(from Antipode, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 427 - June 2002):
"---the process of gentrification, which initially emerged as a sporadic, quaint, and local anomaly in the housing markets of some command-center cities, is now thoroughly generalized as an urban strategy that takes over from liberal urban policy."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------- True. In 1974 my wife and I bought and occupied a large and beautiful house for $22,000 in a decaying part of Detroit. The house was deteriorated, but it was all we could afford at the time. It would have been worth 10 to 15 times more in a suburb not 10 miles north. Our neighbors were the General Motors World Headquarters (before it moved to the capital intensive downtown riverfront), Berry Gordy (Motown) before he moved to Los Angeles, Aretha Franklin's preacher father before he was shot and killed by a burglar; and the original homes of the Dodge Brothers, Henry Ford, and Edison the inventor. Only five miles from downtown, this was the rich suburbs in Detroit's heydays.
But in 1974 this gentrifying island was nestled among wave upon wave of housing and commercial squalor in all directions, the product of deadly deindustrialization. My wife and I dedicated 10 years of labor and financial scrapings to house rehabilitation. Hundreds of others in the neighborhood did the same. Nine or ten other housing clusters in the city were also so engaged. Mind you, they built some good housing in Detroit's early days. I'm told that today the housing value in these neighborhoods is soaring. So, lots of human capital and a tiny bit of investment capital in the "gentrifying" days is paying off today.
This is happening in an emaciated city with a ramshackle commercial infrastructure; hoards of abandoned homes and factories; vast swatches of vacant land that formerly held homes, retail, and industrial; a population loss of over one million; and quality of life data in the sewer. Some survival activists are into urban farming. Developers (ably assisted by compliant business-friendly governments) for years have been cherry-picking cheap prime sites for present and future investment. A tract about the size of an elongated square mile in the downtown riverfront area, facing Windsor, Ontario, is today's focus. There you'll find vulgar capital investment in the form of casinos, convention centers, major league stadiums, and "high culture" establishments that make this a playground for the well-to-do. Of course there's a business- government nervecenter and infrastructure where, incidentally, the Detroit Economic Club convenes. General Motors and parts of Ford are there. A narrow extension of this area goes a couple miles along a northern corridor into the research and educational complex around Wayne State University where automotive and other technologies are on the daily platter.
It's all a big, integrated financial, technical system. The land start-up costs were rock bottom, but the bucks are there today. Indeed, that's the generalized urban strategy that's taken over from liberal urban policy, and we've watched its evolution for decades. It's happening all over the U.S.A., and we're told it's also an international phenomenon. If you're capitalist-minded, it's the way to go. If you're not, it's another reason to organize resistance.
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