Gentrification and Integration

How should the injustices associated with the enduring segregation of Black Americans be addressed? In contemporary debates about racial justice, there are two broad answers to this question. “New integrationists” argue that integration is necessary for remedying racial inequalities.1 “Egalitarian pluralists” instead argue that we should promote strategies that seek to improve the material condition of Black Americans without integration.2 Political philosophers have also recently begun to examine an apparently unrelated phenomenon: gentrification. According to its critics, gentrification may undermine social equality, violate residents' occupancy rights, subject residents to domination, impede valuable forms of democratic communication and/or impinge upon self-respect.3 But so far—with some important exceptions that I discuss below—political theorists have not examined the relationship between gentrification and integration in much depth. This article explores how racialised contexts of gentrification relate to and can shed light on the debate between new integrationists and egalitarian pluralists. I take as my focal point the debate between Elizabeth Anderson and Tommie Shelby.4 I examine three arguments for residential integration that Anderson makes: the opportunity argument, the epistemic-democratic argument, and the relational-democratic argument. I argue that racialised contexts of gentrification reveal some important limits to each argument for integration. But the upshot of my argument is not that we should abandon integration in favour of egalitarian pluralism. Rather, my suggestion is that examining racialised contexts of gentrification gives us a better understanding of the conditions under which residential integration can—and cannot—promote racial justice. My argument leaves open space for a modified defence of integration that takes these conditions into account. Ultimately, however, I suggest that such a modified defence of integration faces some important challenges of its own. This article's second aim is to contribute to the emerging literature on gentrification in political philosophy by examining its racial dynamics. By analysing the racial dynamics of gentrification, I bring to light some features of gentrification beyond residential displacement—in particular, the dynamics of social interaction in gentrifying neighbourhoods—which are relevant to its moral evaluation. My argument also responds to some recent arguments made by Andrew Pierce and Hwa Young Kim and Andrew Walton to the effect that gentrification's benefits can be harnessed, and its burdens can be limited, for the project of integration.5 My focus in this article is primarily on residential integration, though I do also discuss its relationship to other forms of integration at points. Residential integration is usually taken to be a central component—and often the central component—of the broader project of racial integration, because of the central role that residential segregation has played in reproducing patterns of racial inequality. And, as we will see, gentrification bears most directly on residential integration. First, I characterise the integration debate and explain gentrification's relevance to that debate. Then I examine the three arguments for integration in turn with and identify some limits to those arguments revealed by racialised contexts of gentrification. Finally, I reflect on the upshots of my argument for the integration debate, and for some recent arguments about gentrification's integrative potential. Residential segregation has long played an important role in upholding and maintaining what Desmond King and Rogers Smith call the “white supremacist racial order” in US politics.6 A variety of social technologies, including overt violence, restrictive covenants, redlining, real estate discrimination, predatory lending, and exclusionary zoning policies, have cemented patterns of residential segregation between Black and White Americans.7 Those patterns persist today, with roughly one in three Black metropolitan residents living in a “hyper-segregated” neighbourhood.8 And as Douglas S. Massey and Nancy Denton have demonstrated, residential segregation has played a central role in generating the persistent gap between Black and White Americans in wealth, opportunity, and well-being, effectively confining many Black Americans to so-called “ghettos” and constituting them as members of an underclass.9 The debate between new integrationists and egalitarian pluralists is a debate about how to respond to these injustices. Anderson and Shelby each provide sophisticated accounts of how advocates of racial justice should respond to segregation, which have set the terms of the contemporary debate over integration in political philosophy. This contemporary debate is an outgrowth of a broader set of debates within Black political thought about—put crudely—how Black Americans should respond to their oppression.10 These debates have a long history and have branched out in many directions, including Frederick Douglass's assimilationism, Martin Delaney's Black nationalism, Ida B. Wells-Barnett's view of Black self-help, W. E. B. Du Bois's cultural pluralism, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) and Charles Hamilton's conception of Black Power, Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of interracial unity, Audre Lorde's reflections on difference, and far beyond. None of these complex visions of Black liberation can be reduced to a simple defence of integration or egalitarian pluralism, but each is an important part of the intellectual heritage of the contemporary debate between new integrationists and egalitarian pluralists.11 Both parties to the contemporary debate agree that desegregation is morally required.12 That is, they agree that the barriers that uphold and maintain patterns of residential segregation along racial lines should be dismantled, for example by