Gentrification: Uneven by Nature

At this point, I'm basically just gloating.  Public opinion has turned from ra-ra save Birmingham gentrification to some middle path that the revitalization is uneven (NPR's words) like somehow we can make it even.  Capitalism is uneven by nature.  Look at the globe.  The defining feature of the globe is uneven development, hell, we even have a name for it - the first world and the third world.  This is how capitalism works.  It develops the places that are profitable and underdevelops the places that aren't.  People invest in New York City over Ghana because you can make a lot more money in former than the latter, and people invest in downtown because you can make a lot more money there than West End.  Why would any capitalist invest in West End?

There are two processes to uneven development - differentiation and equalization.  When capitalists see a geographic area in which the potential profits are higher than the actual profits, they sink money into that area.  The City of Birmingham signaled this by investing in Downtown.  Early adopters and first to market in these areas are generally the most profitable, the pioneers if you will.  Eventually, because of competition, profits equalize in that geographic area and investors leave it to rot until there is a large gap between the potential and actual profits and the cycle starts over.  So, it's sort of capitalist whack-a-mole.  They dump money into a geographic area until it's not profitable and then move and it happens from the global scale to the local.

In Birmingham there were and are three distinct phases of this.  First, heavy investment into a new city creating the steel industry; the steel industry left as did whites and the era of suburbanization (investments in interstate highways and other infrastructure to support suburbs) and people commuting to downtown Birmingham for medical and financial jobs began.  Finally, capital returned to invest in the three Rs of gentrification - retail, real estate, and restaurants and bars.  The latter two invested very little into working class and poor communities which, in Birmingham, are almost exclusively black.  The popular narrative is that white flight killed the city, but I would argue that deindustrialization hurt worse.  The white folks that left weren't spending their money in black businesses anyway.  Thus, the shape of development throughout the region and across the globe is and always has been unstable and uneven, subject to boom and bust cycles even between adjacent neighborhoods in the city.

It's funny that NPR would choose the word uneven to describe Birmingham's development, I think suggesting that it should be even.  But, their observation is apt.  Gentrification is uneven by nature and nothing is going to change that, nothing.  The only way to change it is to change development strategies to a new economy strategy.  It needs to be cooperative, small, sometimes cottage industries, small loans from community controlled banks, novel methods of land management controlled by the community such as community land trusts, and a branding strategy that sells the city as a model city for the 21st century.

And tell Brookings Institution to go take a hike.