Socialist Politics and the City

(This is a slightly edited version of a post from September 2011).

A while back, I got into a lively debate with some comrades about the role of the city in socialist politics. The debate seemed to dwell on the question of whether the city or the urban form (it's worth noting that those very concepts were contested in the discussion) coheres with (or makes possible) the socialist ideal of a collectively self-governing society free of exploitation and oppression. I won't try to summarize the objections or positions of those with whom I disagreed, since I wouldn't be able to do them justice. But I would like to reflect a bit more about the position I found myself defending in that discussion.

Let me begin by confessing that much of my thinking about these matters is strongly influenced by an article Mike Davis wrote a couple years back for New Left Review. Here's an excerpt that is particularly emblematic of the view he puts forward in that essay:

There are innumerable examples and they all point toward a single unifying principle: namely, that the cornerstone of the low-carbon city, far more than any particular green design or technology, is the priority given to public affluence over private wealth. As we all know, several additional Earths would be required to allow all of humanity to live in a suburban house with two cars and a lawn, and this obvious constraint is sometimes evoked to justify the impossibility of reconciling finite resources with rising standards of living. Most contemporary cities, in rich countries or poor, repress the potential environmental efficiencies inherent in human-settlement density. The ecological genius of the city remains a vast, largely hidden power. But there is no planetary shortage of ‘carrying capacity’ if we are willing to make democratic public space, rather than modular, private consumption, the engine of sustainable equality. Public affluence—represented by great urban parks, free museums, libraries and infinite possibilities for human interaction—represents an alternative route to a rich standard of life based on Earth-friendly sociality. Although seldom noticed by academic urban theorists, university campuses are often little quasi-socialist paradises around rich public spaces for learning, research, performance and human reproduction.

The brilliance of Davis's argument is that he weaves together the ecological genius of urban living with the social and political importance of the city. Taking ecological concerns seriously, he argues, requires anti-capitalism. But sustainability also requires urban forms. And, independently of ecological concerns, Davis gives us reasons to think that the socialist ideal has always had a close affinity with the forms of social organization made possible by dense urban communities. All three political concerns -anti-capitalist, ecological and urban- hang together in a kind of equilibrium, each drawing support from the other. I find this to be a a highly plausible and attractive picture.

Before I say more about why I endorse this picture, let me say a little bit about what's essential to the idea of the city. Like any familiar concept, the idea of city carries with it innumerable associations and meanings, not all of which I intend to endorse. As I've noted elsewhere, the idea of "the urban" (or worse, "the inner city") is often a racialized euphemism in the United States. I've written elsewhere about the phenomenon of suburban white "fear of the city", which goes hand in hand with the racist image of black people (especially young black men) as dangerous, pathological, angry, and so on. This racist ideology, when combined with individualistic/consumerist ideologies nourished by the suburban form, yields an especially potent anti-city form of consciousness. Of course, as waves of gentrification flood into cities, expelling working class residents, most of them people of color, this generalized "fear of the city" has begun to wane among middle and ruling class whites. Still, it's fair to say that there is still plenty of animus against the urban form out there. In defending the city as an ideal, I'd like to sidestep these ideological encumbrances.

By "city", I mean nothing more than a densely populated community in which functional uses are integrated (rather than separated), that is walkable and bikable, where large numbers of people with very different backgrounds live together and share basic social institutions (e.g. libraries, parks, museums, schools, etc.). I mean an active, lively built environment that makes use of efficiencies created by density, mixed-use, and diversity. I mean a space that laid out on a human scale, not a automotive scale. Though every city fails to fully embody this ideal, big cities come the closest to approximating it. I'll elaborate more on this ideal in a moment.

Still, attractive though this ideal may be, cities continue to get a bad rap. Cities, it is often said, are dirty, cramped, polluted, dangerous, and concrete-heavy. They embody the worst of capitalist industrialization. According to this common view, if cities are gray and asphalt, suburbs and towns are green and leafy. Suburban living, the story goes, is comfortable, safe, harmonious and, most importantly for "green" politics, loaded with expansive lawns and large trees. Low density residential configurations make for a less concrete-heavy landscape, and strict separation of uses entails that residential spaces are far from industrial spaces. It follows, then, that cities, with all their iniquity, pollution and concrete, are the antithesis of sustainable living. Sustainability requires a suburban home with a Prius parked out front, a new-fangled energy efficient refrigerator full of organic produce, etc.

Though these ideas have wide currency, on reflection they have little plausibility.

As the Davis quote makes clear, we would need several additional earths for everyone on the planet to have the massive single-family McMansion with a big irrigated lawn, a couple of cars, etc. It therefore goes without saying that the McMansion lifestyle cannot be egalitarian or, for that matter, socialist in spirit since it is only possible on the assumption that the vast majority of humanity doesn't enjoy it. Now, McMansion enthusiasts might complain that I'm for levelling everyone down to shared poverty. But I'm not; I'm for privileging public wealth over private consumption. I'd rather enjoy the beauty and grandness of world-class public buildings than lock myself up in a McMansion.

Still, we know that McMansions aren't the root of the problem. The problem is one of a basic model of social/economic development that became dominant in in the postwar era. I'm talking about the low-density, use-segregated, car-heavy model of development characteristic of Postwar suburban sprawl, which has been nothing less than an unmitigated environmental (and social) disaster. It is well-known that this model was pushed by ruling classes after WWII to facilitate economic growth (think of, for instance, the impact of the suburban form on the sales of new construction homes, cars, appliances, etc.). The construction of the interstate highway system, in conjunction with huge subsidies for mortgages in low-density suburban areas, made this model hegemonic for a generation. Its dominance continues, though it is becoming increasingly contested and mired by its own contradictions.

Many readers of this blog will already know that I have no love for cars, so I'll set the issue of cars aside for the moment the problem of the environmental costs associated car-exclusive built environments. (See here for some of my own views, and see here and here for more recent socialist critiques). This leaves many other problems to be dealt with, e.g. extremely high per capita uses of energy (think of the energy spent heating a McMansion in the winter). Even the surface-level aesthetic credentials of the ideal "green" suburb are dubious. Most suburbs are monotonous nightmares where indigenous plant life is uprooted, old trees cut down to make space for useless lawns, tacky landscaping, multi-lane highways and, of course, massive parking lots. Many of the suburbs surrounding Chicago (especially the newer ones) tend to have far fewer trees than the typical street in the city. Moreover, the low density of suburbs combined with their extreme un-walkability (and un-bikability) means that you can only enjoy what green-space there is from the windows of an automobile. And let's not forget the massive, four-lane highways connecting sprawling residential subdivisions with other single-use spheres of activity. To say that these are an eyesore is an understatement.

But the problems of the suburban form aren't simply aesthetic or ecological. The social, political and economic problems are profound as well. I'll keep this point brief. The suburban form, as such, privileges individual consumption over public goods, it alienates individuals from one another, it nourishes individualist/consumerist ideologies by leaving little space for non-commercial social interactions among people. Moreover, suburbs are usually planned piecemeal in a top-down manner by developers in conjunction with national (and multi-national) corporations, they are often racially exclusive, and lots of them are little more than quasi-feudal gated "communities" meant to keep out those who aren't rich. It has also been noted (by Davis, among others) that the low-density spatial configuration of suburbs makes organization and collective action less likely to transpire (compared with a dense, urban working-class neighborhood where residents would be far more likely to unite and fight).

So much for suburbia. But what's the alternative?

The only viable alternative, I'd like to suggest, is the city. But not everyone on the Left agrees with that claim. Anarcho-primitivists, for example, argue that the city isn't the only alternative to suburbia. In fact, according to their view, city-dwellers should reject cities for similar reasons and return to pre-capitalist forms of social organization that predate the industrial revolution.

I could spend several posts saying why this view is wrong, so I'll have to be unfairly brief here. First of all, as a Marxist, I am not unequivocally negative about Modernity. I am ambivalent: modernity has brought with it all kinds of progressive possibilities for developing human potential, but it has also brought vastly increased environmental destruction and new forms of exploitation and oppression.

