The Injustice of Gentrification

Abstract

Discussion of gentrification is ubiquitous in cities around the world. And while criticism of it is common, there is still considerable contestation over whether gentrification is unjust. Political theorists have recently turned their attention to the normative evaluation of gentrification, especially the displacement of long-term residents from neighbourhoods experiencing redevelopment and reinvestment. Two important limitations in this recent work are, first, a narrow focus on the link between gentrification and displacement, and second, the injustice of gentrification has been evaluated in light of abstract ideals of justice divorced from the lived experience of its harms. Although the emerging literature usefully identifies some of the harms of gentrification, it fails to recognise the full extent of the injustice of gentrification. To address these limitations, I argue the normative evaluation of gentrification should start with a conceptualisation of the problem grounded in the experience of its negative effects. Further, employing a more comprehensive conceptualisation of gentrification’s negative effects reveals it to be a distinctive and encompassing urban injustice better understood by examining how gentrification is defined by harmful inequalities of political power, leading to exploitation, dispossession, displacement, marginalisation, and violence.

Many of us are troubled by gentrification, as new resources and actors profoundly transform the urban landscape. For some, this is welcome and beneficial, but for others it is threatening and harmful. Reporting on gentrification reflects this uncertainty of public judgment, as journalists both celebrate and lament its effects. ¹ And while developers and investment-friendly think-tanks sing gentrification’s praises (Duany 2001; Vigdor 2002), some affected individuals and communities resignify it as social cleansing (Taylor 2017), colonisation (Lopez 2020), or genocide (Alkebulan-Ma’at 2018). Despite its ubiquity, the moral significance of gentrification is not well understood, complicating our attempts to judge if it is unjust or not.

Although the study of gentrification in the social sciences has deepened our understanding of its nature and causes, the normative judgments of critical scholars tend to be presumed rather than explicitly defended. Given this lacuna, political theory has turned its attention to gentrification, with authors examining whether it is morally wrong or unjust. There are two important limitations in this work thus far. First, political theorists have narrowed their focus to the link between gentrification and displacement, in which long-term residents are forced from their neighbourhoods. And second, gentrification-induced displacement is evaluated via the application of principles derived from versions of what Goodhart (2018) calls ideal moral theory (pp. 23–27). There are sound practical reasons to narrow the scope of inquiry, and analysing the phenomenon in relation to well-known normative criteria clarifies some of the harms associated with displacement. The existing literature, however, does not fully grasp the injustice of gentrification, remaining within what Shklar (1990, 17–19) terms the normal model of justice, which understands injustice as “the absence of justice” (p. 15). In place of the normal model, Shklar (1990, 85–90) advises us to attend to the democratic sense of injustice arising from experiences of social inequality, unfair treatment, and affronts to human dignity. Attending to the democratic sense of injustice requires an engagement with the lived experience of gentrification, opening the way for an evaluation better capturing its distinctive harmful effects.

What does it feel like to have your home destroyed, to be forced out of your neighbourhood, and to lose your community? Moulden (2021), an urban justice activist, recounts the harms caused by the destruction of three housing developments in a single year. Gentrification, he argues, damages individuals and communities through the immediate material and psychological loss of homes and neighbourhoods, as well as the long-term damage done by forced displacement, harassment, and deprivation. Moulden draws together personal experiences, those of communities he works with, and reflections from housing activists globally to argue gentrification should be seen as a municipal crime. He frames it as a crime committed against the city’s residents but also against cities, as gentrification destroys communities, remakes neighbourhoods, and transforms the urban landscape. In claiming gentrification is a criminal act, however, Moulden is making a political, rather than a legal, claim, which he imagines physically enacting on the ruins of the home he lost. “As I stood in front of the door of my childhood home, now marked with a red X for demolition, I imagined spraying ‘Moulden,’ my family’s last name, on the unit . . . as an act of resistance” (Moulden 2021, 283). He links the destruction of his childhood home in Baltimore to the marking of shack-dwellers’ homes in Soweto, and beyond—where gentrification takes on a new but recognisable face (Lees 2012). The worldwide resistance to gentrification tells us it is a profound problem in contemporary urban life, giving practical importance to the question of the justness of gentrification. But before we can answer that question, we must understand the harmful effects of gentrification that give rise to resistance.

The first part of my argument surveys the existing literature, highlighting its limits and offering an alternative grounded approach informed by philosophical pragmatism. The second part focuses on the experience of individuals and communities suffering and resisting the consequences of gentrification. Examining a fuller range of gentrification’s negative effects reveals a distinctive and profound urban injustice rooted in inequalities of power, denying individuals and communities meaningful control over their lives and limiting their democratic voice in the wider life of the city. ² This power inequality leads to harmful social and political hierarchies defined by exploitation, dispossession, displacement, marginalisation, and violence. ³ The final section of the argument, then, considers how this diagnosis of the injustice of gentrification contributes to practical action to resist it.

The Experience of Displacement and the Displacement of Experience

Kohn (2013) provides a pioneering evaluation of what is morally wrong with gentrification, arguing the displacement of long-term residents violates luck egalitarian principles because it forces residents to bear the costs of choices they did not make (p. 308). Focusing on a different harm caused by displacement, Huber and Wolkenstein (2018) object to the violation of the occupancy rights of long-term residents driven from ‘the place in which their social, cultural, and economic practices are anchored’ (p. 379). Both of these accounts consider the harms caused when people are forced from their homes and communities, concluding that this aspect of gentrification can be unjust in some instances. Another line of analysis examines how gentrification fosters unequal political relationships that enable displacement. Putnam (2021) frames the problem in terms of domination, arguing gentrification-induced displacement results from a nexus of domination formed when a landlord’s right to raise rents is supported, or unchallenged, by the government (pp. 180–85). Wells (2022) shifts focus to analyse how gentrification becomes unjust when the relationship between citizens and their state fails to uphold the social basis of self-respect. She argues state-led gentrification, leading to displacement, expresses a lack of respect for citizens’ interests, and is unjust because the state fails to protect those harmed by gentrification, instead favouring wealthier citizens (Wells 2022, 829). Although these careful normative evaluations of gentrification are welcome, thus far the judgments offered are constrained by a reductive conceptualisation of the phenomenon, which is encouraged by beginning with the theorist’s ideal of just access to housing or the proper relationships between citizens and governments. We can think of this as a top-down approach.

