As Zukin remarks, “What Jacobs valued — small blocks, cobblestone streets, mixed-uses, local character — have become the gentrifiers’ 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 superficially eclectic mix of bars and restaurants are owned by the same developer. [...]
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 it’s under $40,000. In the poorest neighborhoods, HIV infection rate approaches double-digits, and like every other indicator of inequality, it’s only getting worse. [...]
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.
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