In classical Marxism, the ambivalence toward modernity (which, under any plausible interpretation of modern, has to be loosely identified with capitalism) expresses itself as follows. On the one hand, capitalism has developed the forces of production (e.g. technologies, productive instruments, productive techniques, technically useful knowledge) to an extremely high degree. But the highly developed productive forces and technology in capitalist society are not put in the service of human liberation. Though we can do so today in ways that would have been unthinkable in the Bronze Age, capitalism doesn't use the productive forces to eradicate all forms of poverty, suffering, and starvation. Technological innovation is not put in the service of developing human potential or creating green/sustainable living. Rather it is put in the service of generating ever growing profits. As far as the default mode of the system is concerned, it's all about the bottom line, all the time, and in the long run that the bottom line requires endless compound economic growth. It's not hard to see that this spells destruction for the natural environment.

But that destruction isn't the result of technology, industry, and cities as such (as primitivists would have it). Environmental degradation is the result of the social/political system of capitalism, i.e. an apparatus which generates and uses technology for purposes other than human need and ecological considerations. So the culprit is our political system, not technology or the urban form itself. A sustainable, green socialist society need not dispense with all technologies developed after the emergence of capitalism. That would be absurd. After the revolution, I'd still like to have modern plumbing thank you very much. And aside from improving human lives in innumerable other ways, many technologies enable efficiencies that reduce per capita energy consumption and waste.

And let us not even begin to list the incredible forms of knowledge, association, culture, and so forth that have been enabled by modern technological developments. There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We should radically change the uses that capitalism puts technology to. And we should radically change the way that technological innovation proceeds under capitalism, and put in the service of worthier goals. And, to be sure, many technologies currently in vogue in capitalist societies will need to be abandoned, chief among them the personal automobile as a primary means for each individual to get around. So much for primitivism.

So if I'm right, that leaves us with the city as an ideal form of socialist community. I've set this up as a negative, indirect argument for the city using the process of elimination. But I don't think that's the main thing the city has going for it.

Aside from the environmental gains to be made from consolidating space, eliminating waste, and creating efficiencies from the shared use of public institutions and utilities, there are social and political benefits that attach to city life as well. As Davis points out, the possibilities for spontaneous social interaction and the propensity to feel a sense of shared fate make the urban form an excellent accompaniment to the socialist ideal of a free community of equals, or an association of free producers. Furthermore, if socialist politics privilege the common good and public wealth over private gain and individual greed, then cities are an excellent physical embodiment of the socialist ideal. Rather than hiding our interdependence on one another, cities lay it bare in a way that other forms of structuring communities do not.

The close affinity between collective self-governance from below and the dense, urban form should not be overlooked either. To some extent, the Occupy movement has certainly born this out. If we want to affirm the fact that we are a community of equals who cooperate together for mutual gain, urban forms are the way to go. There is an implicit disavowal of community and interdependence in low-density suburban forms. The built environment in suburban forms creates an illusion of individual self-sufficiency that encourages toxic political forms of consciousness. At their best, however, cities make it hard to ignore our interdependence. There's something intrinsically valuable, I think, about being aware of the ways that we're profoundly connected and inter-dependent.

Cities also unleash human potential and creativity in ways that no other social form can. The sheer density of interesting and creative people living in close proximity to one another creates the possibility for endless combinations of different approaches, lifestyles, artistic endeavors, and projects. If socialism is about making human development, rather than profit, the priority of social production, I can think of no better means than the best aspects of dense urban spaces.

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Socialist Politics and the City

A couple of weeks back, I got into a lively debate with some comrades about the role of the city in socialist politics. The debate seemed to dwell on the question of whether the city or the urban form (it's worth noting that those very concepts were contested in the discussion) coheres with (or makes possible) the socialist ideal of a collectively self-governing society free from exploitation and oppression. I won't try to summarize the objections or positions of those with whom I disagreed, since I wouldn't be able to do them justice. But I would like to reflect a bit more about the position I found myself defending in that discussion.

Let me begin by confessing that much of my thinking about these matters is strongly influenced by an article Mike Davis wrote a couple years back for New Left Review. Here's an excerpt that is particularly emblematic of the view he puts forward in that essay:

There are innumerable examples and they all point toward a single unifying principle: namely, that the cornerstone of the low-carbon city, far more than any particular green design or technology, is the priority given to public affluence over private wealth. As we all know, several additional Earths would be required to allow all of humanity to live in a suburban house with two cars and a lawn, and this obvious constraint is sometimes evoked to justify the impossibility of reconciling finite resources with rising standards of living. Most contemporary cities, in rich countries or poor, repress the potential environmental efficiencies inherent in human-settlement density. The ecological genius of the city remains a vast, largely hidden power. But there is no planetary shortage of ‘carrying capacity’ if we are willing to make democratic public space, rather than modular, private consumption, the engine of sustainable equality. Public affluence—represented by great urban parks, free museums, libraries and infinite possibilities for human interaction—represents an alternative route to a rich standard of life based on Earth-friendly sociality. Although seldom noticed by academic urban theorists, university campuses are often little quasi-socialist paradises around rich public spaces for learning, research, performance and human reproduction.

The brilliance of Davis's argument is that he weaves together the ecological genius of urban living with the social and political importance of the city as well. Taking ecological concerns seriously, he argues, requires anti-capitalism. But sustainability also requires urban forms. And, independently of ecological concerns, Davis gives us reasons to think that the socialist ideal has always had a close affinity with the forms of social organization made possible by dense urban communities. All three political concerns -anti-capitalist, ecological and urban- hang together in a kind of equilibrium, each drawing support from the other. I find this to be a a highly plausible and attractive picture.

Before I say more about why I endorse this picture, let me say a little bit about what's essential to the idea of the city. Like any familiar concept, the idea of city carries with it innumerable associations and meanings, not all of which I intend to endorse. As I've noted elsewhere, the idea of "the urban" (or worse, "the inner city") is often a racialized euphemism in the United States. And, given that the U.S. is a racist society, racialization goes hand in hand with devaluation and disparagement. As waves of gentrification wash into neighborhoods previously inhabited by working class people, most of them people of color, this "fear of the city" is beginning to wane among middle class whites. But it's fair to say that there is still a good degree of negative connotations attached to the idea of the city.

By "city", I mean nothing more than a densely populated community in which functional uses are integrated (rather than separated), that is walkable and bikable, where lots of people with very different backgrounds can live together and share many basic social institutions together (e.g. libraries, parks, etc.). I mean a space that makes use of efficiencies created by density, mixed-use, and diversity. Though every city fails to fully embody this ideal, big cities (e.g. Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc.) are especially close to it. I'll elaborate more on this ideal in a moment.

Still, attractive though this ideal may be, cities get a bad rap. Cities, it is often said, are dirty, cramped, polluted, dangerous, and concrete-heavy. They embody the worst of capitalist industrialization. According to this common view, if cities are gray and asphalt, suburbs and towns are green and leafy. Suburban living, the story goes, is comfortable, safe, harmonious and, most importantly for "green" politics, loaded with expansive lawns and large trees. Low density residential configurations make for a less concrete-heavy landscape, and strict separation of uses entails that residential spaces are far from industrial spaces. It follows, then, that cities, with all their iniquity, pollution and concrete, are the antithesis of sustainable living. Sustainability requires a suburban home with a Prius parked out front, a new-fangled energy efficient refrigerator full of organic produce, etc.

Though these ideas have wide currency, in point of fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

As the Davis quote makes clear, we would need several additional earths for everyone on the planet to have the massive single-family McMansion with a big irrigated lawn, a couple of cars, etc. It therefore goes without saying that the McMansion lifestyle cannot be egalitarian or, for that matter, socialist in spirit since it is only possible on the assumption that the majority don't enjoy it.