The authors surveyed make their evaluations through variants of ideal moral theory, which Goodhart argues is characterised by two assumptions. The first, following Shklar, is that injustice is “conceived as the absence or opposite of justice” (Goodhart 2018, 27). And the second, that “ideal moral principles of justice” should be used by the theorist “to criticize existing social arrangements” and offer reforms “to make society more just” (p. 29). Goodhart diagnoses three pathologies arising from these assumptions. The first is the paralysis of analysis, in which theorists focus on “philosophical disputation over which conception of justice should be adopted” (p. 32). The second is the subordination of politics to morality, in which politics is “contained and constrained to ensure that it cannot interfere with the dictates of morality and the realization of justice” (p. 34). And, finally, the tendency to distortional thinking, in which assumptions “about the nature and features of the ideally just society” sanitise, euphemise, and ignore “unpleasant or inconvenient features of our world” (p. 38). This distorts “our thinking about justice,” inhibiting “our ability to conceptualize injustice adequately by dismissing it, making it invisible, or treating it as aberrational” (p. 39).

In identifying how displacement violates luck egalitarianism or occupancy rights or fails to uphold rights to nondomination or the social basis of self-respect, the authors demonstrate why there are instances in which justice requires that long-term residents should be allowed, and even supported, to stay in their homes. The logic of this is clear, but the approach restricts consideration of the harmful consequences of gentrification to those most clearly violating the theorist’s selected ideal principle. Thus, the analysis focuses on showing how that selected principle reveals when gentrification is unjust, without addressing the experience of gentrification’s harms or its specific context to determine the appropriate principle. The theorist defines the problem to be analysed. Further, the injustice of gentrification is misrepresented by focusing on if, and when, individuals and communities have a right to stay in their homes and neighbourhoods, which presumes the broader legitimacy of the social order and frames the injustice of gentrification as exceptional. But this, in turn, assumes the existing distribution of power in cities is acceptable and the actions of those with economic and political power are justified, so long as they do not violate the theorist’s chosen principle. There is little recognition of the politics involved, especially in presuming the commodification and marketisation of housing are legitimate. This supresses political questions about who should have power to make decisions about who stays and who goes, about how neighbourhoods change, and who has the authority within social relationships and governing institutions, including the power to dominate market exchanges or distribute basic goods.

It is here the pathology of distortional thinking becomes important. Both Kohn and Putnam gesture to the possibility gentrification gives us reason to suspect city planning, housing markets, and neoliberal urbanisation might reflect deeper injustices. Similarly, Huber and Wolkenstein highlight the alienation caused by neighbourhood transformations, whereas Wells identifies exclusion as another instance of the failure of equal respect. But the authors do not centre these wider concerns, reflecting positional distortions. The theorist’s privileged perspective inhibits their understanding, while also importing unarticulated ideological presumptions about which concerns should be prioritised and how the injustice identified should be addressed.

Attending to the democratic sense of injustice expressed by those suffering the consequences of gentrification highlights the political nature of the distinction between unjust displacement and mere misfortune caused by legitimate urban redevelopment. Shklar (1990) writes, “when the victims of disasters refuse to resign themselves to their misfortunes and cry out in anger, we hear the voice of the sense of injustice” (p. 83). This is the voice tempting Moulden to spray his family’s name on his childhood home. It is the voice heard when victims of gentrification describe their experiences as social cleansing, colonisation, or genocide. Shklar (1990) insists the “sense of injustice is eminently political” (p. 83) because it challenges the normal model of justice, revealing it to be “the expression of the inequality that is the real fountain and origin of injustice” (p. 87). Focusing on how gentrification violates ideal principles of justice limits our evaluation to its most obvious and visible harms. Shklar encourages us to look to the more encompassing consequences and wider causes of injustice, which helps us to see the manifold everyday injustices of gentrification as evidence of what Ackerly (2018) calls “injustice itself” (p. 73).

Injustice itself refers to the emergence and maintenance of “exploitative and oppressive power inequalities” within our necessary relationships of dependence and interdependence (Ackerly 2018, 87). These inequalities result from individual actions but also institutional policies and habituated practices. Further, injustice itself is difficult to see, analyse, and change because it is obscured by the normal model of justice. “Taking on injustice itself requires revealing the power of social constraints on what we can hear and understand.” (Ackerly 2018, 90). Attending to injustice itself in the case of gentrification requires a turn away from ideal moral theory and engagement with the experience of its harms, as those affected by injustice are epistemologically better positioned to identify the complex of institutionalised power inequalities creating structural opportunities for exploitation and oppression, and the forces of normalisation obscuring injustice itself. The normalisation of injustice, which Ackerly (2018) categorises in terms of habituation, misinterpretation, and fragmentation (pp. 91–101), is especially acute in cases of gentrification because of its familiarity and ubiquity. We can think of this as a bottom-up approach.

Deeper engagement with the experience of gentrification’s harms reflects a shift from ideal moral theory to grounded normative theory. Grounded approaches are philosophically and politically diverse but share four methodological commitments: comprehensiveness, recursivity, attentiveness to epistemological exclusions, and epistemological accountability (Ackerly et al. 2021, 5). Fully appreciating the harms of gentrification, and its injustice, requires a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon, which is not limited to displacement, as well as a recursive approach to theorising, incorporating experiences of gentrification’s many harms into our normative evaluations. I analyse the harms associated with gentrification by drawing from both generalised concepts and the everyday knowledge and framings of those resisting its harms. This not only addresses the exclusion of the knowledge and understanding of those affected from the evaluation of gentrification, it also creates space for accountability in relation to the theorist’s judgment. For example, my argument is that gentrification is a profound and distinctive injustice but not equivalent to social cleansing, colonisation, or genocide (as some urban justice activists claim), nonetheless it draws from anti-gentrification activism, and its success must be judged, in part, on its acceptability to those experiencing gentrification’s harms.

