Appropriating the planet

In a fragment by Jorge Luis Borges, successive generations of cartographers create increasingly exacting maps of China. Their maps grow steadily larger to incorporate more and more minute details until “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it,” for the only map that could communicate every detail of China would be a map on the scale of the country itself. Today, the Chinese maps are even larger than the empire.

The commanding heights of the gentrification economy are tech and biotech firms that collect, systematize, privatize, and commodify inputs such as genetic data, personal information, and behavioral profiles at levels far beyond that accessible through first-person experience: the stuff of ever-growing maps, new material for market exchange. The more perfect these maps, whether of a user’s consumer proclivities or genome, the more profits may be wrung. These inputs are not initially purchased from another party. Instead, as Shoshana Zuboff explains, “Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.”

For Marx, capitalism is necessarily based in primitive accumulation, the “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force” necessary for one class to acquire capital and for another to be dispossessed to the degree that it must sell its labor to survive. Marx placed this initial violent accumulation in the late 15th and 16th centuries, when English peasants were forced off feudal lands and Indigenous American and African peoples were enslaved.

Peter Kropotkin was quick to critique Marx’s “erroneous division between the primary accumulation of capital and its present-day formation.” Later Marxists likewise found that primitive accumulation was not a bounded historical event but an ongoing process. Silvia Federici cites World Bank structural adjustment programs which, under the guise of making poor countries “competitive,” uproot the “last vestiges of communal property and community relations” and “force more and more people into wage labor” as one example and the exploitation of women’s unpaid domestic labor another. The social, biological, and psychological data now closed off and privatized by capital are a new frontier of such accumulation.

The material limit of appropriation of land is the amount of existing acreage, just as the material limit of the appropriation of iron ore is the quantity found in a certain mine. The gentrification economy is based on the modeling and mapping of the world; its material limit is the representation of the world down to the atomic level. So long as this endeavor remains profitable and requires a small caste of educated technicians, the gentrification economy and the struggles against displacement may only be expected to continue.

User, subject, worker, resident

There are at least three lines of popular political critique of the tech economy aside from resistance to community displacement. One critique of tech companies concerns their management of platforms that serve as a semi-public space. The prohibition or promotion of certain content or communities is criticized from the perspective of users. There is also a line of critique from the perspective of those subjected to new forms of power: quantified, mapped, and modeled. And warehouse workers, rideshare drivers, and software engineers alike criticize their tech industry employers from the perspective of workers. The struggle against gentrification is a critique of a fourth type. In addition to the user, the subject, and the worker, there is the resident. The Block Sidewalk campaign in Toronto joined an anti-gentrification fight to concerns about surveillance technology and U.S. corporate encroachment: resistance on the terms of the subject as well as that of the resident. The fight to kill Amazon’s New York campus highlighted both how housing costs would rise and how few local residents would get high-paying jobs: the resident and worker. The fight against Google Berlin pulled together opposition “from the displacement of the neighborhood, through data abuse of Google, to criticism of power and technology,” the synthesis of such critiques “made possible by a shared intensification of a social conflict.”

From the perspective of the ruling class, existing residents are residual, remainders, leftovers. “Join the dance of those left over,” goes the Los Prisioneros song, an anthem of the movement against Pinochet that found new life during Chile’s 2019 Estallido Social. “The games ended for others with laurels and futures. They left my friends kicking stones.”

Common sense militancy

It is hard to imagine a demand more modest than the maintenance of one’s home, community, and life. And yet to stop displacement would demand, housing activist Vasudha told me, “a reimagining of the current socio-economic system, because as it currently exists, gentrification is incentivized and encouraged until every cent of profit is milked out. The last 200 years of housing policy and how the ‘market’ works is encouraging and incentivizing gentrification. To stop it will require masses of people to really come together and pitch in and make sacrifices to a larger movement to restructure the socio-economic system as it currently exists.” The reasonable demand for universal housing in an economic system based on private land ownership is a “non-reformist reform” in the original sense outlined by André Gorz: not an especially progressive reforms to demand of the capitalist state, as the democratic socialists would have it, but an apparent reform that in fact could only be instituted by a “fundamental political and economic change” created through the “autonomous power” of the dispossessed.

