Cities Are for Everyone

Gentrification is Antisocialism

Anything that humans construct, humans can transform.

~ Sarah Schulman

---

It wasn’t very nice of me, I admit, but I did laugh when I read about protestors squirt-gunning tourists this summer in Barcelona. It didn’t help that CNN had published one photograph — in which a woman hides her face in her hands while her date hunches over his wine as though afraid of some nearby wasp — with the caption, “Diners cower as protesters march past a restaurant.” Like many cities worldwide, Barcelona has been swamped by “record visitor numbers as the travel industry has roared back from a pandemic-induced downturn.”

As the protestors put it, “Barcelona is not for sale.” This is certainly the fantasy behind squirting water at some stranger drinking a glass of wine on a sidewalk — as well as the source of a deeper frustration with cities all over the world, even the ones no one really wants to visit. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense — and isn’t terribly ethical — to ban or discourage people from visiting or living in your city. That said, it isn’t the people, I don’t think, that locals take issue with; it’s the behavior, and the costs that come with it.

These two dynamics — the behavior and the cost — are how locals experience that catastrophe we call gentrification. While tourists are not residents, the apartments or hotel rooms they rent are a part of the cities they visit, as are the restaurants they eat at, the stores they stop in, the parks they photograph. In fact, tourists are part of the city. They ride the same trains, walk down the same sidewalks, and have the same ability to contribute to or disrupt the city’s atmosphere. But they treat those trains and sidewalks and restaurants and parks as if they’re all part of a chartered experience — one massive product to consume. And in this way, they aren’t all that different from “gentrifiers” — those who, the story goes, move into poor neighborhoods, open their coffee laboratories, police the behavior of their neighbors, and drive up the rent, displacing those who can no longer afford to live there.

Like tourists, gentrifiers consume a neighborhood. This is why there’s always a “new” one to move to; each neighborhood gets picked down to its bones, then abandoned as the money moves somewhere else. As

P.E. Moskowitz

puts it in How to Kill a City, “They see everything as an individual choice… not as a symptom of a process with definable causes. But this ignorance naturally benefits those who profit from gentrification. What would happen if gentrifiers saw themselves not as consumers but as active members in a community?” The purpose of gentrification, Moskowitz goes on, is not to change what sorts of shops are in a neighborhood, nor what kind of lifestyle is lived there, but to replace what once housed a community with what can now house capital: “Gentrification, at its deepest level, is really about reorienting the purpose of cities away from being spaces that provide for the poor and middle class and toward being spaces that generate capital for the rich.” The rawest, ugliest version of this is Manhattan’s “Billionaires’ Row,” where a series of supertall skyscrapers hold the real estate investments of the richest people in the world — most of them unlived in. Here, hundreds of thousands of square feet of living space sits empty, right in the middle of the densest urban area in the United States.

Billionaires’ Row may be an extremity, but it’s not an anomaly. Across the nation, more than 15 million homes, most of which are own by banks, sit vacant while approximately 650,000 people remain unhoused. While this looks like a financial loss, it actually inflates the value of the remaining properties those same banks own, especially after they write the vacant properties off their tax liabilities. Commercial landlords play this same game: the empty storefront underwrites the rented storefront, which is more profitable than leasing both at a more reasonable rate. As a result, housing costs are astronomical, our commercial corridors are desolate, and what few public spaces remain become temporary encampments for those who have nowhere else to go.

The quickest way to turn a neighborhood into a storehouse for capital is to turn people into capital. In this way, gentrification is neoliberalism, full stop. Gentrification’s key aspect of replacement is how neoliberalism functions in a social setting, slowly monetizing all aspects of life until every part of every day is transactional. This is largely what Sarah Schulman describes in Gentrification of the Mind:

There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It’s a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It’s a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility… The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.

Who cares what people blindly select? Why not just let people enjoy things? If somebody wants to turn themselves in a brand, why stop them? Because the aspect of gentrification that makes it a community problem is that the behavior of those who buy into this consumerist ethos is part of the community. It’s a community problem, for example, if certain people stand in the street and take the same photograph of a mountain that tens of thousands of other tourists have taken and uploaded before them. So too is it a community problem if half the apartments in your building are vacant or hosting strangers for a few nights at a time — people completely divorced from the cooperation required to maintain a certain quality of life in a communal space. And it’s a community problem of horrific proportions if not enough people in your city have, via civic engagement, pressured local leaders to fine negligent landlords out of existence or provide rent protections for lower income residents.

Gentrification works by pitting the individual against their community, which makes it antisocial to its core. Historically, this has been most evident in the homeowner, who sees every transgression as a potential decrease in their literal wealth (for most homeowners, the home is the only thing of value they have). Until recently, owning property has been the locus of these civic transformations (hence the “gentry” in gentrification — the landowning class). The entire system of property — including taxes, valuation, “desirability,” legal responsibility — invites homeowners to be most vigilant against those who are most vulnerable, especially in neighborhoods where homeowners regularly have to call paramedics, pick up needles, and dispose of human waste.

