Abstract
Introduction
The extent of influence exerted by academic discourse on displacement-inducing urban policymaking in the USA is challenging to ascertain, yet we cannot doubt the existence of this influence. Academics are frequently called to act as consultants in the drafting of policies. Policymakers and staffers are often college-educated, having been potentially influenced by discourses circulating within the academy, and surely, policymakers and staffers may otherwise come upon academic work in the course of their own research, to the extent that research is conducted. This article explores the territorial stigmatisation–gentrification nexus and how it is advanced by an intellectual pipeline between academics and policymakers in the USA. Despite much research revealing the pathologising narratives latent within displacement-inducing urban policies (e.g. Crump, 2002; Katz, 1989; Kirk, 2023a; Slater, 2013, 2021; Wilson and Wyly, 2023), little work has explicitly sought to underscore the influence of academic discourses in promoting these policies. Centring a triad of discourses surrounding concentrated disadvantage, social mix and neighbourhood effects – emergent namely from the academic fields of urban sociology, criminology, urban planning and urban economics – I provide an evidential linkage between academic discourse and displacement-causing US policymaking by conducting a document analysis of official reports related to two major US government programmes: the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing (MTO) Demonstration programme and the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE) VI programme. I suggest that these academic discourses operate to legitimise displacement via neighbourhood-centric framings which advance territorial stigmatisation and related gentrification. These discourses, I argue, reinforce the real estate state and the destructive capitalist force of uneven geographical development while working to facilitate the disregard of propositions that would effect structural change.
Territorial stigmatisation, first coined by sociologist Wacquant (1992, 1993), and gentrification have been portrayed as ‘two sides of the same coin’ (Paton et al., 2017: 584). In his early explication of territorial stigma, Wacquant (1993: 369) broadly defines it as a ‘powerful stigma [that attaches] to residence in the bounded and segregated spaces, the “neighbourhoods of exile” to which the populations marginalised or condemned to redundancy by the postfordist reorganisation of the economy and state are increasingly being relegated’. Wacquant (1992, 1993, 2007, 2008, 2015) argues that in advanced capitalist Western societies, journalists, politicians and academics have launched a stigmatising assault on the territoriality of urban marginality – particularly on socioeconomically disadvantaged Black neighbourhoods of the USA and working-class areas of Europe. This attack casts poor, often minority-majority neighbourhoods as pathological spaces of criminality and moral degeneracy, portrayals that aid neoliberal efforts to expand the regulation of the urban poor via ‘policies of removal, dispersal, or punitive containment’ (Wacquant, 2015: 245). Undoubtedly, territorial stigmatisation remains a prevalent and exigent phenomenon, as stigma continues to become attached to devalued spaces across geographies exemplified in the persistence and (re)production of, inter alia, ‘ghettos’, ‘slums’, ‘
Gentrification has been defined as ‘the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city into middle-class residential or commercial use’ (Lees et al., 2010: xv), though it has been conceptually extended beyond the inner city to describe an even greater reach as suburban, peri-urban and rural locales experience residential turnover from less affluent to more affluent demographics (Hudalah et al., 2016; Markley, 2018; Phillips, 1993). From a more critical perspective, gentrification is understood to be ‘[t]he theft of space from labour and its conversion into spaces of profit . . . achieved through displacement and resettlement’ (Chatterjee, 2014: 5). Scholars have pointed to a deepening embeddedness of gentrification across major Global North cities that reshapes landscapes in search of ever-increasing profit via the displacement of vulnerable, low-income, minoritised, racialised populations and their replacement with higher-income, less stigmatised demographics as the built environment is put to ‘higher and better use’ (Aalbers, 2019; Kirk, 2023a, 2023b; Lees et al., 2013; Stein, 2019; Wilson, 2023; Yonto and Thill, 2020). 1 Recently, the apparent proliferation of gentrification in major metropolitan areas has been explained by scholars calling attention to an ascendant formation of parasitically conjoined elite real estate interests, city planning and policymaking (Kirk, 2023a; Lauermann and Mallak, 2023; Stein, 2019; Wilson and Wyly, 2023).
In his popularly received book
Against this backdrop, I begin by relating important connections between territorial stigmatisation as a discursive project, uneven development and the related emergence of urban rent gaps – what Smith (1979, 1987, 1996b) offers as the principal mechanism motivating gentrification. I then turn towards a critical exploration of concentrated disadvantage, social mix and neighbourhood effects discourses, tracing their genealogies and unpacking their problematic assumptions. Next, I conduct a document analysis of official reports related to two major US government programmes that have produced displacement, the MTO Demonstration programme and the HOPE VI programme, revealing their reliance on the work of scholars who advance these discourses. Finally, I offer an explanation for the present configuration of the academy-to-policy pipeline and why it has failed to onboard critical, macro-structurally orientated scholarship, and issue a call for a direction forward.
