from the ground up. (From Between the Lines) 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. An excellent job of puncturing the myths and exposing the ideologies that make gentrification seem natural, inevitable, and desirable. And with incisive clarity, she develops an account of what a radical, intersectional anti-gentrification politics might look like." The result, over time, is what Kern calls the “paradox of priming for your own displacement,” through which “groups that typically have little more than cultural capital are priced out by successive waves of gentrifiers with relatively more capital of all kinds.” All this may appear to be the unfolding of an organic process—and perhaps it did once proceed without anyone having the conscious intention to change an area’s demographics. But in more recent decades, gentrification has taken shape as a conscious strategy “wielded by those who actually have enormous capacity to remake cities and neighborhoods, like developers and city policymakers.” Confronts gentrification with a multidimensional and intersectional critique, revealing the process of urban 'improvement' as an unending campaign of social exclusion and a biting metaphor for making money. She combines her own experience as a city dweller with extensive social research to provide both a call for creative collective action and a good read."

Rather, she argues, it is an continuation of the setter colonial project that removed natives from their land. And it can be seen today is rising rents and evictions, transformed retail areas, increased policing and broken communities. 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." Hundreds of new condominium or other luxury high rises don’t tiptoe anywhere. Gentrification today is often faster, more radically transformative, and directed by powerful state and corporate actors. Under the umbrella of gentrification, we could be talking about public housing demolition or conversion to market housing, the rise of short-term rentals through platforms like Airbnb, or greening projects that turn spaces labelled “derelict” into ecological destinations (think NYC’s High Line). There are so many phenomena that get called gentrification that some researchers think the term has lost all meaning. For me, the term still works best because it holds onto the power relations at the center of the process. In other words, it’s political. First observed in 1950s London, and theorized by leading thinkers such as Ruth Glass, Jane Jacobs and Sharon Zukin, this devastating process of displacement now can be found in almost every city and neighborhoods. Beyond the Yoga studio, farmer’s market and tattoo parlor, gentrification is more than a metaphor, but impacts the most vulnerable communities and is part of the wider financialization of our cities. Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies challenges a number of well-entrenched perspectives on gentrification from the anticapitalist left as well as the market-minded right...Kern's book is thorough in its intersectionality."

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? Leslie Kern, author of the best selling Feminist City, 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. 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. 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? Not that the hipsters play no role, then, but their impact is infinitesimal compared to any given zoning commission. Yet taking gentrification as just another manifestation of neoliberal capitalism—a form of social engineering carried out under impersonal financial imperatives—can also make the changes look inevitable, hence irresistible. While making use of more or less Marxist analysis, Kern takes her distance from any narrowly conceived understanding of gentrification as an economic phenomenon. Leslie Kern, author of the best-selling Feminist City, travels from Toronto, New York, London, Paris and San Francisco and scrutinizes the myth and the lies that surround this most urgent urban crisis of our times.

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? 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?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. Fortune 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.