Gentrification

Feministing has an excellent interview up with a woman fighting gentrification in Brooklyn. I find this opening quotation quite powerful:

Basically, at one point I was reading Patrice Lumumba [a former Congolese anti-colonial leader], and it just came down to this ... even if I am able to move these young people, if their parents don’t have a place to live, or an affordable place to live, then they won’t be able to live as healthy, conscious human beings. And so people have to start thinking about each other and their communities. They can’t wait for their government or someone in office to. They have to start taking care of each other.

Gentrification isn't just about an aesthetic preference for the bohemian over the Gap, or knee-jerk class resentment. On a fundamental economic level, gentrification involves pricing housing and retail space beyond the poor and working class so that upper middle class whites can enjoy a version of the city that's as `safe' (read: homogeneous and unchallenging) as a suburb. Or, put the other way around, it's deliberately denying `undesirables' (in senses of both race and class) access to economic resources they need to flourish for the benefit of the privileged. That makes it an issue of justice.

I'm not denying (and neither is McFarlane) that improving the economy, reducing the violent crime rate, replacing unsafe buildings, etc., in a struggling neighbourhood are goods. But these goods can be achieved by and for the current citizens of the neighbourhood, not by removing them.