Uneven development and the function of discourse
Scholars investigating the territorial stigmatisation–gentrification nexus have connected territorial stigma with an often-posited mechanism for gentrification: the rent gap (e.g. Kallin, 2017; Kallin and Slater, 2014; Paton et al., 2017; Risager, 2022; Slater, 2017a, 2017b). First put forward by Smith (1979, 1987, 1996b) as an account for inner-city housing disinvestment and revaluation following post-Second World War suburbanisation (see also Agnew, 1981; Walker, 1981), the rent gap refers to the difference between capitalised ground rent – the land rent that is presently collected for a parcel and is capitalised upon sale (as expressed in price) – and potential ground rent – rent that could be collected if the parcel were redeveloped/rehabilitated and put to ‘highest and best’ use. The rent gap is thus the difference between the actual rent being collected and the ideal rent that might be received. It is useful at this juncture to further contextualise Smith’s (1979, 1987, 1996b) rent gap theory of gentrification. Smith argues that the rent gap emerges principally as a by-product of uneven development, a condition endemic to capitalism characterised by see-sawing disparities in development across space as capital is invested and disinvested in search of accelerating rates of accumulation. This uneven development leads to investment in one place at the expense of disinvestment from another, resulting in the diminishing of capitalised ground rents as housing stock is devalued due to ageing, falling into disrepair and sometimes because its building style falls out of fashion with changing architectural aesthetic preference. In his exegesis of the rent gap-forming uneven development of the 1970s–1990s across the Global North, Smith points to suburbanisation and the subsequent spatial decentring of traditional urban industrial vocations as key manifestations facilitated by waves of neoliberal privatisation (Smith, 1996b: 36–37, 165).
As Smith (1996b: 165) writes, ‘The dramatic suburbanisation of the urban landscape in the last century or more provided an alternative geographical locus for capital accumulation and thereby encouraged a comparative disinvestment at the centre – most intensely so in the US’. Importantly, as Wacquant and Wilson (1989) show in the case of the USA, this ‘disinvestment at the centre’ generated massive growth in urban joblessness and poverty, in turn facilitating the creation of an ‘urban underclass’
3
of the minoritised inner-city poor, represented most extremely by Black, low-income residents. This spatial and industrial restructuring – not simply White flight and the movement of jobs and capital into the suburbs, but the outsourcing of industry abroad and the neoliberal withdrawal of the state in favour of laissez-faire policies – had sweeping, detrimental implications for Blacks already living in urban ‘ghettos’. Paralleling Smith’s (1996b) elucidations of suburbanisation, industrial restructuring and neoliberal privatisation, Wacquant and Wilson (1989: 10) link these forces to the degradation of minoritised, inner-city built environments and community services: As we shall see, the social structure of today’s inner city has been radically altered by the mass exodus of jobs and working families by the rapid deterioration of housing, schools, businesses, recreational facilities, and other community organizations, further exacerbated by government policies of laissez-faire that have channeled a disproportionate share of federal, state, and municipal resources to the more affluent. The economic and social buffer provided by a stable black working class and a visible, if small, middle class that cushioned the impact of downswings in the economy and tied ghetto residents to the world of work has all but disappeared. Moreover, the social networks of parents, friends, and associates, as well as the nexus of local institutions, have seen their resources progressively depleted.
This ‘rapid deterioration of housing, schools, businesses, recreational facilities, and other organizations’ (Wacquant and Wilson, 1989: 10) brought on by urban restructuring in the USA represents the emergence of rent gaps ripe for gentrifying closure. While this deterioration is described above as ‘rapid’, it is nonetheless a years-long process. For Smith (1979, 1987, 1996a) and other early rent gap researchers (e.g. Clark, 1988, 1995), it is important to understand that the rent gap does not emerge in the short moments that lead up to redevelopment following the decision to redevelop; instead, they tell us that the production of the rent gap is a process that is initiated long before any redevelopment is posited. 4 Disinvestment and the devaluation of capital investments in the built environment often begin years prior to any decision to redevelop, and in connection with the spatial organisation of capital across the landscape. Yet, it must be emphasised that not all places that are stigmatised undergo gentrification – as persistently low-income neighbourhoods are far more common than actively gentrifying ones (Lichter et al., 2012). It is surely in these persistently disinvested, stigmatised and neglected spaces where suffering is most acute. While not all stigmatised places become gentrified, all gentrified places were first stigmatised before their gentrification. This suggests that the stigmatisation–gentrification dynamic is contingent on intervening factors – for example, the character of the housing stock, the relative location within the city, local positive externalities, etc. – rather than being simply deterministic.
Recognition of the drawn-out nature of built environment devaluation is reflected in territorial stigmatisation scholarship, which relates the discursive processes of place-based stigmatisation that take hold before a neighbourhood becomes gentrifiable. 5 Recently, scholars have explicitly cited territorially stigmatising discourses in their explorations of gentrification (e.g. Gray and Mooney, 2011; Horgan, 2018; Kallin, 2017; Kallin and Slater, 2014; Liu et al., 2021; Paton et al., 2017; Risager, 2022; Sakizlioglu and Uitermark, 2014; Sisson, 2021, 2022; Slater, 2017a, 2017b; Slater and Anderson, 2012). The shared contention is that territorial stigma is utilised as ‘an engine of regeneration’ (Kallin and Slater, 2014: 1364) that drives down the reputation of disadvantaged areas – and that it is through this exacerbation of negative connotations that the rent gap as an opportunity to generate profit further widens. Hence, a critical aspect of rent gap formation is the formation of ‘reputational gaps’ (Kallin, 2017; Kallin and Slater, 2014) that discursively and materially devalue areas which are then sought to be closed by way of gentrification.
