Opinion of Gentrification

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It depends what you mean by gentrification and even then it depends a little on the circumstances, but, basically it's a bad thing. It also tends to lead (and quite inevitably) to the creation of banlieues (there isn't a good word for this in English), which is something that middle class people have a strange tendency to forget.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There's a little too much council housing to drive out all the working class, admittedly.

So, basically, for Bornheim read Islington.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Gentrification is the market working, it's not possible to stop.

Actually I think you'll find that where housing is concerned it can be remarkably easy to stop anything you want to stop; so long as the political will is there. Housing is about power; housing is power.

Gentrification provides a case in point. Some of the most dramatic gentrification in recent decades¹ has been in inner London, and while much of this can be put down to simple market forces,² much of it owes its occurrence to political decisions and the blatant abuse of the power of the state in the 1980s and early 1990s (class war, if you will, with the bourgeoisie winning, as is their wont). In Wandsworth (which includes the historically - and now very much formerly - proletarian district of Battersea) and Westminster (which includes Paddington) this was done at a borough level (with financial assistance from central government) and in the case of Westminster amounted to a criminal conspiracy.³ This strategy has recently been adopted in Hammersmith & Fulham, an area already largely gentrified through 'market' means. In the old docklands things were done not through local government (because local government in the relevant boroughs was controlled by parties opposed to Thatcher), but through central government, private finance and the open crushing of local democracy; the result being the grotesque totalitarian behemoth known officially as the London Docklands Development Corporation, which forcibly gentrified large sections of the city with fanatical enthusiasm while also (through the eastwards expansion of the financial district at Canary Wharf) laying the foundations for future 'natural' market based gentrification of vast tracts of the former East End.

<sup>1. Along with large scale transformation of many suburban areas into banlieues; Wembley, North Croydon, Ilford...

2.  Except maybe not so simple; consider the importance of the deregulation of the private renting sector in the 1980s, and also the selling off of much social housing stock in the same decade. Even here, at the most innocent level of gentrification, we see state power at work.

3. Dame Shirley Porter and 'Building Stable Communities', aka the 'Homes for Votes' scandal of the early 1990s.</sup>

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Because we are citizens and not only consumers.

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I quite agree. That is one reason why I dislike gentrification. Oh... but that statement does not apply to gentrifiers, does it? For such people the rules are different. Consumer choice is king for those with money; to oppose this is to oppose Nature.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I need to post more here, (later maybe), but in the meantime, it should be noted that you can have gentrification in rural areas as well. And it is an Abomination Unto The Lord.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

That's capitalism; because I don't know who ought to have a particular property entitlement we have a market.  If you're concerned about distributional justice, that's best addressed through redistributive taxation and government spending, not through command and control regulation of the market.

Throwing your hands up in the air and bleating 'that's capitalism!' and acting shocked that anyone should question The Market (hallowed be its name) is not an answer, particularly when (as has now been pointed out in the thread) there is no such thing as a natural market in housing. Indeed, not only is their no such thing, there isn't really anything resembling one. Housing is about power, not ineffable laws of pseudo-nature. Attempts to claim otherwise are really just attempts to justify class war.

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How could the open abuse of state power in those cases be considered to be 'completely apart from gentrification' when without that very abuse of state power those particular cases of gentrification could not themselves have happened?

And all of this without remembering that the blueprint for all ultra-aggressive gentrification everywhere (and the subsequent creation of the banlieues) is what Haussmann did to Paris in the 19th century.