by
Samuel Stein
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As cities destroyed their public housing, they chipped away at rent controls or abandoned them altogether. This helped cement the relationship between planning and gentrification. With strong rent controls in place, urban planning interventions like new parks, schools and transit do not necessarily produce elevated housing costs; while public investments in neighborhoods might widen rent gaps, rent controls would prevent landlords from closing them. With rent controls diminished or removed, however, landlords could more easily raise rents based on new neighborhood improvements; they market these planning interventions as amenities for their property, and thus immediately turn inclusionary public investments into exclusionary private gains. Today a weak form of rent control still stands in some California, DC, Maryland, New York and New Jersey cities, but these systems have been systematically undermined by landlord-backed legislators and under-enforced by regulators. Many US states have passed ordinances outlawing further controls.
By choice or by force, planners use gentrification to create the physical environments for capital to thrive. It is the process by which cities seek capital, and capital seeks land. Its endgame is a city controlled by bankers and developers, run like a corporation, designed as a luxury product and planned by the finance sector. What was public becomes private; what was common becomes enclosed; what was cheap becomes expensive; what was shared becomes traded. Through the real estate state, the city becomes gentrified. Through gentrification, the city becomes neoliberal.
This should not have come as a surprise. Simply adding housing supply does not necessarily drive down overall prices. In many cases, it does the opposite, since developers almost always build for the top of the market, not for the greatest need; real estate functions as plural—rather than singular—markets, meaning that increasing supply at the top of the market does nothing to reduce demand at the bottom; purchasers of luxury housing often do not live there full time, thereby creating an enormous market for empty apartments; people generally do not move frequently, so the kind of “self-sorting” required for residents to meet their “market equilibrium” does not actually take place; and in the absence of tight and universal rent controls, the rise of big flashy buildings is more likely to raise than diminish neighbors’ rents. Because luxury real estate is such a reliable and under-taxed investment in New York City, it is exceedingly rare for tall new buildings in gentrifying neighborhoods to rent or sell at rates that are affordable to those who live nearby. In most cases, they are the kinds of luxury projects that result in displacement—either directly through demolition, or indirectly by elevating rents in the surrounding area.
To beef up the stock of such land and properties, cities can adopt policies that facilitate the transfer of private land to the public.14 When property owners fail to pay taxes, cities can stop selling liens to speculators, as New York City currently does, and instead transfer tax-deficient properties into a scatter-site community land trust.15 Cities could pass “right to sell” bills, giving households at risk of foreclosure the opportunity to sell their home to the city, which would operate it as public housing.16 Cities could also institute a “right of first refusal” on home sales, as is being established in parts of Paris. Under this system, the city has a first pass at any property for sale, and can pay the seller market value for their home and convert it into social housing.17 Thanks to a ballot referendum, San Francisco’s Small Sites Program has started buying out rent-controlled buildings and transferring ownership from private landlords to community land trusts.18
Where manufacturing capital dominates, the industrial workplace becomes a main site of struggle and the union movement the leading voice of labor. Where real estate is the dominant sect of capital, however, the importance of a strong and dedicated housing, tenant and anti-gentrification movement increases and becomes a crucial conduit for labor action. This is not to say that workplace struggles matter any less in places where real estate rules—deindustrialization simply means working for a different form of capital, not ceasing to work and be exploited. But just as a globalized economy means that workers at particular logistical chokepoints can effectively shut down the entire system with targeted strikes, an urban economy overdependent on real estate means that a large and effective tenant movement has the power to deny speculators the chance to use the city as an investment vehicle.
In New York, there is growing momentum around the activist slogan “Not For Sale.” It is chanted at rallies and plastered over posters for posh new developments. In early 2016, a network of activists called “New York City Not for Sale” released a five-point platform that is, ultimately, a radical anti-gentrification plan:
- End homelessness in New York City. Immediate housing for all homeless people through new construction or seizure of vacant “warehoused” properties. Citywide moratorium on evictions.
- Universal rent control. Apply rent control laws to all rental properties in New York City. Institute an immediate rent freeze, and phased rollback of rents to 20 percent of tenant income.
- Transfer distressed buildings to tenant ownership. Transfer properties using the 7A receivership process or eminent domain. Tenant ownership in the form of cooperatives, mutual housing associations, or community land trusts.
- Repair and expand high-quality public housing. Full funding for the NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) and full repairs and enhancements for all NYCHA properties. Begin construction of new, high quality public housing with community centers and art spaces.