This literature points to different, co-working agents that produce territorial stigma and which thereby drive the opening of the rent gaps and reputational gaps necessary for gentrification to occur. Together, agents of territorial stigmatisation like news networks, the police, speculative real estate developers, investors and aspiring home buyers cast and recast vulnerable communities and their environs as, inter alia, pathological, blighted, declining and hence in need of (gentrifying) intervention (Arthurson et al., 2014; Garbin and Millington, 2012; Gray and Mooney, 2011; Hastings, 2004; Jahiu and Cinnamon, 2022; Kallin and Slater, 2014; Schwarze, 2022; Slater, 2017c; Wacquant et al., 2014; Watt, 2020). Here, I focus on the relationship between two additional agents of territorial stigmatisation: academics and policymakers.
Academic discourses legitimising displacement
Concentrated disadvantage, social mix and neighbourhood effects
I train our attention on three interconnected, influential discourses emerging from the academy that I show provide academic legitimacy to policies that territorially stigmatise and displace – these being discourses surrounding concentrated disadvantage/poverty deconcentration, social mix and neighbourhood effects. These triadic discourses have long been recognised as linked (Ostendorf et al., 2001), and they continue as fellow travellers in urban academic and urban policy language. I will briefly summarise each in turn.
Concentrated disadvantage scholarship studies the spatial clustering of socioeconomic disadvantage within neighbourhoods and the resultant feedback effects that amplify issues associated with poverty. The concentration of disadvantage is typically measured by the percentage of residents below the poverty line, the percentage of families reliant upon public assistance, the percentage of unemployed single parents and the percentage of non-White residents (Benson et al., 2003). According to concentrated disadvantage scholarship, policymakers should make deliberate efforts to deconcentrate poverty within particular neighbourhoods by dispersing low-income households throughout the city rather than concentrating them in isolated, economically disadvantaged places. This scholarship argues that concentrated poverty can have detrimental impacts on individuals and their communities; when many low-income households are concentrated in one neighbourhood, they argue, it can reinforce and perpetuate cycles of poverty by limiting access to quality education, healthcare, employment opportunities and other resources – in addition contributing to social isolation, crime and other negative social outcomes (see e.g. Goetz, 2000; McClure, 2008; Sampson et al., 2007; Wodtke et al., 2011). Though now widely discredited but still influential (see Arthurson, 2012; Bolt et al., 2010; Manley et al., 2012), social mix scholarship argues that policymakers and urban planners should attempt to prevent the concentration of specific socioeconomic groups in particular neighbourhoods by promoting instead the integration of people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, ages, ethnicities and family structures, which will lead to greater upward mobility (see e.g. Mumford, 1923; Riesman, 1958; Sarkissian, 1976: 386). Finally, the neighbourhood effects literature centres the impacts of the local social and physical environment on neighbourhood residents’ well-being, opportunities and behaviour – attempting to show how factors within a neighbourhood can contribute to its deterioration (e.g. Sampson, 2012; Sharkey and Elwert, 2011; Small, 2007; Wodtke et al., 2011). It views neighbourhoods not merely as physical spaces but as complex social environments that shape the experiences and behaviours of residents, emphasising how the social and physical features of a neighbourhood, such as poverty rates, residential segregation, social cohesion, availability of resources and quality of institutions, can significantly impact the lives of neighbourhood residents. I will now expand on critiques of concentrated disadvantage and social mix before offering a more favourable but nonetheless critical appraisal of neighbourhood effects and how they have been used by some urban economists.
The intellectual genealogy of contemporary concentrated disadvantage and social mix research can be traced to the work of scholars like Oscar Lewis and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who argued that poverty is largely the product of poor families’ values and practices. Lewis (1966) developed his ‘culture of poverty’ thesis based upon work in Mexico City, positing that poverty may be transmitted intergenerationally, therefore becoming in effect a ‘culture of the poor’. Relatedly, Moynihan’s (1965: 28) publication by the US Department of Labour titled
Poverty deconcentration and social mix thinking view disadvantaged neighbourhoods as otherwise irreparable, dysfunctional places where poverty and other social issues are endemic and inherent to the community itself. Such viewpoints give tacit support to territorial stigmatisation by perpetuating the stereotype that the problems faced by disadvantaged neighbourhoods are largely the result of the residents’ behaviours, values or culture, rather than acknowledging the role of systemic factors like historical discrimination, lack of economic opportunities and limited access to resources – let alone contextualising neighbourhood disadvantage in the broader light of fundamental mechanisms of capitalist spatial production. Indeed, these discourses have been powerfully critiqued for misinterpreting the symptoms of poverty and disadvantage – for example, crime, disrupted family structures, joblessness, etc. – as
Neighbourhood effects is a robust methodological framework that has been incredibly fruitful at revealing a great deal about the symptoms, reinforcement and results of disadvantage in urban neighbourhoods (see Sampson, 2012, 2019). My reasoning for including this line of research is twofold. First, beyond generally identifying local social and institutional infrastructures, the neighbourhood effects literature is largely inattentive to critical macro-structural factors contributing to urban disadvantage – for example, capitalist uneven development. Second, some urban economists have appropriated the language of neighbourhood effects to advance problematic, people-based poverty deconcentration and social mix policy recommendations, warranting discussion.
