“Art and Culture”: an opaque shield for capital accumulation by dispossession (the process otherwise known by its euphemism gentrification).
There is a lot to criticize about the town that I live in, the town that I came from. However, it is irreproachable for its honesty and lack of pretension. It doesn’t pretend to be better than it is, and for this reason, you can almost forgive it for its unabashed ambition to destroy everything beautiful about the natural environment it builds its glittering carnival of industriousness on top of. An industriousness that is only play: luxury rentals, boulevards full of wine bars and Mediterranean restaurants, tapas spots, nail salons, pilates studios. The flavor of the moment also has a younger face: arcade bars, axe throwing, novelty ice cream, omakase, breweries featuring beers with “local” flavors (it must be key lime), a vegan bakery. Whatever trend exists somewhere in the American Northeast or proves popular among tourists in Venice will wend its way here.
This town is Fort Lauderdale, but it could easily be any of South Florida’s cities, the inaccurate designation for the urban sprawl that crawls like a fungus, unbroken, along the entire southeastern coastal region of the state. It could be Delray, West Palm Beach, Boca Raton, Hollywood, or Miami. They’re all exactly the same, down to the copy-pasted downtowns and even the restaurants and bars. “In a world characterised by the forces of globalisation and increasing moves towards cultural uniformity, the identification and marketing of 'differentness' is a major element of city regeneration. Innovative cities are able to identify and 'sell' their cultural distinctiveness.”[1]
This is in no way new, and is in fact, even a traditional feature of the area. Florida has been the subject of many development booms, in which naïve and adventurous people from other states and countries were talked into investing in a place with no actual industry (other than citrus groves and cattle farming). It happened in the 1920s, probably several times throughout the 1950s and 1970s (since a lot of houses are from this time period), and in the run-up to 2008.
But all development here has fallen into an obvious pattern now: “Traditional warehouses and shops are replaced by new cultural industries and boutiques, marking the area as ‘safe’ for successive commercial investment that will upgrade services and raise rents.”[2] Let's illustrate it.
A large development group selects a few blocks of warehouses right up against an “up and coming” neighborhood (translation: working class). They buy or lease the plot, and they partially renovate the pre-existing shops and warehouses. Which means that they knock down and strip out everything inside, maybe put in some tract lighting and paint the walls and floor white. They often don’t bother to put in air conditioning (this adds to the “authenticity”). Then they seek out some “interesting” and “cool” people to put in these spaces: subsidized or free rent for an “artistic” or “cultural” business. A glass blower who makes custom bongs, sandal cobbler, boutique of upcycled thrift store clothes (just Def Leppard t-shirts that have been tie-dyed and then shredded into fringe on the bottom, the same as you did in elementary school, but owned and modeled by waifs with dyed hair), the obligatory serious coffee shop, brewery with wacky local flavors (invariably key lime), take your pick.
The biggest warehouses are used as gallery spaces. Smaller ones are cut up into tiny rooms with no windows and rented out to “artists-in-residency” who are really just retirees who pay for these studios to make pottery, jewelry, and fiber works. The rent pays for the running costs and any other incidentals, and the development group is able to write everything else off as they are providing a community service. Events are hosted bi-monthly, and the shops and bars are open all the time. People are actually attracted, though no one spends any money in those shops that can in any way make them financially soluble. The perception of the area changes from “blighted region in a bad school zone” to “center for the arts.” Maybe one in ten of the “artists” are locals. Most are carefully curated imports who are known to provide the professionalized image the developers have envisioned.
This goes on for a few years, and then, the apartment buildings start sprouting up. Those local residents who were amused and enjoyed watching the festival from their porches vanish as if they were never there. The rows of duplexes and concrete single story houses surrounded by mango trees, chain link fences, and angry dogs have been disappeared like political dissidents in Stroessner’s Paraguay. In their place is the monumental white wall of the new build. Where there was shade, there is now the full-blown rage of the sun reflected up onto your defenseless body. The single person balconies made of mesh wire remind you of the Netherlands, cold and impersonal. Live oak trees are sometimes planted in front, dressed up with Spanish moss, as if these buildings will be around long enough for oaks to age. No one you know can afford to live in these buildings, and if they could, they would simply buy a house.
Before you know it, that “cool spot downtown” is surrounded on all sides by these monstruous new builds. Their residents, only ever bedecked in exercise clothing, have appeared on the spot as if out nowhere, as if they themselves have no personal histories, only impersonal ones, but what they share in common is that they all have dogs which shit all over the sidewalk, since every green space has now been covered in concrete. Pretty soon thereafter, the developers no longer have any use for the studios, and in fact, they are sitting on top of some pretty attractive land. They’ve had no problem selling these buildings to groups who are eager to lease the units at only 30% occupancy. It’s just an investment (banks often have the appearance of residential towers – see Ordos, etc.). The subsidized rental rates for artists are now increased to their actual price, and anyone who protests has no leg to stand on – “you had that much time to develop your business, and you didn’t? There must be something wrong with your planning.” If that doesn’t work, they’ll find some other way to take back the place, since, after all, most of these places were fitted for retail without running water, toilets, air conditioning, or proper ventilation. Once everyone is out, they knock down the warehouses (worthless provisional buildings which were initially cherished and given “new life” as studios – ha! Did anyone really buy that?). Then that last remaining space is filled with more new build towers.
