Greetings Troublemakers...
welcome to Trouble.
My name is not important.
Whether you live in a
densely-populated metropolis,
or a mid-sized city,
chances are you've had
first-hand experiences
dealing with the process
of capitalist urbanization
known as gentrification.
It's called gentrification.
They can buy the land at a lower price.
Then they move all the people out,
raise the property value,
and sell it at a profit.
While this disease is
often popularly associated
with its most visible symptoms,
like the opening of a new boutique cafe
on your block,
or the seemingly endless construction
of new high-rise condo towers...
gentrification is, at its core,
a process of displacement.
It is class warfare,
waged in the physical spaces
of our neighbourhoods.
It is speculation and investment,
financed by banks, investment firms
and pension funds,
enacted by real estate developers
and facilitated by state, regional
and local governments.
The development of the modern city
has always been, and continues to be,
intimately tied to the interests
of capitalists and the ruling class.
Many of the cities that exist today
first emerged back in
the 18th and 19th century,
often in tandem with
the development and spread
of industrial manufacturing
and resource extraction.
Early capitalists required
massive numbers of workers to toil
in their factories and mines,
and so people were forced off the land
and into concentrated urban populations,
where they often lived
in squalor and misery.
In much of the Global South,
this phenomenon is still taking place,
as farmers and Indigenous communities
are pushed off their lands and forced
to move to cities to work in factories
or precarious jobs in informal
and black market economies.
In 2014, the UN estimated that
for the first time in human history,
more than half of us lived in cities.
This trend is only set to increase..
and by far the fastest rate of urban
population growth is occurring in
sprawling and overcrowded
mega-slums.
Meanwhile, in the Global North,
today's metropolitan cities have become
the command and control centres
for transnational corporations,
hubs of global finance,
and incubators of the dynamic new
flag-bearers of the so-called
information economy.
Yet at the same time,
decades of corporate off-shoring
and neoliberal structural adjustments
have created deep reservoirs
of inequality.
Gentrification is a byproduct
of this contradiction.
A process whereby cities
and neighbourhoods
regenerate themselves
by displacing working-class people
to suburban ghettos in order to make
more room for the lavish lifestyles
of the rich.
Over the next thirty minutes,
we will look at gentrification
as a structural phenomenon,
and examine how it is playing out
in three megacities:
Toronto, New Orleans and Istanbul.
Along the way,
we will highlight the voices of a number
of individuals who are organizing
with their neighbours,
fighting back against the state
and corporate developers...
and making a whole lot of trouble.
Since the financial crisis in 2008,
we’ve increasingly seen
the financialization of
the rental housing sector.
Financialization is a bit of
a complicated term.
What it really refers to is this shift
in the way that capitalism
has been operating,
and a change that's taken place
since about the 1970’s.
So a shift from capital accumulation
coming from commodity production
to coming through financial channels.
And what this has also involved is
an increasing role for finance capital
in other parts of the economy where
it hadn’t previously played
a prominent role,
and then enforcing on those
parts of the economy, logics of finance.
Today, big money is made in cities.
The real estate market is currently
the largest sector of
the Canadian economy.
If you look at the biggest landlords
in the country, 18 out of the top 20
would fall under the category
of these financialized landlords.
You see things like hedge funds
and pension funds that are invested
in different local housing markets
because it’s seen as a relatively
safe investment.
Fincialized investment in Canada
has been growing since the 1990’s.
Real Estate Investment Trusts
are increasingly taking over
the rental housing market.
Since 1996,
Real Estate Investment Trusts,
or REIT’s, in particular,
have grown from owning zero
multi-family apartment suites,
to owning over 160 000.
Such that now they own
about ten percent of privately-built
multi-family housing in the country.
Real Estate Investment Trusts
allow investors to pool capital together
to purchase real estate
and the real estate itself
then gets managed in a way
to try and increase its value
and generate profits
back to those investors.
So real estate investment trusts
have access to tremendous amounts
of capital and can buy large portfolios
of buildings as they grow.
And then they can take advantage of
economies of scale to make
those buildings more profitable.
What they call this is "re-positioning."
This has created a situation where
all landlords across the board
have been forced to take on
certain strategies to increase profits
in order to compete on that market.
Housing prices have been going up
in Canada and indeed
other parts of the world.
Canada’s been hit particularly hard.