Robert J Sampson – the originator of the neighbourhood effects concept and its foremost advocate (Sampson, 2012, 2019; Sampson et al., 2002) – insists in his work that macro-structural realities affect urban disadvantage, but like other neighbourhood effects researchers, he chooses not to centre these structures, instead choosing to centre neighbourhood-level phenomena. As he writes: None of this is to say that macro structures, such as globalisation, capitalist accumulation, or politics, are unimportant, any more than are individuals . . . I simply argue that neighbourhood contexts are important determinants of the quantity and quality of human behaviour in their own right, and that they play an important role in mediating both macro and micro processes. (Sampson, 2019: 8)
To be clear, structural factors are not absent in Sampson’s work – but those dealt with must not be construed as macro-structural in any sense – nor would Sampson claim that they are. Indeed, a major argument in Sampson’s work is that neighbourhoods have emergent properties that are determined by local social and institutional factors above and beyond the income or racial composition of a neighbourhood. For example, a key emergent property is collective efficacy – the perception of a group that they can work together to accomplish shared goals – which again, is not solely about income or demographics (i.e. there are both high- and low-poverty, Black and White neighbourhoods with high collective efficacy), but rather is best predicted by the civic infrastructure of local organisations like non-profits (Sampson, 2012: 158). It is not my intention to portray this work as invalid or unvaluable; certainly, it is insightful and pathbreaking. However, its methodological peripheralisation of macro-structural factors in the course of its focus on the neighbourhood has meant that the neighbourhood effect does not engage with the capitalist mode of production and its internal mechanisms which fundamentally and significantly contribute to the contours of neighbourhood advantage and disadvantage. Because processes of uneven development are so essential to neighbourhood investment and disinvestment (Slater, 2013; Smith, 1979, 1996b, 2008), surely this constitutes a vital site for resistance in scholarship, policy and on-the-ground activism. However, Sampson and other neighbourhood effects researchers debate not about
In a call to bring together each side of the place- and people-based policy camps, Sampson says: ‘Rather than choose between place- and person-based approaches . . . we need both types of interventions to effect durable change’ (Sampson, 2019: 22). Indeed, neighbourhood effects work has mostly advocated place-based (i.e. neighbourhood-based) policymaking, but Sampson and others (e.g. Chetty et al., 2016) have also supported – in conjunction – person-based policymaking. The most prominent varieties of person-based approaches for ameliorating urban disadvantage, however, are poverty deconcentration and social mix strategies which pathologise poor and majority non-White neighbourhoods and promote displacement. We see the reproduction of poverty deconcentration and social mix thinking in a prominent example of the recent neighbourhood effects literature.
In their highly cited paper examining the MTO experiment – a programme by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that provided vouchers to families in public housing in disadvantaged neighbourhoods – and the effects of its exposure of children to better neighbourhoods, Chetty, Hendren and Katz (2016) situate their study into a neighbourhood effects framework. They find that ‘improvements in neighbourhood environments continue to have large effects on children’s long-term outcomes even after early childhood’ (Chetty et al., 2016: 899). Chetty and colleagues advocate both poverty deconcentration and social mix, affirming the use of vouchers to assist in the movement of low-income families to lower-poverty neighbourhoods – an example of poverty deconcentration thinking – and advocate social mix as they recommend ‘efforts to integrate disadvantaged families into mixed-income communities’, which they posit ‘are likely to reduce the persistence of poverty across generations’ (Chetty et al., 2016: 900).
Sampson himself has been antagonistic towards social mix thinking in particular, as he affirmingly quotes a passage from Mary Pattillo’s 2018 piece ‘The problem of integration’: ‘Promoting integration as the means to improve the lives of Blacks stigmatises Black people and Black spaces and valorises Whiteness as both the symbol of opportunity and the measuring stick for equality’ (qtd. in Sampson, 2019: 24). Yet, he has been much less antagonistic towards poverty deconcentration strategies, which he terms ‘move out approaches’ (Sampson, 2012, 2019) and about which he appears ambivalent or even hopeful. Because this scholarship chooses to magnify only the neighbourhood and local social-institutional factors, emergent support for such problematic policy recommendations by neighbourhood effects researchers is unsurprising. Only macro-structural analysis in complement to neighbourhood- and local-level analysis may provide the grounds for a more radical understanding of urban disadvantage and therefore open the door to structurally minded solution-seeking. I now turn towards an exploration of some of these policies and the ways in which they deploy academic discourses to legitimise displacement.