If people can be turned into capital, or assets, they can be turned into liabilities. This, in my view, is the function of the housing crisis — and why most mayors are happy to let it continue. Public space, for landlords, is unprofitable space. The person who sits in a park or a plaza for a half hour is a lost business opportunity; they could, instead, have some coffee in your café or a cocktail at your bar, or even throw an axe at your bizarre axe-throwing establishment. Therefore, in most American cities, it’s to the benefit of these business owners — as well as the mayors who, let’s be honest, get their cut — if parks and plazas are full of tents and panhandlers instead of people who’ve gone there to relax or smoke a cigarette or take a short walk around a pond. If there’s a use for public space in neoliberal urban planning it’s this: only those with no money to spend elsewhere should use it. Everyone else, we’re to understand, must be driven into commercial spaces — to the bars, to the restaurants, to the escape rooms and the 21+ arcades and the other playgrounds for people so privileged they never have to become adults. At the same time, homeowners remain invested in the more punitive aspects of city government — policing, fines, and code violations.

In perpetuating the property crisis, American cities are intentionally using unhoused people to disenfranchise their more fortunate residents from enjoying public spaces, while at the same time reinforcing the homeowner’s reliance on police, the only recourse for conflict.

---

Property, however, is no longer quite the site of contestation it once was — or at least it pales next to a truly inescapable civic quarrel: the concept of “the public” itself. In this way, the smartphone has supplanted property as the primary tool of gentrification, and tech companies have replaced banks as the corporate drivers of this antisocial movement.

Back to those two dynamics: If property ownership and its artificial scarcity are about cost, smartphones are about behavior. While the neoliberal approach to property, in cities, is curbing us toward commercial rather than public spaces, smartphones are curbing us away from the idea of the city as a cooperative environment, a place where we agree how to be.

When I say “smartphone,” there are certain assumptions. For most people, it is their camera — including their video camera. It is also their stereo, their television, their turn-by-turn navigation app, their gaming device. They make video calls with it, and sometimes share memes with friends. They use it to surveil people all over the world, and often surveil themselves for whoever’s watching. In gyms, they sometimes use it to track their fitness progress. All of these have the potential to be public behaviors (and usually they are). The technology itself has encouraged this activity, and made it easier than ever to, say, watch television in public, listen to music in public, have a robot cheer you on in public. People use smartphones to film and photograph strangers in public — usually without permission — and upload those photos or videos to social media platforms, which aggressively solicit this behavior. All of this is what I mean when I say that smartphones are a part of our communities.

None of this activity is, in Schulman’s caustic phrase, “normal, neutral, and value free.” The object itself is irrelevant; it’s the politics behind the object that are so troubling — and yes, so antisocial. Smartphones and the companies who sponsor them (and the apps we load onto them) have brought two things into every single public and commercial space in the country, as well as most of the world: surveillance and noise.

Outside of the more paranoid (but accurate) aspects of surveillance (e.g. TikTok as psy-op), with smartphones we constantly threaten one another that anything we do or say can be recorded at any time, contextualized in any fashion, and uploaded to thousands or millions of strangers who will consume this recording as entertainment or distraction. A chilling effect of this omnipresence is that it’s much harder than it was ten or twenty years ago to confront someone for behaving antisocially in public. A person who plays music on the bus, a person who blocks a sidewalk, a person who takes pictures without permission — to confront them is to risk being filmed, either by them or some bystander, and misinterpreted by an audience that has no interest in understanding the situation. This isn’t to say that every “Karen” has been innocent or that truly racist confrontations haven’t been recorded and uploaded and circulated online, but the success and virality of these confrontations has convinced those who’ve internalized these “internet values” (e.g., that Karens are out there ready to challenge your behavior, even if your behavior, frankly, fucking sucks) that any confrontation must be filmed and documented and discredited. The person with the camera and a social media account has within reach the means to exempt themselves from all accountability in public, and can behave, if they choose, however they want — as long as they can spin it as social justice. Like the homeowner’s reliance on police, this resort to surveillance of our peers replaces conflict and its potential for resolution with complaint and its culture of punishment.

Part of that antisocial behavior is noise — the smartphone’s other major intrusion into daily, if not hourly, life. In virtually every space not entirely under your own control, the sound of the twenty-first century is the tinny tit-tit-tit-tit-tit of some stranger’s phone as they watch a thirty-second video, then another, then another. There isn’t a bus or an airport or a park or a sidewalk — nor a restaurant under seventy dollars a plate, no train, no beach, no store, no gym — where you can escape this sound. The library might be the only place left, but even there you have the risk of it. I’m not even going to get deep into the health effects of this kind of noise pollution, but rest assured, it’ll take years off your life — especially if you’re poor. And yes, the pandemic seems to have loosened or eliminated whatever courtesy many people may have had with respect to making noise in public, the headphones left behind or simply never acquired¹. Paired with the portable speaker, tech companies have ensured that no American, ever, need go without music; indeed, you can even bring music into the wilderness, lest anyone around you risk hearing birds or the sound of water.

