Alexander Bard on Sun, 18 May 2014 15:09:44 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Gentrification - or a focus on income and wealth? |
Dear Friends Concerning the recent discussions on the evilness of Google and/or Facebook as corporations (one thing) and the evilness of Google and Facebook employees for causing major gentrification to speed up in the Bay Area (an entirely different issue to me), can soebody please explain to me how gentrificaton became a major cause of concern to leftists? It smacks of good old conservatism to me. Should cities be stale, unchanged, fixed over time? Should people only be allowed to move through government directives and/or death? If not, then why is gentrification our concern? Is Niznij Novgorod suddenly the ideal here? Should we not be more concerned with the classic issues of wealth and income distribution and Piketty's extremely vaiid point that Europe and America have returned to a 19th century class society in terms of precisely wealth and income (for which Reagan and Thatcher plus of course Blair should correctly be blamed)? Because the problem with gentrification is not that rich people buy poor people's property when the poor can not afford to keep them (or as is of course mostly the case, the poor never owned the property in the first place) but if and when the wealthy have all the wealth in the first place (which is far from always the case at gentrification). Every time I see a political maneuver to save a city from gentrification the biggest benefactor turns out to be a terribly wealthy old ladiy who likes to keep an eight-room apartment for herself and a cat. I just don't like the naivety of Soviet-style economics precisely because it kills both creativity and equal opportunity even with the best of intentions. So why can't we do better than that and go straight to the core of what a class society is: The struggle over financial means. Today increasingly also the struggle over connections (lobbies killed democracy) and education and job opportunities etc. But back to Marx! Would he have been concerned with gentrificaton? Certainly not. It was a conservative concern then and so it is today. And if gentrification is a particularly bad problem in the Bay Area, have you guys even heard of Mumbai, Shanghai or Istanbul? Doesn't seem so, or have I missed something here at Nettime? If you're particularly horrified at gentrification in the Bay Area, perhaps it is just because it happens to be particulary fast and therefore obvious there (for American standards, it is still nothing compared to Asian and Latin American megacities) and perhaps because you're docking the real issue here: lax Californian taxation. Nope? Best intentions, but more long term I hope Alexander # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org