Jason Hackworth

The changing state of gentrification

Gentrification has changed in ways that are related to larger economic and political restructuring. Among these changes is the return of heavy state intervention in the process. This paper explores heightened state involvement in gentrification by examining the process in three New York City neighbourhoods: Clinton, Long Island City, and DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). We argue that state intervention has returned for three key reasons. First, continued devolution of federal states has placed even more pressure on local states to actively pursue redevelopment and gentrification as ways of generating tax revenue. Second, the diffusion of gentrification into more remote portions of the urban landscape poses profit risks that are beyond the capacity of individual capitalists to manage. Third, the larger shift towards post–Keynesian governance has unhinged the state from the project of social reproduction and as such, measures to protect the working class are more easily contested.

Postrecession Gentrification in New York City

Although multiple authors have identified changes to gentrification since the early 1990s recession, there is not yet a composite sketch of the process in its contemporary form. The author synthesizes the growing body of literature on postrecession gentrification and explores its manifestation in three New York City neighborhoods. The literature points to four fundamental changes in the way that gentrification works. First, corporate developers are now more common initial gentrifiers than before. Second, the state, at various levels, is fueling the process more directly than in the past. Third, anti-gentrification social movements have been marginalized within the urban political sphere. Finally, the land economics of inner-city investment have changed in ways that accelerate certain types of neighborhood change.

Ethnic packaging and gentrification : The case of four neighborhoods in Toronto

Urban theory has historically situated ethnic commercial strips as an organic extension of nearby ethnic residential enclaving. While this is still a useful way to frame such commercial spaces in many cities, this article argues that some areas of this sort function as a marketable branding mechanism (intended or not) to produce nearby residential gentrification. This article explores the influence of ethnic packaging on the process of gentrification in Toronto, Ontario. Using four ethnically defined business-improvement areas—Corso Italia, Little Italy, India Bazaar, and Greektown on the Danforth—it explores the role that constructed ethnicity plays in the valorization of local real estate markets. The commercial areas of these neighborhoods now function increasingly as ways to market each neighborhood’s residential real estate markets. This has specific implications for gentrification theory and more general ones for the study of urban landscapes.

Local autonomy, bond-rating agencies and neoliberal urbanism in the United States

The influence of bond-rating agencies on local autonomy is explored in light of recent research which views autonomy not as the degree of separation from the global economy, but rather as the nature of the interaction that places have with the wider politico-economic sphere. Based on the recent experience of American cities, it appears that the activities of rating agencies influence local autonomy more so now than during the immediate postwar period for three interrelated reasons. First, the governing turn away from federally-organized Keynesianism has transferred certain responsibilities to localities that are often funded with debt. Localities are thus more reliant on capital markets and the decisions that determine their access to such markets. Second, an increased presence of institutional investors in the municipal bond market has strengthened the investment-grade threshold because such investors are legally prohibited from holding a high percentage of speculative securities. Localities with speculative-grade debt are less able to sell their bonds than before. Third, commercial banks and locally-based lenders, which used to lend more frequently to cities (based on their own market research), are less involved in municipal debt markets than before. The knowledge vacuum created by their exit has been filled by the only other reputable sources on municipal credit: bond-rating agencies. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

Inner-City Real Estate Investment, Gentrification, and Economic Recession in New York City:

Considerable debate about the significance of the early 1990s recession (and subsequent property boom) on gentrification is still largely unresolved because the scale of analysis used to research this question has continued to focus on the neighborhood. This study examines the influence of recession on gentrification in New York City through citywide housing-market data. By using a wider lens to examine gentrification, the larger progression of uneven development and its recent acceleration become clearer. It also becomes evident that the process (of gentrification) is changing, qualitatively and quantitatively, in ways that are difficult to discern in localized studies.

Progressive Activism in a Neoliberal Context: the Case of Efforts to Retain Public Housing in the United States

Recent characterizations of social policy transitions in a variety of national contexts have pointed to the influence of neoliberalism so frequently that some have begun to refer to it (neoliberalism) as the new metaconcept in social theory.

Faith, Welfare, and the City: The Mobilization of Religious Organizations for Neoliberal Ends

Studies of neoliberalism have focused on the rollback/rollout nature of the process as it manifests in different urban geographies. According to this narrative, neoliberalism and its proponents mobilize to roll back Keynesian or socialist institutions, while simultaneously or subsequently mobilizing a rollout of institutions that might reproduce a neoliberal social order in the future. Somewhat lost in this narrative, with its emphasis on the creation of new neoliberal institutions, is the role of existing institutions as vehicles of neoliberalism. This study focuses on the way that gospel rescue missions function as vehicles of neoliberalism within the present context in the United States. Gospel rescue missions, most of which predate the neoliberal turn, provide a form of care for Americas urban homeless that emphasizes personal responsibility (and failure), and de-emphasizes the structural causes of homelessness. Many require their clientele to attend chapel before receiving services, and most shun government funding whenever possible. Although this approach is not explicitly motivated by neoliberalism, such organizations are willing vehicles of the neoliberally inspired individualization of poverty and homelessness. But importantly, this relationship has an incredibly uneven geography, as three case studies show. The unevenness of this geography complicates the picture considerably, belying any simple description of (or dismissal of) faith-based agencies as vehicles of neoliberalism.

The Durability of Roll-Out Neoliberalism Under Centre-Left Governance: The Case of Ontario’s Social Housing Sector

Jason Hackworth’s “The Durability of Roll-out Neoliberalism Under Centre-Left Governance: The Case of Ontario’s Social Housing Sector” raises the fact that Centre-Left governments pose a particular set of problems for activists aiming to undermine or reverse neoliberal policies. This study explores social housing in Ontario during the past 10 years to illustrate and reflect upon this issue. The sector was ravaged by the Tory “Common Sense Revolution” (CSR), but upon being elected in 2003, the current Centre-Left Liberal government has done little to ameliorate the problems in the sector, much less reverse the punitive nature of roll-out neoliberalism that the CSR put in place.

Rightsizing as Spatial Austerity in the American Rust Belt

‘Rightsizing’ is a planning paradigm currently being applied to shrinking cities in North America and Europe. The central idea is to avoid the trap of growth-oriented planning by restructuring the urban landscape around mixed-income, mixed-use clusters. By replacing the current sprawling inefficiency, proponents argue, environmental, equity, and infrastructure efficiency goals can be achieved. Some have worried however, that rightsizing is merely a newly packaged version of urban renewal. I argue that both framings are misplaced. Through a careful consideration of rightsizing plans in five US cities—Detroit, Flint, Rochester, Saginaw, and Youngstown—I argue that austerity urbanism is the more apt way to characterize actualized versions of the idea. Actualized rightsizing lacks the utopian modernism and Keynesian interventionism of urban renewal, and the progressive equity-oriented environmentalism idealized by its proponents.

Public Housing and the Rescaling of Regulation in the USA

The simultaneous upward and downward rescaling of regulation has dramatically altered welfare provisioning systems in very different national contexts during the past thirty years. Frequently lost in the literature on rescaling, though, is the notion that localities have not been ‘given’ power in the same way that international institutions have. Though local institutional variation accounts for more difference in welfare provision than before, there are clear policy boundaries that are policed by market regulators of various sorts. This paper explores the impact of rescaling on public housing provision in the United States to illustrate better this point. I demonstrate that basic demographic, housing stock, and federal funding differences are now less important determinants of uneven public housing production than was the case during the Keynesian era, and that local institutional differences are now playing a greater role in the production and management of public housing. With such institutional differences unleashed, enormous variation in the quantity, quality, and management of public housing is now emerging.