Displacement has been at the centre of heated analytical and political debates over gentrification and urban change for almost 40 years. A new generation of quantitative research has provided new evidence of the limited (and sometimes counter-intuitive) extent of displacement, supporting broader theoretical and political arguments favouring mixed-income redevelopment and other forms of gentrification. This paper offers a critical challenge to this interpretation, drawing on evidence from a mixed-methods study of gentrification and displacement in New York City. Quantitative analysis of the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey indicates that displacement is a limited yet crucial indicator of the deepening class polarisation of urban housing markets; moreover, the main buffers against gentrification-induced displacement of the poor (public housing and rent regulation) are precisely those kinds of market interventions that are being challenged by advocates of gentrification and dismantled by policy-makers. Qualitative analysis based on interviews with community organisers and residents documents the continued political salience of displacement and reveals an increasingly sophisticated and creative array of methods used to resist displacement in a policy climate emphasising selective deregulation and market-oriented social policy.

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Hundred-billion dollar writedowns and trillion-dollar stock market fluctuations have drawn worldwide attention to America's subprime mortgage sector, and its linkages with predatory exploitation in working-class and racially marginalized communities. During nearly two decades of stealth expansion, agents of subprime capital fought regulation and reform by a) using the doctrine of risk-based pricing to equate financial innovation with democratized access to capital, b) appealing to the cultural myths of the 'American Dream' of homeownership, and c) dismissing well-documented cases of racial discrimination and predatory abuse as anecdotal evidence of rare problems confined to a few lost-cause places in what is otherwise a benevolent free-market landscape. The current crisis has undermined the third claim, but mainstream policy debates are reinforcing the first two. In this paper, we challenge all three of these ideological claims. Properly adapted and updated, Harvey's (1974) theory of class-monopoly rent explains how the localized, neighborhood exploitations of class and race in urban America have been woven through Wall Street into transnational webs of structured finance and investment. We map the race and class segmentation of subprime mortgage capital across several hundred U.S. metropolitan areas in 2004 and 2006, and we also analyzed the achievements and prospects of several progressive challenges to subprime exploitation. Subprime Goes Prime TimeAmerica's long-running boom in subprime mortgages met its catastrophic end in 2007. For years, an interdisciplinary group of scholars, attorneys, and activists diagnosed the gathering dangers in the sector, which is designed to provide high-cost, high-risk credit to low-income consumers and others with poor credit histories (Carr and

Empirical research on gentrification suffers from a dichotomy between richly detailed neighborhood case studies and macro-scale, census-based analyses, perpetuating uncertainty over the extent and timing of gentrified areas in American cities. We develop a model relating tract-level census statistics to the results of a detailed field survey of 24 census tracts in Minneapolis-St. Paul. We use stepwise and canonical discriminant analysis to select nine variables distinguishing gentrified neighborhoods and to classify all central-city tracts for each decade between 1960 and 1990. Results indicate a moderate level of overall accuracy, and the model is more than 90% accurate in distinguishing areas of heavy reinvestment from stable, middle-class districts. Compared with other techniques, our approach more accurately distinguishes gentrification from other types of inner-city redevelopment, providing a useful tool for identifying the phenomenon with a measurable degree of precision.Research on gentrification in North American cities has grown rapidly in the last two decades. In urban geography, most recent work has been theoretical, representing a significant departure from the empirical case-study approach common in the 1970s. Consequently, alternative theories of the causes and implications of the phenomenon have advanced considerably, while important empirical questions remain shrouded in mystery. After nearly 20 years of research, analysts still disagree on the extent, timing, and location of gentrified neighborhoods in American cities.The uncertainty over the extent of gentrification stems not only from the complexity of the process, but also from the difficulty of observing and measuring the phenomenon. The U.S. census is the most comprehensive and comparable source of data on changes in urban neighborhoods, but the use of census variables to identify gentrification is highly problematic. These limitations prompt many geographers to eschew census data in favor of intensive field surveys or other qualitative methods to document inner-city reinvestment. There is thus a substantial dichotomy between neighborhood-based studies, which provide little comparability between different settings, and extensive census-based analyses that include little attempt to verify results. With few exceptions, scholars fail to integrate fieldwork with rigorous analysis 248

