One thing that struck me most about this week’s readings was the comparison of gentrification to “Class War” in the Smith excerpt. Before this week’s reading, I never really thought of the term “Class War” as ever really referring to a true war. While the conflicts surrounding gentrification in the Lower East Side certainly didn’t escalate to the point of armed soldiers killing one another on a grand scale, they strongly resembled the violence and strategies of many of history’s more traditional wars – just on a smaller scale. Large chunks of the reading discuss events through fairly militaristic terms, describing parties as “claiming land,” “making strategies,” and “retreating.”

Much like more traditional wars, this smaller scale class war proved to be largely fruitless and extremely costly for both sides involved. Victims of gentrification were beaten down in riots and pushed into unhealthy living conditions, while policymakers and gentrifying parties spent absurd amounts of money keeping lower income families out of the Lower East Side. I can’t help but wonder why there aren’t more systems in place to prevent costly battles like these from breaking out. There already exist a number of diplomatic institutes which aim to limit and prevent traditional war, so why aren’t there any dedicated to preventing class war?