Finally, the approach taken here draws from philosophical pragmatism, attending to what Pappas (2016, 70) describes as the designation of a problematic situation, which precedes the diagnosis of injustice. The experience of those subject to the harmful effects of gentrification is evidence of a problematic situation, but what specific problem does it designate? This question has been ignored thus far by political theorists taking a top-down approach, as they have not responded directly to the harms of gentrification disclosed by experience but instead have focused on whether displacement violates their preexisting understanding of justice. Beginning with the experience of gentrification’s harms allows for the diagnosis of a more encompassing injustice. This injustice emerges from the power inequalities in dominant practices of urban investment and redevelopment, which lead to displacement, as well as exploitation, dispossession, marginalisation, and violence. My aim is to upset the normalisation of injustice itself by providing a diagnosis of gentrification as a profound injustice affecting cities globally. If we follow Pappas (2016, 69–74) in thinking of injustice as situated, then inquiry diagnosing specific injustices can facilitate a more generalised account of injustice. This, in turn, informs prescriptions for practical action, as the conclusions here can serve as a tool for evaluating widespread changes we see in our cities and for guiding practical action to address specific unjust situations. But the results of such inquiry are hypothetical and fallible, which is especially important to remember when generalising from specific situations. In pragmatic terms, the wider value of my diagnosis of the injustice of gentrification here is found in what it allows us to see and do in the world.

A further benefit of turning to experience is in unsettling presumptions about the inevitability of gentrification, which normalise the acceptance of its harms as an unfortunate feature of urban life to be suffered, if not celebrated. By understanding the harms of gentrification from the perspective of those experiencing them, we gain greater critical purchase on contemporary urban life, as we are forced to look beyond isolated violations of pregiven principles of justice to the wider experience of injustice itself. This reveals how normalised individual actions, social practices, and the political order that we take for granted harm individuals and communities. As a result, responding to injustice requires more than reforms addressing rising rents or limiting the power of landlords, important as these are. Gentrification should not be reduced to displacement, and we should not adopt an approach that displaces the experience of injustice.

Diagnosing the Injustice of Gentrification

Accessing experiences of gentrification is not simple. In this section, I draw on participant research and interviews conducted between 2012 and 2018 in Washington DC, Chicago, Los Angeles, and London, ⁴ along with sources written by, or based on the experiences of, urban justice activists. This is supplemented by reports and studies analysing gentrification’s harmful consequences. As my goal is to develop a generalisable evaluation of gentrification, I draw from multiple concrete situations, aware doing so sacrifices details of how gentrification progresses in specific neighbourhoods and the concrete harms experienced. Providing a general diagnosis, however, requires accepting this limitation, to offer a more comprehensive account of the injustice of gentrification.

When those experiencing gentrification resignify it as social cleansing, colonisation, or genocide, they use these terms to describe both the arrival of new people in their community and the destructive processes accompanying them. These processes push long-term residents out of their homes and neighbourhoods, demolish buildings, erect new structures, bring in new institutions and businesses often hostile or indifferent to the existing community, and mobilise police and private security to patrol the streets. They also subject community members to harassment and violence, displacement and homelessness, poor mental and physical health linked to stress and trauma, and a pervasive sense of being devalued and targeted for removal. Although importantly different from colonisation, gentrification involves the destruction of a lifeworld, stretching from the physical reconstruction of streets and buildings to the creation of a new cultural world that undermines the existing community’s sense of belonging. And for those pushed from their homes, gentrification shares with social cleansing and genocide a constitutive willingness to dehumanise and remove groups or classes of people in favour of others seen to be preferable and superior (Smith 1996, 19–27; Zimmer 2022, 270). The political use of these concepts as imperfect analogues suggests the need for an understanding of gentrification involving more than the potential for isolated illegal or immoral acts. However, although I want to take the analogies used by activist seriously in designating the problem of gentrification, my diagnosis of the injustice is importantly different in its causes and consequences. The important link to maintain is that gentrification is possible because of persistent and profound structural disparities in economic and political power, maintained through institutionalised hierarchical relationships.

Starting with a grounded designation of the problem, diagnosis of the injustice of gentrification requires a more comprehensive picture of gentrification than the classical model, which focused on the influx of wealthier people into historical city centres previously home to working-class residents (Lees, Slater, and Wyly 2008, 10–30). Even when the classical account is linked to government actions and corporate real-estate investments in a wider process of urban reinvestment, it can seem natural to celebrate activity bringing resources to neighbourhoods in need of funding and services and to welcome changes leading to what appears to be a more vibrant and secure urban life (Slater 2006). Despite the power it holds in the popular imagination, however, the classic model of gentrification was short-lived, and from the mid-1970s, individual decisions to invest in “declining” neighbourhoods were connected to larger capitalist and state interests (Smith 1996, 35–38). As state-directed urban redevelopment gave way to market forces favoured by neoliberalism, individual preferences for urban living and the pursuit of development potential were increasingly encouraged by market actors, supported by the state, using urban redevelopment as a mechanism of capital accumulation (Hackworth and Smith 2001). Thus, the dominant idea of gentrification, centred on hipsters moving into struggling neighbourhoods and kickstarting reinvestment, proves inadequate for understanding a more complex phenomenon driven by capital’s search for profitable investment (Harvey 2012, 42–53) and the neoliberal assault on democratic governance across geographic scales (Brenner 2004). Further, gentrification has become a self-conscious policy model for planners and a global investment strategy among developers (Smith 2002). Contemporary gentrification is driven by shifts in urban economies toward privatisation and financialisation, guaranteed by public money and assets (Aalbers 2019), and leads to profound political changes in how cities are governed, as markets and investors drive city policy while eroding local democratic governance (Stein 2019).