Moreover, the low-density, use-segregated, car-heavy model of development characteristic of Postwar suburban sprawl has been an unmitigated environmental disaster. It is well-known that this model was pushed by ruling classes after WWII to facilitate economic growth (think of, for instance, the impact of the suburban form on the sales of new construction homes, cars, appliances, etc.). The construction of the interstate highway system, in conjunction with huge subsidies for mortgages in low-density suburban areas, made this model hegemonic for a generation. Its dominance continues, though it is becoming increasingly contested and criticized. Many readers of this blog will already know that I have no love for cars, so I'll set the issue of cars aside for the moment the problem of the environmental costs associated car-exclusive built environments. This leaves many other problems to be dealt with, e.g.: extremely high per capita uses of energy (think of the energy spent heating a McMansion in the winter). Even the surface-level aesthetic credentials of the ideal "green" suburb are dubious. Most suburbs are monotonous nightmares where indigenous plants are uprooted, old trees cut down to make space for useless lawns and tacky landscaping. The suburbs surrounding Chicago, for example, tend to have far fewer trees than the typical street in the city. And let's not forget the worst aspect of the suburban separation of uses: massive, four-lane highways connecting residential subdivisions with other spheres of activity. To say that these are an eyesore is an understatement. And anyone averse to large agglomerations of concrete should want to have nothing to do with them.

But the problems of the suburban form aren't simply ecological. They are socially and politically (and economically) disastrous as well. I'll keep this point brief. They privilege individual consumption over public goods, they alienate individuals from one another, they encourage consumerist ideologies by leaving little space for non-commercial social interactions among people, they are planned in a top-down manner by developers in conjunction with national (and multi-national) corporations, they are often racially exclusive, and many are little more than quasi-feudal gated "communities" meant to keep out those who aren't sufficiently wealthy. It has also been noted (by Davis, among others) that the low-density spatial configuration of suburbs makes organization and collective action less likely to transpire (compared with a dense, urban working-class neighborhood where residents would be far more likely to unite and fight).

So much for suburbia. What's the alternative?

The only viable alternative, I'd like to suggest, is the city. But not everyone on the Left agrees with that claim. Anarcho-primitivists, for example, argue that the city isn't the only alternative to suburbia. In fact, according to their view, we should reject cities for similar reasons and return to pre-capitalist forms of social organization, e.g. agriculture-based communes, that predate the industrial revolution.

I could spend several posts saying why this view is wrong, so I'll have to be unfairly brief here. My objections to primitivism are as follows. First of all, as Marxist, I am not unequivocally negative about Modernity. I am ambivalent: modernity has brought with it all kinds of progressive possibilities for developing human potential, but it has also brought vastly increased environmental destruction and new forms of exploitation and oppression. In classical Marxism, the ambivalence toward modernity (which, under any plausible interpretation of modern, has to be loosely synonymous with capitalism) expresses itself as follows. On the one hand, capitalism has developed the forces of production (e.g. technologies, productive instruments, productive techniques, technically useful knowledge) to an extremely high degree. But the highly developed productive forces and technology in capitalist society are not put in the service of human liberation. Though we can do so today in ways that would have been unthinkable in the Bronze Age, capitalism doesn't use the productive forces to eradicate all forms of poverty, suffering, and starvation. Technological innovation is not put in the service of developing human potential or creating green/sustainable living. Rather it is put in the service of generating ever growing profits. As far as the default mode of the system is concerned, it's all about the bottom line, all the time, and in the long run that the bottom line requires endless compound economic growth. It's not hard to see that this spells destruction for the natural environment.

But that destruction isn't the result of technology, industry, and cities as such, as primitivists would argue. Environmental degradation is the result of the social/political system of capitalism, i.e. an apparatus which generates and uses technology for purposes other than human need and ecological considerations. So the culprit is our political system, not technology and the urban form itself. A sustainable, green socialist society need not dispense with all technologies developed after the emergence of capitalism. That would be absurd. After the revolution, I'd still like to have modern plumbing thank you very much. And aside from improving human lives in innumerable other ways, many technologies enable efficiencies that reduce per capita energy consumption and waste.

And let us not even begin to list the incredible forms of knowledge, association, culture, and so forth that have been enabled by modern technological developments. There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We should radically change the uses that capitalism puts technology to. And we should radically change the way that technological innovation proceeds under capitalism, and put in the service of worthier goals. And, to be sure, many technologies currently in vogue in capitalist societies will need to be abandoned, chief among them the personal automobile as a primary means for each individual to get around. So much for primitivism.

So if I'm right, that leaves us with the city as an ideal form of socialist community. I've set this up as a negative, indirect argument for the city using the process of elimination. But I don't think that's the main thing the city has going for it.

Aside from the environmental gains to be made from consolidating space, eliminating waste, and creating efficiencies from the shared use of public institutions and utilities, there are social and political benefits that attach to city life as well. As Davis points out, the possibilities for spontaneous social interaction and the propensity to feel a sense of shared fate make the urban form an excellent accompaniment to the socialist ideal of a free community of equals, or an association of free producers. Furthermore, if socialist politics privilege the common good and public wealth over private gain and individual greed, then cities are an excellent physical embodiment of the socialist ideal. Rather than hiding our interdependence on one another, cities lay it bare in a way that other forms of structuring communities do not. Cities also unleash human potential and creativity in ways that no other social form can. The sheer density of interesting and creative people living in close proximity to one another creates the possibility for endless combinations of different approaches, lifestyles, artistic endeavors, and projects. If socialism is about making human development, rather than profit, the priority of social production, I can think of no better means than the best aspects of dense urban spaces.

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More on Cabrini-Green

Here.

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On the closing of the Cabrini-Green highrises

Cabrini-Green occupies a strange place in the public imagination of many (especially white) Americans. The mere existence of the 1992 horror film Candyman, most of which was actually shot on location at Cabrini, is a nice metaphor for this phenomenon. On the one hand, it is the object of scorn. But on the other, one finds a persistent, voyeuristic fascination with the Cabrini phenomenon that seems aptly filed away in the same genre as detached-observer crime porn TV-shows like Gangland.

Lately we've seen quite a bit of coverage of the fact that the last Cabrini-Green high-rise is slated to be demolished soon. Since the implementation of the CHA's "Plan for Transformation" in 2000, more than 1,700 residents have displaced as the high rises have been torn down one by one. This is a nation-wide phenomenon that began in the 90s, which, I think it's fair to say, is part of a larger neoliberal trend to privatize, cut public services, and so forth.

As I've written elsewhere on this blog, US public housing is shot through with contradictions of various sorts. In order to be able to say anything illuminating about the present situation concerning the demolition of the Cabrini-Green high-rises, we need to say a bit about their history.

The first major piece of public housing legislation in the US was the 1937 Housing Act, which ostensibly aimed to respond to serious scarcity problems in housing during the Great Depression. But due to "the successful lobbying of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Savings and Loan Association, the act was kept from being a central part of FDR's New Deal agenda". Moreover:

"Roosevelt was persuaded that public housing was "too socialist" a remedy to the existing scarcity of homes, and kept it out of the Administration's legislative agenda until the mid-1930s. After a bitter ideological debate in Congress, the act was finally passed in 1937, but not without significant concessions to the private sector. Among the most significant were requirements that public housing schemes include "equivalent demolition" of housing in the surrounding community (and compensation to the owner) so that no new units were added to the overall stock". (see J. Hackworth's excellent book, The Neoliberal City)

Of course, the reason for this was that property-owning classes and real estate capital did not want public housing to compete with them (a development which would have forced them to lower rent prices to remain competitive in a market with more housing supply). It has been the same story with every subsequent housing bill passed after 1937: every measure would include provisions designed to prevent a serious public challenge to real-estate capital.

After WWII, the mass influx of soldiers returning to major cities led to a severe housing shortage. Landlords began installing "crash panels", illegally, to turn a two-unit building into an overcrowded 8 or 10-unit cash cow. This severe shortage gave landlords a substantial amount of economic bargaining power and led to a great deal of dirty dealings and exploitation. This vulnerability and exploitation was particularly acute in the case of black people, who, in Chicago for instance, were confined to small ghettos whose borders were strictly enforced by white violence (see Beryl Satter's excellent Family Properties for an in-depth analysis of how racism and exploitation shaped the housing scene for black Chicagoans 1945-the present.)

It was in this context of severe shortage that the 1949 Federal Housing Act was passed. Like the 1937 bill, landlords and real estate capital fought hard to make sure that the Act wouldn't endanger their economic power. They succeeded marvelously. Again, the letter of the law would require that public housing be prevented from ever competing with private landlords. The bill required that:

"(a) rent ceilings were to be set at a maximum of 20% lower than the lowest nearby private housing, (b) structures were to be stigmatizing and aesthetically austere in order to make public housing stand out from average housing stock; and (c) there would be low operating budgets for the Public Housing Authorities charged with managing the facilities."

There's a bit more context to put in place here. The idea of building large high-rises in the manner of the Cabrini towers was part of an international trend. After the Great Depression, a new configuration of capitalism emerged under the influence of Keynesian ideas about fiscal policy. The old ideas of "laissez-faire" were almost universally discredited by the Great Depression. Understandably, it was pretty difficult to buy the old myth that the "free" market would solve all problems after the devastation caused by the Depression. It was clear to everyone that, left to its own devices, capitalism was prone to serious, recurring crises and instability. Thus, a consensus formed at the top of society to the effect that much larger measures of state regulation and intervention would be required to sustain steady profits and economic growth. This postwar "managed" capitalism came to define the era from 1945-1973.

Though many reforms came about through this change of orthodoxy which benefited ordinary people (vastly increased public spending on infrastructure, education, health care and housing), we should not be mistaken about the power dynamics involved. Capitalist social relations were hardly up for reform, and most of the beneficial policies of the era were implemented in a technocratic, top-down manner. This was social-engineering from above, not a serious reform program from below.

Public housing policy between 1945-1973 exemplified these trends. Some of the ideas that would influence US public housing, to be sure, had predated the Second World War (e.g. the top-down, technocratic ideas of Le Corbusier which were implemented to clear slums in Paris). In either case, however, the basic forces driving public housing were all coming from above rather than below.

This is, then, the context in which the high-rise towers at Cabrini-Green were built. They were, from the very beginning, part of a top-down plan that sought more to deal with a "problem population" than to empower those on the bottom of society. The structures were built to facilitate social control, not community or the satisfaction of human need. This is evident in the aesthetic properties of the buildings.

They created intentionally austere, bare-bones and basically anti-social built environments. The community and solidarity that did arise in Cabrini did so in spite of the built structures themselves. The buildings were spaced out, far away from one another, and all of the towers prioritized automobile-scale development over human-scale development. They were all single-use and included no mixed-use development at all. Rather than looking like inviting places conducive to community interaction, the high-rises were in many ways uninviting and unsettling to they eye. I don't say this because of the building materials themselves- I actually think very highly of reinforced concrete as a building material (aesthetically, environmentally, etc.) Moreover, I don't entirely endorse the Jane Jacobs-style critique of Brutalism and other Modern experiments in reconfiguring space- there was some, albeit often botched, progressive content to movements like the Bauhaus. Still, to be sure, much of what Jacobs had to say about "deductive" urban renewal (what black activists described as "negro removal") is absolutely right on. This inhuman, technocratic nearly destroyed urban life as we know it. I just wouldn't take the conservative view that everything about the Modernist experiment was misguided, adventurist elitism.

This is all a way of saying that I agree that the high-rises were basically a failed model from the very beginning. So what light does this shed on the demolition of Cabrini today?

So far I've mostly spoken of buildings, structural considerations, and macro-level policy. But the question of Cabrini has to do with real, living human beings. What will become of the former residents who will be displaced and what other options will be made available to them?

The residents themselves appear to be under no illusions about the way the system works. They understand that it does not work to serve their interests. Thus, they are entirely justified in being skeptical about whether there is a viable alternative waiting for them when the high rises are all torn down. They are rightly suspicious of neoliberal Section 8 policies as an alternative to real public housing. They are, for good reason, angry that they are being displaced not "for their own good", but because of the potential profits to be made by dispossessing them and gentrifying the area. They are aware that they are being forced to choose between a turd and a shit sandwich, and they justifiably want a more desirable alternative. And they deserve a better alternative. If mainstream America looked at the residents of public housing as fully equal citizens worthy of respect, rather than deviant subhumans who are more "problems" than fellow comrades, then perhaps it would be more obvious than it is that society owes them a better alternative. This isn't a matter of "charity", but of justice.

To be sure, some news reports will see this as a human interest story (rather than political) and will express some sympathy for the displaced residents. However, many news reports will try to cast the resident activism and opposition as irrational. Why, the news reports will ask, would a rational human being want to continue living in such squalid conditions? But that's the "nice" way of putting their point. Underneath that "innocent" head-scratching attitude is often a kind of anti-"welfare mother" racism that abhors the alleged slothfulness and deviance of those who reside in public housing.

But the only thing that is irrational in this situation is the false choice forced upon us: either choose the failed top-down public housing model of the 50s/60s, or have no public housing at all. In effect, we're told that we have to accept under-maintained, under-funded, crime-infested structures like Cabrini, or we have to accept that public housing itself is a rotten idea. This makes no sense.

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Voices of Cabrini

Voices of Cabrini: Remaking Chicago's Public Housing from Ronit Bezalel on Vimeo.

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Gil Scot-Heron: New York is Killing Me

(via ColorLines):

Gil Scott-Heron - New York Is Killing Me (2010)

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Crude vs. Sophisticated Anti-Gentrification Arguments

As a socialist, it goes without saying that I do not think that housing, land-use and urban investment should be controlled and run solely in the interests of profit. Thus, I am a critic of what's called gentrification. But to be a socialist, or to oppose the reign of landlords and rich developers over and above tenants and the masses of people, is to be against gentrification for a specific set of reasons. Unfortunately, one rarely runs across such reasons in most mainstream discussions of gentrification. Instead one gets a straw-person account of the critical position, wherein the opponent of gentrification is against it for merely "cultural" reasons (e.g. they hate coffee shops, artisan bread bakeries, sidewalk beautification projects, etc.). The struggle for or against gentrification thus becomes a struggle for or against certain consumer preferences, for or against certain consumer lifestyles ("gritty" bohemian or working-class life vs. the clean-edged modern design of frou-frou bars and restaurants). This is a distortion.

At its absolute worst, the pro-gentrification crowd frames the debate as follows. There are two choices: (1) economically depressed slum plagued by crumbling infrastructure and high crime, or (2) an economically growing neighborhood (increasingly populated by rich white people exclusively) in which property values are on the rise and commercial investment revitalizes housing stock, roads and schools. Having framed the argument in this way, the pro-gentrification folks (for an excellent example, see the strictly disciplined political line taken over at Uptown Update) have little trouble in ridiculing any and all critics: they simply prefer crime-ridden neighborhoods that have crumbling infrastructure and no jobs.

Or, to take the "cultural" manifestation of this framing of the question, we could say that the opponents of gentrification simply hate the following things in themselves: modern architecture, artisan cafes, coffee shops, art galleries, bars and restaurants, boutiques, etc. In other words, the opponents of gentrification just have a problem with such "white" things as bread, coffee, art, good schools, and jobs. Insert the racist "culture of poverty" argument here to give the claim a "scientific" veneer.

Now everyone with a brain should know that this framing of the "debate" is complete bullshit. No rational person wants crime, crumbling infrastructure, underfunded schools, slumlord-ruled housing, unemployment, etc. Moreover, there is little reason to think that the yet-to-be-dispossessed simply have different "cultural" preferences that motivate their criticisms of gentrification. In contrast, what the critics of gentrification oppose is precisely the prescribed choice imposed on us in the framing of the question discussed above.

Here's an example. Take the Lawndale neighborhood on the West side of Chicago. Traditionally, Lawndale was always a working-class neighborhood populated by various immigrant communities and, more recently, black people. At one time Lawndale was a center for the working-class Jewish community in Chicago. It has, to be sure, seen its up's and down's, but today it is in worse shape than it has ever been. The reasons why are not particular to Lawndale whatsoever: de-industrialization, capital flight, severe population loss, ruthless criminal landlord practices, racism, etc. all ravaged the community from the 1960s onwards.

Martin Luther King, Jr. actually moved to Lawndale in the late 1960s in order to draw attention to the severe neglect and poverty afflicting black people in Northern cities (it had been a favorite position of many moralizing white liberals in the 1960s that racism was merely a problem in the South).

Today, Lawndale is dire straits. It has hundreds of liquor stores but only one grocery store. (Jonathan Kozol writes that it had in the early 1990s "one bank, one supermarket, 48 state lottery agents ... and 99 licensed bars." and that, according to the 1980 census, 58 percent of men and women 17 and older had no jobs). This is a familiar story. Most of the big companies and factories that employed the community in the first half of the 20th century have closed down or moved overseas to find more easily exploited labor. Today the roads in Lawndale are in such bad shape that they were recently featured in an article in the Chicago Reader.

So, what hope does a neighborhood like Lawndale have as long as investment, land use, and so on are controlled by profit-seeking capitalist investors?

Within the coordinates of profit, Lawndale is not a neighborhood populated by a community of people with needs, talents, and interests. On the contrary, from the perspective of capitalists, Lawndale is one of two things: either its a profitable investment or it isn't. And, surprise surprise, profitable investments are typically those that lure in the spending capacities of the rich, most of whom are white. The result is that the social problem, the injustice, of Lawndale doesn't register; capitalism is deaf to human needs when they aren't backed by cold, hard cash.

So, just imagine that capitalists tried gentrify Lawndale (they've attempted to do it, by the way, in the crumbling East Garfield Park neighborhood on the West Side). Suppose that residents of Lawndale, even some who'd been living there for 30+ years, were beginning to be priced out of their own apartments by rising rents and costs of living. Now the residents' political anger at this situation wouldn't have anything to do with so-called "cultural" preferences. On the contrary, their anger would be over the fact that they are given an unfair and oppressive choice: either accept broken schools and crumbling roads, or get out and make room for the rich.

When seen for what it is, gentrification presents us with a deep contradiction in capitalist development. And we forget at our own peril that capitalist control of land use and housing isn't natural or inevitable. It's made by human beings. And what human beings have made they can tear down. But community, democratic control over land use, housing, and investment will not be on offer unless it is demanded by pressure from below.

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"All you see is... crime in the city"

Unlike previous generations of Americans, the vast majority of the children of baby-boomers have come of age in a social environment outside of urban centers. We must, however, be more specific here: the vast majority of white Americans (particularly middle class and wealthier) born in the postwar era have been socialized and formed by the Suburban social and political landscape. There are of course a handful of small exceptions (e.g. the Upper East Side, etc.).

By and large, however, the majority of Americans under the age of 40 are products not of urban life, but of a suburban social environment which itself only emerged and congealed in the 1950s.

There are, of course, millions of interesting insights to be gleamed from this fact, but I'll just focus on one here: large numbers of Americans are afraid of cities as such.

This fear manifests itself in many different ways, but it typically assumes a form something like the following. Cities are dark, crowded, dangerous places where one must always be on the lookout for the inevitable attack. The people there (most of whom, it is imagined, are criminals and of color) are mean, resentful and certainly not to be trusted. Moreover, city-dwellers are looking just for people like you, that is, people who are not from the city and fear its squalor and iniquity. They're looking for you, of course, in order to rob and ruffle your suburban purity. Watch out.

This phobia is homologous to (and deeply bound up with) common views about black people in the contemporary US. As political philosopher Tommie Shelby describes it, "in the present post-industrial phase of capitalist development, blacks are often viewed as parasitic, angry, ungrateful, and dangerous" (whereas they'd been characterized as "docile, superstitious, easily satisfied, and servile" under the conditions of plantation slavery). Witness, also, the way in which the term "urban" itself has become racialized and devalued on that basis.

There are countless examples. A good starting place for analyzing this phenomenon is film. From my armchair, it seems as though the depiction of urban areas and so-called "inner cities" in particular, takes an increasingly negative turn from the 1950s/60s onwards (whereas the positive evaluation of the single-family home, the automobile, etc. seems to soar). Things seemed to have changed a bit in the 1990s with the return of many affluent white people to urban centers. But films from the late 1970s and 80s especially (when major US cities were at rock bottom all across the board) depict the city as a dirty, crime-infested den of violence and darkness. This is typically contrasted with the (apparently) idyllic, whitewashed landscape of suburbia. Such a gaze is always from the outside (suburbia) looking in (toward urban areas). Blue Velvet plays off of this phenomenon in really interesting ways, but I can't go into that right now. (Nor can I go into the political economy of why suburbs emerged and why cities went into severe decline in the middle of the 20th century in the US).

One cinematic example from my childhood stands out: the 1983 Tom Cruise film Risky Business. (Or also from 1983, see this). The entire film is an expression of the gaze of the adolescent, white male child of the suburban well-to-do on the North Shore. The film creates clear demarcations between a suburban land of paternal law, purity, cleanliness, conventionally-defined success, norms of chivalry, etc. on the one hand, and an urban landscape characterized by raw sexual "deviance", iniquity, and crime on the other. "Home" is a massive single-family house in Glencoe whereas the problems Joel faces are all to be found in the land of pimps, drugs, and violence: Chicago.

Film and TV, of course, are only two "ideological state apparatuses" involved in socialization and the creation of people for whom the city is a place unfit for those with "family values". There are doubtless many other examples.

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Markets and Transportation

"Let us first turn to other sectors of the economy to which the "straight" market criteria do not apply without very considerable modification. Transportation is a case in point. Thus most of the world recognizes that urban transit benefits those who do not use it (e.g. by reducing congestion and increasing property values), and that it should be provided by a public authority, with a sizable subsidy to cover inevitable losses. Even in Reagan's United States, docks, airports, and rapid-transit systems remained publicly owned. Involved here are external economies (time-saving, convenience) and diseconomies (congestion, pollution) and also elements of system, of network, which render the conventional neoclassical marginal-cost and marginal-profitability analysis both misleading and irrelevant, and the public-service aspect of high importance. Of course, in making decisions one should always compare costs and results, but one can do so only in the context of network, on the one hand, and the purpose of the activity on the other." - Alec Nove, "Central Planning in Capitalism and Socialism"

This last sentence is crucial. This is the antidote for those who confusedly lament the "inefficiencies" of public institutions like urban transportation and extol the alleged virtues of profit-driven markets. First of all, marginal-cost/marginal-profitability analysis is basically useless here and distorts matters considerably. Secondly, asking that public transit be run "like a business" evinces a deep misunderstanding of the function of public transportation.

This is the crux of the issue. To demand that public transit networks "turn a profit" is to misunderstand what a public transit system is.

What, then, is the function of urban public transit? Quite obviously, it is to most effectively facilitate movement of everyone, on a city-wide systemic basis, in a way that is sustainable, comprehensive, egalitarian, efficient, organized, and user-friendly in the broadest sense. It is decidedly not to exploit certain needs that are profitable while ignoring those that aren't, which is precisely what for-profit transportation does. For example: if you're a capitalist, why invest in means of transportation for, say, poor pensioners who are not a good source of profits? Why not just ignore them completely and focus on markets where there is "effective demand" and the potential for hefty returns? This is, incidentally, what happens with health insurance when it is fully commodified: the poor and sick are left by the wayside whereas private insurers "cherry pick" the wealthy and healthy patients that will better aid the company in maximizing profits.

Now, obviously, rejecting neoclassical marginal analysis here doesn't mean that there isn't some cost/benefit analysis to be undertaken at the system-level by a public transit authority regarding how to allocate funds, service, etc. But this analysis will not look much like the rent-seeking behavior of capitalist investors, first and foremost because the relevant benefit here is not "profit" for the transportation authority, but the extent to which the public transit network fulfills its function well. We need to know what the relevant good is that we're trying to maximize before we can begin an analysis of what an optimal public transit system would consist in. Assuming the metric of cash returns on a balance sheet in the ways that capitalist firms do here is to completely miss the issue at hand (yet, this is precisely what neoclassical economic theory does: it elevates the tendentious, narrow logic of the capitalist firm to a universal and quasi-natural status).

A good transportation system is not one that runs a surplus every year. A good transportation system is one that fulfills its function well. Making efficient use of resources is of course of value, but of purely instrumental value. Contrary to the dogmas of deficit-hawks and those who fetishize balanced budgets, a "cheap" but anemic transit system is not a good one.

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Racism and Exploitation in Housing in Chicago

Read the NYTimes review of a recent book by Rutgers historian Beryl Satter, the daughter of civil-rights attorney Mark J. Satter. Here's an excerpt:

Ms. Satter, chairwoman of the history department at Rutgers University, balances personal stories, including moments of great bravery, with painstaking legal and historical research. She persuasively and devastatingly argues (turning conventional wisdom on its head) that the true cause of black ghettoes in Chicago was financial exploitation — not the “culture of poverty” or white flight. She goes further, linking this kind of financial exploitation to today’s subprime mortgage crisis, an earlier example of greedy lenders pushing people “to take on more debt than they could handle” and charging inflated interest rates.

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Mike Davis on the promise of the city

Here's a little taste:

There are innumerable examples and they all point toward a single unifying principle: namely, that the cornerstone of the low-carbon city, far more than any particular green design or technology, is the priority given to public affluence over private wealth. As we all know, several additional Earths would be required to allow all of humanity to live in a suburban house with two cars and a lawn, and this obvious constraint is sometimes evoked to justify the impossibility of reconciling finite resources with rising standards of living. Most contemporary cities, in rich countries or poor, repress the potential environmental efficiencies inherent in human-settlement density. The ecological genius of the city remains a vast, largely hidden power. But there is no planetary shortage of ‘carrying capacity’ if we are willing to make democratic public space, rather than modular, private consumption, the engine of sustainable equality. Public affluence—represented by great urban parks, free museums, libraries and infinite possibilities for human interaction—represents an alternative route to a rich standard of life based on Earth-friendly sociality. Although seldom noticed by academic urban theorists, university campuses are often little quasi-socialist paradises around rich public spaces for learning, research, performance and human reproduction.

This excerpt comes from his new piece,"Who Will Build the Arc?", in the most recent edition of New Left Review.

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The "Malignant Crime": Urban Arson in the 1970s

(picture from FilthyMess.com)

By 1970, almost every major US city was suffering from severe economic turmoil. Poor and working-class neighborhoods were hit especially hard, with the biggest weight of the burden coming down on people of color.

I was spurred to write this post by the following bit of information from a Chicago Reader article on the history of the Ukrainian Village neighborhood.

[The 60s and 70s] was a tumultuous time for the villages. Real estate values plummeted as landlords neglected their buildings and speculators sat on vacant land and abandoned property. Mom-and-pop businesses along Chicago Avenue fell like dominoes. The arson rate in the area was so high that in 1976 Mayor Richard J. Daley convened a task force to address the crisis.

It was no surprise to read that Ukie-V suffered what was called "the urban crisis" in the 1970s, of course. But the bit on arson struck me. I recalled seeing pictures like the following, and reading something a while back about a massive arson epidemic in the South Bronx in the early 1970s. I also recalled some scenes from Downtown81 shot on the Lower East Side in 1981 in which every other building was a pile of rubble (also see Alphabet City (1984), whose "plot" is structured around a hired arson). I started asking questions like: Was this a widespread problem in cities all over the US? Why was it a problem at this time? What would motivate someone to, apparently, destroy properties in city? Who was involved, and with what interests?

The poster of the picture above gives the following caption:

It was pretty bad in those days as buildings burned down weekly. All arsons commissioned by landlords. These arsons occurred in all of the areas of the city inhabited by lower income minorities. Neighborhoods in Brooklyn like Brownsville, Bed Stuy and East New York. In Manhattan there was the Lower East Side and Harlem and of course the South Bronx.

I'll get to the "commissioned by landlords" bit in a moment. For now, just think about the scale of the arson crisis: all over Lower East Side, Brooklyn, Bronx, Harlem, etc. As it turns out, the problem of arson in the South Bronx, in particular, was particularly acute. From wikipedia:

In the 1970s, the Bronx was plagued by a wave of arson. The burning of buildings was mostly in the South Bronx, concentrated especially along Westchester Avenue and in West Farms. The most common explanation of what occurred was that landlords decided to burn their buildings and take the insurance money as profit.^[39] Competing explanations blamed the insurance companies —since their non-renewals of policies might have encouraged the landlords— or the residents themselves. After the destruction of many buildings in the South Bronx, the arsons slowed significantly in the later part of the decade, but the after-effects were still felt into the early 1990s.

The problem wasn't confined to New York. As a 1977 Time article noted:

"Arson is a barometer of urban decay," says New York City Deputy Chief Fire Marshal John Barracato, "and most city fathers are ashamed to admit they have this problem." But the ruinous dimensions cannot be hidden. In New York City's South Bronx, where Jimmy Carter took an impromptu walking tour earlier this month, there have been more than 7,000 fires in the past two years. "The destruction is reminiscent of the bombed-out cities in Europe," says Bronx District Attorney Mario Merola, who was a navigator in World War II. Chicago's Humboldt Park area has some 400 charred, abandoned buildings. In Detroit, 10,000 houses stand vacant, victims of fire. "The city is burning down," said an anguished Lieut. Robert McClary, head of Detroit's fire-fraud squad.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,945795-2,00.html#ixzz0e8X3PnKc

This is shocking stuff. Chicago, Boston, New York, Detroit and the list goes on. Over 400 buildings burned down in Humboldt Park. Views of flagship US cities reminiscent of bombed-out post-WWII European cities? Why was this allowed to happen?


As the Time article explains, and as most people seem to agree, there were strong economic motivations for landlords:

In ghetto areas like the South Bronx and Humboldt Park, landlords often see arson as a way of profitably liquidating otherwise unprofitable assets. The usual strategy: drive out tenants by cutting off the heat or water; make sure the fire insurance is paid up; call in a torch.

Of course, the Time article seems to want to attribute the majority of arson in impoverished neighborhoods to deviant youth and "hate". There can be no doubt that there were at least some cases of arson in, say, Humboldt Park committed by nihilistic youth destroying buildings for the fun of it. But it seems pretty implausible to claim that anything like the majority of cases were committed on this basis. Moreover, even if they were, it would be a mistake to attribute the causes solely to the pathologies of "drug pushers" and "deviant youth". After all, the arson epidemics were concentrated in neighborhoods ravaged by disinvestment, high unemployment, slumlording, economic devastation, redlining, racism and massive drops in population.

Sociologist James Brady, who was the director of the City of Boston Arson Strike Force in the early 80s, has done a lot of work on this topic, and skewers the classic conservative thinking characteristic of the "deviance" explanation motivating the 1977 Time article. According to Brady:

Traditional methods of dealing with the problem are based on a view of arsonists as pyromaniacs or vandals. [But, there is a] clear link between the policies of banks and insurance companies, on the one hand, and the arson-for-profit schemes of organized crime, professional arsonists, shady landlords, and corrupt public officials... The dramatic upsurge of arson fires in the United States since 1960 has made a shambles of these assurances. Arson now outstrips all other "index" crimes in terms of injuries, deaths, and property losses, forcing us to rethink both our current control measures and our notions about the causes of this menace.

Brady continues:

I argue that the routine profit-making practices of banks, realtors, and insurance companies lead to the processes of abandonment, gentrification, and neighborhood decline which destabilize urban communities and provide the context and motivation for several varieties of arson. Organized crime syndicates, professional firesetters, and corrupt officials all figure prominently in arson-for-profit schemes, but the urban economic context also lies behind the fires of vandals and small property owners desperate to escape losing investments by means of convenient fires.This seems to me to be basically right on. Other studies have also constructed models whereby the best profit-maximizing strategy for certain banks, insurance companies, and landlords is basically a combination of abandonment and professionally-commissioned arson by hired "torches".

I find this heartbreaking. We don't need to talk about arson in order to grasp the inhuman, cold, calculated cruelty of slum-lording, blockbusting, redlining, etc. But this pushes things to another level entirely. Good ol' capitalism, indeed.

The role of public officials in this cruel process would be worth looking into more. Brady discusses it some, but it seems like all levels of government can be indicted for the prevalence of this phenomenon. They (public officials) literally stood and watched as powerful organizations set fire to poor (largely black and latino) neighborhoods. There's something very Katrina-esque about this whole thing.

Examples of this phenomenon abound. For instance, as David Harvey points out:

Something ominous began to happen in 2006. The rate of foreclosures in low-income areas of older US cities began to increase. Officialdom and the media took very little notice because, as had happened many years before in the early stages of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the communities affected were low-income, mainly African-American or immigrant (Hispanics), in cities like Cleveland and Detroit that were in any case already blighted and deteriorated. It was only in mid-2007, when the foreclosure wave had spread to white middle class areas as well as to the US South (Florida in particular) and Southwest (California), where new housing tract developments, often in peripheral areas, were becoming vulnerable, that officialdom started to take notice and the mainstream press began to comment.

One moral of the story, as the crisis in Haiti is reminding us everyday, that we should never underestimate the propensity of capitalism to extract profits from the most heinous human crises and disasters. As if anyone (except Obama and the Democrats) has forgotten, its worth recalling here as well that our for-profit health insurance industry cashes in everyday on human suffering. It's not for nothing that those on the Left call capitalism an exploitative system.

The other moral seems to be that the powers-that-be don't value black and latino life in the same way that they care about white life. Kayne's claim that "George Bush doesn't care about black people" is to the point, only we might substitute any number of politicians or organizations for Bush in that sentence. People can say what they want about Barack Obama, the person... but Barack Obama the president is the same company as Bush on this score.

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Imagining Radical Change with David Harvey and Alex Cockburn

Watch the video here.

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Real Sustainability

Yes, of course individual choices matter and we should not let individual consumption habits off the hook.... but changing the basic infrastructure of food production, transport and the physical organization of living spaces and is what's going to have to happen if we're ever going to have a sustainable society.

Buying organic milk is an important step that has concrete consequences... but this mere act alone is hardly going to shake the structural problems that are destroying the environment. And that organic consumption, as a "niche market", has so comfortably adjusted to the current coordinates of capitalism should make us suspicious. The problem isn't merely 'lifestyle choices' or consumption habits. It's literally, as Owen points out, the physical organization of our lives: exurbs and suburbs, low-density developments that require heavy car usage, centralized corporate food production, huge single-family homes with massive irrigated lawns, etc.

Owen's absolutely right: if we're ever going to have a sustainable society, we're going to have to radically reject the post-war fantasy world of single-family homes with white picket fences with huge garages, family cars, suburb and exurb life as 'typical', etc.

It's one thing to moralize and blame individual people for not giving up their cars in a place in which driving is encouraged or required by 99% of the infrastructure. It's another to talk about creating concrete alternative modes of transportation on a large scale, that would facilitate the phasing out of the car. It's another to talk about rethinking car production, and gradually re-deploying the workers in the auto industry into new productive efforts directed towards making the things that a sustainable society would need (tons more buses, trains, wind-power turbines, etc.).

Americans didn't become addicted to cars by some strange accident: they were slowly hooked and forced into it by a convergence of factors (marketing, government subsidy, creation of interstate system, etc.), but the most important one was the massive proliferation of sprawling post-Levittown suburbs from the 50s onward. Before the 50s, the vast majority of Americans did not own a car... and our infrastructure reflected that fact. Towns were walkable and things people needed (food, entertainment, bars, stores, etc.) were close by. It wouldn't have made sense in the 1920s to build the kind of sprawling nightmares we see today: most people wouldn't have been able to get anywhere.

Taking a look at the recent past would do the sustainability movement a lot of good. It sounds like a pipe-dream to think that our society could make the changes necessary to be sustainable. But the fact is that for the most part the technology and know-how is already there to make it happen, and it's not cutting edge stuff that I'm talking about. Most of what we need to do is simply give up the wasteful excess that we've come to expect from the 50s onward. A lot of what needs to happen is that we need to forgo certain 'technological advances' that have done little else except manufacture new 'needs' and place convenience above all other relevant considerations. We managed fine for most of the 20th century without heavy reliance on the automobile, and many people all over the world do just fine today without a car at the center of their lives.

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The Housing Question

In reality, the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its fashion -that is to say, of solving it in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the question anew... No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is always the same; the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else... the same economic necessity which produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place. (Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (1872)

This passage, which was brought to my attention by an article on urbanism and capitalism by David Harvey, very effectively highlights a deep-seated contradiction that afflicts the urban housing question in capitalist societies.

Capitalism requires, as a condition of producing spectacular wealth for some, a class of people living at or near subsistence who work wage-labor jobs. Modern cities, most of which became what they are today through an earlier process of heavy industrialization, required a large working class to build them (literally and figuratively). If Chicago got rich "on the backs of" the meat-packing and railroad industries, then the wealth of urbanization required a large, poor working-class to help create it.

But where to house these working-class folk? This is the problem.

Capitalism creates (and needs for its continued existence) a sizable quantity of wage laborers who must be located close enough to urban centers in order for capital to employ them. But land and residential property, under capitalism, are not owned by the working class but by another class for whom seeking rent on their property is most important. Worker's wages cannot reasonably be expected to keep pace with real estate markets, particularly when property speculators key in on a working-class section of a city as a potential source of big profits. Put succinctly, land use under capitalism tends to be sorted according to its rate of return for investors, not according to the needs of working-class people. But the working poor, a permanent feature of capitalist societies, have to live somewhere.

For example, at one point workers may have lived in a centralized district when a given city was still industrializing and urbanizing. But as wealth accumulates, the central districts workers occupy may become attractive to speculators. This imagined working-class neighborhood may quickly become a serious drag from the perspective of nearby land-owners and rentiers interested in seeing the value of their investments increase. There are any number of tactics, from blockbusting to eminent domain, that those wanting to purchase the property low and sell high can employ to scatter the existing population.

But as Engels pointed out in 1872, the process of displacement through gentrification doesn't solve the housing problem, it merely recreates it anew. As long as there is a working class, they have got to live somewhere. Yet while it may appear, from the local and narrow perspective of property-owners living in a gentrifying neighborhood that "things are looking up" in that section of the city, in reality the systemic problems that produced a slum in the first place have gone totally unchanged.

The "problems" that used to afflict now wholly-gentrified neighborhoods like Lincoln Park haven't gone away, they've been swept under a different rug. And in many cases, just as Engels pointed out in the 19th century, this process was (in that initial displacement) begun anew. One thinks of the displacement of the Puerto Rican community in Chicago from Lincoln Park, then southwest to Division Street, and finally further west into Humboldt Park. Today parts of Humboldt park are gentrifying due to their proximity to the popular Wicker Park and Bucktown neighborhoods.

When a neighborhood gentrifies, it's undeniable that "good" things do happen: housing stock is refurbished and renovated, property-tax revenues flow into the ward, commercial investment increases, crime decreases, the availability of necessary institutions (banks, grocery stores, etc.) increases as well. The cosmetic features of the neighborhood are cleaned up and green spaces are often cultivated where they had been neglected during tough times.

