Alex Schafran

Origins of an Urban Crisis: The Restructuring of the San Francisco Bay Area and the Geography of Foreclosure

Communities on the fringes of the American metropolis have recently garnered attention as the centers of the foreclosure crisis and its aftermath. On the one hand, this attention to the urban nature of the crisis is welcome, as the metamorphosis of the mortgage fiasco into a financial crisis-cum-global economic meltdown turned popular attention away from the urban roots of this calamity. But this emphasis on the exurbs as the site of crisis lends itself to the misconception that they, rather than the restructuring of the metropolis as a whole, are the sole source of the crisis. This article works across multiple scales to examine how three interwoven factors - demographics, policy and capital - each reacted to the San Francisco Bay Area landscape inherited at the end of the 1970s, affecting the region in new ways, leaving some places thriving and others struggling with foreclosure, which leads to plummeting property values and the deep uncertainty of the current American metropolis. This restructuring can be seen as the convergence between the unresolved urban crisis of the postwar era and the various reactions in the neoliberal era. It demands a reimagining of both planning and geography, especially from the left.

Displacing New York

The capitalization of urban property markets intensifies the contradictions between housing as use-value affordability versus exchange-value asset accumulation, and exacerbates displacement pressures. Policies designed to deal with these contradictions—public housing and rent regulations—allow some low-income renters to resist displacement, particularly in gentrifying neighborhoods. Unfortunately, the resulting empirical configuration has been interpreted in ways that cast doubt on the extent of displacement, its causal links to gentrification, and the necessity of protective policies. In this paper we present an alternative interpretation, using New York City as a case study to analyze the spatial evolution of displacement pressures amidst the restructuring of an embattled yet vital municipal welfare state.

Restructuring, Race, and Real Estate: Changing Home Values and the New California Metropolis, 1989-2010

The wake of the foreclosure crisis warrants renewed attention to geographies of race and real estate. This case study of the San Francisco Bay Area shows that outlying exurban communities on the metropolitan fringe, which saw major in-migrations of communities of color over the past three decades, were hard hit by the real estate crash, after having seen substantial housing price increases during the tail end of the boom. The potential impact on wealth and asset accumulation for these communities is significant. Rather than traditional forms of segregation, this new geography of crisis suggests a form of peripheralization, where minority communities in particular were lured out to the far suburbs under structural conditions of neoliberalism, far different from the federally supported suburbanization of two generations ago. This new reality is reminiscent of the urban roots of the foreclosure crisis, and of the need to view the crisis at a metropolitan scale.

Discourse and dystopia, American style

This paper examines the recent growth in the popular media of new discourses of decline focused on the American suburb. This new discursive twist, which appropriates language traditionally reserved for inner cities, is rooted in both the city/suburb dialectic, which has long dominated American urbanism, and the empirical realities of the foreclosure crisis and changing geographies of poverty in the American metropolis. Scholars should be concerned about the rise of this new discourse, as it reinforces a dialectic long since outdated, roots decline in a particular geography rather than examining the root causes of the crisis, and has potentially deleterious effects on communities already facing social and economic struggle in the wake of foreclosure. Linked as this discourse is to academic research on the suburbanization of poverty, it gives pause to those scholars who would speak in terms of ‘suburban decline’.

Debating urban studies in 23 steps

T his year marks the 50th anniversary of gentrification as an idea (Glass 1964). The golden anniversary of Ruth Glass’s observation about the shifting class geographies of a small sliver of London is a fitting moment for this reboot of City’s Debates section. With apologies to Richard Florida and neoliberalism, I would argue that gentrification, and its myriad causes, impacts, forms, contestations and interpretations, is arguably the most vibrant and constant source of debate in writing about cities over the past three decades. Even when couched in heavy theoretical jargon, debates about gentrification cannot be readily written off as proof of Henry Kissinger’s oft-quoted maxim about the intensity of academic debates—regardless of how you understand it, gentrification matters, and the stakes are exceptionally high. Just as importantly, after a half-century of scholarship, activism and argument, at a point where there seems to be little more original to say about it, gentrification has never been more relevant as a global urban force. In Ruth Glass’s London, as in other up-market cities like Paris, New York and San Francisco, gentrification is no longer just a question of neighborhoods but of the region as a whole. Mumbai is gentrifying, Rio is gentrifying, Luanda is gentrifying. Detroit is gentrifying and decaying simultaneously, something it has in common with many postindustrial cities like Manchester and Leeds. As we enter the second half-century of debating gentrification, critical urban studies must continue to investigate and expose the ongoing mutations of this paradigmatic urban transformation, and we should be proud of the collective work that has been done up until this point. I will stand by the statement that critical scholarship and debate about gentrification has mattered, even if at times it feels like shouting into the wind. Nevertheless, we should be profoundly humbled by this anniversary, by all the things which have not changed over the past half-century, and by the fundamental question of how critical urban thought and action can make real change in the next half-century. Just one example: it is not a coincidence that this golden anniversary and the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty in the USA coincide. What began as a fight against poverty quickly devolved into a fight against concentrated poverty, a fight against certain types of (mostly inner-city) neighborhoods, a fight against public housing and ultimately a fight with the very (poor) people who lived in them (Goetz 2003; Samara, Sinha, and Brady 2013)—fights which have opened up space for gentrification (Goetz 2011; Hackworth and Smith 2001; Wyly and Hammel 2001). Critical urban research has been brilliant at noticing these types of connections, and has been unyielding in reminding even the most well-meaning of policy actors that the best intentions can have devastating consequences. Yet the fact remains that our critique, and the often fantastic intellectual and

