The story of property: Meditations on gentrification, renaming, and possibility

Abstract

Property is a story. We assign land and resources legal status, and we narrate this as ownership and power. The interlocking loans, credit, and debt from which housing markets are compiled are built through narratives about value and its origins. The urban landscape, which is made by those markets, is produced through a confluence of human decisions, made with information about conditions and access. This information is based in stories—stories about what will sell, whether risk is viable, and what constitutes risk itself. These interlocking stories produce processes such as gentrification, one of the key contemporary challenges of booming cities in the Global North. Stories about the value of property, the primacy of growth, the role of race in valuation, and the urgency to invest in the urban landscape all shape gentrification. Meanwhile, stories from below have power too, offering important reframing. This paper examines two gentrifying neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area, analyzes the role of narrative in framing urban change there, and identifies counter-narratives that offer tangible alternatives with the potential to drive decisions around urban development. In sum, this paper foregrounds the role of narrative and storytelling in defining the economic forces such as property that shape urban places.

Legal affordances in global wealth chains: How platform firms use legal and spatial scaling

“…Second, AirBnB makes housing inequality outcomes worse and supports the rentierization and financialization of urban property (Christophers, 2021). As such AirBnB is part of an ongoing story of gentrification (Brahinsky, 2020). Third, Bird and other e-scooter and bike NAPFs show the audacious disregard with which private capital treats public space.…”

Property as technology

“…Similar wastelands are scattered throughout the Silicon Valley region, in part due to the toxins emitted from Cold War-era technological development (Pellow and Park 2002). Many of these have yet to be adequately remediated, particularly in areas with higher concentrations of people of color (Brahinsky 2020;Dillon 2014).…”

“…This focus also draws upon work of numerous urban geographers and critical race theorists who have long made the argument that race is co-constitute of space (Brahinsky 2020;Byrd et al 2018;Gibbons 2016;Gilmore 2002;Harris 1993;Lipsitz 2006;Pulido 2000;Ramírez 2019;Roy 2017). 1 In particular, I am invested in thinking through what Adam Blesdoe and Willie Jamaal Wright describe as anti-Blackness being 'a necessary precondition for the perpetuation of capitalism ' (2019, 8).…”