(en) Canada, linchpin.ca: Short Circuit: Towards an Anarchist Approach to Gentrification

I. Defining Gentrification ---- No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is 
everywhere 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, and often in the immediate neighbourhood. ----
The Housing Question. --- Gentrification, etymologically speaking, is a relatively new 
word, coined in 1964 by the English Marxist sociologist Ruth Glass. Conceptually, some 
would claim that it has been a feature of urban life for hundreds of years. Between 1853 
and 1870, for instance, the Haussmannization of Paris forced thousands of poor people from 
the centre of the city, where rents had traditionally been cheaper, to the urban 
periphery; these migrations were the forced results of structural changes Baron Haussmann 
had proposed to the city?s urban geography, and rapidly increasing rents.

We might anachronistically consider displacements such as these an example of 
gentrification, but, as we will explore below, the term has some specificity and nuance
that such comparisons fail to capture.

Glass came up with the term gentrification to describe the growing displacement of 
residents of working-class neighbourhoods in London by middle-class property buyers, often 
under the auspice of ?urban renewal?. Much like in the United States, London witnessed a 
flight of monied residents from the city-centre to the suburbs following the second World 
War, precipitated by a boom in suburban housing stock. This boom was largely facilitated 
by the state: plans for the post-WWII reconstruction of London favoured the suburbs as the 
supposed future of the city. High demand for housing in the city-proper led policy 
planners to envision a city population dispersed across a wider geographical area. 
Financial and infrastructural incentives, like those included in the U.K.?s 1946?s New 
Towns Act and 1952?s New Towns Development Act, provided developers with public capital to 
create new suburban areas designed to contain ?overflow? from crowded urban centres. This 
meant that many older neighbourhoods in London quickly converted to multi-occupant 
dwellings; as monied residents moved to the newly expanding suburbs, the demand for 
housing in the city decreased and became more affordable for working-class people. Like it 
did in many other cities, this transformation involved converting dwellings that had 
previously been single family houses into rooming houses or shared accommodations.

The state, preoccupied with its vision of suburban expansion, relegated these increasingly 
working-class areas to decay and ruin. Repairs and renovation were considered unnecessary 
or wasteful and resources were funnelled into suburban development. Given these revisions, 
two major changes to many London neighbourhoods become salient to our discussion of 
gentrification: 1) Housing stock in these areas became affordable to working-class 
residents due to the migration of more affluent residents to the new towns and suburbs,
thus creating predominantly working-class neighbourhoods; 2) The flight of more affluent 
residents also created a disinvestment in these new working-class areas: existing housing 
was repurposed but also fell into disrepair as necessary capital was now not available for 
maintenance uses (owing to a combination of state indifference and the migration of 
private capital).

Thus, by the time Glass was writing, portions of London were populated by working-class
denizens who occupied architecturally older buildings that had often fallen into 
disrepair. This configuration of space meant that real estate in many of these 
neighbourhoods was cheap and often of historical or architectural significance. By the 
late 50?s and early 60?s, many middle-class professionals began to take an interest in 
these dwellings and neighbourhoods, purchasing cheap property and renovating it. These 
?pioneer? gentrifiers usually employed their own labour and capital, as government 
subsidies were still tied up in the New Towns plan and financial entities were reluctant 
to offer loans, as the neighbourhoods were considered risky investment prospects,on 
account of their primarily working-class composition. As more and more middle-class people 
adopted this strategy, rents rose as landlords and property owners realized that their 
existing properties could be more profitable if utilized by or sold to non-working-class 
residents. This led to the displacement of many working-class residents as their 
neighbourhoods became prohibitively expensive. By way of example, the Barnsbury 
neighbourhood of London witnessed a drop in unfurnished rental units from 61% of the 
housing stock in 1961 to just 6% in 1981.

For Glass, this shift represented the jumping off point for her definition of 
gentrification: the ?rehabilitation? of working-class areas by middle-class property 
buyers and the subsequent displacement of the original tenants. Glass also emphasized the 
class element of this transformation; gentrification is a play on the English term gentry, 
used to denote the class of landowners and bourgeoisie immediately below the nobility in 
the social hierarchy. The affluent middle-class professionals who saw investment and 
housing opportunities in traditionally working-class areas were, according to Glass, the 
contemporary manifestation of the gentry. By this rationale, we may define the classical 
approach to gentrification as the displacement of poor people from areas and housing by
the economic and social pressures brought on by having new residents with more access to 
social and financial capital move into their neighbourhood(s) and make substantial 
alterations to both the housing stock and demographics of the area. Or, in the words of
English geographer Tom Slater, gentrification is ?the neighbourhood expression of class
inequality.?