Some of the savvier studio owners move on to the next “up and coming” area – Little Haiti, Pompano or Dania Beach. Others go back to their bartending job and consider this foray an interesting chapter in their life. Meanwhile, the now entirely residential downtown of our original city has nothing left to attract people. They start to long for other places, which they hear about through the grapevine. Places like Little Haiti, Pompano, or Dania. It’s a little cheaper, they’ve heard, and not that far, you can commute, and if you work remote, that doesn’t even matter. There’s a lot of cool little shops and bars opening up there. Maybe they should check it out. After all, the place they live has become boring, nothing more than a retirement community really. Only units but nothing to do. Better get a move on.
At some point, the wider global economy comes into play as well. Sand becomes impossible to buy for any price, a shipping container tips over in the Suez, and the bubble bursts. There’s nothing to develop, there’s no secondary circuit into which capital can flow. Better just sit tight and hold onto that money for a minute. No, that would be too unproductive, but VC is not for these risk-less entrepreneurs. Perhaps, there’s a town in Portugal that American retirees have been attracted to – wouldn’t that be a nice place to go? Or maybe somewhere in Chile? So many people are remote now. We can drag and drop these peons anywhere we want.
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It’s too late to pretend anymore. We all know how it works. Development trends come and go, and we let them wash over us as if we were anemones with no power to influence the tide. We can all clearly see that the only people who are helped by this trend are our lords and masters.
“The general theory of art and urban change shared by Zukin, Florida, and others is this: art and artists increase the value of places in which they exist and work by contributing to its cultural and aesthetic cache.”[3] – developers have long known this, and it is a deliberately planned process, not a side effect. Take the case of Pompano Beach. Several months ago, an “artist-in-residency” program (the glorified name for subsidized rent) opened up in the new “arts district” and in the last month a new plan to massively generate a downtown materialized. It’s a step-by-step process initiated by development groups. Shifting the blame toward “artists” mystifies the actual culprits; the artists were also used (though we must admit that some of the shrewder ones see the benefit in this arrangement).
But despite its touted benefits, the fact remains that constant construction and real estate development in cities devoid of non-service sector industries does not uplift the local average person. Despite the wide approval of these schemes, the reality is that “measuring the physical, social and economic impacts of these interventions is problematic and the evidence is seldom robust, despite their wide usage.”[4] Only luxuries are developed, but because of stagnant wages and inflation, it’s not affordable for normal people, and they can’t benefit from it. Art and culture never really regenerated anything. Well, it’s a nice thing, but it devolves into useless elitism while maintaining its innocuous branding as an unalloyed good.
The process of gentrification hyper-intensifies wealth inequality. The biggest losers in the great migration south that took place during the pandemic were not city mayors in northern locales but locals who had already been living in desirable cities. If they rent, their rent increased. If they owned, everything else increased, such as the cost of groceries and take-out places, restaurants, other necessary goods. As working-class areas become fashionable districts, all the affordable places disappear because their rent goes up to. Everything becomes luxury – housing, food, clothing, schools, medical clinics. Free parking becomes pay parking. It’s no longer affordable to have a car, but there’s still no other choice (spending an extra two hours a day commuting by indirect bus lines does not fall under the rubric of a choice – aren’t we talking about rational actors?). The sewer line breaks and pours into the ocean, needs to be refitted for all the new buildings, despite the fact that they sit unoccupied most of the year.
So in what way does gentrification benefit the average person? Not a single bit. Any politician who pretends it does is being disingenuous. Breakneck development of luxury flats won’t in a million years benefit the average worker. Gentrification is failed economic growth. What gentrification refers to now is an insidious urban planning that exacerbates wealth inequality, does not ease the housing crisis, is environmentally ruinous (how can massive tower building and concreting over the earth possibly be eco-friendly? The population density argument is a lie because most of these units are unoccupied), and only temporarily creates some jobs, but not really good ones. Usually part-time or contractor positions that offer no security or opportunity for advancement, service industry positions and more delivery roles.
Some people may think that, in the absence of gentrification, we would just see an expansion of poverty with no glittering distractions. We would just get dead cities full of abandoned warehouse districts and social remnants, outcasts of the “knowledge economy.” But the term knowledge economy is misleading, as it only refers to the top twenty percent (or less) of our society. Most of us work in the service economy. If we start seeing gentrification only for what it is – growth without equity – then we can probably start seeking the alternative, what a growth with equity would look like.
[1] Speake, J., & Fox, V. (2000). Investigating culturally—led urban regeneration. Teaching Geography, 25(2), 56–60. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23763348 [2] Gainza, X. (2017). Culture-led neighbourhood transformations beyond the revitalisation/gentrification dichotomy. Urban Studies, 54(4), 953–970. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26151388 [3] Crisman, J. J. (2021). Art and the Aesthetics of Cultural Gentrification: The Cases of Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. In C. Lindner & G. F. Sandoval (Eds.), Aesthetics of Gentrification: Seductive Spaces and Exclusive Communities in the Neoliberal City (pp. 137–154). Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1hp5hpc.10 [4] ibid
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