Although there is contestation over the meaning and continued usefulness of gentrification as a concept, my argument follows Davidson and Lees (2005), who defend its value, even though “gentrification has become increasingly complex because different actors and locations have become involved and the landscapes produced have changed” (p. 1168). They argue we should hold on to the term and its focus on how wealthy residents and global investors recapture city centres, pushing lower-income groups to the city’s margins, even as the actors and mechanisms driving the process evolve and expand (Davidson and Lees 2005, 1187). Widening our understanding of gentrification from “a narrow and quixotic oddity in the housing market” to what Smith (1996, 39) describes as the “leading residential edge of . . . the class remake of the central urban landscape,” in turn requires a wider examination of the negative consequences designating the problem in need of diagnosis. In turning to the experiences of those subject to the effects of contemporary gentrification, the harms they face exceed unjust displacement, which I explicate by categorising five types of oppressive social relationships common in gentrifying spaces defined by power inequalities prone to harmful manipulation, which are constitutive of injustice itself.

Exploitation

Azieb Tesfamariam signed her lease for a two-bedroom apartment in Washington DC in April 2013 (ONE DC n.d.; Wiener 2014). A single mother of three and a recent immigrant from Eritrea, Azieb moved into her new building, Mount Vernon Plaza (MVP), because she could not afford the numerous rent increases demanded by her former landlord. When she moved to MVP, Azieb let her new landlord know she was working part-time as a cleaner and had a limited income. So she was shocked to receive notification in December 2013 that her rent would rise by $600 per month. The owners of MVP had made use of the low-income-housing tax credit to finance the building, which required them to reserve a portion of the units for low-income residents. This programme made Azieb’s unit affordable initially, but the landlord decided to end the scheme and raise rents. While many residents left, Azieb and others resisted. Working with ONE DC (2014), they reversed the increase and won back the additional rent paid, but the new agreement between the landlord and the city was limited, only extending the affordable rates until the end of 2021 (Department of Housing and Community Development 2015).

MVP raised rents to capitalise on the intense gentrification in northwest Washington DC, but residents avoided displacement, so does this mean the increase is unobjectionable? Focusing on displacement misses important aspects of the situation. MVP’s actions typify the exploitation central to gentrification. Drawing from Young (2011, 53), we can start with a general concept of exploitation as “social processes that bring about a transfer of energies from one group to another to produce unequal distributions,” which take place within social institutions, enabling “a few to accumulate while they constrain many more.” Using this general idea of exploitation recursively with lived experience helps to reveal how gentrification involves distinctive historical and contemporary exploitation.

Before a neighbourhood can be gentrified, the land must first be devalued by creating a gap between its current and potential value. In cases of gentrification in the United States, this devaluation is often linked to policies enabling suburbanisation and “white flight” from city centres in the mid-twentieth century (Hanchett 2000). The creation of urban ghettos, where poor non-white residents were concentrated in areas of deprivation, is linked to the historical racial segregation of housing and the denial of mortgage financing to Black Americans (Rothstein 2017). The emergence of devalued neighbourhoods depended upon the exploitation of racial privilege by whites able to benefit from public subsidies, enabling them to access better employment and suburban homeownership. Further, ghettoization created a highly exploitable pool of workers and tenants, forced into low-paid and informal work (Shelby 2007, 140–43) and vulnerable to landlords seeking maximum rental income on poorly maintained property (Desmond 2016, 74–76). And where landlords might struggle to find financing or tenants for their properties, they are able to take advantage of government programmes and subsidies.

Yet exploitation does not cease with the creation of devalued neighbourhoods, rather it evolves as areas become sites for reinvestment. Vulnerable residents like Azieb, drawn to neighbourhoods with more affordable rents, face exploitation by landlords looking to increase their profits as land and property values rise. Low-income residents in gentrifying areas lack economic resources to keep up with rising rents and often struggle to move due to a lack of affordable housing, moving costs, and the need to remain in specific areas to access work, schooling, child-care, and community. This leaves vulnerable tenants in the position of “having to relinquish more and more of their hard-earned income to landlords in order to retain access to the same unimproved (or in some cases deteriorating) housing stock” (Zimmer 2017, 59). As Zimmer (2017) argues (p. 59), “tenants would not submit to this unequal exchange . . . unless they were economically vulnerable,’ and it is this vulnerability that is exploited by landlords maximising their returns in gentrifying neighbourhoods. Behind the familiar idea that housing decisions reflect the logic of the market, and losers in the market experience misfortune but not injustice, we can see the radically unequal power between landlords with wealth, access to credit, and support from public funds and the immigrant single mother who needs a place to live that allows access to work and schools. The structure of this relationship creates an exploitable hierarchy, whereas the legal system and normal market justice portrays the exploitation of this hierarchy as not unjust, ignoring the politics that structure laws and markets, as well as the harmful effects of policies and practices. Finally, economic exploitation is enabled by political exploitation (Zimmer 2017, 64–66). To have their vital needs met, for example, residents of MVP resorted to extraordinary measures and depended upon groups like ONE DC to create even a temporary and uncertain space for themselves in the city, struggling to get the attention of public authorities (Davis 2014). Meanwhile, the landlord was supported by the law and had ready access to city officials—and eventually millions of dollars of public money in the form of tax incentives and deferred loan repayments. Gentrification is made possible by historical exploitation and is carried out through the exploitable hierarchal relationship between poor, and often racialised, tenants and the landlords, developers, financers, and government officials with greater institutional power to manipulate markets.

Dispossession

Martha Biggs was raised in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing project, and after her mother died she inherited her childhood apartment (Gottesdiener 2013, location 946). Martha, then eighteen, lived there with her first child until she was evicted under Chicago’s extreme interpretation of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (1997) one-strike policy. The policy allows authorities to evict public-housing residents if anyone in the unit is charged with a crime, regardless of whether they are convicted (Caputo 2011). The eviction from Cabrini-Green led to several years of housing instability for Martha and her children. They lived with neighbours and family, in vacant and foreclosed properties, in a homeless shelter, and finally, after another eviction, in a minivan. Her struggles with homelessness tormented Martha, and she finally confessed to her friend Patricia Hill that the situation seemed hopeless (Gottesdiener 2013, location 2095–2313).