aggressively enforcing anti-discrimination legislation and removing facially neutral zoning regulations that systematically exclude Black Americans from White neighbourhoods. This would be no small feat: although legal barriers to residential desegregation were removed with the passage of the Fair Housing Act, racial discrimination in housing markets continues to explain residential segregation to a significant degree.13 Anti-discrimination legislation in the real estate sector is underenforced, and more subtle forms of discrimination such as “racial steering” significantly impact patterns of residential segregation.14 And zoning regulations that limit the development of affordable housing in White neighbourhoods continue to play an important role in maintaining patterns of residential segregation.15 But few believe that effective enforcement of anti-discrimination legislation and inclusionary zoning policies would end the racial injustices associated with segregation. Both new integrationists and egalitarian pluralists see desegregation as a necessary but not a sufficient response to racial injustice.16 Beyond desegregation, new integrationists and egalitarian pluralists disagree about how segregation should be addressed. For new integrationists, policies that actively facilitate the residential integration of Black and White Americans—such as housing vouchers that promote the entry of Black Americans into predominantly White neighbourhoods—are a demand of justice.17 Anderson makes three main arguments for residential integration. First is the opportunity argument, which claims that residential integration has an indispensable causal role in remedying Black disadvantage by creating material opportunity. Second is the epistemic-democratic argument, which claims that residential integration is a central part of the process of democratic learning needed to address racial inequality. Third is the relational-democratic argument, which claims that only a racially integrated society will realise the conditions of social equality that are constitutive of the democratic ideal. Egalitarian pluralists reject the claim that residential integration is an imperative of justice. Shelby argues that “we should not regard residential integration as a legitimate mechanism for correcting the unjust disadvantages the ghetto poor face”.18 On his view, racial justice neither requires nor prohibits residential integration. Shelby argues that relying on residential integration puts the costs of addressing racial injustice onto Black Americans.19 Black Americans moving into White neighbourhoods are exposed to racial hostility, prejudice and discrimination—or the burdens of being “Black in White space”, as Elijah Anderson puts it—and on Shelby's view they cannot be required to bear such burdens as a matter of justice.20 He also argues that residential integration can prevent Black Americans from enjoying goods such as solidarity and community that can be obtained in neighbourhoods with a Black critical mass. For Shelby, solidarity amongst the oppressed is an important component of an ethic of resistance to racial injustice and is a legitimate basis for Black residential clustering.21 My suggestion is that we can make progress in this debate by examining racialised contexts of gentrification. The dynamics of gentrification illuminate some limits to arguments that have been made for residential integration. But first, it is important to clarify the relationship between the debates over integration and gentrification. What is gentrification, and what has it got to do with racial segregation and integration? Gentrification is a process of spatial and demographic change that occurs as urban spaces used by the less affluent are transformed into spaces used by the more affluent, typically involving an influx of wealthier residents into relatively deprived areas.22 There are some disagreements about the precise boundaries of the concept in the urban studies literature—for example, about whether gentrification necessarily involves the displacement of low-income residents, and about whether it only applies to historically disinvested neighbourhoods in the central city or whether it can apply to other spaces, such as public spaces.23 But for our purposes, we need not worry too much about these disagreements. This is both because the cases of gentrification that I am interested in here typically take place in historically disinvested residential neighbourhoods in the central city—and so are, in this respect, core cases—and because displacement need not be a necessary feature of gentrification for my analysis to get off the ground. Defined in this way, gentrification is not necessarily a racialised process. Here, however, I focus on cases of gentrification that involve White incomers moving into predominantly Black neighbourhoods, because such cases are particularly relevant for the integration debate. Gentrification often has some racialised aspect, and incomers in gentrifying neighbourhoods tend to be disproportionately White.24 But gentrification does not always display these racial dynamics. In fact, White gentrifiers often avoid majority Black neighbourhoods25 and prefer racially mixed neighbourhoods,26 which is consistent with findings on the role of White preferences in maintaining segregation.27 There is evidence to suggest, however, that gentrification involving White incomers in Black neighbourhoods is becoming increasingly significant.28 The racial dynamics of gentrification also differ significantly across contexts. Qualitative research on gentrification in Latino neighbourhoods and on gentrification involving the Black middle classes in predominantly Black neighbourhoods, for example, raises a number of distinct questions about racial politics that I do not address here.29 So it is important to keep in mind that the cases of gentrification that I focus on here represent only a subset—albeit an especially relevant and perhaps a growing one—of all cases of gentrification. In cases of gentrification that do display these dynamics, race is key to understanding how the process unfolds. Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana argues that race plays an important role in the processes of valuation that are involved in gentrification.30 Gentrifying neighbourhoods are typically disinvested before redevelopment becomes profitable,31 and race often explains which neighbourhoods face disinvestment and how it occurs—for example, through systematic predatory lending to Black Americans that leads to mortgage foreclosures.32 Race also plays an important role in the revaluation of neighbourhoods, with the “diversity” of a neighbourhood being commodified to make a neighbourhood more attractive to early-stage gentrifiers and investors.33 Tyler Zimmer draws on Charles Mills's discussion of the racial coding of geographical space to diagnose the ideological underpinnings of racialised processes of gentrification.34 He argues that Black neighbourhoods are often depicted as “dens of iniquity, crime, vice and violence”. Such depictions serve a dual function: to both rationalise the initial neglect of such neighbourhoods and to mark them out as “morally open for seizure, expropriation, settlement and development”.35 Set against the background of White flight from city centres to the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s, which left many inner-city neighbourhoods disinvested, gentrification is also sometimes viewed as an expression of a “revanchist” ideology that valorises the re-taking of the central city for the White middle classes.36 Race is not merely an incidental feature of cases in which White incomers move into predominantly Black neighbourhoods, but a central part of the way in which it unfolds and is legitimated. These racialised cases of gentrification are relevant to the integration debate because they are, in demographic terms, instances of residential integration. That is, racialised processes of gentrification create more racially mixed neighbourhoods, in which a larger number of Black and White Americans live side by side, at least in the short to medium term.37 In the long term, some neighbourhoods do experience “resegregation” as White incomers begin to dominate, but others appear to reach stable racially integrated equilibria.38 Advocates of residential integration typically envisage Black Americans moving out of Black neighbourhoods and into White neighbourhoods. In racialised cases of gentrification, the process operates in reverse: White Americans move into predominantly Black neighbourhoods. Racialised cases of gentrification provide an interesting test case for the integration debate. By examining the dynamics of gentrification in racialised contexts, we can bring to light some of the potential costs of residential integration, as well as discovering which of its benefits are robust across even apparently more inhospitable contexts for remedying racial injustice. Turning our attention to racialised cases of gentrification helps us to probe the limits of the case for residential integration. The aim of this exercise is not to undermine the case for integration in general. Rather, it is to identify some problems that can arise in the process of integration and to expose some ways in which integration may, in some circumstances, even deepen racial injustice, whilst at the same time deepening our understanding of the moral terrain of gentrification. In understanding racialised contexts of gentrification as instances of residential integration, I am adopting a fairly narrow understanding of residential integration as a process of demographic change that involves members of different social groups coming to live alongside each other in the same neighbourhoods. But of course, advocates of integration are likely to point out that they understand “integration” to mean something much more substantive than this. Faced with the problems that I identify in racialised contexts of gentrification, they may suggest that certain conditions must be met—so that integration proceeds “on terms of equality”39—in order for a process of demographic change in a neighbourhood to count as a genuine or meaningful instance of integration. This is certainly a defensible response, though it does face its own challenges, which I examine in more detail below. Indeed, part of what is at stake in my argument is a better understanding of how we should understand integration as a political ideal. The idea is not that gentrification is a particularly promising form of integration, such that problems that arise in gentrifying neighbourhoods cast doubt on the project of integration more generally. Rather, the idea is that by bringing to light the problems that arise in the context of gentrification, we can get a better understanding of the conditions under which residential integration can—and cannot—promote racial justice. A better understanding of these conditions is essential if we are to develop a more substantive conception of integration, to understand the place of residential integration within it, and ultimately to judge whether such a conception can function as an action-guiding political ideal in the struggle to achieve racial justice. For the moment, however, it is important to maintain a narrow understanding of residential integration, according to which it is simply a process of demographic change that involves members of different social groups coming to live alongside each other in the same neighbourhoods. This enables us to analyse the conditions under which residential integration can promote or hinder the achievement of racial justice, without prejudicing our analysis by making it the case that only cases that meet certain substantive conditions count as valid tests of residential integration. Of course, those conditions may ultimately figure in a broader account of the political morality of integration. It may be that residential integration