We must unfortunately still contend with those whose superficial concern for the oppressed is outweighed by a greater fear of the oppressed developing just such an autonomous power. Neither the benevolence of corporate charity nor the “proper channels” offered by local representative democracy have proven, in any city in the world, sufficient to halt economic gentrification. Yet the partisans of propriety and moralists of reform continue to insist that those facing displacement and death restrict themselves to permissible tactics proven to fail. And so homes continue to be destroyed and our neighbors continue to expire on the streets. The hands of the self-declared pacifists drip with blood as their throats fill with empty platitudes. Those who demand decorum and reasonableness in resistance are accessories to the most indefensible outrages.

“I don’t know that we can challenge gentrification on political terms,” says Daniel González of San José. “It’s going to require a lot of militancy. Not just militancy, because you need a multi-faceted approach to enable greater participation. But you do need to have a very real and material threat to the stakeholders, to the city, to the investors. It needs to go beyond the arena of representative politics.”

Andrew Lee is the author of Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War. Lee has supported grassroots social movements for more than 15 years and his work has been published in outlets including Teen Vogue, Yes! Magazine, and The New Inquiry. He writes at In Struggle and is a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

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Holiday in the sun

The politics of place and displacement follow gentrifiers on holiday. Depending on the balance of class interests and power, the unique character of a place can attract gentrification as much as it can be wielded as a weapon against it. Charming Barcelona’s tourist-centered redevelopment started in earnest during preparation for the 1992 Olympics and intensified when the Convergència I Unió party rezoned swathes of the city to attract international capital in the depths of the Great Recession. Today, Barcelona has reached an “acute” state of gentrification thanks to the appeal of its “historical heritage, cultural dynamism, business economy,” and beaches. “The neighbors are disappearing,” reported one resident, saying rents had increased 200 Euros in recent years. “They are leaving.” But tourism is now a “fundamental industry,” per the managing partner of a hospitality consulting firm. “Many directly or indirectly connected industries would suffer greatly without it.”

With Airbnb, landlords around the world can easily replace tenants with tourists, multiplying the amount of money they receive each month. A San Francisco landlord evicted a tenant paying $1,840 a month to charge tourists twice as much. Airbnb rentals are estimated to have raised average rents in New York City by $400 a year. The platform has faced pushback in cities from Amsterdam to Venice as housing units are reserved for globe-trotting tourists.

The international vacation destination ought to be foreign and exceptional — nothing less justifies the airfare. But it must also make sense to the vacationer. There must be appealing hotels easily booked, attractions advertised in an understandable way, staff who speak their language, restaurants with menus that fit their tastes. As Guy Debord pointed out, tourism is “the opportunity to go and see what has been banalized,” commodified, made legible and essentially equivalent to any other vacation destination one might choose.

This tourism gentrification, which carves up working-class neighborhoods to attract vacationers’ dollars with hotels, resorts, restaurants, and shopping districts, is less frequently discussed in the United States, perhaps because the nation’s intellectuals and academics find themselves partaking in the practice on holiday. This is unfortunate, since tourism gentrification has come home to roost in devastating ways. The 1996 Olympics provided Atlanta elites with the opportunity to clear poor people from central areas, decimate public housing, and brand the city for global consumption, paving the way for today’s rampant gentrification. The 2028 Games in Los Angeles are already creating a “housing disaster” years in advance. The Philadelphia city council voted 12-5 to approve a downtown basketball arena threatening to destroy the local Chinatown, against the wishes of 69% of residents and after arresting dozens.

Homeland or death

The fully engineered tourist district attracts huge amounts of foreign capital that can anchor the economy of an entire region or nation. Land was legally bought and sold in post-revolutionary Cuba for the first time in 2011. Though non-Cubans are formally excluded from the market, it is reported that many property sales are funded with remittances from Cuban American relatives or conducted by Cuban citizens operating at the behest of foreign buyers.

