Gentrification (or: why you need to have a civilized society to have nice cities)

Today's subject is gentrification. I've just finished reading "Home from Nowhere," by James Howard Kunstler (hencefore referred to as JHK), a book in which he strongly advocates the redevelopment of the mostly derelict cities of America, the creation of nice, pleasant, and livable urban spaces as an alternative to sprawl and suburbs.

Sounds good to me. But imbuing urban spaces with new life has a name, and to most it's a pretty ugly one: gentrification. JHK is something of a supporter of said process. He claims (p. 54) that "[t]he problems of the cities are not going to be relieved until the middle class and the wealthy return to live there." The problem people have with gentrification, though, is that when the rich come in they put up fancy apartment buildings and drive up property values and make so the less fortunate can't afford to pay rent and get pushed out. JHK doesn't believe that to be right, though, and his vision involves mixed-income neighborhoods where all can live (p. 56):

Where does the underclass go if the cities are reoccupied by the well off? The underclass ceases to be an underclass and becomes something else: a working class of honorably occupied people who make less money. They share the city with other classes, as was always the case in history until our era. They observe the same standard of public conduct as everybody else. They live on less desirable streets in less desirable buildings, but they need not live in either material or spiritual squalor.

That doesn't sound too bad. Though it somewhat offends my leftist sensibilities and egalitarian tendencies, I can recognize that the abolition of class-based society is not really in the cards at this point, and this sounds like a rather decent way of dealing with things.

So why isn't this the way gentrification goes? Until recently, I was living in Portland, OR, a city where gentrification was quite the hot topic. It was going on in many parts of the city, and it was pushing out the poor. One of the more striking manifestations of this was Chinatown. It used to be that to get the really good, authentic Chinese food, you went to Chinatown, a part of one of the older sections of Portland on the west side of the river. Nowadays, anyone who knows anything about Chinese food will tell you that, to get a really good authentic meal, you have to head to E 82nd Avenue, a truly ugly strip full of all the worst kinds of things JHK describes in his book. It sucks.

The reason for this shift is gentrification. The Pearl district, the epicenter of Portland gentrification, is expanding expanding into Chinatown. Those who have traditionally lived and operated businesses there can't afford the rent anymore, so they move out to the sprawling suburbs of the East side, where rent is much, much cheaper. This has been the bizarre consequence of urban "revitalization" in Portland: the middle and upper classes are colonizing the urban center, and the worst, dodgiest, most undesirable parts of town are definitely the eastern suburbs. Hands down. These have all the worst aspects of suburbs – car crazy, strip malls, etc – but with the added bonus of poverty and the associated social pathologies.

Why are things happening this way? Why, instead of the functional, mixed-income neighborhoods described by JHK do we have an all-white, all-wealthy population in these redeveloped neighborhoods? I hate the Pearl. Though it's mixed-use, dense, pedestrian-friendly, and has great public transportation, it's still got that ultra-clean, sterilized feel that rich suburbs do.

Clearly we could put our finger on a number of reasons why, instead of creating a city for everyone, as in JHK's vision, gentrification seems to just push the poor out to the fringes. For example, we could say that the mixed-income thing wasn't planned well enough. And that wouldn't be incorrect. But I don't think that's the real, deep issue. The real issue is our socio-economic system, it is the brutal capitalism the American economy runs on and the savage inequalities it creates. The vision JHK describes is possible, surely, but it can't tolerate the intense class divides of our modern society.

I've seen JHK's city – in places like Denmark, for example, where my parents lived for a few years. They lived in a "suburb" of Copenhagen, meaning a town just outside the city that was part of the urban area. Even there, a relatively affluent area, a less affluent class could reside. They were storekeepers and electricians and plumbers, and they lived in less desirable buildings on less desirable streets. But they were not commuting from far-flung suburbs. And they were not desperately poor.

That last bit presents a huge obstacle towards creating livable, mixed-income cities in the US: our working poor are not making a decent living, and they are very much an underclass. They are not "honorably occupied people who make less money." They bust ass working multiple jobs at places like McDonald's and Walmart, and still can't make ends meet. Economically, it is just not possible for them to share neighborhoods with wealthy people, even with deliberately mixed-income planning.