II. The Multiple Stages Theories of Gentrification

Capital doesn?t care if we feel at home somewhere. That feeling is a barrier to investment.
- Prole.info, The Housing Monster

Building on Glass? work in the mid 1960?s, American urban theorist Philip Clay postulated 
a four-stage model of gentrification that aimed to describe its mechanics more 
substantially. Clay?s work proved highly influential in shaping discourse around 
gentrification, illustrating, in part, how neighbourhoods actually become gentrified. This 
was a contrast to Glass? classical approach, which was more a descriptive theory of a 
process already well underway by the time she was writing. Clay?s four-stage model was 
broken down as follows:

Stage one: Pioneering gentrification - New residents of a neighbourhood, often with more 
access to financial resources and cultural/social capital, move into traditionally 
working-class neighbourhoods. They renovate property, usually using private capital 
because mortgages are unavailable due to the perceived risk of the area. Little or no 
displacement occurs at this stage, as existing properties are often vacant and new 
properties are built on unused land.

Stage two: Expanding gentrification - Word spreads about the emerging ?viability? of the 
neighbourhood; perceptive realtors begin offering property in and around the area. The 
associated financial risk implicit in stage one is minimized, but not eliminated: large
scale developers are still wary of injecting capital into the area. Displacement begins, 
as the stock of available housing falls and rents begin to increase. Small mortgages start 
becoming available and renovation may expand to adjacent blocks. Buildings may be held for 
purposes of real estate speculation, as landlords and property owners see emergent changes 
to the area.

Stage three: Adolescent gentrification - More risk-averse people may start moving into the 
neighbourhood, as there now exists a growing consensus that the area is a ?safe 
investment.? Gentrifiers, old and new, may band together into associations to exert 
additional political/social pressure to further the gentrifying process (i.e. 
Neighbourhood associations, business improvement associations, historical preservation 
societies, etc.). Rents increase dramatically at this point and class struggle between 
gentrifiers and older residents becomes most pronounced. Media attention may develop as
physical changes to the area become more evident and external private capital (loans, 
mortgages, etc.) becomes more easily available.

Stage four: Mature gentrification ? The area is considered safe, trendy, a good 
investment; homeowners may begin to see themselves displaced; major developers and 
financial institutions may begin to profit off the area. Buildings held for speculation
now appear on the market. Interestingly, even the first wave of gentrifiers may be 
displaced at this stage, as even wealthier people decide to move in and financial entities 
see land in the area as a profitable investment site.

Clay?s model is both a strength and weakness for gentrification theorists. On the one 
hand, as noted above, it provides a relatively concrete picture of how neighbourhoods 
actually become gentrified. It is useful both as historical metric for examining how 
gentrification has affected an area and, simultaneously, as a tool to evaluate possible
interventions in the process: for example, if a neighbourhood exhibits characteristics 
typical of stage three or four, actions appropriate to stage one would be counter-productive.

Conversely, Clay?s model is very much a microcosmic theory: it focuses on the process of 
how a specific neighbourhood undergoes gentrification, but offers little insight into the 
broader forces that drive the process; it emphasizes ?how? at the expense of ?why?. 
Perhaps the most useful feature of Clay?s model, from an anti-capitalist perspective, is 
the treatment of gentrification as the progressive reduction in risk for outside 
investors. Movement between the various stages of Clay?s model describe how barriers to
outside investment are gradually removed; from a financial point of view, a gentrified 
neighbourhood is a safe neighbourhood. But, in the absence of a broader account of the 
functioning of capitalism, this analysis is incomplete. Subsequent models, like those 
discussed below, attempt to address these deficits by linking the transformation of 
neighbourhoods to the larger operation of globalized capitalism or, put another way, to
add a macrocosmic dimension to the microcosmic particulars of Clay?s stage model.

Owing to several of the weaknesses cited above, two noted urban sociologists, Neil Smith 
and Jason Hackworth, proposed a model that takes into account the broader processes that 
create the conditions that make gentrification possible. Consisting of three stages 
punctuated by recessions, the Hackworth and Smith model views gentrification as a cycle of 
investment and disinvestment, and is a useful counterpoint to the narrower focus of Clay?s 
four-stage model.

Stage one: Sporadic and State-Led (1950-1973) - Smith and Hackworth identify this early
stage of gentrification as something of a successor to Clay?s stage one. In contrast to
Clay, they emphasize the role of the state in providing the impetus for further 
gentrification. Between 1950 and 1973, in both North America and much of Western Europe, 
gentrification was a relatively isolated phenomenon, largely confined to smaller 
neighbourhoods in larger cities. As noted by Clay?s model, pioneer gentrifiers employed
their own capital and sweat equity to redevelop existing housing stock. Spurred by 
successes in this regard, the state began to see gentrification as a shorthand, cheaper
means of accomplishing ?urban renewal? projects. Limited federal funding became available 
after early pioneer attempts at gentrification proved successful, often in the form of 
grants and subsidies for the renovation of damaged or unused buildings. By controlling 
these funding streams, especially given the initial reluctance of private sector 
investment, the state exercised a primary role in determining the course that 
gentrification took.

1973-1977: Recession - An emerging global economic recession created a situation where the 
state sought to move capital from unproductive to productive sectors, favouring investment 
in areas that actively produced surplus value. This discouraged tendencies at play in 
stage one: money used for grants and subsidies was redirected towards sectors of the 
economy that provided a higher return on investment.

Stage two: Expansion and Resistance (1970?s and 80?s) ? Within this stage, gentrification 
took on both a cultural and financial dimension. Recovering from the recession, cities 
began to view gentrification not so much an occasion for urban renewal, but as an 
opportunity for investment. The state, still reeling from the recession, began to take a 
more cautious approach, realizing the necessity of creating new investment opportunities, 
but still reluctant to actively subsidize gentrification as it once had. In this light,
state funding for gentrification took a more laissez-faire approach, trying to prod the
private sector into further investment. As a consequence of these developments, 
gentrification became much more widely dispersed: in order to attract the investment 
necessary to further urban restructuring, cities began investing in cultural and 
commercial centres adjacent to potential gentrifying neighbourhoods (museums, promenades, 
stadiums, galleries, etc). These cultural centres, in the words of Smith and Hackworth,
?smoothed the flow of capital.? And, as globalization continued apace, links between local 
urban restructuring and international finance became more tangible; the state sought to
attract globalized capital, with gentrification as a primary target of investment. This
loosening of global capital on disinvested neighbourhoods created much more rapid, 
ruthless, unchecked pace of gentrification, which was often resisted by the residents 
facing displacement.

Early 1990?s: Recession ? Another, smaller global economic recession led several theorists 
to postulate ?degentrification? as many neighbourhoods saw the process ground to a halt or 
severely clawed back, indicating general post-recession skittishness from investors.

Stage three: Further Expansion (1990?s-2000?s) ? Rebounding from the recession, this third 
wave of gentrification again witnessed a shift in strategy. States and corporate powers
began much more actively colluding in the process of gentrification. Gentrification became 
viewed, by both parties, as a strategy of generalized capital accumulation. In contrast to 
the casual laissez-faire support of stage two, the state was now actively partnering with 
larger corporate entities to further gentrification?often as development partners. 
Concurrent to these developments, this attitude of viewing neighbourhoods solely as sites 
for potential global investment and development saw gentrification branch out from its 
traditional roots in disinherited urban areas to many other parts of the city. Also, 
developers now began to play a much more active process, supplanting pioneer gentrifiers 
as the primary engine of gentrification. Finally, this stage also saw effective community 
resistance to gentrification minimized or ignored because the approach to space encoded
within gentrification - that of an internationally distributed network of financial 
capital tied to the state?s urban planning policies - became viewed as something close to 
inevitable or ?common-sense?. Gentrification had become, in many places, something akin to 
a hegemony of urban space, something healthy cities aspired to, as inevitable and regular 
as the tides. History has now reached a point where gentrification is no longer merely 
middle or upper-class buyers displacing working-class people, but an approach to space 
that privileges existing class relations and props up global capitalism in very real and 
tangible ways.

Developing a coherent picture of a phenomenon as complicated and multifaceted as 
gentrification requires both large-scale and small-scale analysis. We need to be able to 
both identify what is happening in our communities and link it to what is happening the
world over. In this light, the works of Glass, Clay, Smith and Hackworth should be seen as 
broadly complimentary. The next section of this article will explore in greater detail 
some of the bigger economic questions at play within gentrification and how they relate to 
debates on the use of the city.

III. The Economics of Gentrification

With the upheaval of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the 
bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
-Walter Benjamin

The 1970s witnessed a number of critical theoretical contributions to the field of urban 
studies that challenged the dominant assumption that changes to urban demographics and 
geography were reflections of the sovereignty of consumer choice ? a belief which framed 
the long-standing influence of the Chicago School of Sociology on the study of urban 
development. An important contribution to emerge from this shift was the Rent Gap Theory 
pioneered by Neil Smith (of the Smith and Hackworth model). This theory has not been 
without its critics, but it remains one of the best means of understanding the individual 
incentives that lead landowners to contribute to gentrification.

Land is a unique form of commodity, in that its exchange value is entirely dependent on
its potential use value. In an urban setting, the use value of land is a social 
construction based primarily on its location ? the general desirability of a surrounding 
neighbourhood, proximity to transportation corridors, public parks, shopping centres etc. 
Landowners and developers capitalize on property?s latent use value through the addition 
of labour and investments of further capital, whether the end result assumes the form of 
an economic venture (a factory, theme park, etc), owner-occupant housing or a multi-tenant 
apartment building. The type of fixed capital investment pursued by the landowner will 
vary, depending on zoning regulations and the maximized potential for profit derived from 
the use of the land ? a factor that Smith described as Potential Ground Rent. However, 
this capital investment, once completed, becomes a barrier to further investment; once a 
building has been constructed, the land cannot be used for anything else. At this point, 
the land?s Potential Ground Rent materializes into Capitalized Ground Rent, in the form of 
a steady income stream (in the case of rent) or a lump sum (in the case of sale), while
finance capital moves off in search of new opportunities for investment. This cycle of 
investment/divestment explains why areas of the city face staggered waves of development.

As time passes, technological and architectural innovations, coupled with changes to the 
surrounding neighbourhood combine with the inevitable deterioration of the buildings and 
corresponding rise in maintenance costs. This creates a gap between Capitalized Ground 
Rent, and the Potential Ground Rent that could be actualized by the redevelopment of the 
property. The more time passes, the larger this gap growths, and the stronger the 
incentive for redevelopment. Once the rent gap reaches a certain threshold, it becomes 
more profitable for a landlord to let their property sink into an abject state of 
disrepair than to continue paying for its active upkeep; they thus give up on the ?hard
work? of being a landlord and become a speculator ? biding their time for the right 
opportunity to sell their land to developers eager to capitalize on its Potential Ground 
Rent. And so the cycle continues.

Changes in the structures of the city

As capitalism has transformed itself through the neoliberal restructuring of global 
production, cities have undergone a parallel process of urban restructuring. In developing 
regions, this change has manifested most clearly in the spread of Export Processing Zones 
(EPZs)?concentrated industrial trading hubs designed for the manufacture and 
transportation of cheap goods, on a mass scale, to global consumer markets. In developed 
regions, on the other hand, this shift has been marked by the transition to a 
post-industrial economy characterized by the growth of finance, advertising and service
sector jobs, and the relative downgrading of the manufacturing sector. Cities, 
traditionally built to house workers in close proximity to large factories, nowadays 
reflect an economic environment in which the working class has been dispersed among a much 
larger number of companies, each composed of smaller, more flexible workforces.

The shift to a post-industrial, information-based economy has also forced a recomposition 
of the working class itself. Large metropolitan cities have become the managerial 
epicentres of global commerce, with wealth creation dependent on a new technocratic class 
based in finance, insurance, real estate, marketing and I.T. This swarm of white-collar
workers is attended to by an even larger contingent of service and hospitality workers in 
the food and beverage, customer service and retail sectors ? types of employment marked by 
their precarious nature and low wages. The decline in the traditional manufacturing sector 
has been mitigated by a corresponding rise in construction jobs, largely tied to the 
cyclical boom and bust nature of urban restructuring.

This shift in demographics hides the true economic forces that drive the process, as 
influxes of yuppies come to be seen as the cause, rather than the symptom, of 
gentrification. This perception is most palpable in neighbourhoods where increased condo 
development is synonymous with urban displacement. Yet this situation is not without 
historical precedent; the social and economic divisions between those who benefit from the 
new, higher-paying jobs of the postindustrial economy and the more precarious segments of 
the class echo earlier divisions between so-called ?skilled? and ?unskilled? labourers of 
the late nineteenth century. Now, as then, the primary agent of capitalist restructuring 
remains the capitalist class.

From boom to bust

Emerging from the economic recession of 2000-2001?a crisis triggered by the bursting of
the dot-com stock market bubble?the period of 2000-2007 was characterized by massive 
growth in the housing sectors of many developed nations. A mixture of low interest rates 
and financial deregulation combined to produce unprecedented housing bubbles in the United 
States, Ireland, and Spain, with significant price increases also occurring in Britain,
China, Australia, France, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Canada. By 2005, the 
Economist was reporting that the combined value of all residential property in the world?s 
developed economies had shot up by an estimated $30 trillion over the previous five years 
? an increase that not only dwarfed any previous housing boom, but was also larger (as a 
percentage of GDP) than the stock market booms of the 1920s and early 1990s, effectively 
making it the biggest asset bubble in human history.