One of the hottest real estate markets
where we’ve seen the largest increase
in property values has been Toronto.
In Ontario,
the government sets an annual
rent guideline.
This is the amount that landlords
are legally permitted to
raise rents for sitting tenants.
The guideline in 2017 was 1.5 percent.
Yet we saw a 6% overall
increase in rents.
And so landlords have been able
to raise rents beyond
the provincial guideline
primarily through vacancy decontrol.
Since the 90’s we’ve had no rent control
on vacant units.
So this creates a pressure
to try and make units vacant
so that the rent can be increased
up to whatever the market will bear.
In the last year,
the average price for a one bedroom
unit in Toronto has increased
to over $2000.
The pattern that we’ve seen
has been one of increasing social and
spacial inequality in this city.
So a pattern towards gentrification
in the urban core.
The demographic data
is really very clear.
It shows that downtown Toronto
and the corridors along subway lines
are essentially enclaves
for rich white people.
The majority of working-class,
heavily racialized population
is being pushed out
into the inner suburbs
or is struggling to stay
in a few remaining areas
in and around downtown Toronto,
including places like Parkdale
and the Queen and Sherbourne area.
Rising house prices in Toronto
have also created a situation where
many young professionals in the market
for their first homes
have been priced out of the city.
So we’re seeing a lot of young
professional people trying to buy property
in cities like Hamilton.
The city of Hamilton’s cool quotient
has been on the rise for some time,
but the prosperity that’s got some
celebrating has others worried about
whether the urban renaissance there
could be leaving some people behind.
Hamilton is a mid size city in southern Ontario and for most of its history, Hamilton was
a large steel manufacturer.
It’s still known as the “Steel Town” although for years now, the steel industry
has been shrinking, and now it’s trying to essentially recreate itself as a “artistic
hub” and kind of draw in creative professionals from the greater Toronto Area.
Because of Hamilton’s physical proximity to Toronto, we have kind of a secondary wave
of gentrification happening in Hamilton.
The province of Ontario has regional population targets and a general idea about where they
want to see population growth happening.
In order to facilitate this and in order to integrate some of the metropolitan areas,
they’ve invested in larger scale transportation infrastructure.
One such initiative is the Go Transit Network which is a fleet of busses and trains which
link commuters from the greater Toronto Area.
Hamilton has two new Go Transit Hubs in the works.
One in the east and one in the north of downtown.
Both of these are aimed at making Hamilton more attractive as a potential bedroom community
of Toronto.
And beyond that, the province is also funding a light rail transit or LRT line in Hamilton
which is going to run the length of the lower city from Mcmaster University in the west,
out to Stoney Creek in the very east end of the city.
This project is really going to open up the city to gentrification.
This is essentially a state led strategy of urban intensification and the levels of development
that accompany it.
Despite the upheaval and mass displacement that it brings in its wake, gentrification
is usually a pretty gradual process, and one that traditionally tends to take place in
stages.
Stereotypically, it starts with artists, students and hipsters of various stripes moving into
a working-class neighbourhood, drawn to the area by its cheap rents.
These new arrivals bring with them increased social capital and disposable income, and
soon a host of new cafes, restaurants, bars and art galleries begin to spring up to cater
to their tastes.
From there, the area starts to get a buzz, and real estate agents begin promoting it
as an up-and-coming neighbourhood.
Homeowners decide to cash in on rising property values, while long-standing working-class
and racialized tenants are priced, or otherwise pushed out.
More middle-class residents move in, rents go up... and the cycle repeats until the area
is completely transformed into a sterile playground for the rich.
That's how the story goes, anyway.
In reality, this oversimplified formula for gentrification ignores the important role
that developers, finance capital, police and urban planners at various levels of government
play in coordinating the process.
But even when all those variables are factored in, the fact remains that gentrification generally
still takes years to play out... for the simple reason that it's hard to displace large numbers
of poor people from their homes in one fell swoop.
Except of course... when the powerful forces pushing gentrification get a little helping
hand from the even more powerful forces of Mother Nature.
You’ve got Pagoda’s over there, you’ve got the Church of Yoga over here, you’ve
got the Uber building down the street, so you’ve got all these little spots here and
there that are quickly making it so this is actually a high traffic area of primarily
white people that are not from here carrying yoga mats.
That’s what this area, it used to be a very poor area, got replaced with.