The point I'm trying to make, and the point that JHK misses, is that to create the kinds of places he envisions we need to change our socio-economic system drastically. The existing places that have all of JHK's positive characteristics – the cities of Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands, etc. – are social-democratic states. They have highly progressive taxation systems that limit social inequality. They have a strong sense of egalitarianism and social responsibility. Only under a social-democratic system can you have "a working class of honorably occupied people who make less money," not under one of brutal free-market capitalism. Pleasant, redeveloped cities that are also affordable for the less-affluent simply cannot be created in our society as it exists today. The poor are simply too poor, and the rich too rich. It's no accident that the places with the nicest cities also have progressive, humane socio-economic systems.

In effect, all the pathologies of American society are all deeply intertwined. Inequality, sprawl, derelict cities, car culture, corporate power, low voter turnout, obesity – these and many other problems are deeply intertwined and mutually reinforcing. They cannot be disentangled and looked at separately. The approach to healing this society, to civilizing it (to use a word JHK likes), must be holistic. JHK's is not.

Who is this America?

At least one positive thing about the recent immigration reform bill in Congress is that it has really generated some serious soul-searching and debate on the question of the place of immigrants in current American society. Supporters of immigrant rights have been forced to articulate their point of view. However, this soul-searching does not go deep enough, and important assumptions about national identity, if there even is such a thing (which I doubt), remain unquestioned.

Of course, many supporters of immigrant rights are quick to invoke the "nation of immigrants," how welcoming the huddled masses within are borders is part of the very foundation of America. And they bring up important points. Thus Paul Krugman, in the New York Times yesterday (May 25th, "Immigrants and Politics"):

Moreover, as supporters of immigrant rights rightly remind us, everything today’s immigrant-bashers say — that immigrants are insufficiently skilled, that they’re too culturally alien, and, implied though rarely stated explicitly, that they’re not white enough — was said a century ago about Italians, Poles and Jews.

This fact, while well documented (see, for example, Michael Frye Jacobson's excellent 1998. book "Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race"), really does bear repeating because it vividly illustrates that what we think of as "America" is neither timeless nor unchanging. There is, then, no simple essence of "America" for immigrants to destroy, even if they could.

But the point I want to make here is even more basic. Consider another passage from a New York Times article yesterday, about a poll on American attitudes towards immigration (May 25th, "Immigration Bill Provisions Gain Wide Support in Poll"):

The poll showed that Americans are uncertain about the benefits of the most recent wave of immigration, and divided over how many immigrants should come in the future.

The question that pops into my head after reading this sentence is: "should?". Or, spelled out more clearly, why is it that we believe we have a right to dictate the fate of these people, that we think we can (and should) allow or deny them entrance here? Is that really a choice that we can make and impose on others? Underlying the whole thing is the assumption that there is an unproblematic and unitary nation, and that we control it. I take issue with that assumption.

Think for a moment about this thing we call globalization. Clearly it means a lot of things, but one undeniable component is the intertwining of national economies, a meshing that is now inextricable and means that changes in agricultural policy in the US can lead to food riots in Mexico. But Mexicans have no say in who makes policy in the US. Why would they? They're not US citizens.

The point here is that while we talk about discrete political entities, in fact no nation is an island (metaphorically speaking, of course). The global economic order and the global political order are not in sync: one ignores borders, while for the other they are of paramount importance. And this leads to many problems (and, frankly, leads me to wonder if the nation-state, in its current incarnation, is not becoming obsolete (and in fact, phenomena such as the growth of the EU seem to validate this opinion). But let's leave that can of worms aside for now). Those who migrate to the US usually do so for economic reasons, like the Mexicans who (let's be honest) are really at the ones who are being talked about in this debate. As an editorial in The Nation put it ("Raw Deal on Immigration", posted May 24th):

By wrenching open the domestic Mexican market to subsidized US exports, trade deals like NAFTA have put poor Mexican farmers out of business while driving up the domestic price of staples like corn. Unable to make ends meet in Mexico, people make the rational calculation to go to the United States, where jobs pay more and are more plentiful, so they can send money home to support their families.

