Abstract
Gentrifier offers an important contribution to public discourse and debate on gentrification by taking an unconventional approach in a crowded field. Seeking economic growth while curbing the displacement of long–term working–class residents remains an elusive task for scholars and policymakers alike. For the authors of Gentrifier, this puzzle at the center of gentrification scholarship is better understood through the perspective of gentrifiers themselves. To attain gentrifiers’ perspectives, the authors argue that professional urban scholars need to look no further than themselves. This proposition sets up the book, which attempts to take on contemporary processes of gentrification, and details the conundrums faced by everyday gentrifiers.
The authors begin by challenging conventional notions of gentrifiers as a homogeneous group drawn to working–class communities by consumption patterns and/or quests for authenticity. For the authors, identifying the social location of gentrifiers not only complicates notions of the universal, middle–class gentrifier but also reveals the structural dimensions of gentrification and their interrelated manifestations at an everyday scale. To navigate the “messiness of gentrification,” the authors forward an analytical “multi–tool” aimed specifically at differentiating structural and agentic characteristics that undergird each set of gentrification–related interactions examined in the book. For example, housing choices otherwise lumped together under the umbrella of gentrification are broken down into seven elements spanning macro– and micro–level interactions that drive gentrifiers’ housing market selection: monetary, practical, aesthetic, amenity, community, authenticity, and flexibility. These elements delineated by the “multi–tool” serve to reveal complexities faced by actors navigating the housing market and simultaneously challenge the archetype of the universal gentrifier motivated by the singular desire to gentrify.
The second chapter illustrates how gentrifiers’ life stages shape the ways they navigate the housing market throughout various neighborhoods. For example, thinking of their time as graduate students, the authors highlight their quest for affordability and practicality in housing. As “early gentrifiers,” these pursuits often led them to working–class communities to reside. Later, as their careers advanced, the authors describe how their new middle–class standing prioritized new factors in navigating housing decisions. Similar to many gentrifiers attaining middle–class status, the authors argue that at this life stage, their investment potential took priority over affordability. They assert that newfound buying power shapes middle–class gentrifiers’ appraisals of housing choices and, as a result, prioritizes prospective returns on investment for individuals, differentiating this group as “late gentrifiers” rather than “early gentrifiers.”
Building on micro–scale analyses, Schlichtman, Patch, and Hill examine the structural conditions that thrust the back–to–the–city movement toward practices of gentrification. In the third chapter, they place narratives of invasion that often accompany gentrifiers within a larger context of social policies and practices that disproportionately affect communities of color. Together, the rise of global cities at the macro–level, histories of redlining at the meso–level, and declining affordable housing stock at the micro–level all underscore how gentrification is invariably linked to structural processes advancing unequal power relations in cities. According to the authors, locating gentrifiers in the context of structural processes, which guide them to disinvested areas, complicates conventional stereotypes of gentrifiers as willing invaders and, instead, connects individual processes to larger systems of domination.
In the fourth chapter, the authors bring a cultural dimension to their analysis by focusing on the cultural production of gentrifiers. Here, the authors identify six different types of gentrifiers populating the gentrification landscape— the conqueror and the colonizer/connector, the consumer, the competitor, the capitalist, and the curator. Each type of gentrifier highlights the different relationships each type has (or lacks) in their respective neighborhood. Even as all gentrifier types here “operate as Columbuses,” they help urban scholars differentiate the various prerogatives of each kind of gentrifier and add another blow to the shallow gentrifier archetype.
The book closes by exploring competing policy approaches that ultimately undermine progressive and practical approaches to gentrification. Policies that would otherwise work to curb gentrification (e.g., harnessing property taxes, expanding inclusionary zoning, and increasing housing and transit at the regional scale) are often derided as too conservative by progressives and, simultaneously, too extreme by conservatives. In a political climate where gentrifiers garner a disproportionate amount of media attention, the authors argue that the undergirding structural apparatus that gentrifiers navigate is often overlooked.
Gentrifier takes on a challenging task and considerably advances our understanding of gentrification within the fields of urban sociology, cultural studies, and geography. Appropriate for undergraduate– and graduate–level courses, the book is a significant contribution to a range of syllabi. Focusing on the interplay of structural and agentic factors constituting various gentrifier types, the book provides scholars much to consider in regard to contemporary patterns of social mobility and related geographic connections.
In one of the most interesting sections of the book, the authors shed light on yet another life stage mediating gentrifiers’ motives: parenthood. As children become part of the housing decision–making process, the proximity of a home to places like schools and play spaces is foregrounded while flexibility and authenticity become subtext. While housing decisions seem similar across life stages, the authors argue, the search for housing becomes increasingly complex for gentrifiers. Tethered to larger, macro–scale transformation of urban environments, such micro–level processes reveal contemporary patterns of spatial mobility that push individuals to places which, on the one hand, have inherited the legacy of disinvestment or, on the other, bear histories of excluding potential residents who are working class and/or people of color. In complicating the housing and school choices parents make for their families, this section offers a unique connection between gentrification scholarship and an expanding literature on the privatization of education and the decline of public education.
Future scholars should build on the work by Schlichtman, Patch, and Hill to illuminate the gendered dynamics shaping gentrifier pathways and include the particular ways women–identified individuals navigate these processes—presently, men–centered perspectives are at the fore. The analytical tools, vignettes, and research presented in Gentrifier remain pertinent as scholars, policymakers, and residents are acquainted with an urban political economy transformed by the Great Recession. While there has been much said on the issue of gentrification, Gentrifier encourages urban scholars to reframe conventional discussion and ensures the conversation remains fresh.