I’ve seen this city go through changes in my life.
The building of the Crescent City Connection- that bridge transformed this community in
a multitude of ways.
With that bridge came urban renewal.
One of the oldest African Communities was displaced in order to build a housing project.
The third would be Betsy, Hurricane Betsy.
Because of Besty, people that would normally be still living down by the Bayou or the 9th
ward, would have just remained in those areas.
But because of the devastation of those communities, it forced them to come into a community that
was being rebuilt and reborn, and then Katrina.
Out of all of them, Katrina was the worst.
It had the most devastating impact.
I moved to New Orleans in 2014.
I’m from Venezuela and my country’s consulate had closed down in Miami so I came here to
get my passport.
There was also some immigration restrictions that encouraged me to move here.
A big factor was connected to gentrification, which is moving here because housing was more
affordable after Katrina and because employment was something I could find here more accessible
than in South Florida.
Because of Katrina and the great displacement of local communities after Katrina and during
Katrina, to be a guest in this city and to be a resident in this city post Katrina, and
be a respectful guest, you have to be very aware of the racial dynamics of who has been
displaced and who has been the demographic replacing the people who are no longer able
to come back to the city, alongside with millions of dynamics that go anywhere from microagressions
to being a major player of gentrification and in the systems that are negatively impacting
and negatively affecting the communities here.
Katrina was also the very first major disaster where Fema came under homeland security.
The first two weeks after Katrina, it was all about security.
You know, it felt like all those that matter had left.
Those who was left in the city, don’t even really matter.
And they made that crystal clear by their action.
With that and the advent of disaster capitalism.
Seeing everything from trash removal, to the removal of bodies- was held up until certain
individuals got they contracts.
You had billions of dollars that was allocated to a city with a population of less than half
a million.
Billions.
But it impacted no one that really had the needs.
The needs of the community have gone unaddressed and instead what has been prioritized has
been profit and the passing of policies that have been geared towards making profit from
the displacement of people.
Looking at prisons and the jail systems now, and how much of the money that the government
gives is still going towards allegedly restoring or rebuilding or expanding the jail or the
prisons or rebuilding or expanding new hospitals which are more for profit and they’re not
as affordable.
With all these examples you can see how the city systemically is still taking money from
the disaster and still profiting from the displacement of the community here and investing
that money in for profit projects that are geared towards tourists or geared towards
upper class guests or upper class residents as opposed to working class communities and
poor communities, and particularly communities of colour which was the majority of people
in New Orleans before Katrina.
People are being priced out of their homes.
A unit that was maybe 500 during pre-Katrina, now was somewhere around 12.
Developers are coming in, and now you have the advent of the Air B&B, you know you have
a New Orleans that is constantly being transformed around us.
You see a lot of whites and others coming in to predominantly African American community.
Directly after Katrina, everybody basically had to evacuate the city.
A lot of the housing that could have been restored, was not restored.
Instead it was taken down and new housing that’s not affordable was built up or businesses
were built up.
In general, we’ve seen almost no efforts to bring back people that were displaced by
Katrina, and instead we’re seeing efforts to continue to profit from making more tourist
hot spots.
The industry that’s really running the city is tourism.
White tourism.
And it’s controlled by white dollars.
And they control not only the white tourism, but they control about 90 percent of the black
tourism.
A lot of the money that’s being given to New Orleans from the government is going to
the expansion of prisons or the attempts at building new prisons.
It’s a completely a for-profit organization, so a lot of the money is being either misplaced
into making more profit from poverty and crime and displacement, or it’s being put into
development that is to better assist the communities that are not from New Orleans, so it’s being
put to renovate big businesses or to make the business sectors and the upper class sector
and the tourism sector in the city better and it’s not being distributed in the places
that it’s the most needed.
This is a city that’s ran by the police because it’s ran by tourism.
And in order for tourism needs to survive, it’s got to be protected.
But you try to tell the police- it don’t have nowhere near the impact of poverty.
That’s the most cruel thing.
You know, you be living on a block, where there only one person got a Mercedes, you
dig?
And you catchin’ a bus.
Ten years ago, the international financial system nearly collapsed.
A historically unprecedented housing bubble in the United States burst, setting off a
chain reaction that ended up threatening the institutional pillars of global capitalism
itself.
As millions of people lost their homes, governments around the world scrambled to bail out the
banks and pump money back into the global economy.