Pipeline to displacement
My effort in this work is not merely to show that pathologising discourses are latent in much displacement-inducing urban policy – for this has already been comprehensively demonstrated elsewhere (e.g. Crump, 2002; Katz, 1989; Kirk, 2023a; Slater, 2013, 2021; Wilson and Wyly, 2023). I also venture to emphasise the role that academic discourses have played in advancing such policies via their neighbourhood-centric theorisations. To accomplish this, I provide examples of the influence that academics and discourses surrounding poverty deconcentration, social mix and neighbourhood effects have had on the construction and interpretation of displacement-inducing urban policy. I focus in particular on two major US government programmes that have resulted in displacement: the HOPE VI programme and the MTO Demonstration programme, which I show relied upon academic discourses surrounding poverty deconcentration, social mix and neighbourhood effects in either their design or their post hoc interpretation.
The HOPE VI programme, in operation from 1993 to 2010, was an initiative by the HUD aimed at addressing the dire state of ‘severely distressed public housing’ (HUD, 2000). This initiative involved the demolition of such housing units, their replacement with mixed-income communities and the encouragement of permanent relocation for the displaced public housing residents (HUD, 2000). The programme emerged in response to a dire report by Congress’ National Council of Severely Distressed Public Housing, which drew attention to the substandard living conditions faced by public housing residents nationwide. HOPE VI ‘exemplifies such core principles of neoliberal urbanisation as entrepreneurialism and personal responsibility’ (Jones and Popke, 2010: 115; see also Hackworth, 2003), as it relied upon a mixed-finance redevelopment approach that encouraged the partnership of private entities, non-profits and state and local public sector stakeholders with public housing authorities.
Scholars have noted the foundational role of Wilson’s (1987) book
For example, in 2016, HUD enlisted the National Initiative for Mixed-Income Communities (NIMC) to analyse the HOPE VI programme. This research group explicitly utilises poverty deconcentration and neighbourhood effects research in their interpretation of the data, while social mix logic lurks implicitly beneath the surface. NIMC’s stated mission is ‘to help reduce urban poverty and promote successful mixed-income communities by facilitating high-quality research and making information and evidence easily available to policymakers and practitioners’ (HUD, 2016: 8). Their report emphasises the goals of ‘ending segregation and concentrated poverty’ (HUD, 2016: 59). A separate, earlier report prepared by contracted experts for HUD in the year 2000 alludes to ‘extraordinary concentrations of poverty’ (HUD, 2000: v) and how HOPE VI ‘often replaces large buildings and developments with smaller ones, in an effort to deconcentrate the poor’ (HUD, 2000: 2). Additionally, it deploys neighbourhood effects research concerning persistent poverty to justify the deconcentration of the poor, although without directly citing sources: ‘Research has shown that persistent poverty, the kind that endures over many years and may be passed from one generation or another, tends to be found in neighborhoods where social support systems have broken down’ (HUD, 2000: 69). In these reports, poverty deconcentration and neighbourhood effects language are explicit; however, propositions favouring the forced reorganisation of neighbourhoods into mixed-income communities also display social mix logic insofar as they attempt to promote the integration of individuals from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds to avoid the spatial clustering of specific socioeconomic groups in particular neighbourhoods (Arthurson, 2004, 2012; Davidson, 2012; Sarkissian, 1976).
Perhaps the most straightforward example of these tethered academic discourses impacting policy and encouraging displacement is the MTO programme. Between 1994 and 2010, the MTO was an experiment undertaken by HUD that provided vouchers to poor families in public housing in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York in an effort to deconcentrate poverty by incentivising relocation to private market housing in less distressed neighbourhoods (Briggs et al., 2010; HUD, 2023). The families were randomly placed into one of three categories: (1) an experimental group, which received assistance to relocate to a neighbourhood with a poverty rate of less than 10%, typically a suburban area; (2) a comparison group, which received a Section 8 voucher to subsidise their rent without any specific location restrictions; and (3) a control group, which remained in public housing. An official 2011 report prepared by HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research explains that the office sought advice from a ‘Technical Review Panel’ of academics, including Robert J Sampson, in the ‘design, execution, and interpretation of the MTO study’ (HUD, 2011: iii).
