News
Page 8
BY JARED PABEN
STAFF W R ITE R
the end of gentrification - or the last stage -
is that neighborhoods move into a different
scale of living. Buildings get bigger, they
become completely unaffordable to the
people that used to live in that neighborhood,
and the entire feel of a neighborhood changes
because it now caters to that new
demographic. So I think the changes can
start out as subtle, but nowadays, especially
in a city like Portland, I think you’re seeing
less of that mom-and-pop-moving-in-and-fixing-
up-a-house kind of gentrification and more of
the corporate, top-down gentrification where
condos are all of a sudden plopped into a
neighborhood.
nsufficient income taxes on the rich, cash-
starved local governments and
opportunistic developers constitute the
ingredients for a particularly bitter pill for
low-income people: higher rents.
So says Peter Moskowitz, who has written
a new book exploring gentrification and its
impacts on American cities. But what
particularly worries him is the fact that young
white people moving to cities - those
urbanites who contribute to gentrification
while also suffering the effects of it - fail to
recognize they can be part
of a badly needed
J.P.: What are some of the
H ig h Sax rates fo r the
mainstream political
ingredients that lead to the
r ic h "u se d to p a y fo r
movement for housing, he
gentrification of different
th in g s lik e p u b lic
said.
parts of cities?
schools. T h a t used to pay
“They just see
P.M.: I think you should
themselves as like, ‘Well, I
fo r th in g s lik e p u b lic
go all the way back to how
just have to make more
tra n s it, fo r p u b lic hous
cities became attractive
money to afford more rent.’
in g , fo r h o u sin g subsi
real estate investments in
Or, ‘Well, I should move to
the first place. If you look
dies. H ad now none o f
a different city,’”
at right after World War II
th
a
t
exists,
so
c
itie
s
are
Moskowitz said. “It’s much
and the creation of the
fe n d in g fo r them selves,
easier to see yourself as
suburbs - really right after
individualized than it is to
an d th e o n ly w ay th a t
the Great Depression,
see yourself as part of this
th e y can fu n d th e ir tax
which is when the suburbs
collective action that needs
started to be created - the
base is to a ttra c t ric h
to take place.”
federal government
p
e
o
p
le
/'
That collective action is
essentially subsidized the
PETER MOfflmwrra
materializing in cities
mortgages of white people
overseas.
and redlined communities
“It’s not uncommon in
of color. And what “redlining” means is
Berlin to have tens of thousands of people on
literally they drew red lines on maps and said,
the streets protesting gentrification, which
“Banks cannot lend here.” And they
seems almost unfathomable in most U.S.
determined what neighborhoods those would
cities right now,” he said.
be based on how many people of color lived
Moskowitz is author of “How to Kill a City:
in them. And so what that essentially did was
Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for
push an entire generation of white people out
the Neighborhood,” which he describes as a
to the suburbs and give them wealth in the
narrative journey through gentrification in
form of housing and create a completely
San Francisco, New Orleans, Detroit and New
disinvested urban core. So now fast forward
York City. The book was published in March.
to the 2000s, and what’s an attractive real
The Philadelphia-based journalist and
estate investment if you’re an investor? The
writer spoke with Street Roots about
suburbs are already built o u t Commute times
gentrification, its causes, its effects and some
are ridiculous. No one wants to live there
potential solutions.
anymore because it’s boring. And cities all of
a sudden seem like a great investment:
Jared Paben: To set the scene for readers, I
They’re cheap. You can buy a bunch of single-
was wondering i f you could give us a sense of
family homes and build a huge condo there
what gentrification looks like on the ground. I f I
and get a great return on your investment
were walking down the street, how would I
That’s the main ingredient is this decades-
recognize it?
long history of disinvestment in the cities.
Peter Moskowitz: It looks like a couple of
And now that kind of seesaw has tipped it the
different things. When it’s first starting out,
other direction.
you might just see the renovations. Or you
I also think you have to look at how
might you see new trees being planted. It
governments fund themselves these days,
might look like a neighborhood is really
when tax rates on the rich are so low,
coming back to life, especially if it’s
especially at the federal level. We used to
happening in a neighborhood that’s been
have 70, 80, 90 percent income tax
disinvested in for a long time. Slowly but
rates for the richest
,
surely things will change. How I see
Americans, and now
I
that’s down to about 39 percent And with all
the loopholes, even lower than th a t That
used to pay for things like public schools.