But rather than spending that money on rebuilding the local communities that they'd just destroyed,
the banks poured that money into a number of so-called 'emerging economies'.
A prime example being Turkey.
Back in 2008, Turkey was already in the midst of a construction boom, and the flooding in
of billions of dollars in foreign investment only quickened the pace.
In the five years between 2011 and 2016, house prices in Turkey doubled.
Much of this growth was concentrated in Istanbul, the sprawling metropolis of over 15 million
people that once served as the capital of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, and which
for over two thousands years has remained the primary bridge between the continents
of Europe and Asia.
The dizzying pace of urban transformation in this former Ottoman capital has been closely
linked to the dictatorial ambitions of the country's president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,
who has sought to use the reconstruction of Istanbul as a tool for consolidating power
around a new national identity.
If we talk about the global capitalist crisis, it’s obvious that the states are trying
their best to get over this crisis with the tool of urban gentrification because they
have the companies, they have the law making.
The capitalization process of Istanbul city is not a new thing, it is a long term project
of the state.
We are talking about over 50 years.
The last 12 years, the process get faster in the government of the AKP.
These urban gentrification projects always has been resource of income for the state.
These projects has been widely spread and they started to change the face of the city
and now they are making it more and more easier to make this.
In the beginning, it was only possible to destroy that building and make a new one with
a consensus of all people living in.
But now, they make it majority of people and the state of emergency also helps to build
this legal process more and more easier.
For last four or five years, they are nationalizing the private spaces.
By these practices, they are trying to change the type of capitalist power.
It is also politic of homogenizing the people.
Deleting all cultures and force them to be Muslim, force them to be Sunia Muslim, and
Turkish people, which is the identity of the state.
For Istanbul, you can see there are big walls which are coming from Ottoman or Byzantine
time.
Out of the walls, they have built the slums.
The builders of the Gejekondu Areas, slum areas, are so called minorities.
It’s not just Alevis and Kurds, but also Roma people.
People who had immigrated from village to big cities like Istanbul.
From the beginning, these neighbourhoods like Gazi Neighbouhood, like Bir Mayis Neighbourhood,
and CHKMUNTLU?
All these neighbourhoods were built with the participation of the whole community.
And caring and thinking about of all the needs of that community.
So, these slums means more than just spaces to live, but it’s also a way of relationship
that people are caring about each other.
During 1960’s and 1980’s, many revolutionary organizations have appeared, and this is important
because next residents of these regions will be the organizers of the first actions against
the destruction policy of the state.
The Taksim riots started against the construction of a mall.
The Gezi Park protests became so popular.
The rioters of Taksim/Gezi achieved the collectivization of the park, and this is a great example of
how we can struggle against the gentrification politics, against the space politics of the
states and the companies.
The meaning of the park, the meaning of the space has been changed.
People got the control of the park and the space has a political meaning.
When we look what happened after Gezi, that riots, the people coming together and the
occupation of the Gezi Park becomes something to hold and many people go on resisting after
the Gezi Park was evicted.
The social resistance was very high and people were not afraid to go on the streets anymore,
and that also affected in a way urban gentrification protests and many other protests, but as the
oppression become more and more visible, and that social opposition became less and less
seen, that also has its effects on urban gentrification.
During one week, the Turkish state have been killed over 10 young people.
We are not just talking about of a day, we are talking about years where people have
been oppressed politically, socially and economically.
One of the first things that they are trying to break is the relationship in these neighbourhoods.
The culture of resistance and the culture of solidarity.
It is not just a struggle against the gentrification projects.
It is against the violence and the terror of the state.
These days, gentrification can often seem inevitable.
It is, after all, a constant process firmly anchored upon the sanctity of private property
and the unshakeable logic of the free market.
According to this cold logic, homes, and the land that they are built on, are commodities
like any other.
It follows, then, that they can be bought and sold... and if the people living there
don't hold the deed, there's not much they can do to stop it.
Except, of course, there is.
Because despite what capitalist may claim, our homes are not commodities like any other.
They’re much more than that.
People defending their homes have been primary agents of struggle for the entirety of human
history.
From anti-colonial struggles waged by Indigenous nations, to peasants taking up arms to defend
their lands from enclosure and theft... people tend to fight hard for their homes.
And while things in cities are different, and often much more complicated... the basic
principle is the same.