- Democratize development. Institute direct election of community boards with veto power over development decisions. Expand public input into the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP). Moratorium on upzoning until these reforms are completed.67
[...] The Recognitions needed devotees who would keep its existence known until such time as it could be accepted as a classic; but a cult following is not the finest one to have, suggesting something, at best, beloved only by special tastes—in this case, the worry was, a wacko book with wacko fans. In fact, a cult did form, a cult in the best old sense, for it was made of readers whose consciousness had been altered by their encounter with this book; who had experienced more than its obvious artistic excellence, and responded to its neglect not merely with the resigned outrage customarily felt by those who read well and widely and wish that justice be accorded good books; it was composed of those who had felt to the centers of themselves how much this novel was indeed a recognition and could produce that famous shock: how it revealed the inner workings of the social world as though that world were a nickel watch; how it combined the pessimisms of its perceptions with the affirmations of the art it, at the same time, altered and advanced; more, how its author, though new to the game, had cared enough about himself, his aims, his skill, to create greatness against the grain, and, of course, against the odds.
Well, it was ambitious certainly, dense, lengthy, complex. Its author is a romantic in that regard, clearly concerned to create a masterpiece; for how else, but by aiming, is excellence to be attained? It’s not often one begins a sand castle on a lazy summer morning—pattybaking by the blue lagoon—only to—by gosh!—achieve—thanks to a series of sandy serendipities—an Alhambra with all its pools by afternoon. The book was about bamboozlers, the slowest wits could see that, and therein saw themselves, and therewith withdrew. This was not to be a slow evening’s soporific entertainment, it was to be their indecent exposure.
They cribbed from the dustjacket. They stole from any review appearing earlier. They got things (by the thousands!) wrong. They condemned the subject, although they didn’t know what it was; they loathed its learning, which they said was show-off; they objected to its tone, though they failed to catch it; they rejected with fury its point of view, whose criminal intent they somehow suspected. They fell all over one another praising Joyce, a writer who, they said, was the real McCoy, whereas . . . yet had they been transported to that earlier time, they would have been first in line to shower Ireland’s author with deaf Dublin’s stones.
ugh i love this
Silence became his mode, exile (in effect) his status, cunning in scraping by his strategy, while compiling data and constructing other people’s niggling or nefarious plots, building another long book out of our business world’s obsession with money, manipulation, and deception, composing a hymn to Horatio Alger, music made of inane, conniving, sly, deceitful speech. J R did ok at the store for a time, and gathered in the National Book Award, but I think it was less read than The Recognitions, less enjoyed, and could not produce, of course, the same surprise. Furthermore, although clearly created by a similar sensibility, and expressing a common point of view, J R was as different from the earlier novel as Joyce from James. But do not put down what you have to go to J R yet, even if it is almost as musical as Finnegans Wake, a torrent of talk and Tower of Babble, a slumgullion of broken phrases and incomplete—let’s call them—thoughts; because there is plenty to listen to here; because we must always listen to the language; it is our first sign of the presence of a master’s hand; and when we do that, when we listen, it is because we have first pronounced the words and performed the text, so when we listen we hear, hear ourselves singing the saying, and now we are real readers, we are participating in the making, we are moving the tune along the line, because no one who loves literature can follow these motions, these sentences, half sentences, of William Gaddis, very far without halting and holding up their arms and outcrying hallelujah there is something good in this gosh awful god empty world.
Which is almost the whole point of what we do.
AHH
Too often we bring to literature the bias for “realism” we were normally brought up with, and consequently we find a work like The Recognitions too fanciful, obscure, and riddling; but is reality always clear and unambiguous? is reality simple and not complex? does it unfold like the pages of a newspaper, or is the unfolding more like that of a road map—difficult to get spread out, difficult to read, difficult to redo? and is everything remembered precisely, and nothing repeated, and are people we know inexplicably lost from sight for long periods, only to pop up when we least expect them? Of course; the traditional realist’s well-scrubbed world where motives are known and actions are unambiguous, where you can believe what you are told and where the paths of good and evil are as clearly marked as highways, that world is as contrived as a can opener; for all their frequent brilliance, and all the fondness we have for these artificial figures, their clever conversations and fancy parties, the plots they circle in like carousel’d horses, to call them and the world they decorate “real” is to embrace a beloved illusion. The pages of The Recognitions are more nearly the real right thing than any of Zola’s or Balzac’s.