These grossly inflated housing prices spurred a frenzy of new home construction. Between 
1996-2005, there were 553,267 new houses built in Ireland (a country with a population of 
4.5 million); while the three years of 2004-2006 saw over 1.8 million new homes built in 
Spain, and over 5.7 million in the United States. This glut of new construction produced 
an incredible windfall for the banking sector, which profited both from the financing of 
development projects and the corresponding explosion in home mortgages.

We all know what happened next. As the housing bubble in the United States burst, it soon 
became clear that the banks financing the boom had seriously over-leveraged themselves.
Toxic subprime mortgages, hidden from balance sheets through the use of securitized debt 
instruments, were now spread throughout the global financial system; the result was the
international economic crisis of 2007- 2008, which was quickly followed by several rounds 
of successive bank bailouts and the prescribed solution to the fiscal deficits created by 
this swindle?austerity.

Looking into the future

Alone among G8 nations, Canada emerged from the global economic crisis in relatively good 
shape. A stricter financial regulatory system in the lead up to the crisis had barred 
Canadian banks from engaging in some of the riskier practices of their US counterparts and 
kept them from overexposing themselves, unlike their European counterparts, to the turmoil 
of the credit derivatives market. Following a short downturn in 2008, the housing market 
soon stabilized and continued its expansion. But problems in the Canadian market were 
brewing, even then. Financial deregulation introduced by the Harper administration in 2006 
subsequently led to the rapid creation of a large subprime housing market where none had 
existed before: persistently low interest rates have flooded the balance sheets of the 
Canadian Housing Mortgage Corporation (CHMC) to nearly $600 billion; and rising housing
prices have led to exponential growth in Home Equity Lines of Credit (HELOCS), leading to 
a corresponding explosion in household debt levels. And over the past year, housing sales 
have finally begun to decline, causing many financial analysts to declare that the bubble 
is about to burst. Because the loans insured by the CHMC are backed up by the Canadian 
taxpayer, a mortgage crisis triggered by a housing collapse will automatically lead to 
bank bailouts and massive federal deficits, thus requiring the implementation of further 
neoliberal restructuring, almost certainly coming in the form of punishing austerity 
measures. While it is impossible to predict how this will play out in the urban 
environment, there are some things that we know for sure.

Much of the growth that has occurred during this bubble has been concentrated in Canada?s 
two most overpriced housing markets: Toronto and Vancouver. Both cities have witnessed a 
flurry of high-rise condo development that has accelerated the displacement of low-income 
residents from their respective downtown cores. These condominium towers are being built 
quickly, en masse?and often on the cheap. In an article entitled Faulty Towers, journalist 
Philip Preville spoke to a number of recent condo buyers in Toronto, who pointed out some 
of the structural issues they discovered soon after moving into their shiny new homes. 
These problems included, but were not limited to: collapsing glass balconies, faulty 
ventilation and drainage systems, cracks in the foundation, poor insulation, thin walls, 
cheap cement coating on steel rebar, improperly installed floor-to-ceiling windows and 
leaky sprinklers. Maintenance costs for these buildings typically begin to skyrocket 
within the first two years, as the ?owners? of the building are forced to pay for repairs 
to the initial shoddy construction, and install more energy efficient water heaters, air 
conditioning units and fluorescent lighting systems.

When these buildings, facing the divestment cycle outlined in Smith?s Rent Gap Theory, 
begin to decay, they will pose unique obstacles to reinvestment, owing to their diverse
per-unit ownership structure. As these condo units become more and more dilapidated amidst 
the context of a collapsing real estate market, their value will drastically plummet. 
Owners of these condos will be faced with the choice of either continuing to live in them, 
while paying ever mounting maintenance fees, selling them at a loss, or converting them
into rental units. As many current condo owners will likely have no interest in becoming 
landlords, these units could foreseeably be subcontracted out to rental agencies or sold 
off in blocks to a new generation of slumlords, who could seek to increase their profits 
by neglecting to carry out required repairs. No matter how this plays out, in a decade or 
two these high-rise condominiums, currently epitomized as the status symbols of the urban 
?middle-class? and the cutting edge of gentrification, are fated to become the slums of
the future

IV. Anarchist Responses to Gentrification

Houses are ours because we build them and need them, and for that reason we?re going to
have them!
-Rent Strike Participant, Milan, 1970

Anarchists understandably feel an intrinsic and visceral opposition to gentrification. It 
represents a capitalist attack on our neighbourhoods and homes, a destructive expression 
of state and corporate power that uproots entire communities. Perhaps most of all, it 
enrages us because it so often seems largely beyond our control, watching landlords and
speculators mould neighbourhoods as they will, with the firm support of the state. As 
disgusting as this situation is on its own, there are also several reasons that anarchists 
should oppose gentrification from a purely strategic point of view.

