Gentrification and Displacement: Smith, Lees and Slater

Gentrification is the process by which a low-income neighbourhood receives investment and wealthier residents, rises in price and ends up expelling the people who lived there; displacement is the consequence that process produces and that public debate usually leaves out. The sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term in 1964 to describe what was happening in Islington, London, and since then three authors have set the terms of the discussion: Neil Smith, who explained its economic logic; Loretta Lees, who studied its social and cultural effects; and Tom Slater, who demanded that displacement be put back at the centre of analysis.

Neil Smith: rent gap and the revanchist city

Smith formulated the rent gap theory in 1979: a neighbourhood gentrifies when the difference between what its land yields under current use and what it could yield under another use grows large enough for investment to be profitable. Prior disinvestment, low rents, deteriorated buildings, is not an accident but the condition that prepares reinvestment. In The New Urban Frontier (1996) he adds the political dimension: the revanchist city of the 1990s, with New York as the case, reconquered the centres for the middle classes through policing, evictions and a frontier discourse that treated the poor as occupiers of a territory to be taken back.

Loretta Lees and the new forms of gentrification

Lees, with Slater and Elvin Wyly, systematised the field in Gentrification (2008) and extended it beyond the classic model. She describes the super-gentrification of already gentrified neighbourhoods that receive the financial elite, new-build gentrification on industrial land and the planetary gentrification she studies with Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto López-Morales in cities of Asia and Latin America. Her specific contribution is symbolic displacement: even if a household manages to stay, the neighbourhood stops being theirs when the shops, the uses of public space and the cultural references that made it liveable change.

Tom Slater and the three kinds of displacement

Slater, in The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research (2006), charged that academia and public policy had stopped talking about displacement in order to adopt the language of regeneration and social mix. He recovers Peter Marcuse's 1985 typology: direct displacement through rent rises or demolition, exclusionary displacement when low-income people can no longer move into the neighbourhood, and displacement pressure when the environment that sustained daily life disappears. Only the first is measured, which is why displacement looks small in the statistics.

Consequences of displacement for urban inequality

The consequences for inequality accumulate. Displaced households move to peripheries with worse transport, schools and jobs, lengthen their commutes and lose the support networks that made care and job-seeking cheaper. Gentrified neighbourhoods concentrate income and services; destination neighbourhoods concentrate poverty. The city becomes more segregated precisely in the name of social mix. And housing, made expensive by the speculation the rent gap triggers, stops being accessible to the next generations of middle and low earners, not only to those expelled.

The debate between gentrification and displacement is not about words. Calling the process regeneration or revitalisation describes the physical upgrade and hides the human cost; calling it displacement forces the question of who leaves and where they go. The policies that work, rent regulation, public housing that is not sold off, municipal pre-emption rights, community land trusts, affordable housing quotas in areas gaining value, start from recognising that the market, left alone, displaces. Smith, Lees and Slater agree that gentrification is a political decision, and that it can therefore be decided otherwise.