socialismartnature:

Residents of big cities everywhere face the effects of gentrification, as long-time residents are pushed out of neighborhoods they called home by rising rents and housing costs and other changes. In this article based on a speech at a recent ISO forum in Brooklyn, Ronnie Flores looks at the roots of gentrification—and how we should respond.

… In the past few decades, however, as the suburbs developed, there was less room to invest small and gain big. Thus, capital made its return to urban life. After decades of consigning them to poverty and despair, capital re-enters starved urban communities only when it has become most profitable to do so.

When there’s a wide enough gap between the current rent in an area and the potential rent that can be made if it were to undergo reinvestment, a project for gentrification is born. This “rent gap” is the mechanism underlying gentrification.

IT’S UNDENIABLE that gentrification brings with it some improvements in neighborhoods. Indeed, it must do so—in order to attract the consumers it targets and make a good return for investors. It must be asked, however, who benefits from the improvements?

As Karl Marx wrote in Capital almost 150 years ago:

‘Improvements’ of towns, accompanying the increase of wealth, by the demolition of badly built quarters, the erection of palaces for banks, warehouses, etc., the widening of streets for business traffic, for the carriages of luxury, and for the introduction of tramways, etc., drive away the poor into even worse and more crowded hiding places.

In these past few decades, while urban neighborhoods were struggling for survival, capital was circling the sky above, like a vulture, watching and waiting for the right time to strike.

Long-standing residents, who came to these decaying neighborhoods when they were cheap enough to get by on a low wage, become an obstacle for the capitalist gentrifiers. Their displacement becomes a precondition for the total transformation of the neighborhood.