As the Nation celebrated a new era, its home ownership rate had moved to an historic high ... . Public housingöespecially the isolated, distressed clusters of high-rises scarring cities from Newark to Chicago to St. Louis to Oaklandöhad experienced a rebirth ... . And in cities like Atlanta, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., public housing tenants now lived side-by-side with neighbors who, a few years earlier, might not have considered visiting the area, much less settling down in it.'' HUD (2000, page 50)`T he spotlight of the Olympics provided the catalyst to`remove the problem' of public housing from the doorstep of the corporate and academic institutions that could not abide or accommodate the proximity of poor people ... a national landmark was sacrificed to the`downtown business agenda' and partially funded by unsuspecting U.S. taxpayers who financed a public relations program instead of providing necessary support for public welfare.'' Keating and Flores (2000, pages 305^306)`T he revanchist city is a city of occasionally vicious revenge wrought against many of the city's most dependentöunemployed and homeless people, racial and ethnic minorities, women and immigrants, gays and lesbians, the working class. It has everything to do with a defence and reconstruction of the lines of identity privilege. '' Smith (1997, page 129) These three quotes, torn out of the context of wildly divergent debates and discourses, offer a glimpse of the complex reconstruction of American urbanism in the 1990s. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD, 2000), in a lavish, glossy compendium of its accomplishments targeted at the new presidential administration, celebrates the transformation of contemporary US urban policy ö a`vision for change' emphasizing homeownership, flexible devolution, and the creative use of market forces to rebuild low-income inner-city neighborhoods

Predatory home mortgage lending has become a central concern for housing research, public policy and community activism in US cities. Regulatory attempts to stop abuses, however, are undermined by claims that 'predatory' cannot be defined or distinguished from legitimate subprime lending, and claims that the industry performs a public service by meeting the needs of low-income, high-risk consumers (many of them racially marginalized) who would have been denied credit in previous years. We evaluate these claims in historical-geographical context, drawing on David Harvey's theory of class-monopoly rent to analyse what is new (and what is not) in contemporary financial exploitation. We use a mixed-methods approach to (1) provide econometric measures of subprime racial targeting and disparate impact that cannot be blamed on the supposed deficiencies of borrowers, (2) qualitatively assess the rationale for judging particular subprime practices and lenders as predatory, and (3) trace the connections between local practices and transnational investment networks. The fight against predatory lending cannot succeed, we argue, without a renewed analytical and strategic emphasis on the class dimensions of financial exploitation and racial-geographical discrimination.

The wording varies from city to city, but the meaning is clear: the house or apartment you live in is going to be taken by the government and destroyed. The government will then sell the cleared land to someone else for private development. Please move. '' Anderson (1964, page 1) The`urban renewal' provisions of the US Housing Act of 1949 (US Congress, 1949) left a legacy of neighborhood destruction and displacement, culminating in a durable consensus across the political spectrum on the injustice of forcing people from their homes and communities (Anderson, 1964;Hartman et al, 1982;Sumka, 1979). After the end of large-scale government urban renewal, however, this consensus weakened as the singular causality and clear visibility of state action were privatized, diffused, and obscured amongst the varied actors involved in private-market gentrification (Hackworth and Smith, 2001;Marcuse, 1986;Smith, 1996). In cities of the Global North, displacement became harder to measure and easier to ignore as gentrification evolved within a broader affordability crisis of debt-leveraged financialization of housing (Hackworth, 2007; Immergluck, 2009), and as analysts considered the decisively larger scale of displacement in cities of the Global South (Harris, 2008; Winkler, 2009). Recently, new evidence from the US has further undermined the consensus, casting doubt on the extent of displacement and its causal links to gentrification (