Gentrification And Social Inequality

If it is simply left up to the free market, it is more likely that rich people and business will push out the poor and the smaller businesses. The way income and wealth is largely distributed within America means that most of the rich and corporations moving in are Caucasian and those being displaced are minorities and people of color. It is a product of predatory capitalism that is able to reign due to the lack of proper restrictions and checks and balances on behalf of the government. The strange anxiety that any rules or regulations would stymie the development of these various cities and neighborhoods continues to be a convenient and false defense against gentrification criticism.

Jean Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality insists on a

Money is a major symbol of American meritocracy—the major symbol of American hyperreality—American life is literally sustained upon this singular thing. And again, given the way wealth is distributed within this country and how the gap continues to widen, the power to articulate who gets to live and who gets the short end of the stick is at an imbalance. This makes gentrification a weapon of structural violence. Peter Marcuse insists that the problem of gentrification “[…] should be tackled comprehensively through a city-wide housing plan established through democratic and participatory planning, with binding guidelines aimed at creating an adequate supply of housing across all income ranges and prioritizing measures to provide decent and affordable housing for those who are not provided for […]” (Marcuse 2015:1265). These assertions are ideal yet in a capitalist system that values the perks of a private free market economy, they remain largely unseen. Baudrillard insists that since money became a “universal equivalent” on which American society uses to measure everything including our lives, we have lost touch with the material reality long ago. Money thus degenerates culture and personal meaning, making it easier to denounce those living in gentrified places prior to its renewal. The ethical

“They are, like those they displace, the victims of powerful economic forces that are operating through the market and are significantly influencing public urban-policy economic forces operating in a private market characterized […] by the return of capital to the city.” (Marcuse 2015:1266). The moral and ethical implications of gentrification particularly when it is at its worst put gentrifiers in a difficult position. Jean Baudrillard raises concern about urbanization altogether, noting the falsities of urban “reality” and how our ability to develop geographical locations into concrete and steel kingdoms disrupts the human individual’s connection to natural spaces—the real. Baudrillard also insists that as American society’s complication of the industrial process swells and articulates itself in so many variant ways, the concept of identity and the realness identity begin to drop in value and are replaced with the functions of multinational corporations and capital. This gives society leeway to disrupt the sacred meanings and the sacred reality and pervert it with simulations and simulacra. This will result in the death of society—the oversaturation, the overconsumption, the overlapping deconstructions and reconstructions that will eat up and phase out everything—the death of