In an essay in praise of noise for the Atlantic, Xochitl Gonzalez wrote of being shushed at Yale: “These students were implying that their comfort superseded our joy.” When I first read it, I couldn’t help but reverse the polarity, and now this is what I think, every time someone starts watching videos on the bus without headphones or brings a speaker to a public park: I guess their joy must supersede my comfort. This too is an internet value, a value learned from the relationship we have with our phones: that your own experience is more important than that of anyone else around you, so live your best life. Make all the noise you want. Be authentic, even if your authenticity was created in a Silicon Valley boardroom.

Gonzalez never mentions why, precisely — or when — people are asking her to be quiet.² The understanding, of course, is that this is a racial conflict: white people want quiet, which makes silence a form of gentrification³ and noise an “expression” of identity. And yes, noise regulations are unjustly enforced in the usual, predictably racist ways. But so are traffic regulations. The misapplication of enforcement does not invalidate the regulation, and it doesn’t mean silence is “gentrification.” Smartphones, in fact, reveal the opposite: Here, in the palm of your hand, is the disruptive result of enormous capital investment, come to give your neighborhood — your sidewalks, your parks, your beaches, even your own back yard — the same inescapably shitty corporate-created soundtrack as every other place on earth.

Rebranding the smartphone’s antisocial activities as some twisted form of social justice is disingenuous at best, complicit at worst. If we pause (at all!) and think about it, the smartphone and everything that comes with it — particularly the way it changes the behavior of many who use them — amounts to a colonization of public space. Through video surveillance, noise, inattentive listeners, idiotic dances, obstructing walkways or streets by posing — and even through more systemic influences, such as restaurants placing more care in the way food looks (e.g. the way it’s photographed and posted on social media) than the way it tastes — the ubiquity of this technology ensures that the values of a tech company are imposed on everyone in a public space, at virtually any time, for the sole benefit of that tech company. This aspect of colonization is especially egregious in the case of “privacy policies” that apps like Instagram or TikTok ask you to agree to, since those of us getting filmed in the background or photographed surreptitiously didn’t agree to anything. Filming a stranger in your TikTok is a violation of their privacy, and doing it on behalf of a tech company, to increase its public influence for your own interest, makes you a tech colonizer. You are stealing someone’s likeness to increase the value of your currency.

I know this seems vitriolic, if ridiculous, but I hate noise, and I hate surveillance, and I hate the way smartphones have colonized every aspect of being in public.⁴ And the reason I hate all of this is because I love cities. As frustrating as they are, as dirty as they are, as crowded as they are, there is no greater human achievement than a city; and a city is an achievement because no one person (despite Le Corbusier’s fantasies) can author a city. As Jane Jacobs wrote, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” A great city is a great work of cooperation, of collaboration. A great city cares for everyone. In this way, it’s a microcosm of society itself — that great thing we build and maintain together through a vast, intricate series of small agreements. Cities are proof that our species is not “inherently” violent, that “human nature” is not the stuff of Game of Thrones and McCarthy novels. They are monuments that show we can work together, live together, and thrive together.

The purpose of gentrification is to work against this, to cede the project of the city, and ultimately the project of society, to the rich. To colonize the city and turn it into content. Only the rich, the neoliberal story goes, get to create — not only the society, but the society’s rules. For this illusion to be credible, we are invited, via entertainments and distractions, to turn ourselves into assets while we let our neighbors get turned into liabilities. We are disenfranchised from participating in the ongoing creation of our shared reality, and we replace that creation with consumption, surveillance, and punishment. What seems frivolous, then, in the smartphone’s omnipresence, becomes existential: Once you and your neighbors, letting corporations replace your values with their own, are no longer authors of the city, it doesn’t take much for your luck to change, and for those who own and manage you to write you off as a loss.

---

1. Apple’s newest iPhones no longer come with a pair of ear buds — another way these companies sponsor the annihilation of public space.

2. And they are asking, it should be said. Could you lower your voice, could you use headphones, could you be respectful of your neighbors: The way its framed, the essay implies that strangers shouldn’t make requests like these, which disavows any sense that public space can be negotiated, or conflict addressed.

3. Again, noise pollution is felt most cruelly by the poor, particularly by children in low income families, where high noise levels have been demonstrated to lead to decreased learning abilities, lower reading comprehension, anxiety, depression, and concentration deficits.

4. Even the roads are more dangerous now that drivers have ceded their sense of direction to GPS navigation.