Liberalism and Gentri!

cation
by Gavin Mueller

Gentrification isnt a cultural phenomenon its a class offensive by

powerful capitalists.

1866 Mitchell Map of Washington, DC

hen I want to examine the limits of liberal ideology, I look for class struggle;
when I want to !nd some class struggle, I simply step outside my door. You
dont have to live in Washington, DC, like I do, but it helps.

Like a lot of cities, Washington is really two cities in the same space. Weve got Washington,
the place of popular imagination, gleaming white marble monuments and Aaron Sorkin
speechi!ers, the mostly-from-out-of-town professional class keeping the rusty wheels of state
administration turning.
Weve also got DC, the city distinct from the operations of the federal government, made up
of residents, who are mostly poor and mostly black. These two cities are locked in a one-

of residents, who are mostly poor and mostly black. These two cities are locked in a onesided war of attrition, with a"uent newcomers and their local allies conducting clear-andhold operations against their less well-heeled neighbors. I can watch from what
Forbes magazine, that barometer of bohemianism, has labeled the sixth-hippest neighborhood
in the US, where I live.
This is gentri!cation, which, if youre reading this and live in a city, is a process youre caught
up in. Theres a violent side of gentri!cation think Rudy Giuliani and his broken
windows alibi for crackdowns on petty crime. But theres a softer side to this war as well, the
liberal project of city governance whose patron saint is the activist Jane Jacobs, author of Death
and Life of American Cities.
In the face of rampant suburbanization and slash-and-burn urban renewal, Jacobs emphasized
the attractions of urban life in all its diversity, revealing the support networks that lent
resiliency and quality of life to neighborhoods otherwise deemed undesirable. She was also a
!erce critic of the monumental architecture of public housing, in favor of the historic charms
of low-density buildings. Jacobs once-revolutionary ideas are now liberal urbanist common
sense: pedestrian tra#c, mixed-use development, a heterogeneous mix of architectural styles,
businesses, and people. My city councilmans slogan, A Livable, Walkable City, comes
straight out of the Jacobs playbook, and it is di#cult to !nd it objectionable.
However, as urban sociologist Sharon Zukin has pointed out again and again, Jacobs aesthetic
insights cant make up for her avoiding of class realities. Lambasting planners while ignoring
the far more powerful real estate developers, Jacobs polemic has been turned against even her
prized East Village neighborhood, a site of rapacious gentri!cation stretching back to the
1980s.
As Zukin remarks, What Jacobs valued small blocks, cobblestone streets, mixed-uses,
local character have become the gentri!ers ideal. This is not the struggling city of working
class and ethnic groups, but an idealised image that plays to middle-class tastes. In the
absence of true diversity in income and ownership, a simulacrum can be easily substituted. In
my up-and-coming neighborhood in Washington, the super!cially eclectic mix of bars and
restaurants are owned by the same developer.
Zukin points out that Jacobs fondness for buildings ran roughshod over the actual people who
made up the neighborhood. A line from the excellent gentri!cation documentary, Flag Wars,
set in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, makes the point clearly: I just feel bad for the
houses, intones a somber yuppie, as he gazes upon the dilapidated buildings in which his
neighbors reside. Moved by this sympathy, he and his cohort of gentri!ers pressure their
poorer neighbors by anonymously reporting housing code violations.
Liberal support for gentri!cation was a contradictory and even an embarrassed thing not too
long ago. Carol Lloyds 1999 Salon article Im the Enemy! sees the writer joining an
anarchist-$avored group trying to mount opposition to the dot-com yuppies invading San

anarchist-$avored group trying to mount opposition to the dot-com yuppies invading San
Franciscos Mission District, before it dawns on her that she herself is a gentri!er. But things
are changing.
One advantage to living in DC is that these liberal niceties are being quickly thrust aside: here
the word gentri!cation has lost its pejorative sense, ceasing to scandalize the yuppies who
proudly reclaim the term as they reclaim homes and neighborhoods from the communities
who have lived here for decades.