Almost two decades before the establishment of a real estate market, the Cuban state began emphasizing tourism as a way to attract foreign capital. In the early 1980s, several buildings in Old Havana were recognized as UNESCO World Cultural Heritage sites—a designation supposed to recognize the objective importance and international legibility of a place while facilitating economic and technical assistance for historic restoration. During the economic devastation of the post-Soviet “Special Period,” when petroleum imports to the island virtually ceased, the state developed public institutions to promote tourism while dilapidated colonial buildings were transformed from residential units into restaurants and luxury hotels. Former residents were directly displaced to the city’s outskirts. Even while the ban on real estate speculation remained, the increased valuation of Old Havana real estate was expressed in the informal market. Remaining tenants began renting out rooms or running small businesses that benefited from easy access to the tourist market. (Access to foreign currency is so significant that Cuban taxi drivers can make more than surgeons.) In 2001, 40% of residences were free tenements; by 2019, it was only 12%, with 75% of residences in touristified Old Havana now private property. If privatization and tourism-oriented redevelopment is the priority of a state whose foundational narrative is the revolutionary expropriation of private property, it should be no surprise when US state elites find economic incentives more convincing than purported liberal commitments to “inclusion,” “diversity,” or “the community.” 

Andrew Lee is the author of Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War. Lee has supported grassroots social movements for more than 15 years and his work has been published in outlets including Teen Vogue, Yes! Magazine, and The New Inquiry. He writes at In Struggle and is a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. 

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Universities as gentrifiers

“These super-men and world-mastering demi-gods listened, however, to no low tongues of ours, even when we pointed silently to their feet of clay.” —W.E.B. Du Bois

The workers and capitalists who profit most from the gentrification economy are often blessed by familial wealth and almost always with advanced degrees. College-educated workers received a full 97% of “good jobs” created after the Great Recession as the labor market polarized between low-paying jobs and those requiring post-secondary education. If it is highly-educated workers who are the crux of production in the wealthy imperial core, and if achieving such jobs is necessary for workers to achieve not only luxury but a minimally dignified life, it is no wonder that the gentrification economy increases the power and influence of organizations such as the Silicon Valley’s largest landowner: not Apple, Amazon, or Google, but Stanford University.

Not only Silicon Valley’s largest owner of both commercial land and single-family homes, Stanford University controls a domain including a research park, a shopping mall, a hospital, and professor housing. 61% of the university’s 8,180 acres are undeveloped entirely, a green oasis of wealth amid a housing crisis.

“People think of Stanford as a university with a football team and two basketball teams, I guess,” explains Lenny Seigal, former mayor of neighboring Mountain View. “But it’s a corporation with enormous land ownership, and it functions in its relationship to the surrounding communities as a corporation.”

And an enormously successful corporation, at that. With a $37.8 billion endowment in 2021, the university has invested billions in income-generating properties. Though it received its land holdings from its founder, robber baron Leland Stanford, the university reaps enormous wealth from a long enmeshment with the tech industry. The relationship dates back to 1937, when two Stanford students founded Hewlett-Packard. Millionaire faculty members invest in students’ startups. Venture capitalists teach classes. When graduates—whose median family income is $167,500 to begin with—donate the proceeds of high-paying tech jobs to their alma mater, the endowment grows.

But alumni generosity isn’t the only benefit Stanford gets from the industry. The Office of Technology Licensing asserts ownership rights over technology developed at Stanford. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Netflix, VMWare, and Sun Microsystems were all started by Stanford affiliates or using Stanford technology. Cisco’s first router was based on the Stanford University computer network. The Office of Technology Licensing received $336 million when it sold its Google stock in 2005. As of 2012, the office had netted Stanford $1.3 billion in royalty payments.

Classes and class

For the privileged children of the Valley, pressure to secure an elite institution’s diploma is immense. Parents pad out their children’s resumes by dropping thousands of dollars to send them on charitable service trips to Mongolia. Palo Alto paid over a million dollars to install sensors along the commuter rail line to detect attempted suicides when admissions decisions roll in. The city’s high school students kill themselves at several times the national rate.