Simple, right? And yet, when US-engineered trade deals are pushing immigrants across the border, why do we think we can tell them whether they're welcome or not? Who is this America guarding the nation, and why does it think it has a right to do so?

Leftists in academia (or, why your professor hates America)

Let me begin this blog by talking about one particular manifestation of a much larger issue that I believe to be of crucial importance, one that I will be coming back to and approaching from different angles often. My own (admittedly dorky) label for this issue is "the problem with structural problems". I'll begin somewhere near and dear to my (dorky) heart: academia.

In his book "Thinking Points", George Lakoff points out (p.62) that "[i]n surveying conservative and progressive arguments, we have noticed another important regularity. Conservatives seem to argue on the basis of direct, individual causation, while progressives tend to argue on the basis of systemic, complex causation." This statement leads me to wonder about claims, made by Horowitz and other rightists of his ilk, that there is a leftist bias in academia. Because, in a sense, this fact seems to point a different explanation; namely, that a progressive stance is almost inherent in intellectual pursuits and that to be both a serious scholar and a dedicated rightist involves constant, unresolvable tension.

In studying history, politics, social sciences, or anything that probes the social in any way, one is struck with the massive complexity of the whole thing. Nothing is ever simple. To take a particularly obvious example, consider underdevelopment in sub-Saharan Africa. How did that happen? Why is it getting worse instead of better? To even begin to answer these questions at all, we would need to delve into the subjects of colonialism, neo-colonialism, post-colonialism, natural resource management, globalization, neo-liberal economics, and so much more. Zooming in on any particular theme or area or event, one is confronted with a massive number of contingencies, of individuals doing things at specific places and specific times. Nothing is ever the result of an individual rationally making a decision in a social/historical/political vacuum. All this means that taking an honest look involves confronting an almost overwhelming complexity.

More importantly, it involves grappling with what is called a structure or a system because, again, causation is rarely direct. I fill up my tank at the Shell station. This helps – just a tiny bit – make Shell a profitable business, ans thereby gives it a mandate to keep doing the work they're doing. Work that involves the economic and environmental destruction of such places as the Niger delta. But that's not me, I'm just going about my life, doing what I need to make it to work. This is indirect causation (and a relatively simple example at that). Indirect causation operates by reinforcing and perpetuating a structure through day-to-day acts that, taken individually, seem like nothing at all. This entails a whole host of problems for our way of thinking about morality, something I will be coming back to (again and again and again) in this blog. But back to academia.

With this in mind, we might begin to see why there's a leftist "bias" in the world of letters and minds. In those hallowed halls and ivory towers, people dedicate lives to studying such problems. Academics are, therefore, acutely aware of the complexity of the world, of the indirect causation that underlies most issues. With this awareness, conservative discourse stops making sense. Take the bootstraps principle, a conservative favorite (as described by Lakoff in "Thinking Points" p.61): "With enough self-discipline, everyone can pull himself or herself up by the bootstraps. The government has no responsibility to help people who have fallen behind, because it's their own fault, caused by lack of discipline and morality." This principle comes, of course, with a whole host of assumptions, all of which are problematic to the careful observer of society. It assumes the playing field is even, it assumes that there are no built-in, self-perpetuating obstacles to certain groups' achieving prosperity. How, I want to ask, could any honest intellectual accept these assumptions? This goes a long way to explaining the prevailing political leaning of academics. It's not a bias. Professors are hired because they are good scholars and teachers. This, I am suggesting, makes them extremely likely to have progressive sensibilities. But they're not hired because of their political beliefs. Those are simply a natural outcome of careful study. Accepting the assumptions of the bootstraps principle would make you a bad scholar with a myopic view of society. And who wants that in a professor?

Horowitz' Academic Bill of Rights says so itself: "All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives. No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs."