Gentrifier

August 21, 2017
Professors Schlichtman (DePaul University, sociology), Patch (Roger Williams University, sociology), and Hill (Temple University, anthropology) team up in this scholarly attempt to reveal the places where the academic theories about gentrification meet the decisions—personal and political—that create the conditions for gentrification. All three authors situate themselves as gentrifiers from the outset and spend the rest of this slight auto-ethnographic treatise interrogating how they, all PhDs interested in the process of gentrification, came to represent the very forces that they professionally advocate against. The investigation ranges across national, municipal, and personal topics: how racist urban planning policies formed disinvested neighborhoods, how transit infrastructure affects the livability of a neighborhood, how decisions about school lead a family to choose one neighborhood over another. Ultimately exonerating individuals, these scholars decide that the epithet gentrifier “is a structural position enacted when particular personal choices coincide with particular structural tendencies.” Concluding with a call to action, emphasizing the importance of listening to and working with existing local communities to ensure that any displacement that happens as a result of gentrification is the result of a choice and not disenfranchisement, the book oddly ignores the fact that this discussion is happening on contested, colonized lands.