“How to
Kill a City – Gentrification, Inequality and the Fight for the Neighborhood,”
by Peter Moskowitz, 2018
As anyone knows who lives in
a bigger city, gentrification is becoming obvious in the U.S. (and across the world). Its not just in New York or San Francisco
but in second-tier cities like Minneapolis, Cleveland, Denver, Kansas City, Atlanta or St.
Louis.
Affordable apartments and homes are being torn down or upscaled into
something only those with well-paying corporate jobs can afford. Moskowitz defines gentrification as how pure neo-liberal
market capitalism treats real estate – essentially wringing the highest profit
out of every square foot, no matter the consequences. This study focuses on 4 U.S. cities – New York
and San Francisco of course, but also New Orleans and Detroit.
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| Still Your City? |
Moskowitz keys in on the
profit angle, whereby having a neighborhood that is still ‘cheap’ in rents or
real estate is essential to it being converted into something else, as long as
it is geographically close to a neighborhood that is already going ‘up.’ “Buy low, sell high’ is the simple mantra. Moskowitz calls it the ‘rent gap.’ So pockets
of poverty or low-rent areas can become new investment opportunities, as long
as they are close to where the action is.
It is usually urban black or
Latino people that are the immediate casualties. Throughout the book Moskowitz makes it clear
that the real-estate system has been and still is racist. FHA loans since the beginning under FDR were
ethnically distributed, with black people red-lined. Urban ‘removal’ that targeted minorities was
initiated under Reagan, but continued under Clinton and even Obama in different
ways. His descriptions of New Orleans and Detroit
both show how this works today.
In two of these mostly black
cities, gentrification is the result of disaster capitalism - Katrina ‘remade’ New Orleans, while bankruptcy is remaking Detroit, both into something else. In San Francisco
it is the result of the invasion of the Silicon Valley
salaries. In New
York, it is the problem of being the homeland of Wall Street and a
good chunk of the U.S.
ruling class and now part of the international capitalist class. Regarding the latter, empty ‘bolt-holes’ of
the cosmopolitan rich fill some apartment blocks.
Gentrification, like climate
change, doesn’t happen overnight, but anyone paying attention can see its
signs. Much has been made of the arrival
of mostly white hipsters, artists, coffee shops, bike shops and lanes, museums,
health clubs, hip restaurants, even light rail as the ‘causes’ of
gentrification. As Moskowitz astutely points
out, they are only the results. Even the
hipsters and artists will be moved out once the neighborhood reaches ‘peak’
development. Phase Zero in gentrification is actually planning and cash
by capitalist firms, banks, foundations and non-profits, along with government
plans for re-zoning, permits, variances (including eminent domain), bond
issuances, tax breaks and government loans.
Running a freeway through a low-cost neighborhood can be part of the
process too. The politicians of both
parties, along with the corporate leaders of each city, along with a host of
‘non-profits’ based on neo-liberal ideas, form the power base for the process. No city is immune.
For governments and the
politicians, the idea is to attract deep pocketed corporations and individuals
into the city so as to prop up the tax base.
This is done given the collapse in federal and state funds for
cities. Part of this process is that
Section 8 housing vouchers and public and subsidized housing have been nationally
downsized, eliminated or mismanaged. What this does
is force people with working class incomes to move to the suburbs. Engels pointed this out in 1872 in “The Housing Question,” when he discussed
Haussmann’s conversion of Paris
and the ouster of the Parisian proletariat.
Rosa Luxemberg, the Polish-German Marxist, noticed this same process in Berlin, where grand
avenues, theaters, statues, parks and other upscale amenities were built to
attract the rich into that city. Luxemberg wrote that building like this
absorbs masses of extra capital.
Only the ‘attractors’ have
changed since the 1800s, but the underlying process of catering to the rich remains
the same.
