London, if not the whole of the UK, is in the oft-noted, midst of a housing crisis. House prices and rents along with them have reached levels of absurdity, while wages either stagnate or spiral downwards for the majority. Councils are effectively banned from building social housing, even if loopholes preventing them from building are being exploited by a small number, such as Camden.
The super-rich are emptying Central London, and conservation districts messed with in the name of vulgar opulence. Gentrification scatters populations ever outwards, as the takeover by artists and cultural experimenters - who unwittingly and often unwillingly inflate land values - is followed by shopping centres, developer flats, and chain stores.
Councils seem unwilling to resist, or cite an inability to stand up to central government and the legal teams of private investors. But that’s not entirely it. In my old locality of Walthamstow, there seems to be a concerted attempt to turn the entire town centre into high rises, shopping centres, supermarkets and multiplex cinemas. In my new home of Colchester, shopping centres abound, even in the midst of the economic collapse of pre-Brexit. It’s more than helplessness. It’s a tried and tested model of regeneration – called ‘corporate regeneration’ – which favours big retail and housing over an organic, people-led model.
Then we have the release of the Panama Papers, showing the degree to which investors are hiding taxable in shell companies that invest in property markets around the world.
The question is often asked, “How can we stop gentrification?” The answer is by adopting an ethic, which states that not everything should be for sale.
Consider the example of the West Berkeley plan, written about by John Curl as an example of how US communities are seeking to preserve the ‘commons’ – areas of society standing outside of the marketplace and designed for the common good and common usage.
This is what Curl says about the West Berkeley Plan in an article published recently:
“An inspiring example of a contemporary movement aiming to protect the commons from economic attacks and displacement can be found in West Berkeley, California. Outsiders who visit this area often wonder why in 2016 it has not been totally swept up in the relentless gentrification that has decimated and transformed so many other Bay Area neighborhoods. Why it is still full of funky little homes, local businesses, artists, artisans and industries? The secret answer is the West Berkeley Plan, through which a long-established, mixed-use urban neighborhood successfully created, recognized and defended a threatened commons.
The West Berkeley Plan was a radical transformative structure right in the heart of mainstream society, which all the developers strenuously opposed, since it limited their capacity to exploit and extract profit. Yet the movement eventually rose above the opposition and implemented the Plan by a unanimous vote of the city council. We had allies in city hall. That turned out to be key.
It began in the 1980s, when, during an era of expansive Reaganism, I brought several council members down to West Berkeley and showed them around the thriving and economically diverse community that at was at risk of displacement. Meanwhile a community group formed called West Berkeley MAARS, which stood for Merchants, Artists, Artisans, and Residents. The city council passed an “urgency ordinance” to stop wild gentrification and stabilize the situation, because there was no area plan in place to govern development in the neighborhood.
The first thing we tried was a commercial rent stabilization ordinance for industrial spaces. Berkeley already had commercial rent regulations protecting small merchants in two gentrifying commercial districts across town, as well as residential rent control. These ordinances treated affordable rental space as a commons. The community needed to protect that commons to remain a diverse community. But within weeks after the city council passed the West Berkeley ordinance, the state legislature intervened with a law outlawing all commercial rent control in California. It was then that the city council initiated the West Berkeley Plan process.”
So here we see the initial ingredients of a successful plan to resist gentrification – political will and community activism. So what was the plan?
“The Plan was based on the radical concept of a neighborhood planning and administering itself by consensus. All the stakeholders attended big public meetings, refereed by the city. Over a period of several years large numbers of people participated, argued, fought and ultimately came to acceptable compromises in which every sector had enough of their needs met. All the groups in West Berkeley could stay. No one would be pushed out by unchecked gentrification. This was true community-based planning in the best sense of the term.
We managed to stabilize the situation through zoning. We created a series of industrial zones, in which industrial and arts-and-crafts spaces were protected. Industrial and art space was recognized as a commons. Once landlords realized they could only rent out an industrial space to an industry or artisan, and not convert it to a higher-paying use, they had to accept the situation and rents no longer escalated. Since an industrial or arts-and-crafts space use can only generate a modest income level, and since a landlord can only replace an industrial tenant with another industrial tenant, landlords had to accept community stability.
Although developers continued to attack the West Berkeley Plan before the ink was even dry, over the decades the plan has held. This continued success has been largely due to the ongoing efforts of another community organization called West Berkeley Artisans and Industrial Companies (WEBAIC), which took over the struggle from MAARS.”
There are three key aspects of the Plan of note.
Firstly, that culture and the arts are not viewed as a luxury but something that has a necessary place in communities. Art and culture, along with other forms of productive activity, are given space and a permanent home.
Second, that the arts and culture, when planned for as part of a general strategy to circumvent gentrification, do not cause gentrification. It is only when cultural ephemera are used to valorise land, a schema highlighted by Richard Florida and critiqued by Sharon Zukin, that art and culture appear as the Trojan horse of rising land values and rising rents.
Thirdly, that local governance can promote the commons. In the West Berkley plan, zones were created which made it impossible to turn buildings and land over to higher value enterprises.
But in the main, and this is where we started, we need to agree that not everything should be for sale. We are entitled to ‘feel at home’ in neighbourhoods and to engage in stable, productive activity, without being forced out when developers say our time is up.
Thanks to RoarMag who were happy for me to reprint sections of the article by Curl.
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