Patricia is another Black woman from Chicago who faced the threat of eviction and homelessness, but her story is different. She was a police officer and long-time political activist (Hill 2012), so when her mortgage company tried to evict her and foreclose on her home she was prepared to resist. In 2009, at the height of the subprime mortgage crisis, Patricia’s mortgage-servicing company applied fraudulent charges of $500 a month to her payments. Initially thinking this was an error, she came to realise the lender was trying to obtain her home (AREA Chicago Archive 2013). Although she never received an explanation for their actions, she presumed the lender hoped to repossess the property to profit from rising prices in the Bronzeville neighbourhood where she lived (Hill 2012). What connects these two women is their experience of dispossession.

Dispossession is conventionally associated with land enclosure and settler colonialism, where land and resources are taken by force and existing inhabitants dispossessed, creating a class of property-less individuals dependent upon wage labour or leading to the removal of indigenous communities. Critical scholarship on gentrification identifies an analogous practice in contemporary urbanisation. Harvey (2003, 149) writes, “[w]hat accumulation by dispossession does is to release a set of assets (including labour power) at very low (and in some instances zero) cost. Overaccumulated capital can seize hold of such assets and immediately turn them to profitable use.” In gentrifying neighbourhoods, this distinctive form of dispossession is seen in the destruction of publicly funded housing to make way for private investment, often involving the transfer of public assets to private investors for less than market value (Cancino 2021). Similar, if less dramatic, acts of dispossession occur in the rental market as rising rents, intentional disinvestment, service charges, and the loss of subsidised programmes push poorer residents out of their homes. It can also be seen when homeowners are forced to sell their homes or face eviction due to rising property taxes, government appropriation, and mortgage fraud. The impetus for dispossession arises when potential property values create opportunities for profitable investment, but only if the land or property in question can be secured below market value. Additionally, as gentrification is linked to desirable urban aesthetics and lifestyles, the cultural assets built up in neighbourhoods are also valued by investors looking to capitalise on them without compensating the communities creating them (Harvey 2012, 78–80).

Again, working recursively between general conceptualisation and lived experience, the distinctive harms of gentrification can be seen and evaluated. With the help of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign (CAEC), Martha was able to avoid displacement, moving into an abandoned home on the city’s south side, occupying the property, and making a home for her family as a political enactment of the human right to housing (Gottesdiener 2013, location 2911–2946). Similarly, Patricia worked with CAEC to resist her eviction, with the group disrupting attempted removals, helping her return home after an illegal eviction and fighting her case in court. Dispossession is separate from exploitation, though the latter often enables the former. It involves a transfer—usually the conversion of individual and communal resources into commercial assets—enriching investors while materially, emotionally, and culturally impoverishing those affected. It is also different from displacement, as the harm of being robbed of one’s resources is morally distinct from being forced to leave one’s home or neighbourhood, even as the harms are often linked.

Martha’s eviction from Cabrini-Green, and the final demolition of the complex, are instances of uncompensated loss. For the individuals who called the project home, and for the community formed there, the spaces, buildings, and relationships they valued were destroyed, converted into an asset for the city to sell off and creating an investment opportunity benefiting local government, developers, landlords, and new residents. This loss cannot be rendered as an illegal act of theft within the property system, but it is experienced as such by those forced from their homes and separated from their communities. In addition to helping us see how the normal model of justice obscures and downplays the loss experienced, focusing on dispossession counters the presumption that communities subject to gentrification are only poor and deprived, awaiting the arrival of new resources and people. Although gentrifying neighbourhoods face challenges, they are spaces where people work and save, invest and create, and individually and collectively lead meaningful lives. This dynamic is especially clear in Patricia’s case, as she was not only a homeowner but a community leader, contributing to her neighbourhood and the wider city, but this did not prevent an unscrupulous lender from attempting to repossess her home. And her experience is not unique, as long-time homeowners in gentrifying areas frequently face questionable and illegal actions by lenders, which push them from their homes because they lack the resources and support to resist dispossession. Further, the difficulty of simply holding on to one’s home means even when individuals like Patricia are successful in keeping their property, larger neighbourhood transformations lead to cultural dispossession. Bronzeville, where Patricia lived, is emblematic of this process. The area was the historic centre of Black life in Chicago. Not only has the neighbourhood been remade by gentrification (Hyra 2008), the remaking benefited from the area’s cultural history, which was marketed to new residents (Harvey 2012, 77–80), a sales pitch repeated in cities across the United States and around the world (Lees, Shin, and López-Morales 2016, 100–108). Dispossession is predicated on a denial of the autonomy and value of existing communities and unilaterally appropriates their resources, converting them to assets to enrich the powerful.

Displacement

In August 2013, twenty-eight young mothers living in the Focus E15 hostel in East London received eviction notices. The mothers were facing the prospect of homelessness because the local Newham council removed the funding enabling the hostel to provide accommodation and services (Butler 2013). Newham, like much of East London, was experiencing an extended period of gentrification, intensified by the 2012 London Olympics, leading to rising rents and the loss of publicly funded housing (Watt 2013). The mothers at the hostel were already struggling, priced out of the private rental market and unable to secure local council or social housing, they had been displaced within their neighbourhood. Eviction from the hostel promised another displacement, but this time the mothers were told they would be offered housing outside of London, with some offers of accommodation hundreds of miles away. The experience of these young women is not unique. An often-unrecognised aspect of gentrification-induced displacement is that it is an iterated process with multiple moves, coerced choices, and dwindling options disempowering residents over time.

The existing literature rightly identifies how displacement deprives individuals of their homes for reasons beyond their control and through relationships of domination and disrespect. But these harms must be connected to the wider phenomenon of disempowerment, as the underlying cause of displacement is the normalisation of unequal control over access to housing and community. Even if those displaced by gentrification are imperfect victims who make bad choices, they are still harmed when they are forced from their homes and communities. Further, we need not posit an absolute right of occupancy to recognise the unequal power at play between low-income tenants and the landlords, investors, planners, and officials determining access to housing and neighbourhoods. This inequality exists even when powerful individuals and institutions act within the law, a reality summed up by then–Newham mayor Robin Wales, who told the Focus E15 mothers, “[i]f you can’t afford to live in Newham, you can’t live in Newham” (Stone 2015). Although existing analyses of the injustice of gentrification hint at the problems with the commodification of housing, they fail to identify the distinctive injustice created when city residents are divided into those with the ability to live where and how they want and those subject to involuntary displacement, reflecting the normalisation of market justice. The mothers, organised now as the Focus E15 Campaign, dramatized this inequity by refusing to be displaced from the local area and temporarily occupying the Carpenters Housing Estate, which the local council had closed and marked for demolition (Gillespie, Hardy, and Watt 2018).