I think that it’s important for revolutionaries and for anti-capitalists and anarchists who
want to fight a process like gentrification which is multifaceted to actually be embedded
in the communities that are affected by gentrification.
The only way of actually stopping gentrification is getting out in front of it, and in order
to get out in front of it, you need to actually be living there.
You need to have social relationships with the people who are going to be displaced,
and you need to help with them to fight.
And you know this is not, the sexiest type of work.
You have to come in very humble and really try and support the work that’s being done
by the people that are the most affected and not trying to come into anyone’s community
with like a saviour complex, especially if you’re white, to try and fix people’s
problems because usually there’s been communities of people that have been facing those issues
for decades, if not hundreds of years.
I think that the left are often looking for shortcuts.
Unfortunately, currently, the left is largely based around academic spaces and, you know,
is not necessarily associated with the fabric of working class people’s lives.
Ground level tenant driven organizing in buildings is what’s actually making a lot of change.
People in their building can work together build a moment, and fight in a way that they
can stop these companies from exploiting them and kick them out of their homes.
Hundreds of residents here in Parkdale are heading into their second month refusing to
pay rent in protest of rent hikes
Build working class organizations that are independent from politicians, social service
agencies, or non-profits.
You can’t be beholden to anybody’s interests other than our own.
It’s not going to be benevolent on the part of landlords, or a change of heart on the
part of policy makers that’s going to lead to the types of changes that tenants need
to see.
You have to create your daily life against system.
You have to organize your own ways with people that are not like the capitalist relationships.
You have to create solidarity.
You have to care about each other.
You have to take the responsibility of each other and you have to be organized, thinking
about the needs of your community and the people in your community.
That comes with responsibility of constantly trying to bring visibility and attention and
voice and power to the people who are actually affected by the injustices.
Fighting for ways that people can live affordably in cities and build communities there, for
social purposes rather than for capitalist accumulation.
People tend to be much more satisfied to just gripe about things as they exist, than to
actually try to seek out and understand what is fuelling the process and how they might
actually go about trying to stop it.
Housing is allocated by the market, it’s not allocated according to social need.
And so, this is why you have these constant and persistent problems that don’t seem
to go away.
Don’t be trapped in the dead ends presented to us by political and legal systems.
We need to find our own ways to creatively struggle in our own interests.
Everyday with your every action, you have to fight against, you have to create for your
struggle.
Giving struggle against the strategies of the companies but also strategies of the state.
And the state- it is an enemy that we have to struggle.
Not just urban development projects - every front.
You know, let the fire burn.
They ashes is good for cultivating the land.
You dig?
And I’m just plant a lot of seed.
Grow something else up.
In our hyper-atomized and individualistic societies, we have become incredibly isolated
and alienated from one another.
Those of us living in multi-residential apartment blocks can often go years without communicating
with our neighbours, beyond the occasional small-chat when getting on the elevator.
We're conditioned to keep our noses out of other people's business, and to call the cops
if we see someone loitering, or if the neighbours play their music too loud.
This divide and conquer strategy is intended to keep us weak, and incapable of mounting
collective resistance to shared hardships.
So if we are to avoid the future that capitalists have in store for us, in which our cities
are even further transformed into geographically segregated and heavily militarized urban enclaves
of poverty and wealth, this is a mentality we must overcome.
So at this point, we’d like to remind you that Trouble is intended to be watched in
groups, and to be used as a resource to promote discussion and collective organizing.
Are you interested in organizing your building, or starting a collective to fight gentrification
in your neighbourhood?
Consider getting together with some comrades, organizing a screening of this film, and discussing
where to get started.
Interested in running regular screenings of Trouble at your campus, infoshop, community
center, or even just at home with friends?
Become a Trouble-Maker!
For 10 bucks a month, we’ll hook you up with an advanced copy of the show, and a screening
kit featuring additional resources and some questions you can use to get a discussion
going.
If you can’t afford to support us financially, no worries!
You can stream and/or download all our content for free off our website: sub.media/trouble.
If you’ve got any suggestions for show topics, or just want to get in touch, drop us a line
at trouble@sub.media.
Stay tuned next month for our second installment in this two-part series, as we take a look
at three more cities facing the onslaught of gentrification, and how people there are
fighting back.
This episode would not have been possible without the generous support of Fernando,
and Miki.
Now get out there, and make some trouble!