As we have noted, gentrification is both a process of transforming the city to reflect 
changes in the global economy and a restructuring of urban space to meet the constantly
expanding needs of capital investment: this effectively makes gentrification the urban 
front line of capitalism. If we can halt the incursion of gentrification into a 
neighbourhood, we are effectively halting capitalism?s expansion, and denying capital the 
chance to reproduce itself at our expense.

Gentrification brings with it increased repression through the installation of additional 
CCTV surveillance cameras, the further commodification of public space, a broken window
approach to policing and the spread of private security. It is a process perpetuated by
local business and resident associations, developers and city counsellors: manifestations 
of the ruling class banding together to collectively assert their class power. Struggling 
against gentrification thus means struggling against the spread of this repressive 
apparatus and a chance to sharpen our skills while defying the collaborative efforts of
capitalists and the state.

Finally, neighbourhood-level struggles against gentrification can build a capacity to 
assert our own class power by spreading confidence in the possibilities of collective 
action. The violence of gentrification pulls back the veil of capitalism, showing it 
plainly for what it truly is: a contest between classes with mutually opposing interests. 
The state?s willing collaboration in this process, be it through the blatant doublespeak 
of city counsellors or the eagerness of police to defend the private property rights of
absentee landlords, can make our neighbours increasingly receptive to anarchist ideas, as 
they become validated through lived experience.

Conceptualizing an Anarchist Intervention Against Gentrification

Resistance to gentrification is a pervasive feature of the gentrification process. The 
form such resistance takes, however, is nowhere near universal and varies widely from 
neighbourhood to neighbourhood. In some places, acts of property destruction, sabotage and 
propaganda assume a place of prominence; in others, neighbourhood groups or associations 
form in order to exert organized political and economic pressure on gentrifiers and their 
agents. Historically speaking, concerted anti-authoritarian responses to gentrification
have been limited and have usually been closer to the former approach, as borne out by 
numerous historical examples (Mission Yuppie Eradication Project in San Francisco; the 
Anti-Gentrification Front in Vancouver; and the Toronto Solidarity Cell in Toronto).

Both of these approaches have individual strengths and weaknesses but, broadly speaking, 
most neighbourhood responses to encroaching gentrification seem to fall somewhere on a 
continuum between the two. On the one hand, acts of property destruction, sabotage and 
propaganda are usually enacted by individuals or small groups, working alone and often 
isolated from larger political projects or neighbourhood engagement. On the other, the 
emphasis on organizing tenant or neighbourhood committees necessitates a wider focus and 
often employs tactics like door-knocking, social research and lobbying. The primary 
difference between the two poles of this hypothetical continuum is where the effective 
locus for resistance is located: the ?direct action? pole locates the site of resistance 
as the individual or small group, whereas the ?advocacy? pole situates the network or 
group as primarily important.

It is important to note that no individual or group that we know has taken a hardline 
stance that either the social or the individual is the sole force capable of attacking 
gentrification. We have divided actions along this continuum not to caricature 
perspectives on struggle, but to talk about how energy and resources are expended in 
anti-gentrification work and to foreground how both poles presuppose perspectives on 
gentrification that are problematic and incomplete. To further develop this distinction, 
we will look at two recent approaches to anti-gentrification work that have coexisted in 
the same geographic area, Vancouver?s Downtown East Side (DTES).

Vancouver?s DTES is often colloquially referred to as ?Canada?s poorest area code?. Recent 
years, however, have seen an influx of gentrifying capital in neighbourhoods like China
Town and Gastown, with the attendant new condos and businesses familiar to the process.
The rapid changes in the neighbourhood have seen longtime residents displaced and 
necessary social services rendered inaccessible. The volume of people affected by the 
DTES? gentrification has produced a range of responses, two of which typify both the 
strengths and weaknesses of the continuum proposed above.