“We are not teenagers. We are lifeless bodies in a system that breeds competition [and] hatred,” wrote one Palo Alto High School student in an op-ed entitled “The Sorrows of Young Palo Altans.” “If you’re not into [science, tech, engineering, and math],” said another, “you feel that you are not going to succeed.” The horror that pushes teenagers onto the CalTrain tracks is not of being a worker instead of an owner. It is of falling from the circle of workers who do well in the new economy into those who do not, from able to gentrify to those only ever displaced.

When universities expand campuses to attract more elite students, they become not only the facilitators and beneficiaries of gentrification, but its agents as well. In Orlando, a $1 billion, 68-acre mixed-use development around UCF Valencia called the Creative Village caused housing prices to double before construction even began. Wayne State University’s private police force enforces security across the gentrified core of post-industrial Detroit. In Philadelphia’s so-called University City, historically the Black Bottom, university development has caused housing prices to more than double and the Black population to be cut in half. Universities are now the largest employers in most large cities in the US. “The department store is closed, the newspaper is bankrupt, the local bank is no longer local, and the manufacturing is gone,” says Lewis & Clark College president Wim Wiewel. The universities endure, and they have “enthusiastically seized more economic and urban development responsibilities.”  

On violence

And though the right wing claims that colleges are laboratories for the identification of fictitious violence where hoodwinked undergraduates are indoctrinated into believing in the false danger of stereotypes and of slurs, the actual violence of university-facilitated displacement gets scant mention in lecture halls. There are no mandatory freshman courses on the people the new dorm building forced out. Breitbart is not writing outraged screeds about how some mistreated child was “called out” for their techie parents.

Some of the most pernicious and pervasive forms of violence are those not acknowledged as violence at all. Displacement is called rejuvenation, development, revitalization—all biological terms. Such language allows gentrification’s proponents to portray themselves as agents of an inevitable natural force, not the instigators of mass dispossession by force, and to react with feigned horror when communal banishment is resisted by force, as well.

All things being equal, people generally find the preservation and self-determination of community and home preferable to the opposite. To convince someone of the futility of such a preference requires an ideological infrastructure of considerable sophistication.

It also requires a certain quantity of loaded guns.

Andrew Lee is the author of Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War. Lee has supported grassroots social movements for more than 15 years and his work has been published in outlets including Teen Vogue, Yes! Magazine, and The New Inquiry. He writes at In Struggle and is a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. 

The post The school of gentrification – an excerpt from Defying Displacement appeared first on Shareable.

Defining displacement

Gentrification is commonly understood as consumption: who chooses to rent or purchase which housing unit. From this perspective we can ask many questions: why white people wish to live in “gritty” neighborhoods, or why they have the opposite attitudes of their parents and grandparents whose white flight bankrupted the cities they abandoned for segregated suburbs. We can debate whether the true villains in the story of neighborhood displacement are the punks and artists, or the yuppies, or the coffee shop patrons, or all white people who move into neighborhoods of color, or any people at all who move into neighborhoods where rents are on the rise. We might wonder at the confluence of factors which make a specific neighborhood appealing for different suspects at different times. And we can play the parlor game of deciding to what degree someone is or is not a gentrifier based on complex tabulations of identities, oppressions, and experiences.

What we cannot do is move beyond the liberal middle-class sport of achieving moral righteousness through carefully curated consumption: the ethical consumerism which pretends to change the world through the thoughtful selection of the correct can from the grocery store shelves. Analyzing gentrification exclusively through the critique of individual consumer preferences elides the socio-economic and political structures within which these preferences prevail. The scope of the anti-gentrification struggle is reduced to the moral turpitude within a new resident’s soul. And all the while, business districts are planned, tax abatements unveiled, redevelopment schemes dreamed up, corporate and university campuses expanded, neighborhoods transformed, and communities destroyed.