Engaging with the experience of displacement reveals additional harms linked to disempowerment. First, as Lees and White (2020, 1708) document, displacement occurs through a variety of mechanisms and “is rarely a singular move,” and “more often multiple moves occur before people settle.” This clarifies why measuring displacement is not straightforward and care must be taken to track multiple moves over time, as we saw with the mothers displaced to, and then from, the Focus E15 hostel. In addition, this means the “brutal, alienating and discriminatory” effects of displacement are experienced repeatedly (Lees and White 2020, 1709). Second, involuntary displacement causes psychological harm, making it harder still for the displaced to meet their basic needs and pursue their vital interests. As Nine (2018) shows, even voluntary moves harm our cognitive function because of the intimate link between self and home. The negative effects of moving are more pronounced for those already vulnerable or moving into unstable situations, as they are more susceptible to the stress and cognitive impairment of displacement, lacking the resources to cope effectively. In being subject to multiple disruptions beyond their control, the displaced may lose hope that the sense of home necessary to their well-being is even possible (Nine 2018, 252–55). Finally, when displacement affects communities, it leads to the loss of residents’ emotional ecosystem. Fullilove (2016, 11–17) terms this loss “root shock.” Extending Nine’s link between home and self, Fullilove (2016, 14) documents how displacement shatters the lifeworld of individuals and “undermines trust, increases anxiety . . . destabilizes relationships, destroys social, emotional, and financial resources, and increases the risk for every kind of stress-related disease, from depression to heart attack.” And for communities it “ruptures bonds, dispersing people to all the directions of the compass,” destroying the community such that “even if the neighborhood is rebuilt exactly as it was, it won’t work” (Fullilove 2016, 14). The forced displacement caused by gentrification, then, is more than being priced out of one’s preferred neighbourhood. Whatever the intentions of the individuals and institutions responsible for gentrification, they harm displaced residents and communities in repeated and ongoing ways by denying them meaningful control over their lives and the neighbourhoods where they make their homes.

Marginalisation

Anne Moody, a homeless woman residing in the Skid Row area of downtown Los Angeles, was arrested at least eighty-seven times by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) between 2007 and 2013 (Bluemel 2014a). Each of her arrests was on misdemeanour charges, primarily for violating the city’s controversial Municipal Code 41.18 (Municipal Code of the City of Los Angeles 2022), prohibiting sitting, sleeping, or lying on a sidewalk. The LAPD’s campaign of harassment, called “Operation Bad Moody,” focused on Anne because she insisted on defending her rights and resisting her unfair treatment (Bluemel 2014a). Along with the thousands of other homeless residents of Skid Row, Anne was subjected to intense marginalisation. As Young (2011, 53) defines it, marginalisation occurs when a “whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to severe material deprivation and even extermination.” Although homelessness is an extreme and specific form of marginalisation, it can be experienced by anyone unable to participate fully in society. In turn, the marginalised are more vulnerable to the other harms associated with gentrification, as new residents are better able to compete for resources, and the institutional actors remaking neighbourhoods often act to silence or remove those that do not contribute to desired changes and profitable investment.

The harm of marginalisation is manifold. It results in material deprivation, which is especially clear in the case of homelessness, where individuals lack means to meet their most basic needs and often find their vital functions criminalised (National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty and National Coalition for the Homeless 2009). Even when extreme material deprivation is addressed through social welfare, marginalisation persists. Young (2011, 54) identifies two further harms: first, the marginalised are deprived of the “rights and freedoms that others have” and, second, they are restricted in the exercise of their “capacities in socially defined and recognized ways.” On Skid Row, numerous charities and social services provide for the needs of homeless residents. That provision, however, restricts their autonomy, exposing homeless individuals to control by authorities, both public and private, with little accountability (Ali 2012). Limitations include shelters imposing access restrictions and curfews on residents and police and private security officers monitoring and controlling their activities and movements. In Anne’s case, the violation of her rights by the LAPD was only mediated by her insistence on a trial by jury and support from the public defender and the Los Angeles Community Action Network, meaning most of her arrests did not result in charges, and when they did, fines and jail sentences were limited (Holand 2014). Other homeless residents less willing, or able, to contest the violation of their rights often find themselves in a vicious cycle, where minor offences lead to fines and court appearances they fail to attend, which then results in arrest warrants and more serious charges. Young’s account also highlights the inability of the marginalised to develop their capacities in recognised ways, leading to feelings of uselessness, boredom, and a loss of self-respect. Anne, for example, lacked anything useful to do and anywhere enriching to be, forced to exist in public under conditions making that very existence a social problem. And she was criticised for refusing offers of “assistance” that failed to recognise her desire to stay in the neighbourhood. The social order operating on Skid Row did not recognise Anne as a full person.

