Read on Twitter
I see lots of people dragging this Op Ed disguised as an intellectual contribution to the study of urban wealth extraction and displacement, thought I might join in! https://twitter.com/theatlantic/status/1345392735151382529
The scene opens with the article’s only piece of evidence: rents have gone down during a pandemic in the hottest US urban real estate markets. One is left to wonder - what’s going on...everywhere else? How are the decreases distributed across the inventory?
Other studies (linked in original thread) are much less favorable to the author and not mentioned. Posters are also rightly wondering about what effect being unemployed but still forced to pay rent might have. Also, what’s the role of redlining?
Okay, selective evidence, probably some flourishes from the editor to make this urbanist clickbait, “looky here the solution to pernicious social issues is free markets,” standard issue capitalist propaganda. Why care to comment?
What’s particularly disingenuous about this article is the misrepresentation of community rooted opposition to market rate development in areas undergoing racist displacement.
People at threat of displacement intimately understand the forces arrayed against them. They understand the effects of policies that incentivize speculators and tech/fin companies while defunding neighborhood schools and shuttering comm centers.
It’s not only bad historical research to opportunistically cite a handful of tweets and campaign messages, it amounts to erasure of the voices and knowledge of the working class and oppressed people who bear the brunt of gentrification.
Opposing development by the forces of capital is a single tactic in a broader struggle for human rights and self determination. Orgs who resist (tax abatement incentivized) development also work on many other fronts!