Rethinking Mega-Regions: Sub-Regional Politics in a Fragmented Metropolis

Schafran A. Rethinking mega-regions: sub-regional politics in a fragmented metropolis, Regional Studies. The recent surge in mega-regional research in the United States has identified the need for analysis at a gargantuan scale. A corresponding set of arguments examines the difficulty for planning and political intervention at this scale. Using an empirical examination of one mega-region – Northern California – this paper argues for a rethinking of mega-regional geography, one which differentiates between mega-regions as an ever-expanding envelope and mega-regions as a particular set of impacted spaces. This approach, which requires a more nuanced understanding of the historical formation of individual mega-regions, enables a tactical, sub-regional intervention, even as the scale of analysis expands.

The Strange Case of the Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area is hard to get ones head around and is frequently misunderstood. It is immense, decentered, sprawling, autotopic, multiracial, divided, and more—a crucible of the modern suburban and exurban metropolis. It is distinctive in several regards, but illuminating of the dynamics behind metropolitan geography. Indeed, the Bay Area has been integral to the production of modern American suburbia and its urban system embodies many of the contradictions of the contemporary moment.

The future of the urban academy

D avid Madden’s pithy and well reasoned response to my ‘23 steps’ piece is spot on on a number of fronts. I concur wholeheartedly with his overall emphasis on the political nature of urban knowledge. His first point of critique that I empirically misjudge the aspirations of critical urbanists is one in which I very much hope he is correct. I think he certainly is when it comes to those of us not in formal positions of status and power within the academy and the worlds of intellectual production, but I remain skeptical about the ability of many of us to maintain wider aspirations as careers develop, at least under current conditions. I similarly respect his second point about neoliberalism fatigue, and the rationality of continuing this approach. As an American in the UK, I have learned to appreciate just how intense the neoliberal attack has been. Perhaps I should have taken that point of reference out, focusing my critique on the lack of historical understanding of the wider history of liberalism (#6) or the need to reco-opt ideas co-opted by neoliberalism (#7). Joining the chorus of neoliberalism fatigue at that stage detracted from my point about building power, which is far more important. It is with regards to building power that I somewhat resist Madden’s third critique, and this is ultimately the true point of difference between us. Any talk of building power for the university can be seen as elitist, as we both discuss, but only because the university has historically been an elite institution. When I talk of building a more powerful urban academy, I do not do so based on a ‘special claim on legitimacy’, or any other traditional claim of intelligence or knowledge production. I do so because no other major sector the state or any of its iterations, the for-profit or non-profit sectors, the ‘community social movements, the radical activists, the marginalised city dwellers’ with whom both Madden and I have worked over the years is capable of creating the true center of public participation, learning and engagement necessary to redefine urban citizenship and the urban itself in the 21st century. I do not think that Madden’s position – that ‘the people who should be building power are the critical urbanists in the broader sense— the community social movements, the radical activists, the marginalized city dwellers,’ and that those of us in the academy should only participate in power building as part of those institutions – is sufficient. The university is a unique, large, resourced, powerful institution in its own right. We have unique potentialities not necessarily unique capabilities and transforming the urban academy from being part of the problem to part of the solution cannot be seen solely in terms of having impact outside of the academy. I think we need to focus more vigorously on redefining what the academy can be. A critical urbanism intent on radical change must see the reformed, rebuilt, redefined, and reimagined urban academy as the single most important institution for the future of urbanism. We must have the courage to reimagine the academy not as a participant in larger debates but as the fundamental center of those debates. It must be reprogrammed completely so that it

Breaking the Double Impasse: Securing and Supporting Diverse Housing Tenures in the United States

Abstract What might be described as a double impasse characterizes debate on U.S. housing tenure with advocates fighting for rental or ownership housing on one side and Third Way or mixed-tenure solutions on the other. Breaking this impasse requires disengaging from conceptions of an idealized form of tenure and instead advocating making virtually all tenures as secure and supported as possible, so that diverse households are able to live in homes that best fit their changing needs over their life cycles. This essay (a) presents data on the variety of tenures in the United States; (b) conveys a new two-dimensional map of tenure according to their degrees of control and potential for wealth-building; and (c) shows how U.S. institutions shape their risks and subsidies. Most U.S. tenures are at least somewhat risky, including those that receive the greatest federal subsidies. A new housing system is needed to secure and support as many tenures as possible.

Politics and Possibility on the Metropolitan Edge: The Scale of Social Movement Space in Exurbia

Both the suburbanization of poverty and the growth of suburban social movements have been the focus of much academic discussion of late, even if these two discussions are not necessarily linked. One area that has been relatively underresearched when it comes to both phenomena are exurban regions, critical spaces of change and crisis, in particular in upmarket regions like those in Northern and Southern California. This paper presents a case study of the ‘social movement space’ of eastern Contra Costa County, on the edge of the San Francisco Bay Area. It argues that not only did propoor, social-justice-oriented movements arise over the past decade in response to changing geography, they exhibited a form of ‘scalar promiscuity’ which differs from the regionalization of social movements or other forms of ‘scale jumping’ well known in the literature.