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.

For decades community activists fought to increase access to capital for disinvested communities. Now community activists question whether communities have access to capital or capital has access to them. Their concerns are related to the expansion of subprime and predatory lending. The subprime crisis has often been conceptualized as the action of a minor group of predatory lenders, a problem that is individualized, segmented and inherently local. I suggest instead that mortgage capital is the post-industrial widget, the emblematic product of the post-industrial economy. Capital accumulated by owners is extracted from urban communities and flows through brokers and lenders to investors and the subprime lending industry, linking global (and local) capital to place. Place is the node that facilitates capital accumulation, completing the flow from the ethereal world of securities and investment in the secondary circuit of capital to the real-world place of extraction in urban communities. Subprime lending in this context can be seen as a critical component of the financialization of the economy. National housing, macroeconomic and tax policies have expanded the importance of banking and finance within the global and national economy by increasing demand for, and the supply of, mortgage capital. I illustrate the impacts of national financial policy on urban places by examining mortgage foreclosures in Essex County, New Jersey and by talking with residents of one urban community in Newark, New Jersey. Copyright (c) 2009 The Author. Journal Compilation (c) 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The wording varies from city to city, but the meaning is clear: the house or apartment you live in is going to be taken by the government and destroyed. The government will then sell the cleared land to someone else for private development. Please move. '' Anderson (1964, page 1) The`urban renewal' provisions of the US Housing Act of 1949 (US Congress, 1949) left a legacy of neighborhood destruction and displacement, culminating in a durable consensus across the political spectrum on the injustice of forcing people from their homes and communities (Anderson, 1964;Hartman et al, 1982;Sumka, 1979). After the end of large-scale government urban renewal, however, this consensus weakened as the singular causality and clear visibility of state action were privatized, diffused, and obscured amongst the varied actors involved in private-market gentrification (Hackworth and Smith, 2001;Marcuse, 1986;Smith, 1996). In cities of the Global North, displacement became harder to measure and easier to ignore as gentrification evolved within a broader affordability crisis of debt-leveraged financialization of housing (Hackworth, 2007; Immergluck, 2009), and as analysts considered the decisively larger scale of displacement in cities of the Global South (Harris, 2008; Winkler, 2009). Recently, new evidence from the US has further undermined the consensus, casting doubt on the extent of displacement and its causal links to gentrification (

After decades of disinvestment, population flight, and housing abandonment, a number of very-low-income urban neighborhoods became sites for reinvestment in the late 1990s, suggesting that a new process of neighborhood change was at work. This reinvestment bears much in common with what is traditionally or popularly thought of as gentrification: inmigration of higher income residents, transformation of neighborhood culture, and potential displacement of existing residents. Yet this new reinvestment process differs from conventional gentrification in important respects. In particular, high crime rates, and a lack of locational advantages or an attractive housing stock make this reinvestment all the more surprising and worthy of further investigation. Our goal in this paper is to explore this process of neighborhood change that emerged during the course of the 1990s, using as our illustrative case the West Side Park neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey (figure 1). We undertake a close analysis of this change, examine its context, the agents that initiated it, and the policy and political frameworks that support it, and we suggest possible implications.We argue that a nexus of forces have come together over the last decade to create this new process of neighborhood change in distressed cities such as Newark. In particular, a neoliberal policy regime, emphasizing poverty deconcentration, mixedincome neighborhoods, homeownership support, and reliance on the private market rather than the state, has played a key role in spurring new construction and a corresponding influx of eligible moderate-income, minority households. The local state

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