uch bald-faced attitudes stem from dire inequality in cities like the nations capital,
and the pro!ts to be made from it. In this respect, Washington is a good case study
in the uneven development at work in cities across the country. Its always been a

starkly unequal place here slave labor built the Capitol building and census data reveals
the biggest gap between rich and poor in the nation.
Within Washington city limits, 15 percent of families earn $200,000 or more a year, 15
percent exist below the poverty line. Washington has one the highest percentages of college
graduates (46 percent) and one of the highest rates of functional illiteracy (33 percent).
Poverty is entirely racialized: the median income for a white household is over $100,000; for
black families its under $40,000. In the poorest neighborhoods, HIV infection rate
approaches double-digits, and like every other indicator of inequality, its only getting worse.
The speed and rapacity of Washington gentri!cation lets you see clearly whos responsible,
without Richard Florida nostrums about creatives. We dont have creatives. We have
bureaucrats and IT workers with a few more years of beards and bong hits in them, and really,
isnt this what most creatives are? The sheer expense of living in Washington, and the
squareness of your average fed worker, mitigates against the hipster bohemianism weve come
to associate with the !rst wave of neighborhood revitalization.
Gentri!cation has always been a top-down aair, not a spontaneous hipster in$ux,
orchestrated by the real estate developers and investors who pull the strings of city policy, with
individual home-buyers deployed in mopping up operations.
The !rst installment of DC gentri!cation began as the smoke lifted after the riots following
Martin Luther Kings assassination. Large parts of the black areas of the city (at the time,
everything east of Rock Creek Park, including what is now downtown) were burned. With
the fear of urban insurrection hanging in the air, property values plummeted, paving the way
for local real estate magnates to snap up hugely lucrative portfolios.
Developers succeeded in getting the city government and banks to assist in their purchases,
promising community projects, like homeless shelters and hospitals, that they rarely delivered

promising community projects, like homeless shelters and hospitals, that they rarely delivered
before they $ipped the property. Often it was enough to throw chump change into Mayor
Marion Barrys re-election fund, or $y out some city council members on a junket to the Virgin
Islands, to secure lucrative city projects and advantageous loans. Now the big operators, like
Qatars sovereign wealth fund, simply bypass the city government: according to broker Jerry
Coren, when it comes to DC real estate deals, Politics is really not essential.
By the 1980s, funded by huge amounts of capital, including millions in overseas investments,
DCs characteristic architecture, the soulless mid-sized cube of o#ce space, had replaced the
eclectic mix of local businesses around the White House. Currently the areas fortunes are
managed by the Downtown DC Business Improvement District, a cabal of property-owning
hacks who talk Jacobs-style beauti!cation in the interest of pushing property values higher.
Among their tactics: implementing mandatory fees to price out small businesses; hiring nonunion workers to pick up trash and check parking meters; encouraging crackdowns on poor
and homeless residents to push them out. The Downtown DC BID was one of the !rst
organizations to raise an alarm about Occupy DCs encampment in McPherson Square. The
BIDs president, Richard Bradley (who gives himself $70,000 raises while squelching eorts
by BID employees to unionize) pressured the National Park Service to evict Occupy from the
very !rst week, and continued to insist on a police response throughout the entire occupation.
Today, government-abetted gentri!cation has trickled down to small home buyers. Forget
your fairy tales of urban pioneers bravely staking out territory in the urban hinterlands at
every point, this has been a takeover planned by large business interests who fund their
projects with tax abatements.
In Columbia Heights, developers dropped a Target into the middle of a neighborhood stricken
by violence and poverty to jumpstart capitalist development. Real-estate values soared, and
speculative condo developments cubes again began to replace single-family homes, in
spite of a bit of residual gunplay at the metro stop.
The construction of a trolley line (of dubious utility, but just try to convince a yuppie that a
streetcar is pointless) $agged my own neighborhood for skyrocketing property values,
precipitating a rush that has become a steady churn of property circulation. For-sale signs have
the lifespan of a may$y before the realtor sets a smug GONE! on top of it. The house across
the street from me has been sold each year Ive lived here.
Real estate is practically recreation in DC go to a bar and instead of gabbing about local
sports (few yuppies grew up with Washingtons teams, and feel little loyalty to them), people
chat about the up-and-coming neighborhoods, where the deals are, which neighborhoods have
undergone the most drastic change. And which are still scary or sketchy.
Its important to understand whats going on here. A powerful capitalist class of bankers, realestate developers, and investors is driving gentri!cation, using a mixture of huge loans (to