That used to pay for things like public transit,
for public housing, for housing subsidies. And
now none of that exists, so cities are fending
for themselves, and the only way that they
can fund their tax base is to attract rich
people. That merges with developers’
interests to buy up real estate for cheap. And
cities all of a sudden say, ‘Hey, want to bring
a bunch of rich people to the city? Well that’s
good for our bottom line. Here’s some land,
here’s some tax breaks. Please come and do
what you will.’
UPZONED
and
J.P.: Some of what you mentioned about
mortgage policies and redlining I recognize
from the Vice article you wrote focusing on
LGBTQ communities in New York. Looking at
that, are there examples of specific places where
it’s been most disheartening - or even
maddening - to see this occur? You talked
about New York, but you also mentioned in
“How to Kill a City” New Orleans, San
Francisco and Detroit.
DISOWNED
Author Peter Moskowitz
discusses gentrication -
how it happens, who it
harms, and how we can
work toward a solution
P.M.: I visited those four cities, and I’ve
never actually been to Portland, but I do hear
it’s pretty bad there. But yeah, I think pretty
much every large and mid-sized city is under
pressure right now. To me, the most
disheartening is a place like New Orleans
because of how (Hurricane) Katrina
decimated the city and how the city used that
as an opportunity to essentially kick out
100,000 African-Americans. There are now
100,000 fewer African-Americans living there
than there were before Katrina. And you
know, the politicians essentially said - the
governor at the time, Kathleen Blanco, said it
took the storm of a lifetime to create the
opportunity of a lifetime. And they dismantled
the school system, they dismantled the public
housing system. So that was just the most
direct and evil - for lack of a better word -
version of gentrification I saw. But I really
think anywhere it’s happening it’s sad.
Because even if it does bring new public
transit or revitalization in an aesthetic sense
to a neighborhood, it’s pointing to this deeper
sickness of how we fund our cities and how
we think of our cities.
News
Street Roots • April 28-May 4, 2017
Street Roots • April 28-May 4, 2017
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I
example, or San Francisco - they’re both
good examples, but let me talk about San
Francisco. They’re socially liberal. They’re
pro-gay marriage. But they’re still giving tax
breaks to developers. They’re still giving tax
breaks to large companies. They’re still
underfunding public transit and public
housing. So there are maybe degrees of
difference between these cities, between a
conservative city and a liberal city. At the end
of the day, I don’t really think it matters that
much these days. Every city is kind of
addicted to funding themselves via
gentrification.
J.P.: Is that fair to say, in general, that
government fiscal policy is a prime driver?
P.M.: Yeah, I think it’s the prime driver.
Let’s say you have a hundred poor people
and a hundred middle-class people and a
hundred rich people in a city. The poor
people are going to require more resources
in terms of housing, in terms of public
transit, and all those things. Theoretically,
the rich people in a classical Keynesian
economic model would fund those poor
people, but because we don’t have high
enough income taxes, we have to extract
wealth in other ways. And that’s essentially
become the job of city governments, is to
convince rich people to spend their money in
cities. Whether that’s buying a condo so they
can extract it through property taxes or
coming there as tourists, whatever it may be.
Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of
New York, one day on the radio said if we
could just get a couple more billionaires to
live in New York, so many of our problems
would be solved. That’s really the modus
operandi of cities: How do you get as many
rich people living there as possible?
J.P.: That’s an interesting idea. It almost
sounds like the land-use laws that allow this
kind of upzoning are really being driven by a
lack of tax revenue, and that’s what’s having the
downstream effects on low-income people in
those neighborhoods.
P.M.: Exactly.
Peter Moskowitz
J.P.: In your research, did you find that
liberal cities are more prone to this than
conservative ones? Or did you see any kind of
difference at all with regard to political
philosophies in a city?
“How to Kill a City,”
by Peter Moskowitz
J.P.: B ut isn’t there something
to be said for upzoning
areas to allow more
density, to allow more
transit-oriented
development,
walkable cities,
things like that?