is only, or especially, valuable for the pursuit of racial justice under certain conditions. But those conditions should be identified through an analysis that takes a narrow conception of residential integration as its starting point, rather than one that presupposes them as part of the definition of residential integration. Andrew J. Pierce and Hwa Young Kim and Andrew Walton have also recently examined the relationship between gentrification and integration, but their approaches differ from the approach that I take here.40 Both Pierce and Kim and Walton see in gentrification the potential to avoid some of the costs associated with traditional approaches to residential integration, since it does not require Black Americans to bear the burdens associated with moving into hostile White neighbourhoods. Pierce argues that if gentrification's negative impacts can be limited—through policies such as community land trusts—then it can provide the benefits of residential integration without some of the costs to which egalitarian pluralists object.41 Similarly, Kim and Walton argue that what they call “advantaged relocation” into disadvantaged neighbourhoods can—so long as it avoids displacement and cultural imposition—reduce prejudice and tackle social inequality without imposing unfair burdens on, or expressing stigmatising judgements about, the disadvantaged.42 I return to Pierce's and Kim and Walton's analyses of the relationship between gentrification and integration below. For the moment, it suffices to note that where Pierce's and Kim and Walton's aims are to show how an idealised form of gentrification might be harnessed to tackle racial injustice through integration, my focus is on what actually existing processes of gentrification tell us about the prospects and pitfalls of residential integration in the first place. Anderson's central argument for residential integration is that it plays an important role in achieving racial justice by creating opportunities for Black Americans. Anderson's argument includes both a diagnosis of the pathologies that reproduce Black disadvantage and a prediction about the role of residential integration in remedying that disadvantage. Anderson's diagnosis is that Black disadvantage is reproduced through various mechanisms of social closure such as opportunity hoarding and exploitation. She argues that residential segregation perpetuates Black disadvantage by preventing Black Americans from accessing good job opportunities, preventing the formation of social ties that enable upward mobility, and undermining the tax base needed for the provision of local public goods.43 She also argues that residential segregation causes stigmatisation by limiting inter-group contact between Black and White Americans. This exacerbates cognitive biases that give rise to racial stereotypes and discrimination—which intensify patterns of segregation, in a mutually reinforcing cycle.44 Anderson's prediction is that integration will remedy Black disadvantage in two main ways.45 First, she argues that residential integration plays an important role in increasing material opportunity for Black Americans by improving job prospects and facilitating the acquisition of cultural and social capital. Second, she argues that increasing contact between Black and White Americans leads to destigmatisation. Here, she draws on the “contact hypothesis”, according to which inter-group interaction can—at least under certain conditions—reduce prejudice by broadening the boundaries of the perceived “in-group” and by reducing reliance on stereotypes.46 Anderson takes her prediction to follow from her diagnosis: “if racial segregation is the problem, it stands to reason that racial integration is the remedy”. But the connection between the two is not a necessary one, and she accepts that we must “put integration to the test by investigating its consequences in practice”.47 My suggestion is that racialised cases of gentrification show the limits of Anderson's prediction without giving us reason to doubt her diagnosis. Indeed, racialised cases of gentrification give us reason to support Anderson's diagnosis: neighbourhoods that become candidates for gentrification are often initially disinvested through precisely the mechanisms of social closure that Anderson takes to be central in reproducing Black disadvantage. But racialised cases of gentrification also show the limits of the two main ways in which Anderson predicts that integration will remedy Black disadvantage. Take first the argument that residential integration will increase material opportunity for Black Americans. Gentrification is sometimes defended on similar grounds, with its advocates arguing that it will increase employment opportunities for the urban poor and/or provide them with social contacts that enable upward mobility.48 But in practice, the relationship between gentrification and economic opportunity is much more complicated than this suggests, and this complexity sheds light on the limits of the opportunity argument for integration. One version of this argument—which Loretta Lees calls the “networks and contacts” argument—claims that a greater social mix in integrated neighbourhoods will create “bridging capital” between members of different social groups, leading to greater opportunities for the worst-off.49 Shelby objects to this argument on the grounds that it requires us to view social relationships as a “resource to be used for socioeconomic advancement” and “puts blacks in an untenable supplicant position” vis-à-vis Whites.50 But even if such concerns can be overcome, gentrification shows that its prospects are limited. As Lees points out, the empirical support for this claim is weak in the context of gentrification, with most studies finding little evidence that mixed-income neighbourhoods create social connections that lead to increased economic opportunities for the poor.51 The networks and contacts argument assumes that those living side by side