estate developers, and investors is driving gentri!cation, using a mixture of huge loans (to
which only they have access) and government funding to push land values higher.
This leaves DCs professional class with a choice. If their household income is in the six-!gurerange, they can generally secure mortgages in gentrifying neighborhoods, buy property, have
low-wage workers !x it up for cheap, and ride those property values into a secure position in
the middle class. Or they can pay exorbitant rent until they move back to Peoria. Not much of a
choice. If they buy, theyre putting everything on the line, albeit a line that, in this city, has
only gone one way in the past decade.
The median price of a home in 2000 was around $150,000. In 2009, it was over $400,000.
Home values went up over 10 percent in the last year. If youve got a $400,000 house, you just
made more than the median income of a black family, just for belonging to the propertied
class.
Tying up your assets, your middle-class future, in home values does something to people. It
alters their interests. It sutures a professional class, of liberal and even progressive beliefs, to
the rapacious capitalist expansion into the city. The people who move to gentrifying areas tend
to have liberal, tolerant, cosmopolitan sympathies. But they are aligned materially with
reactionary and oppressive city restructuring, pushing them into antagonism with established
residents, who do nothing for property values. Behind every Jane Jacobs comes Rudy Giuliani
with his nightstick.

his produces racism. Racism isnt just a bad feeling in your heart, as a liberal
believes when she insists that she isnt at all racist. Its a force that emerges from
the pressures of maintaining ones own position, and the resentments that spring

forth from this process. It produces fear and hatred of the poor for being poor, for having any
pretense of being on equal footing with the propertied. It is a hatred for the potential threat to
the property values which underpin a tenuous future among the professional middle class:
blackness.
This bubbles up into everyday life in all sorts of ways. At a cookout in a gentrifying Northeast
neighborhood, I watched as a guest, a nice man with a nice job and a nice family, became
increasingly incensed by some black teenagers riding mopeds through the alley. Their bikes
were loud, but they did nothing to us, said nothing to us. And yet he seemed to resent their
very presence: he glared, he muttered under his breath.
It was not only that these boys existed, but that they enjoyed themselves unapologetically, in
full purview of the gentry. They didnt shuck and jive, they didnt cower, and they didnt stay
quiet. His rage grew every time they passed by, his !sts clenching and unclenching at these
children who were born in this neighborhood, who dared to have fun to his face.

children who were born in this neighborhood, who dared to have fun to his face.
This rage is a counterpart to fear: the man was angry at himself for being afraid. Frantz Fanon,
writing about his experiences as a black man in white Paris, gave a diagnosis apt to this day:
The Negro is a phobogenic object. Young black bodies have been mass cultures symbol for
irrational, savage violence for decades, for centuries. And so the whites fear them, and this fear
can manifest as anger, as callousness, as hatred. And yet, Washingtons rate of violent crime
against whites is lower than the national average. White skin is quite literally a protection from
harm. But it doesnt insulate your property values. That requires extra vigilance.
The fact is, these phobogenic boys have much more to fear from the whites living alongside
them. We can leverage state violence against them we can call the cops. On message boards,
police o#cers urge gentri!ers to report any suspicious activity, which includes legal activity
such as walking, talking, and standing. Smoking weed in the alley? Call the cops. A group of
teenagers talking loudly? Call the cops. Litter? Call the cops, just whatever you do, dont
actually approach people! State repression is the solution to all problems.
Locals lament that boys as young as thirteen cant be given adult time for petty theft and
vandalism. In the era of mass incarceration, adult time could mean a decade or more of rape
and torture in Americas overstued gulags, to be released forever marked as an enemy of the
propertied classes, practically destined to end up behind bars again. As bell hooks remarks,
black folks associated whiteness with the terrible, the terrifying, the terrorizing. White
people were regarded as terrorists, especially those who dared to enter that segregated space
of blackness. And so we are.