The Anti-Gentrification Front (AGF) is a moniker used by several anonymous individuals who 
have staged acts of targeted property destruction and propaganda, usually in the form of 
communiqu?s posted on the internet. These attacks on businesses and developers, including 
the destruction of a new pizza restaurant?s windows in late 2012, have attracted enormous 
media attention and placed questions around the gentrification of the DTES at the 
forefront of discussions around development in Vancouver. In some ways, the AGF?s choice 
of tactics demonstrates a relatively sophisticated, if incomplete, understanding of 
gentrification. AGF actions seem to be designed to increase investor trepidation by 
ensuring the neighbourhood remains ?risky?. Its actions demonstrate that members of the
DTES community will continue to resist ongoing gentrification with direct action.

Conversely, however, the very nature of these tactical choices ensures that the AGF will 
remain small and largely anonymous. This risks creating a vanguardist clique, where 
?effective? resistance to gentrification remains the province of a small, politically 
homogenous group that may not reflect the broader wishes of the neighbourhood they claim 
to act for. Small group formations like the AGF are, by their nature, largely politically 
unaccountable and do not articulate an alternate vision for the area. Seen in this light, 
anti-gentrification work is an inherently negative political project: it opposes, but does 
not propose. The limitations of this perspective are already apparent, as AGF actions are 
recuperated and depoliticized by those eager to paint their resistance as the work of mere 
criminals and agitators?a trope that has been front and centre in media and popular 
discussions of AGF actions, and has limited broader public support for their work.

The Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood Council (DNC) is a community group formed in 2009, out 
of the ashes of several other neighbourhood groups, including the Downtown East Resident?s 
Association (DERA). The DNC has done much to highlight the gentrification of the DTES, 
including publishing reports and studies on the impact of gentrification and organizing
meetings and town halls for residents to discuss and strategize around gentrification 
issues. The DNC is open to all residents of the DTES who agree with its organizing 
principles and constitution, and has a broader focus that many anti-gentrification groups, 
engaging in work around harm reduction and anti-colonialism, among other issues. In 
contrast to the AGF, the DNC actively engages in the political process, even having a 
member of its Board of Directors on the Local Area Planning Process (LAPP) committee?a 
City of Vancouver-run project to produce a development plan for the ?revitalization? of
the DTES. The DNC receives funding from several other community organizations and donors, 
including the Vancity credit union.

The approach to gentrification presupposed by the DNC understands resistance to 
gentrification as a communal effort, but also creates some confusion regarding the scope 
and limits of their activities. By accepting a role in official discourse around 
development, the DNC largely focuses on advocacy and research. The ties between the city, 
businesses and non-profits like DNC also create a web of associations that serve to 
obfuscate the way gentrification actually proceeds, painting it as a process to be 
managed, with the participation of anti-gentrification groups like DNC serving as means to 
legitimate this perspective. Additionally, the flow of funding, resources and legitimacy 
that organizations like the DNC rely on from outside entities can diminish the 
effectiveness of the organization, linking them to those that may seek to influence their 
politics. For example, in 2012, DNC member Ivan Drury was removed from a seat on LAPP when 
the city manager accused him of being ?threatening? and ?bullying? for employing direct
action tactics by leading a neighbourhood delegation to confront a Development Permit 
Board meeting on condo development.

As anarchists, we need to situate our efforts to resist gentrification between these two 
poles, developing a perspective that retains the social focus and flexibility of groups
like the DNC but also acknowledging the necessity of extra-governmental resistance to 
gentrification proposed by formations like the AGF. We need structures that are 
accountable to and reflective of the neighbourhoods we struggle in, but that also develop 
a radical and comprehensive indictment of the broader capitalist forces that produce 
gentrification. In short, we need to develop structures in our communities that can 
effectively bridge the gap between ?direct action? and ?advocacy?. We would argue that the 
assembly form is the only structure that can viably incorporate these criticisms and 
function as an effective challenge to gentrification.

Understanding gentrification as a multifaceted process that encompasses many struggles,
including work around police harassment and defence of immigrants, we need structures that 
are both flexible enough to respond to a variety of community issues while retaining a 
political perspective rooted in a sound understanding of how global forces shape our 
neighbourhoods and communities. Directly democratic neighbourhood assemblies can focus 
involvement in neighbourhood struggles, serving as both an impediment to unwanted 
investment (by serving as a viable conduit for collective action and a means of developing 
class consciousness and identity) and a tool for bettering the neighbourhood for current 
residents. This can be done by ensuring its composition reflects their needs and desires 
(social services, new development, etc.) of the local residents and mobilizing broad 
segments of the community to fight for them.