But for whom are all of these improvements relevant? Certainly not for the working-class populations whose displacement was a condition of this "improvement" to the neighborhood.

This is the problem: in capitalism, it is a condition of the betterment of downtrodden neighborhoods that they are gradually purged of working class people. Improving neighborhoods requires that poor residents are displaced and shoved aside. Race complicates this process further, of course, but the tactic of "accumulation by displacement" is usually the same. This is precisely the contradiction inherent to capitalism mentioned by Engels in the quote preceding this post. It isn't possible, within the framework of profit-driven market forces alone, to improve working class neighborhoods as such. Improvement ultimately requires a cleansing of the poor, a process of what Harvey calls "accumulation through displacement". Because who bankrolls the improvements? Investors. And what piques their interest? High returns on their investments. And if that is our only criterion for determining how to use land, then its not hard to see why working class neighborhoods are simply moved elsewhere: they aren't fertile ground for high profits.

Why improve the lot of poor workers when you can displace them, raze their homes, build brand-new condos and charge a fortune in rent to the wealthy people who'll move in?

This is what the slogan "the right to the city" is meant to oppose. It openly defies the market logic of capitalist urban thinking and declares, against the imperatives of real estate capital, that bustling urban spaces should be democratic and available to all, not simply playgrounds for the rich. We should not be forced to choose between the crumbling lower Manhattan of the 1970s and what is more and more becoming a massive 'gated community' for the wealthy today.
So the question isn't simply whether or not gentrification is "good" or "bad". It's both at once; although these do not cancel each other out. As Adorno might have put it, gentrified boulevards and working-class slums are torn halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they don't add up.

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Public Housing, Racism and Class Power

Within mainstream white collective consciousness public housing is synonymous with a host of unsavory characteristics: crime, poverty, violence, lawlessness, squalor, dependency, ugly high-rise buildings, etc. The meaning of public housing is also deeply racialized, carrying with it a slew of ugly corollaries including but not limited to the image of the "welfare mother", etc.

In the United States from the 1937 Housing Act onwards, class-bias and racism have been literally inscribed into the laws, physical structures and institutions involved with implementing social housing. This was not inevitable.

Fashionable narratives privilege 'personal responsibility' and competitive individualism to the exclusion of human development, democratic responsibility, social solidarity. But taking the neoliberal line against social housing, which crudely condemns all social housing as such, fails to explain the specific, concrete problems with the implementation of public housing in the United States in the 20th century. Things most definitely could've been otherwise, and we should not allow the argument over public housing to be fought within the frame of either a) accepting the public housing status-quo or b) privatizing and destroying public housing across the board. It's not clear to me that our only choices are Cabrini-Green or no social housing at all.

As Jason Hackworth points out in his book The Neoliberal City (Cornell UP: 2007), public housing in the US "never reached the levels of provision in Western Europe and has always been sensitive to the needs of real estate capital". The first major piece of public housing legislation was the 1937 Housing Act, which ostensibly aimed to respond to serious scarcity problems in housing during the Great Depression. But due to "the successful lobbying of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Savings and Loan Association, the act was kept from being a central part of FDR's New Deal agenda". Moreover:

"Roosevelt was persuaded that public housing was "too socialist" a remedy to the existing scarcity of homes, and kept it out of the Administration's legislative agenda until the mid-1930s. After a bitter ideological debate in Congress, the act was finally passed in 1937, but not without significant concessions to the private sector. Among the most significant were requirements that public housing schemes include "equivalent demolition" of housing in the surrounding community (and compensation to the owner) so that no new units were added to the overall stock". [scary how most of this more or less deftly describes recent events in Washington regarding health care 'reform']

Of course, the reason for this was that property-owning classes and real estate capital did not want public housing to compete with them (a development which would have lowered rent prices and made housing more affordable all around). Yet the most compelling rationale for implementing public housing, according to the Keynesian line, is precisely to do just that: eliminate severe housing scarcity and thus force the market into competition with public institutions, which drops prices and combats slum-lording. But this path means lower profits for rentiers and property-owning classes, hence their opposition and hard-lobbying efforts to prevent this from coming to pass.

As Hackworth points out, most every major piece of public housing legislation in US history included features designed to prevent a serious public challenge to real-estate capital from ever coming to pass. The 1937 Housing Act, as I noted above, had written into it the stipulation that increasing the supply of total housing available was to be made illegal; public housing could only replace already existing housing stock. In effect, lowering prices and undercuting slum lording is proscribed from the onset. If this isn't an excerize of narrow class power I don't know what is.

After WWII with the passage of the 1949 Federal Housing Act, public housing was prohibited from competing with the private housing market through

"(a) rent ceilings that were set at a maximum of 20% lower than the lowest nearby private housing, (b) stigmatizing, austere physical aesthetics due to design limitation created to make public housing stand out from average housing stock; and (c) low operating budgets for the Public Housing Authorities charged with managing the facilities."

The private house construction lobby, Hackworth notes, emerged in the postwar era even stronger than they had been in the 30s and exerted considerable influence in the legislative process in late 40s. Rapid, haphazard suburbanization and the construction of a nation-wide interstate system (instead of, say, a modern network of high-speed rails) further reinforced this influence in subsequent years.

The trend continued with the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act, Section 8 of which began the privatizing onslaught characteristic of the neoliberal turn by "providing housing vouchers for tenants to redeem with participating private-sector landlords" and "providing incentives for private sector and nonprofit real estate developers to construct low-income housing".

The 1998 QHWR Act further consolidated this trend by enabling public housing authorities to turn over management to private managers.

Now, social housing does not have to be like this. As I argued earlier, the alternatives are not (a) have public housing on the model of the institutions set in motion by the 1937 Housing Act and its progeny or (b) private everything and simply have no social housing at all. To criticize (a) is not therefore tantamout to agreement in any shape or form with the race-baiting, conservative business-interests that so loathe the entire ethos of public amentities and collective institutions.

There is no reason, in principle, why social housing must be any of the following:

-aesthetically austere, unsightly high-rises (i.e. physically distinguishes itself from other housing stock in a negative way)
-haphazardly constructed and under-maintained
-plagued by crime and violence
-created in such a way as to maximally avoid competing with the for-profit housing market
-designed only an amenity aimed at providing for the very poor (rather than a more holistic undertaking aimed to wrest larger sectors of the housing market from profiteers).

One more thought -if history is any indication, creating social programs designed to only provide for the most vulnerable, poor or elderly Americans are the easiest to cut in times of crisis or Right-wing reaction. Or, put another way, they are the easiest to let die a slow death due to underfunding and neglect. Pissing off the cordoned-off residents of Cabrini-Green is a far less intimidating affair for government than pissing off real-estate capital. This is to say, it is difficult for already marginalized populations to generate the sort of pressure necessary to ensure that these programs are maintained and continue to function properly. Think of underfunded schools in poor neighborhoods.

But, alternatively, if we had social institutions in which all of society had a stake, the wealthy and powerful would not be so quick to right off them off. A good example here is public education in parts of Manhattan. I've read a dozen or more articles about well-off middle class families in Manhattan sending their children to public schools for the first time because of the recession. The result was widespread protest and outcry over structural problems that have plagued public schools in New York for decades. The only difference in this recent case is that a relatively well-off class of people with more voice were the ones complaining, so the New York Times, et al. took note.

Suddenly, there was a 'visible' outrage over a problem that has been around for many years. The moral is, when politically active and influential (i.e. relative to marginalized populations... obviously the middle classes are still far from being major holders of political power) classes are part of a shared social instituion, suddenly it's not so easy for lawmakers and the ultra-wealthy to shrug off the maintenance and development of those institutions.

PS: I can't recall at the moment, but I remember reading about some explicitly racist provisions of the 1946 Housing Act. Can anyone point me in the direction of where I might read about these provisions? Did they in effect give legal sanction to redlining?

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