The Final Impacts Evaluation report is littered with implicit and explicit allusions to poverty deconcentration, social mix and neighbourhood effects, uncritically describing the neoliberal shift in policymaking towards ‘alternatives to public housing’, such as voucher provisions, as deconcentrating poverty and disrupting undesirable ‘peer influences’. The report explains: Although public support for government housing assistance for the poor remains strong, policymakers have become increasingly interested in alternatives to public housing that may help deconcentrate poverty in America . . . Over the last several decades, housing vouchers and related types of ‘tenant-based’ subsidies have accounted for a growing share of all new federal commitments for low-income housing (Quigley, 2000). (HUD, 2011: 2)
On neighbourhood effects, the report cites the neighbourhood effects scholarship of Sampson and his colleagues. For example: Previous nonexperimental studies suggest that risky and criminal behavior is the outcome domain that has among the strongest associations with neighborhood conditions (Sampson et al., 2002). Neighborhoods may affect risky and criminal behavior through peer influences, the ability of local adults to monitor and support pro-social behavior in the community, or other factors that make pro-social alternatives to crime (such as school and work) more or less attractive. (HUD, 2011: xxix)
The permeation of these academic discourses in the case of the MTO is clear, evinced by the Office of Policy Development and Research’s consultation of academics who advance these discourses and their citations to this variety of scholarship. Results from this report, however, show that the MTO programme had only limited success: An interim multisite evaluation of MTO’s effects was conducted four to seven years after families entered the program. At that point, families who had moved to lower-poverty neighborhoods were doing significantly better than those in the control group in some important respects. On many other dimensions, however, the different groups had virtually identical outcomes, on average. Since previous theoretical work and observational studies had led to expectations of large neighborhood effects, this overall pattern of interim results was disappointing for many in the research and policy communities. (HUD, 2011: xv)
Furthermore, the report explains: MTO moves only modestly reduced neighborhood racial segregation. For control group members, 88 percent of their neighbors were members of racial and ethnic minority groups. Families in the experimental group saw a decline of nearly 6 percentage points in the share minority, while the decline was smaller for those in the Section 8 group. Families in both treatment groups, even those who moved with an MTO voucher, were still living in census tracts that were three-quarters minority. (HUD, 2011: xvi)
Outcomes of the MTO programme have therefore been mixed and unimpressive across an array of metrics, while the programme as a whole can only be characterised, at best, as having modest success.
The two programmes, HOPE VI and MTO, markedly differ in that they go about accomplishing their goals to deconcentrate poverty and disrupt pathological ‘peer influences’ in contrasting ways. HOPE VI demolished territorially stigmatised public housing to replace it with mixed-income communities, seeking the permanent displacement/‘relocation’ of some percentage of low-income, often racialised residents. Slater (2013: 373) summarises the detrimental impacts of the HOPE VI programme and an English programme called the Housing Market Renewal (HMR) programme: The human costs have been immense – studies of persons displaced under these programs document a litany of social harms, among them broken social networks, continued housing problems, inadequate counselling services, health deterioration and various forms of psychosocial stress, particularly acute among the elderly, where reactions to the demolition of their long-time homes can be classified as grief. (Allen, 2008; Bennett et al., 2006; Crookes, 2011; Fullilove, 2004; Goetz, 2003; Popkin et al., 2005)
Meanwhile, the MTO takes on what might be described as a more facially benign approach to deconcentrating poverty and disrupting ‘residential pathology’ in territorially stigmatised places: some residents in areas of concentrated disadvantage are offered vouchers to incentivise their relocation away from stigmatised neighbourhoods. This may not
Indeed, encouraging residents to move away from territorially stigmatised neighbourhoods perpetuates the notion that such places are irreparably plagued by socioeconomic pathology. The choice is therefore made not to invest in and uplift stigmatised neighbourhoods, but instead to incentivise certain residents to leave who in fact may prefer to stay if only their neighbourhoods’ conditions were improved. A chance at a better life is not offered in situ but is rather predicated on relocation and the disruption of established social ties and networks. August (2014) explains that residents of stigmatised neighbourhoods often develop strong connections to their neighbourhoods, having a strong sense of community, robust social networks, local amenities and conveniences and local services and organisations tailored to their specific needs. However, as August (2014) shows, these advantages are offset by the challenges of living in a neglected, underinvested neighbourhood – primarily a consequence of rollbacks in welfare state support, particularly in the realm of public housing – and safety challenges vis-á-vis drug-related activity. Thus, displacement via poverty deconcentration and imposition of social mix (e.g. by public housing demolition or voucher provisions) functions as a distraction from reforms that would attack systematic foundations of concentrated urban poverty and its reproduction (Olsen, 2014). To be sure, the proliferation of ‘distracted’ policy informed by poverty deconcentration, social mix and neighbourhood effects notions is not limited to the USA. Many studies show that poverty deconcentration and social mix strategies – tinged more recently by neighbourhood effects discourses – have been enacted in policies across other parts of the Global North such as in the UK (Davidson, 2008), the Netherlands (Uitermark, 2003), Australia (Shaw, 2012), Canada, France and Ireland (Lees et al., 2012).