Gentrification does more than harm already-vulnerable individuals; it produces marginalised groups by exacerbating exploitative and oppressive power inequalities and increasing alienation, homelessness, and racial discrimination. Devalourised neighbourhoods are rarely homogenous before gentrification, and although those residents most severely affected are already marginalised, such as homeless individuals, other low-income tenants and homeowners find their marginalisation increased. First, long-term residents’ social networks and cultural resources are lost as new residents precipitate changes, brought about by corporate investors, property developers, commercial interests, and government agencies. Second, housing costs, evictions, discrimination, and harassment have the cumulative effect of making it harder for long-term residents to exercise their rights and increases their deprivation. Despite public rhetoric promising more inclusive development, marginalisation remains a serious problem and one often addressed in ways that fail to alter the inequalities that are its ultimate cause (Lees, Shin, and López-Morales 2016, 146). For example, LA has spent twenty years and huge sums of money to eliminate the “problem” of poverty and homelessness on Skid Row as part of its redevelopment strategy for the downtown area, but this has focused on shifting marginalised residents out of the area rather than addressing the source of their marginalisation (Blasi and Stuart 2008). Where residents have attempted to address the situation themselves, they have faced forceful reactions from the city, including the surveillance of residents and political organisers working in the area (Stop LAPD Spying Coalition 2021) and the disruption of residents’ political activities. For example, the LAPD destroyed a self-organised community of eighty homeless individuals set up in nearby Echo Lake Park in March 2021 (After Echo Park Lake Research Collective 2022). The city’s actions are emblematic of its refusal to recognise the rights of residents and their capacity to build meaningful community spaces from which they might effectively contest their marginalisation. Further, such actions are in keeping with wider efforts to address marginalisation through policies of social exclusion, which Beckett and Herbert (2010) describe as banishment. Contemporary banishment results when cities control urban space by excluding specified people from key areas, targeting homeless individuals, street vendors, panhandlers, and suspected criminals for removal, pushing them from the margins of gentrifying areas to someplace else without accounting for where that “someplace else” actually is or addressing the problems this creates for the banished. As urban justice activists emphasise, marginalisation is a refusal to recognise the humanity of those affected, exemplifying the extreme inequality found in gentrifying areas, where the powerful control the lives of the least powerful and can even remove the most vulnerable individuals from city spaces.

Violence

Violent encounters are common in gentrifying spaces. They are an everyday expectation for people exploited, dispossessed, displaced, and marginalised in fast-changing neighbourhoods. Bufacchi (2007, 41) defines violence as “a violation of integrity . . . that damages or destroys” individuals, such that they are “reduced to a lesser being, in physical and/or psychological terms.” A series of imagined encounters, minor critical fabulations (Hartman 2019, xii–xv), give us a sense of how violence permeates gentrifying spaces.

In Washington DC, a group of young black men stand on a street corner, enjoying the warm evening. Suddenly, several unmarked cars pull onto the sidewalk, armed police officers, without badges or identification, jump out and surround the young men. The officers shout orders, search the young men’s pockets, and threaten them if they do not comply—the seriousness of the warning is underlined by hands hovering over firearms. Finding no reason to arrest anyone, the police return to their cars and disappear. Although city officials do not acknowledge these “jump-outs” as an official tactic (Flatow 2014), despite evidence to the contrary (Gelardi 2021), the young men hear the unspoken and repeated message: they are not wanted here. In Chicago, two teenagers, a boy and a girl, find themselves handcuffed and sitting in the back of a police car, charged with trespassing. In the final days of the Cabrini-Green housing project, as the city was “decanting” residents so the site could be demolished, police used the geography of the area to entrap those who remained (Caputo 2013). By condemning the row houses on the Western edge of the site, police ensured the only route to the local neighbourhood required passing through their constructed no man’s land (Taylor 2012). Returning from visiting friends and local shops, the teens are arrested, but the police never pursue the case, as the arrest provides sufficient cause for the city to evict their families. The physical restraints in the police car are a precursor to the more profound power excluding them from their homes and the wider city. In London, a family of four sleeps in a run-down hostel bedroom, listening to raised voices in the hall. The parents worry the mould and damp will make their children sick, worry they will be exposed to the dangerous behaviour of other residents (Focus E15 2022). They wait weeks, and then months, for permanent accommodation, only to be told by officials that they will need to move to a new neighbourhood, in a different city, in another part of the country (Human Rights Watch 2022). In Los Angeles, private security guards, wearing matching polo shirts (Western Regional Advocacy Project 2021), stop a woman as she walks down the street, they restrain her, pin her to the wall. She is terrified. The men injure her arm as they pry an object from her hand, which they presumed was a crack pipe but is only eyeliner (Bluemel 2014b). The absurdity of the encounter underscores who has authority and who must obey.

In gentrifying neighbourhoods around the world, doors are kicked in, individuals are forced onto the street, private possessions are stacked outside for the world to view, and families ripped from their homes are forced to sleep in shelters, abandoned properties, cars, or wherever they find a modicum of shelter. The violence of gentrification can be direct and physical, as representatives of both the state and market use force against vulnerable bodies. It can also be psychological, as personal space, privacy, and basic dignity are violated. And it can be structural, as the normalised and impersonal social order makes it impossible for victims to meet their basic needs or exercise their fundamental rights.

In previous sections, I used the stories of named women to exemplify the harms of gentrification. These women engaged in active and organised resistance, making public use of their experiences and stories. In considering the violence of gentrification, however, I have created fictional examples based on real-world events. The primary reason is ethical, as the stories recounted earlier were first told by those experiencing them, for their own political purposes, so using them to illustrate the injustice of gentrification respects and expands upon their original intention. Further, there are epistemological reasons to employ critical fabulations here, as the normalisation of gentrification and its consequences makes it hard to see the pervasive and often unreported violence inequality breeds. These imagined stories give voice to victims of violence who have gone unheard by drawing on private personal experiences shared with the author, reports from witnesses, and available publicly documented evidence, but without exposing specific victims or instrumentalising their experiences.

The consequences of gentrification examined are all predicated on harmful and abusive inequalities of power normalised by the existing social order. The normalisation of injustice requires a method of differentiation to discount the harms victims experience, what we might describe as dehumanisation, which Smith (2020) defines as conceiving of another person as a subhuman creature, lacking some essential human trait, justifying cruel and degrading treatment (p. 19). In the context of gentrification, this dynamic is most clearly seen in the violence residents experience. The harms of gentrification accumulate, culminating in the forceful removal of residents from their physical neighbourhoods, as well as from social view and political consideration. To conceptualise the centrality of violence to gentrification, Ananya Roy further develops the idea of banishment. Individuals and communities removed from gentrifying areas are not simply physically displaced according to Roy (2017, A3 & A8), they are banished beyond the city as a physical, civic, and social space to what she terms “city’s end.” And in these liminal urban spaces, in the borderland beyond the city, in prisons and detention centres, they are confined, or simply abandoned and left to die. Roy further examines how banishment is premised on the racialisation of both urban space and the city’s denizens, arguing that it results in civic and social death for black, brown, and poor people forced from the city, as they are divested of personhood. Roy’s analysis is rooted in specific US histories of settler colonialism, plantation slavery, and racial segregation, and it does not fully address the complexities evident when the victims and beneficiaries of gentrification do not precisely fit the racialisation of space as white and non-white or the different modalities of racialisation in gentrifying spaces globally. Yet, she reveals how gentrification results in violence, justified through dynamics of dehumanisation, such that banishment marks “not just the disappearance of these residents from urban cores but also the loss of communities and the places and histories they have created” (Roy 2019, 228).