Producing poverty

Far from being an automatic or inevitable process, gentrification is “purposeful and produced.” In the mid-twentieth century, the US government began a concerted project of racial displacement from urban areas. “Our categorical imperative is action to clear the slums,” said Robert Moses, the hugely influential urban planner who masterminded public works projects in New York City for decades. Described by a biographer as “the most racist human being I had ever really encountered,” the New York City Planning Commissioner and chairman of the Slum Clearance Committee would continue: “We can’t let minorities dictate that this century-old chore will be put off another generation or finally abandoned.”

Deindustrialization and white flight drained municipal coffers as elites invested in a repressive War on Drugs. Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper point out that this might more accurately be described as a War on Neighborhoods, with working-class Black urban communities framed by politicians as particular dangers to be subdued. After withdrawing services and protection to attack urban neighborhoods of color, cities now court professional workers and their employers to build out their tax bases. The further elimination or privatization of social services goes hand-in-hand with increased investment in policing and infrastructure to smooth the process of displacement and attract capital for “redevelopment.” The residents who ultimately benefit from neighborhood change are not the first wave of white punks or artists but the professionals who inhabit the fully gentrified neighborhood.

“When Microsoft, Boeing, and other large corporations started to build in Seattle, they wanted to move their mostly white employees into these areas. They worked with banks and politicians to essentially pressure people into selling,” Dezmond Goff of Seattle’s Black Frontline Movement told me. “You have a lot of people who lost homes through both predatory loans and harassment but also people who now can’t participate because they have been incarcerated.”

New directions

By itself, the fact that financial institutions have become the predominant players in the neoliberal housing market isn’t enough to explain why gentrification takes place in modern cities. In the settler colonial imperial heartland, the construction, movement, and survival of oppressed communities has always been contingent on their utility to capitalist interests. The communities displaced today have been subjected to double or triple displacements long before: from the horrors of the Middle Passage to the killing fields of the US-sponsored Dirty Wars to the fatal nighttime cold of the Sonoran Desert. The history of the United States could be written as the story of colonial dispossession and relocation for profit, but what is emerging today is a new pattern of urban dispersal. Hedge funds or institutional landlords concerned only with their own wealth could choose to invest in vast slums or modest homes for the lower-middle class. In the gentrifying city, what they find most profitable is to bet on slum clearance and invest in condominiums for the rich. The patterns of impoverishment and displacement are old, the directionality of urban displacement is new. “So to answer the question of why gentrification happens,” writes P.E. Moskowitz, “we have to answer the question of why the city became profitable to gentrify.”

For comparison, I might harbor a deep-seated desire to own a Beverly Hills mansion. Books could be written about how I acquired such an inclination, about the social structures that induce such desires, or about what this preference says about me or the society in which I live. They would remain hypothetical texts since my desire to live in such a mansion would not change my inability to purchase one. It is a consumption preference I will never fulfill.

Only the complete transformation of a poor neighborhood creates the living standards, amenities, and neighbors that professional-class newcomers desire. Unlike my hypothetical mansion aspirations, these are desires they do fulfill, not only one-by-one but in cities across the world. Regardless of any person’s desire to live in an expensive condominium at a certain address, there is the matter of being paid enough to afford it. What has shifted over the years is not simply the living preferences of white Americans but the relative economic centrality of two class fractions: one segment paid enough to gentrify, another paid so little that they are priced out. A highly educated, largely white segment of working people are now paid astronomical wages while the remains of the urban industrial working class, previously crucial to capitalist profits, are now of so little importance that the utter destruction of their communities is a lucrative venture. To understand this process in rich nations’ richest cities, to situate it within the context of a broad economic transition in global capitalism, and to grasp how thoroughly this change must unsettle our inherited strategies of how to uproot this world, we must look at gentrification not only from the perspective of consumption but production, as well. The struggles around urban displacement are some of the clearest fractures emerging from what has been called the New Economy, the Knowledge Economy, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution, an economic arrangement within contemporary capitalism that we might as easily name the Gentrification Economy.


Andrew Lee is the author of Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War. Lee has supported grassroots social movements for more than 15 years and his work has been published in outlets including Teen Vogue, Yes! Magazine, and The New Inquiry. He writes at In Struggle and is a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

Andrew also appeared on a recent episode of The Response Podcast, “Resisting gentrification and displacement.”

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