will form economically beneficial social relationships with each other, but in gentrifying neighbourhoods incoming residents and existing residents tend not to form these kinds of relationships. Though spatially integrated, they continue to live parallel lives. So, gentrification illustrates that residential integration need not lead to greater material opportunity through building bridging capital. In fact, the reverse may even be true: because gentrification can undermine local social networks and community institutions upon which the poor rely, it can actually make them worse off.52 Another version of this argument appeals to increased employment opportunities and better public goods, such as schools and police protection, as ways of improving the material condition of the disadvantaged. Here, the evidence from the case of gentrification appears less clear overall. Gentrification clearly does bring some important material benefits to a neighbourhood. In some cases, gentrifiers can leverage their social position to secure improved public goods in their neighbourhoods.53 Employment opportunities may also be expanded overall, though it is not clear that low-income residents always benefit from those jobs.54 Existing residents sometimes view the increased opportunities, services, and public goods as serving the interests of White incomers, rather than Black residents. For example, increased police presence in gentrifying neighbourhoods may serve to enforce the values and expectations of White incomers and make the neighbourhood less hospitable for Black residents.55 And where there are material gains that accrue from gentrification, they are typically distributed unevenly. The evidence on mixed-income redevelopment suggests that “the majority of benefits have been realized by private sector developers, local government and other stakeholders…[l]ow income households, on the other hand, do not share in many of these benefits".56 This is not to say that the least advantaged do not gain at all, but benefits of gentrification are typically skewed towards the advantaged. Racialised contexts of gentrification also cast some doubt on the claim that integration will lead to destigmatisation. In such contexts, inter-group interactions often exacerbate, rather than attenuate, animosity and hostility between Black and White Americans. Qualitative research on gentrification in Black neighbourhoods suggests that contact between different social groups is often shallow at best, and that at worst it involves mutual suspicion, hostility, and conflicts over the use of shared space.57 Rather than creating genuinely shared spaces of community across social groups, gentrification leads to the creation of “White space”—spaces in which Black people are “typically unexpected, marginalized when present, and made to feel unwelcome”—in Black neighbourhoods.58 Inter-group interactions in these contexts appear unlikely to achieve the kind of destigmatisation that Anderson envisages, at least in the short to medium term. These findings illustrate some limits of the prospects of residential integration for remedying Black disadvantage, either through increasing material opportunities for the Black urban poor or through destigmatisation. When the paths to the acquisition of social and cultural capital are blocked, the benefits of public goods are skewed towards the advantaged, or the terms of social interaction are inhospitable to destigmatisation, we should not expect residential integration to yield these benefits. They also appear to provide supporting grounds for some egalitarian pluralist concerns about residential integration, such as Shelby's concerns that new integrationists overstate the likelihood of Black residents forming economically useful relationships with White residents and “give too little weight to the bonding capital that disadvantaged blacks already possess”.59 But these findings do not undermine the causal argument for residential racial integration altogether. Instead, what they show is that if it is to be successful, integration must proceed in ways that avoid these problems. Anderson's second argument for residential integration is the epistemic-democratic argument, according to which integration plays an indispensable role in the process of democratic learning that is necessary for achieving racial justice. On Anderson's view, democracy is—amongst other things—a “mode of collective inquiry” that enables citizens to solve collective problems through the use of social intelligence.60 Democratic practices enable us to solve social problems because of the way that they incorporate diversity, communication, and feedback. Diversity here refers to the idea that those who occupy different social positions have access to knowledge arising from their experiences. Communication is a way of marshalling this asymmetrically distributed knowledge. And feedback mechanisms force decision-makers to consider the validity of political claims made on the basis of this knowledge. Anderson argues that integration promotes these epistemic functions of democracy, whilst segregation hinders them. Segregation encourages White Americans to complacently ignore the situation of Black Americans.61 It thus perpetuates the epistemic phenomenon that Mills has dubbed “White ignorance”—a systemic form of group-based miscognition that is sustained by, and itself perpetuates, White racial domination.62 Anderson argues that meaningfully addressing racial injustice requires negotiation and deliberation and that “negotiation and deliberation, in turn, require integration". In order to overcome White ignorance, negotiation and deliberation must incorporate the perspectives of Black Americans. Integration facilitates forms of “direct confrontation between claimants and the addressees of claims” that enable elites to be held to account.63 Anderson is right to suggest that democratic practices can function as tools for collective problem-solving. But we should a