It's the State, Stupid: 21st Gentrification and State-Led Evictions

Abstract

In this paper we show how the form and effects of gentrification have advanced in the post crash, recessionary context. As such, we argue that state-led gentrification contributes to state-led evictions. The cumulative impacts of government cuts and the paradigmatic shift of housing from a social to financialised entity not only increases eviction risk amongst low income households but, through various legal repossession frameworks that prioritise ownership, the state actively endorses it. Given the nature and extent of these changes in housing, we argue that the state-led gentrification has advanced further. Evictions, we argue, are the new urban frontier and this is orchestrated by the state in fundamental ways.

Territorial Stigmatization and Territorial Destigmatization: A Cultural Sociology of Symbolic Strategy in the Gentrification of Parkdale (Toronto)

“…The orchestration of evictions through punitive policy (Desmond, ) or state‐led gentrification, evident elsewhere (Paton and Cooper, ), also partially characterizes Parkdale’s gentrification. Here stigmatization operates through the language of saturation.…”

The Grenfell Tower atrocity

“…Finally, the catastrophe of Grenfell has intensified debate about the lived experience of social cleansing and state-induced gentrification across London (Elmer and Denning 2016; Paton and Cooper 2016;Watt and Minton 2016;Foster 2017d;Tucker 2017a;Vulliamy 2017). A library assistant from one of the low-rise blocks near Grenfell put it forthrightly: 'They want people like us out of the area ' (in Gentleman 2017c, 9).…”

“…The upshot of which is that any locally choreographed gentrification of formerly social housing in Southwark, Southampton, Newham or Newcastle bears a discernible imprint of the central state. This imprint is even more pronounced since 2010 as Conservative-led governments have been channelling ever more public subsidy towards 'right to buy' while simultaneously framing social housing as 'lavish public expenditure' (Atkinson 2017;Edwards 2016;Paton and Cooper 2016). Such political economic sensibilities are writ large in the 2016 Housing and Planning Act: for it effectively compels local authorities to sell-off high-value land and property without the messy trouble of engaging consultation with residents.…”

With or without you: models of urban requalification under neoliberalismo in Portugal

“…The negative effects of the use and promotion of gentrification as an urban strategy that uses public money to pursue market interests have been extensively set out. It is argued that gentrification is likely to harm the interests of the poor (Pugalis 2016) and, more broadly, it can damage the social fabric (Paton and Cooper 2016). The upgrading and replacement of existing building stock, namely of low-rent housing by expensive housing, has an impact on different forms of displacement (Shaw and Hagemans 2015).…”