The possibilities for urban assemblies can be glimpsed by looking at the successes of 
events like the Milanese rent strikes of the 1970s. Tenant unions were formed by 
autonomists who sought to take the class consciousness of workers in the factories and 
transpose it to the neighbourhood level; to accomplish this they built structures capable 
of addressing tenant grievances with direct action, in a manner similar to the way radical 
unions operated in the workplace. For the Autonomia, struggle could not be 
compartmentalized into neat divisions and so their project emphasized listening to their 
community and acting on their material needs, while injecting a broader program for 
political action. This led to several large scale occupations, rent strikes and other 
direct actions that both secured their neighbourhoods and advanced a radical 
anti-capitalist program. While not explicitly centred on anti-gentrification efforts, 
these struggles opened up the neighbourhood as a site of organization and contestation, a 
development necessary for successful anti-gentrification work.

It seems positively utopian to argue that such formations could quickly emerge in today?s 
neoliberal metropolis. North American anarchist politics, especially as it applies to 
anti-gentrification, seems irreducibly tethered to either pole of the continuum. But, as 
the example of the Italian Autonomia demonstrates, the essential prerequisite for action 
that bridges this divide is the construction of a tenant or neighbourhood identity, just 
as effective action around labour struggles requires identification as a worker. In order 
to build a neighbourhood assembly, residents must both believe in a common identity and
the capacity of collective action to address their material needs. The autonomist theory 
of the social factory provided this groundwork in the Italian context. Lacking that in 
post-industrial North America, the project of building neighbourhood assemblies becomes
one of creating these foundational prerequisites in the communities we live in.

We would argue that community-focused direct action campaigns resulting from social 
research and lived participation in our communities (rent strikes, anti-police brutality 
campaigns, and actions taken to stop evictions and deportations) can both produce concrete 
gains and protect existing services for community members under attack, while serving as 
intermediary building blocks for producing larger-scale grassroots structures. Over the
past twenty years in North America, many groups have sprung up that mirror this 
trajectory. In New York City, Movement for Justice in El Barrio is an immigrant-led 
anti-gentrification group that has organized with tenants in Spanish Harlem via 
encuentros, which are open assemblies designed to listen to residents? concerns about and 
form plans of action to see that they are addressed. This format has produced a large, 
diverse movement against the ongoing gentrification of East Harlem that has won several
major victories against landlords and developers, all the while emphasizing the root of
the process as being neoliberal capitalism. Less specifically, the solidarity network 
(solnet) model also broadly reflects this understanding, offering the flexibility to 
respond to various neighbourhood struggles while forging ties among participants. Seen in 
this light, the solnet format has great possibilities for anti-gentrification struggles. 
Resistance to a phenomenon as both distributed and localized as gentrification requires
new forms of organizing and it is groups like the solnets or spaces like the encuentro 
that serve as necessary stepping stones for the broader, wider assemblies that could 
effectively contest the emerging neoliberal consensus that the cities and neighbourhoods 
we live in are just opportunities for investment and that we, as working-class residents, 
are merely impediments to the free movement of capital.

Conclusion

The macroeconomic forces that ultimately drive this gentrification are, at least for the 
moment, firmly beyond our reach: anarchists couldn?t change interest rates, even if we 
wanted to. We can, however, contest these manifestations on the local level, and we should 
do so with urgency. By building local structures of neighbourhood class power, we 
delineate physical territorial gains that can be defended from further capitalist 
incursions, and which can inspire others facing similar conditions. Gentrification is a
relatively ubiquitous phenomenon within the developed world, and so it represents a 
potential entry point of anti-capitalist resistance for almost anybody. As these struggles 
proliferate, grounding themselves in different neighbourhoods, they can network together, 
thereby increasing their participants? collective capacity to attack and defend.

Anti-gentrification struggles elucidate the connection between the macrocosmic economic
forces of capitalism and the microcosmic experiences of everyday life in our 
neighbourhoods. In this way, struggling against gentrification can represent a negotiation 
between the global and the local that ought to prefigure all anarchist thought and praxis. 
The fight against the transformation city into a desert of capital grounds us in a place 
and time: we struggle where we live, but this itself is a contingent fact. In cities, 
towns, slums and neighbourhoods across the planet, the same struggles are being enacted by 
the same class, differing only in minutiae like zoning regulations or height restrictions. 
In electrical engineering, a short circuit is a connection between nodes that results in 
an overcharge of energy, possibly causing damage, fire, etc. We believe that 
anti-gentrification work can prove a short circuit to the smooth functioning of capital, a 
coming together of atomized people and neighbourhoods to assert their power collectively 
and provide the small spark, the brief flare, that can place the entire system in jeopardy.