In the process, Moskowitz
looks at the intentional creation of suburbs and ex-urbs in the U.S. through
highway construction, FHA / VA loans and cultural promotion as one way to
revitalize the real estate profit system, giving capital a new outlet. Now that cities are more lucrative, working
class people and recent immigrants without much money are being forced into suburbs
where transportation, support services, culture and community are almost
non-existent. The majority of poverty in
the U.S.
is no longer in cities, but in the suburbs (and rural areas) surrounding the
cities. Engels and many capitalists
understood that owning a home made workers less likely to strike or to take
risks. Individualism, automobiles, consumerism
and malls are the replacements. These
were the political and economic rationales for the construction of the suburbs
- they were not just ‘natural’ outgrowths.
In New Orleans,
100,000 black people have never returned to the city. A tobacco pipe-like shape in the central city
is now being re-developed, while other areas are being ignored. The 9th ward is still
beleaguered. The public schools, which
were mostly staffed by black teachers, have been destroyed, to be replaced by non-union
charters. The process is all
intentional, from the governor of Louisiana
down to the City Council, from both parties.
Many long-time black residents feel that it is no longer their city, no
longer the same New Orleans. The process is also happening in Detroit,
where a central core of 7.2 square miles is getting all the development funds,
mostly inhabited by white professionals, while many square miles around the
core continue to decay, mostly inhabited by working-class black people. Local billionaires from Quicken Loans, the
Kresge Foundation, Rock Ventures and the Kellogg Foundation basically run the
city through a ‘non-profit,’ Midtown Inc., with the government of Detroit tagging
along. San Francisco is a
well-known story, as sterile Silicon Valley
corporations and their employees price working-class bohemians, artists,
Latinos, hippies, blacks, Asians and gays out of their own city - all with the
aid of the city council and many voters.
New York is another familiar tale. Moskowitz now describes the Greenwich Village
neighborhood he grew up in New York
as an “upscale mall for international oligarchs.” Union
Square, the site of many worker protests, is now surrounded by chain stores, and controlled by a public-private entity
where entry into the park itself is even difficult. Williamsburg
in Brooklyn has been turned into a bland consumerist Disneyland
too, full of the same high-end or mass chains and tall steel and glass apartment
buildings.
Moskowitz goes into great
detail about the history of gentrification in New York, which really started in a plan in
1929. In 1961 much of the city was
rezoned to remove factories and industry and replace them with residential
lofts or stores. The 1975 near
bankruptcy of New York
accelerated the process, resulting in the closure of 34 fire stations, allowing
massive fires in low-rent neighborhoods and human flight. Later Mayor Bloomberg rezoned 40% of the city
himself, eliminating more production facilities.
Deindustrialization in New
York, as in other cities, was intentional.
While Moskowitz thinks New York has laws and
public housing that slow gentrification, every mayor, even ‘liberal’ Bill
DeBlasio, is helping the real estate development machine progress – no matter
how much DeBlasio prattles about ‘affordable housing.’ (A similar lying and deceptive phrase thrown out by
Democrats everywhere, including in Minneapolis.)
This book is great coverage
of the issue from a left-wing point of view.
Its one flaw is that it sometimes obscures class. It mostly stratifies people by ‘poor,’
‘middle-class’ and rich, with poor being a stand-in for black, middle-class
being a stand-in for white and ‘rich’ being a stand-in for ‘very white.’ There is a little sense in the book that
working-class people of every ethnicity and several income levels are being
impacted by gentrification. The ‘working
class’ only shows up occasionally, yet he still thinks factory workers are
‘middle class.’ Moskowitz uses a mostly Marxist
template to look at real estate rentier economics, but his class understanding is muddled.
Moskowitz has a list of
programmatic demands that seem somewhat limited and discusses resistance
individuals and groups that have little mass community power as yet.
Gentrification is class war and in some places, a new form of colonialism. This book helps you understand that.
Other reviews on this topic,
below: “Nomadland,” “Cade’s Rebellion,” “The Beach Beneath the Street,” “Rebel
Cities,” “Tropic of Chaos, “Tales of Two Cities,” “Last Man in Tower,” “The Minneapolis Spectacle,” and “The Shock Doctrine.” Use blog search box, upper left.
And I bought it at May Day
Books!
Red Frog
October 23, 2018
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