Collins (1998, 919) argues violence acts as a “conceptual glue” tying harmful hierarchies of power together, which suggests attending to the violence associated with gentrification is central to understanding the situated experience of injustice, as its effects are not fully revealed through isolated incidents but in the holistic experience of those caught up in an unjust situation. This engagement necessitates taking subjugated knowledge seriously, which may be difficult to fully validate by dominant standards and challenge received wisdom (Collins 2009, 269–71). This is important for understanding the violence of gentrification, as it involves normalised actions and processes, the violence of which is often denied. My claim is that experiences of violence associated with gentrification need to be taken seriously, even if questions remain about how widespread and generalisable such experiences are. Not all aspects of gentrification are violent, and not all those harmed by gentrification experience violence as outlined previously, but those harmed by gentrification have their vulnerability to violence hugely increased. Violence is the final way exploitative and oppressive power inequality in gentrifying areas is expressed, and it illustrates how the manifold harms of gentrification dehumanise and disempower victims in a comprehensive situation of injustice, which is not reducible to a single harm, such as displacement, violating a singular abstract moral principle defined by the normative theorist.

From Diagnosis to Prescription

The grounded and pragmatic approach taken here does not attempt to establish the injustice of gentrification by showing it violates a pregiven principle. Rather, I diagnose the distinctive injustice of gentrification through a grounded analysis of the situated experience of its manifold harmful consequences. Experiencing the harmful effects of gentrification designates a problem requiring inquiry and judgment. The individuals and communities resisting gentrification, and framing it as an injustice, provide impetus and structure to the analysis, especially the focus on exploitative and oppressive inequalities of political power, and the emphasis on the seriousness of the harms experienced, expressed through activists’ use of social cleansing, colonisation, and genocide as analogies. However, the diagnosis presented here is the author’s own, developed through the application of theoretical concepts to analyse experiences of gentrification recursively. Further, it is not a diagnosis of injustice as an aberration from an ideal of justice but as a distinctive manifestation of unequal and damaging relationships, arising in situations where these harmful inequalities lead to exploitation, dispossession, displacement, marginalisation, and violence.

The injustice of gentrification is found, most fundamentally, in the unequal power to make decisions in our cities, determining who gets to live where, whose community is valued, and whose lives get priority. Too much power lies with owners, landlords, developers, banks, governments, and financers, such that their interests and priorities determine what happens in cities over and above the residents. This power hierarchy also increases opportunities for these agents to intentionally manipulate unjust policies and practices embedded within social institutions. Such fundamental inequality can become an afterthought when we start with the normal model of justice, but it becomes the first thought when we start with gentrification as a problem in lived experience. Additionally, this approach links unjust gentrification to wider issues revealed in global processes of urban transformation, especially the loss of democratic accountability and growth of inequality in our cities, reflecting the increasing dominance of elite interests and wider structural changes in political authority. This also reframes the importance of resistance to gentrification. Any progress we can make in changing one of the dominant forms of urban “development,” so it is not producing injustice, will contribute to the wider challenge of addressing the imbalances of power disfiguring our political lives across geographic scales and in multiple spheres. Addressing the injustice of gentrification requires resisting and reversing inequalities while increasing democratic control over our lives, and this work is vital not only to making our cities more just, it is central to confronting injustice itself as it manifests in diverse forms globally.

The scope of my diagnosis is specific and necessarily limited, and it can be more precisely expressed by saying there is good reason to suspect that where gentrification is occurring it tends to create seriously unjust situations, exposing individuals and communities to profound and systematic harms. The claim that gentrification is unjust is a hypothetical, not a categorical, judgment, drawing from specific experiences of, and general knowledge about, contemporary gentrification. This means it is not an absolute claim that gentrification, as such, is always unjust. Judgments of specific instances of gentrification depend upon how processes of urban change unfold in concrete situations. The general importance of the diagnosis here is in providing a framework for assessing gentrification, as it reveals that where urban social space is structured by inequalities, especially of political and economic power, processes of urban change are prone to exacerbating and creating unjust situations. In turn, this suggests the need for further inquiry into the quality of those processes, which is attentive to these dangers and assists in practical action to address identified injustices. In establishing the unjustness of an instance of gentrification, care needs to be taken to consider the experience of those suffering its harms, especially as ideal accounts of justice can normalise and obscure injustice itself. And diagnosing unjust situations in contemporary cities needs to attend to power differentials between those affected by decisions made and changes taking place and those with the capacity to make decisions and authorise changes. Finally, responding to the injustice of gentrification requires the democratisation of power and authority. For those resisting change, this entails a focus on building political and economic power. While for those with established positional power to make changes, justice demands greater efforts to listen to the voice of injustice and work to democratise power in urban spaces. Importantly, this final imperative for responsiveness and democratic accountability includes gentrifiers who lack institutional authority and have less power than financiers, developers, and governments but who nonetheless can assist in resisting injustice by taking responsibility for where and how they choose to inhabit urban spaces. Although anti-gentrification protests often focus on preventing, or removing, gentrifiers, the influx of new residents and resources can be beneficial if the power inequalities and the potential harms of neighbourhood transformation are recognised and addressed democratically.

Unjust gentrification involves many harms taking place at once in a complex situation of inequality to the extent the harms enumerated in my analysis reflect separations useful to inquiry rather than hard and fast distinctions. Each experience of gentrification and its harms is unique, so we are always facing the challenge of how to conceptualise and problematise those experiences. The general evaluation offered here helps to see the depth and breadth of the injustice of gentrification and focuses attention on power inequalities as a key cause. Its primary value is in helping us act more effectively and creatively to address urban injustice.