he liberal discourse on gentri!cation has absolutely nothing to say about !nance

or prison, the two most salient institutions in urban life. Instead, it does what
liberal discourse so often does: it buries the structural forces at work and

choreographs a dance about individual choice to perform on the grave. We get tiny dramas
over church parking lots and bike lanes and whether 7-11 will be able to serve chicken wings.
Gentri!cation becomes a culture war, a battle over consumer choices: gourmet cupcake shop
or fried chicken joint? Can we all live side by side, eating gourmet pickles with our fried !sh
sandwiches? Will blacks and whites hang out in the same bars? wonders Racialicious.
The problems of gentri!cation always boil down to those of mutual tolerance (and so, poor
black people often become racists intolerant of yuppies); the solutions, therefore, reside in
personal conduct and ethical choices. In How To Be A Good Gentri!er, Elahe Izadi oers
such helpful pointers as saying hello to your neighbors and not crossing the street to avoid
them. After all, if youre going to participate in the expulsion of poor people from their
communities, you might as well be civil.

Every liberal account of gentri!cation ends with the same question, with which gentri!cation
chronicler Will Doig helpfully titled one of his columns: Can gentri!cation work for
everyone? It takes a conservative pundit, Jerry Weinberger, to reveal the bad faith behind this
question by answering it:

The fate of the dysfunctional and fatherless [sic] black underclass is likely to remain
grim. Like their brethren across the country today, theyll be invisible to both political
parties, and in D.C., theyll be con!ned to pockets of murder and mayhem, with no
one to look after their interests.

He then concludes with a shrug, pointing out that an interracial couple, symbol of liberal
progress, lives next to him. Liberal gentri!cation articles love to tra#c in these vignettes about
how complicated Washington gentri!cation is, because some of the propertied are black
themselves.
Recently, the Atlantic published an article on the history of gentri!cation in the U Street
corridor of DC that ran over 4500 words. Large !nancial interests merited two of them. The
rest was the typical shambling, rambling piece about restaurants rising from the ashes of the
1968 riots, of the fascinating existence of the nonwhite petty bourgeoisie, of Obama eating a
sausage at local mainstay Bens Chili Bowl. In short, it had nothing new to say. Nevertheless, it
had to keep saying it, for 4500 words. The repression of urban class struggle can never be total,
and it weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the liberal gentry, surfacing again and again in
hand-wringing op-eds.
What choice do I have? ask the liberal gentri!ers, if you press them a bit. This is the only
place I can aord to live! This sums everything up perfectly, puncturing the bubble of
individual choices that make up liberal politics.
You have no choice; everythings been decided ahead of time. If you want the American dream
of a middle-class life with a home you own in the city in which you work, you have few other
choices than to join the shock troops of the onslaught against the urban poor. Align with big
capital and the repressive state in the conquest of the city, and maybe youll have enough
equity to send your kids to college.
Sure, you may feel a bit of guilt, but when it comes down to it, youre still calling the cops at the
slightest provocation. After all, its not just trendy bars and cafes at stake its the yuppies
privileged position in ruling class administration, one of the dwindling means towards any
semblance of economic and social stability in this time of crisis. The gentry werent drafted
into this army, but they didnt exactly volunteer.

arx called the violent expropriation of the poor from their lands primitive
accumulation. The term conjures a one-time sin, in the distant past Adam
Smith called it originary accumulation. However, primitive accumulation

accompanies capitalist development every step of the way, wherever valuable land meets
valueless humanity.
In the early days of America, before Washington existed, nothing short of genocide would
su#ce. Todays colonization requires little more than a low-interest mortgage and 911 on
speed dial. In the face of this slow destruction of the urban poor, liberals have only one
question: cant we have fried chicken and cupcakes, too?