Crucially, the problematisation of neighbourhoods lends to their territorial stigmatisation, their being marked as ‘problem places’. As Kallin and Slater (2014: 1364) argue, this stigma exacerbates the rent gaps that prepare the way for gentrification. ‘The reliance on stigma as an engine of regeneration is written into the very policies that are aimed at these areas of deprivation. As stigma gets worse, the rent gap – the opportunity for profit – gets wider’. Thus, discourses of poverty deconcentration and social mix work to advance reputational and coincident rent gap-widening territorial stigma – paving the way for the gentrification of low-income, often minoritised communities. Moreover, neighbourhood effects scholarship has shown us that neighbourhood contexts are important frames for understanding urban disadvantage and gentrification dynamics (Lee and Perkins, 2023; Sampson, 2012, 2019). However, it has also been used by policymakers homing in on neighbourhood-level solution-seeking and in urban-economic appropriations to intervene on neighbourhoods using poverty deconcentration and social mix frameworks, which in turn pathologise poor and majority non-White neighbourhoods and promote displacement in the name of ‘deconcentration of poverty’ and ‘social mix’. Surely, the peripheralisation of macro-structural factors in the neighbourhood effects model has lent to the ease with which it has been deployed to justify displacement-inducing policies.
Assessing the damage
Ideological positions associating urban disadvantage with individual decision-making within ‘bad neighbourhoods’ have become widespread among not only policymakers but also the public. Rather than examining the see-sawing disparities in development that drive inequality across space increasingly led by elite real estate interests (developers, investors and aspiring homeowners) and the largely classed, raced lines along which investment and disinvestment occur, some academics centre what they argue to be problem neighbourhoods – thereby supporting their territorial stigmatisation and identifying them as the proper targets of political solution-seeking. In the hands of a parasitic relationship between elite real estate interests, city planning and policymaking, the most common ‘solution’ is gentrification (Stein, 2019).
Present academic discourses feeding into the academy-to-policy pipeline – for example, concentrated disadvantage, social mix and neighbourhood effects – neglect engagement with the destructive force of capitalist uneven development as they instead focus on problematising neighbourhoods and the residents within them. Out of the picture in current academically legitimated policy, then, is any resistance to capitalist uneven development, moved forward by a corrupt alliance of elite real estate interests, city planning and policymaking. Thus, ‘the mode of production that shapes [our] urban environments . . . churning, intact – produces further “concentrations” just down the street’ (Slater, 2013: 373). To be sure, policy propositions that would combat the (re)production of urban disadvantage and gentrification, and which take aim at the fundamental, immiserating mechanisms of uneven development, are known, yet they are not enacted, as the stranglehold of uneven development and its avatar in the ‘real estate state’ is (perhaps often unwittingly) abetted by urban and housing academics who either totally neglect or misguidedly peripheralise structural factors in their scholarship.
In Think tanks have reframed a serious crisis of housing affordability as a crisis of housing supply caused by too much state interference in the market, which, inter alia, has trapped people in failed social housing estates that can never be improved. Viewed through the analytic lens of agnotology, we can see a complete inversion going on: the structural and political causes of the housing crisis – that is, deregulation, privatization, and attacks on the welfare state – are put forward as desirable and necessary remedies for the crisis that will squash an intrusive state apparatus.
Neoliberal proposals to deregulate housing facilitate the rolling forward of the gentrification frontier, as private developers seize upon territorially stigmatised areas wherein large rent gaps have emerged. Further, proposals to slash welfare would leave economically ailing residents in stigmatised places without a lifeline. Indeed, the selective withdrawal of the state to promote private enterprise is a central mechanism of displacement. Much scholarship has suggested that the opposite approach – the extension of state influence – can restrain the rapacious propensities of capital that result in displacement.
Widespread rent control in tandem with tenants’ rights legislation and wage hikes (rather than vouchers incentivising stigmatised neighbourhood abandonment) would prevent much displacement (Dorling, 2014; Slater, 2021; see also Diamond et al., 2019), and the aggressive taxation of vacant housing units would disincentivise the speculative hoarding of real estate not in use (see Segú, 2020). These would surely be potent counter-displacement measures. The implementation of a redistributive universal basic income would reduce the immiserating effects of uneven development by putting money into the hands of people in disadvantaged communities (Gibson et al., 2020) – money that can be spent locally and generate multiplier effects. Restrictions on the market share of corporate landlords would profoundly curb gentrification’s encroachment and the intensity of uneven development across space (Fields and Vergerio, 2022). Further, the dramatic expansion of state-owned housing stock in places that lack robust public/state housing sectors would allow rents to be determined apart from market forces yet increase needed housing supply (Chen et al., 2016; Madden and Marcuse, 2016). Considerations of such policies and others that attempt to redress the macro-structural underpinnings of urban disadvantage are too often erroneously rendered immaterial by the present neoclassical configuration of the academy-to-policy pipeline and its parochial, stigmatising problematisation of neighbourhoods and their residents. To be clear, enacting one or two of these measures cannot turn the tide of uneven development and its classed, raced (inter alia) immiseration; a constellation of comprehensive action must take place.
