When we watched the documentary Whose Barrio? last week I had conflicting feelings about it. The idea that goods should go to whoever is willing to pay the most for them is basically the foundational idea of our economic system. I was kind of thinking, as I listened to people talk about losing their apartments and having to move, ‘well, it is sad when you want something you can’t afford, but that’s what capitalism is.’ Losing your neighborhood, community, and, in a sense, homeland, really is an awful, traumatic thing, but gentrification just seems so woven into the fabric of how our society works at the most basic level that how can it ever be stopped?
This article by Samuel Stein made all the efforts of housing organizers around this question suddenly clear to me in these lines: “[Affordable housing] can’t be done in a way that benefits both capital and workers in equal measure… We need housing policies that confront capitalism.” For me, this section brought home how truly revolutionary anti-gentrification movements are. Trying to find a way of allocating land and resources that respects and values communities based on something besides what they can pay really isn’t a small tweak to a limited part of a basically solid system, it’s a whole new paradigm.
I think that’s the basis of the article’s critique of De Blasio’s plan, and inclusionary zoning. Inclusionary zoning is based on the idea that when the market fails to solve a problem satisfactorily we can slightly adjust the rules and the incentives, and the market will then be able to give us the best possible solution. The efforts of Picture the Homeless around community land trusts and other permanent housing solutions propose an alternative that isn’t based on profits or the free market at all.
For me the significant concept from this reading was the idea of “confronting capitalism,” instead of uncritically accepting the lens of capitalism and seeing everything through that set of assumptions, as I had initially done with the movie.
Discussion questions: Is it possible to structure our society so that capitalism is only used in situations where it’s appropriate? What would those situations be? What sectors of our society would benefit from more “confrunting” of capitalism?
