Displacement has been at the centre of heated analytical and political debates over gentrification and urban change for almost 40 years. A new generation of quantitative research has provided new evidence of the limited (and sometimes counter-intuitive) extent of displacement, supporting broader theoretical and political arguments favouring mixed-income redevelopment and other forms of gentrification. This paper offers a critical challenge to this interpretation, drawing on evidence from a mixed-methods study of gentrification and displacement in New York City. Quantitative analysis of the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey indicates that displacement is a limited yet crucial indicator of the deepening class polarisation of urban housing markets; moreover, the main buffers against gentrification-induced displacement of the poor (public housing and rent regulation) are precisely those kinds of market interventions that are being challenged by advocates of gentrification and dismantled by policy-makers. Qualitative analysis based on interviews with community organisers and residents documents the continued political salience of displacement and reveals an increasingly sophisticated and creative array of methods used to resist displacement in a policy climate emphasising selective deregulation and market-oriented social policy.

No abstract

No abstract

Hundred-billion dollar writedowns and trillion-dollar stock market fluctuations have drawn worldwide attention to America's subprime mortgage sector, and its linkages with predatory exploitation in working-class and racially marginalized communities. During nearly two decades of stealth expansion, agents of subprime capital fought regulation and reform by a) using the doctrine of risk-based pricing to equate financial innovation with democratized access to capital, b) appealing to the cultural myths of the 'American Dream' of homeownership, and c) dismissing well-documented cases of racial discrimination and predatory abuse as anecdotal evidence of rare problems confined to a few lost-cause places in what is otherwise a benevolent free-market landscape. The current crisis has undermined the third claim, but mainstream policy debates are reinforcing the first two. In this paper, we challenge all three of these ideological claims. Properly adapted and updated, Harvey's (1974) theory of class-monopoly rent explains how the localized, neighborhood exploitations of class and race in urban America have been woven through Wall Street into transnational webs of structured finance and investment. We map the race and class segmentation of subprime mortgage capital across several hundred U.S. metropolitan areas in 2004 and 2006, and we also analyzed the achievements and prospects of several progressive challenges to subprime exploitation. Subprime Goes Prime TimeAmerica's long-running boom in subprime mortgages met its catastrophic end in 2007. For years, an interdisciplinary group of scholars, attorneys, and activists diagnosed the gathering dangers in the sector, which is designed to provide high-cost, high-risk credit to low-income consumers and others with poor credit histories (Carr and