One key reason that the academy-to-policy pipeline manifests in its present form must be attributable to the localised, neoliberal character of contemporary urban planning. In the USA and other parts of the Global North, the waning of regional and national planning apparatuses in favour of local planning – which works closely with private developers and, indeed, largely on behalf of private real estate interests (Lauermann and Mallak, 2023; Stein, 2019) – has meant that academic discourses centring neighbourhood-level remediations are valued because these are the ones that may be most readily put into practice. National-scale programmes in the USA, for example, must be administered through local, disjointed planning institutions that have little communication with other localities around them, much less at regional, interregional or national scales (Foster, 2010). Attempts at large-scale policies, for example the HOPE VI and MTO programmes, take on a neoliberal character reliant upon private developers to redevelop communities (Hackworth, 2003; Hanlon, 2010; Jones and Popke, 2010) and private landlords to accept government-issued vouchers (Briggs et al., 2010). This neoliberal configuration of planning, which exists to variable extents across the Global North, acts as a major stumbling block to those who would seek to enact regional-, interregional- or national-scale policies targeting uneven development. Thus, although a body of critical urban scholarship stands at the ready to be taken seriously by ‘decisionmakers’, the solutions offered by these scholars come up against a fragmented policy and planning system that is incongruous with concerted macro-scalar efforts to ameliorate the most fundamental causes of concentrated disadvantage.
Meanwhile, less critical academic work regarding deconcentrating poverty, social mix and neighbourhood effects – which are concerned with local, particularly neighbourhood contexts, and which advance pathologising, territorially stigmatising understandings – takes an amenable shape to the pipeline leading to localised, disparate policy and planning institutions. What results is displacement legitimised by academics operating in this tradition. Therefore, it is not my claim that academics advancing these discourses are directly responsible for the increasingly localised and fragmented nature of policy and planning, but that – rather than correctly announcing the futility of such a project and advocating for coherent, larger-scale action – they have shored it up by making the problem of concentrated urban poverty seem solvable within the context of this localisation and fragmentation. Their ‘solutions’, however, are predicated on the displacement and gentrification of underinvested, often racialised urban populations as, like a shell game, new concentrations of disadvantage arise in other locales as capitalist uneven development churns onwards, waiting to be ‘solved’ in like fashion.
Conclusion
Discourse has material effects. The persistent denigration of place shapes and reinforces the contours of investment and disinvestment, constituting the essence of the territorial stigmatisation–gentrification nexus. Rent gaps are opened and closed, aided by the production of ‘reputational gaps’ (Kallin, 2017; Kallin and Slater, 2014) – the driving down of an area’s reputation such that the rent gap as an opportunity to profit further widens. Drawing our attention to a triad of interconnected scholarly discourses surrounding concentrated disadvantage, social mix and neighbourhood effects, I have begun to elucidate how some academic urbanists have given legitimation to policies resulting in displacement by aiding in the reputational gap- and coincident rent gap-widening stigmatisation of low-income, often minoritised urban neighbourhoods. The academic problematisation of the neighbourhood and the individual, rather than broader structural formations, provides policymakers with an academically legitimated licence to pursue only neighbourhood- and individual-level interventions that attempt to disrupt alleged pathology – the transmission of values, behaviours and culture that reinforce and reproduce disadvantage. Such actions work in furtherance of an intensifying reality of capitalist uneven development and its real estate state avatar, as state-led or state-encouraged gentrification ‘solves’ the problem of urban disadvantage via increased land values and urban renewal – in the process shifting disinvestment to other geographies, producing concentrations of disadvantage elsewhere.
Critically, scholarship operating at neighbourhood (or individual) scales finds itself malleable to the pipeline leading to localised and fragmented policy and planning institutions, where such policies may be quite readily put into practice. Conversely, concerted macro-scalar efforts attacking the fundamental causes of concentrated disadvantage are incongruous with neoliberal policy and planning systems. While this debates paper has begun to demonstrate a link between academic discourse and displacement-inducing urban policies in the USA, the limitations of its methodology provide an opening for more extensive research. Important questions remain underexplored, for example how exactly academy–policy networks are forged, within which the role of academic consultancy and the selective funding of academic research by biased entities must be interrogated. Furthermore, while this article demonstrates that some measure of influence is exerted by academic discourse on displacement-inducing urban policy in the USA, its US-centricity limits its generalisability to other national contexts. Almost certainly, the degree of influence exerted by academic discourse generally and the specific discourses that I discuss here on urban policy are highly variable across and within national geographies, meriting further investigation. Finally, while I have examined three discourses – concentrated disadvantage, social mix and neighbourhood effects – these are not to be interpreted as the only academic discourses that may influence policies productive of displacement either in the USA or elsewhere. Assuredly, others exist, of which we should be vigilant.
I conclude with an entreaty to fellow urban and housing scholars to end their legitimation of displacement and its structural underpinnings, to disavow sleight of hand ‘solutions’ that have proven to be no solutions at all. We must take seriously other, heterodox ways of viewing the advanced capitalist urban condition that illuminate the dynamics of disadvantage and marginality in ways that avoid legitimising displacement. Together, we must foster and produce a research programme in fundamental opposition to the theft of working-class space by capital. It must be intrinsically critical of the capitalist production of space typified by unevenly developed geographies – and it must not insinuate that enduring solutions can be found within the present context of neoliberal localisation and fragmentation.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
Funding
ORCID iD