P.M.: Sure. I
think it is
P.M.: I don’t really think political
philosophy matters that much because,
nowadays, liberals and conservatives have
very little differences
when it comes to
city policy. New
York, for
unfortunate American cities were developed
in this really silly way that was based on
automobiles, and it does make sense to create
walkable cities. But the problem is that you
want to do that in a way that doesn’t just end
up creating these rich enclaves. You can’t just
use buzzwords like “walkability” or
something. You have to actually create policy
that protects people. Looking at Williamsburg
in Brooklyn, for example, that was completely
upzoned to have 30-story-tall, 50-story-tall
condo towers. Before, it was kind of an
abandoned industrial waterfront Is that really
a problem? Not necessarily. But if the people
living on the next block don’t have rent
control, then they’re essentially forced o u t
And if they don’t invest an equal amount in
public transit as they did upzoning, then you
have what you have now. They literally can’t
fit enough people on the EL Train. It doesn’t
work anymore. And I assume the same thing
is happening in Portland. They’re building
more densely. That’s great. But if you’re
building more densely and you’re not
protecting the people across the street from
the effects of that, then what’s the point? If
you’re doing transit-oriented development
without adding transit, then what’s the point?
J.P.: What are some concrete steps that
American cities can take to mitigate some of
these impacts on low-income people?
P.M.: In terms of government solutions, I
think the most pressing thing is rent control
across the board, universal rent control. And I
believe essentially every city should have that.
I think a lot of cities get scared that if they
institute rent control, then it doesn’t give
incentives for landlords to fix up places or to
even buy up buildings. But rent control in
Detroit doesn’t have to be the same as rent
control in Portland, which doesn’t have to be
the same as rent control in New York. Every
city can figure out a system and a metric by
which to cap people’s rent.
In terms of other government solutions, I
really think higher taxes are the way to go,
but we’re so far from there in this country.
The biggest solution is we have to start
building a political movement around housing.
Housing is not thought of really politically in
this country. In the last presidential election,
it wasn’t mentioned once during the entire
campaign, even though it’s everyone’s biggest
expense, not only in cities but in suburbs, too.
We have food-justice movements; we have
anti-poverty movements. There’s not a
mainstream housing movement in this
country, which is kind of baffling
to me and is something I think
Page 9
needs to change if we have a hope of
changing how we live.
J.P.: To play devil’s advocate a little bit, i f the
private sector is looking at an area and
investing a lot of money in there and creating
jobs and bringing in tourists, does that always
have to be bad?
P.M.: I think if communities can wrest
control from that situation, it doesn’t
necessarily have to be bad. In Detroit, for
example, they’re working on instituting a
community benefits ordinance where big
developments have to talk to community
members. Before they move in, they have to
guarantee a certain number of jobs to go to
local residents for publicly funded
developments like stadiums and things like
that. So I think there are ways to wrest
control away from corporations and more
towards citizens, and that can give people a
better say in how development happens. It’s
not like people living in the outer
neighborhoods of Detroit don’t want to see
development. Because I think people would
rather live next to a bunch of houses that are
filled with people than live on a block of
abandoned houses and wild dogs, which is
what a lot of Detroit is. So it’s not like people
are saying, “Don’t come here. Don’t develop.”
In some places, like in San Francisco and
New York, it’s a different story: People are
saying that, for good reason. But in places
where development could be used, I don’t
think it’s viewed as a completely negative. I
think people are just saying, “We want a say
in how this happens, and we want to make
sure that it benefits everyone and not just the
developer.”
J.P.: I ’m kind o f an incurable optimist. Have
you ever seen an example where investments are
done right in a community, where the '
community had input and got benefit from that?
P.M.: I think there are lots of examples of
communities revitalizing their own
neighborhoods. If you look at Jefferson-
Chalmers in Detroit, or even the Lower Ninth
Ward right now in New Orleans, both of those
places are facing pressures from
gentrification. But also they’re communities
coming together and rebuilding parks and
rebuilding houses and having neighborhood
watch groups and things like that. I don’t
know if there’s ever been a successful
corporate redevelopment that didn’t have
negative impacts on low-income people. I
think there’s always going to be fallout from
th a t
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P H O T O B Y SERGEI G U S S E V /W IK M E C
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (left) which sits across the East River from Manhattan, “was completely upzoned to have 30-story-tall, 5(Lstory-tall condo towers, ” author Peter Moskowitz says. “I f they don’t invest an equal amount into public transit as they did upzoning, then you have what you have now. They literally can’t fit enough people on the E L Train. It doesn’t work anymore. ”
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