Now That It's Undeniable: Gentrification in Hamilton 2015

Introduction

For the past several years, we’ve been talking quite a lot about gentrification here in Hamilton. In the current moment, as the vanguard of art galleries decisively give way to boutique shops and condos, as sections of town are repurposed into bedroom communities for people who work in Toronto but can’t afford to live there, what do we mean when we talk about gentrification? Two years ago, even the arts industry fucks could claim, without feeling too dishonest, that they were creating something local and durable. Now we watch their flagship galleries and favourite restaurants close while a Starbucks and McMaster satellite campus open in Jackson Square, with condos going up on all sides. You were the footsoldiers of gentrification – don’t say we didn’t warn you.

What is the relationship between gentrification, culture, and development? How do issues of transit, climate change, and population growth enter in? How does an anarchist approach to these issues go beyond the good progressive urbanist line of rent control, land trusts, free transit, and affordable housing? In this context, can we imagine an urban space worth fighting for, or is it, like our friends write in Salto, that “the urban horror … is so engrained that in order to reclaim the city as a project to nourish free lives, we would have to destroy it down to the last stone.”1

We are not writing this to participate in a conversation about what development in Hamilton should look like – development is not a conversation, it is an attack. As a starting point, let’s remember that gentrification in Hamilton does not represent a change in the way power works in this town. All that’s happened is a central fact has been laid bare – that we never actually had control over our neighbourhoods. This might be the answer to why, after years of talking about gentrification, we’re no closer to an effective way of fighting back – we’ve been aiming at the symptoms, not the roots causes.

For all that we might feel connected or rooted in our neighbourhoods, we are only permitted to be there while it’s convenient for those who actually control the areas we live in. But a strong wind is blowing now, and it turns out our roots here are shallower than we might have believed…

In this essay, we take aim at the progressive urbanists who work to dress up development as a public good. Although obviously it’s the developers and politicians who are the underlying problem, it’s usually the urbanists, people who are passionate about downtown “revitalization”, who push back when we set out to critique development downtown. Their visions of livable cities provide cover for the developers and justification for all the displacement and suffering urban redevelopment schemes cause. We need to push back against these ideas and put pressure on the groups and individuals who support them. By doing this, we can isolate those few who actually support the ability of capitalists and politicians to profit by reshaping our neighbourhoods.

Rest of the article at the website.