On the unholy alliance. I was trying to propose what the underlying causes of gentrification are. And a realistic way to oppose them. I was actually trying to get away from some of the arguments that have gone on this forum about coffee bars etc.
If the underlying causes are dealt with then my argument is that gentrification will no longer be an issue.
I was focusing on London. As you have widened it to outside London. Why does gentrification not happen in some area outside London? In case of London the rot set in when Thatcher deregulated the City in the Big Bang. London became a world city for the financial sector. Gentrification is not a very good word for it. Outside London. Another legacy of Thatcher is the de industrialisation of the other parts of the country and the economy ending up centred around London as a financial centre. With all the need for people to service this. The unholy alliance wont engineer people to move to the Northern towns - that is not how the economy works. Its one of the problems with it.
I make a difference between those who think gentrification is just what happens. Its a natural process of change. Its all very unfortunate but thats how life is. ( Also those who say this but in practise welcome it/ do not oppose it).
And those who believe it should be opposed but disagree in some of the causes of it.
I think you are in the second camp.
I've been trying to work out how to inject some shades of grey without writing a huge, messy essay. Suffice to say that for decades London was rapidly depopulating, since when the accelerating desire to live here has reflected
the individual agency of millions of people. Of course the political climate matters, but to attribute that huge change in attitude to a single government policy implies that with a different policy population decline would have continued (and that would have been a good thing?). I don't think that's credible, but to claim there was a 'natural process' at work would be equally wrong.
We are not homogenous, and like any economic shock, gentrification bears very unevenly on us. For some people the effects are life-changingly negative, others are affected not at all, or are affected positively. There is no equality of outcome.
There's a large pool of potential victims, victims of the political abandonment of social housing and planning controls, victims of the decline in the economic importance of non-cognitive labour, victims of other forces equally far beyond their individual or collective control. Those people may pay heavily for gentrification (they may not, there's an element of personal good- or ill-fortune involved) but as a group they're vulnerable to losing their agency and potentially being forced out of London, against their will. They include the large, precarious and vulnerable, group who have insecure housing and/or work yet choose to spend a huge proportion of their income for the perceived benefit of living here. Their agency, their desire to be here whatever it takes, puts each of them in direct competition, one with the next, and forms a large part of the pressure that manifests as social cleansing.
There are also, of course, all those with (so far) secure homes and incomes for whom the impacts of the changes are mainly backdrop, in many cases quite positive, and not only for homeowners. And so on, there's 8 or more million of us and we've all got our own circumstances and our own exposure to the risks and benefits of gentrification.
What is common amongst us is that we all, week by week, choose to live here. Very few of us choose to inflict harm on others but the cumulative effect of our millions of personal decisions has, for many years now and increasingly, harmed some of our fellow Londoners by driveing them into debt, into losing their home, into relationship breakdown and eventually into leaving London. Social cleansing of those at the sharp end.
Yet while not wishing harm on anyone, collectively local people have consistently voted in a neo-liberal Labour council for the last decade or so, with an increased majority at each election. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, we have a council that thinks it has a mandate for its clear pro-wealth agenda.
We can, individually or collectively, oppose specific political decisions, planning applications or whatever, sometimes successfully.
What we've been unable to do, at least since regeneration turned to gentrification, is oppose the collective agency of our fellow Londoners. And would-be Londoners, who'll be here in a flash if they can achieve it, whether they're coming from the other side of the world with little or nothing or from the Home Counties with a good degree and a plummy accent. We can't stop this being an attractive place to live to modern eyes, or even agree on
keeping the public realm crap in order to reduce the attractions. We can't stop people clamouring to move here. We may wish there was a clamour to move to northern towns, it would solve an awful lot of problems, but we're not personally wanting to do that. We don't want social cleansing but our own agency reinforces the pressures which cause it, because each of us wants to live in Brixton/London.
I'm afraid I've written the huge, messy essay anyway.
One more time... all these people you have been chatting to across London have been agreeing with Cuppa's attribution of the sentiment "the lower orders can fuck off now and be grateful for the good times" to my post about pedestrianisation having worked well for the current traders on Electric Avenue?
