Yes, gentrification is fascism. But it’s not too late to shut down both.

Defying Gentrification, Crafting Liberation for Friday April 25, 2025

Listen/watch an annotated version of this newsletter above or on your favorite podcast player.

Yes, gentrification is fascism and I don’t need to cite any other sources besides my own life experience to say it.

I will include this link to the Hampton Insittute’s policy paper from 2021 that makes the case for gentrification as settler-colonialism that extends the definitions beyond Ruth Glass’s original definition of gentrification, which was more relatable to the context of London and how it had become “Americanized” (in her words). I also like this paper from Liberation School on gentrification and how even before it had a name, it had an energy in the bowels of capitalism.

At the end of the day, the g-word is just a simple way, the way the f-word is also a simple way of saying that this shit is fucked up for me trying to keep a house and a livelihood as Black, queer, feminist, suspected neurodivergent in the way that’s going to send me to the work camps, person that’s broke because I can’t figure out one, work cultures and two, I still feel like a little Bama from the South in this whole DC area stew, that’s not so focused on the federal circus.

And yes, since I have to have a job or some kind of income to have a home…

…And yes, since most cities need to control their population and make money to provide for their populations…

…And one of the best ways to do that is to tax new residential buildings with high rents and purchase prices, to provide said services…

…is gentrification…

….And both of these ways are control of how people and their cultures and spaces look, feel, and sound because unfortunately, most of our leaders do not look holistically at how their economic development ideas affect how people are allowed to express themselves, because it’s supposed to make money no matter what.

This is how gentrification ends up being fascism.

And right now, the American brand of fascism is cooking everyone, even those that were supposed to be shielded.

Like our state and local governments, economic development corridors, craft businesses, contractor businesses, white women, white men that aren’t in the current administration’s purview. The military and the entire industrial complex. Humanities and art that was already over-policed by tedious grant cyles and applications that was supposed to shield us from being cut off.

But they just cut us off anyway.

Again we in urbanism land have been acting in a scarcity mindset and enforcing respectability politics in how we plan and administer our plans and this moment just amplifies that.

But we get nowhere without properly dreaming.

And we get nowhere controling people we don’t like because we are so afraid they will cut our coins off. Or controlling ourselves because we fear the end of those coins jangling.

Because so many of you who wanted to silence and control me and others like me, are sitting at home underpaid, distraught, depressed, and distressed, looking at a loss of your home and livelihood, because of who you are. And all that control and constraint and “respect” wasn’t enough.

But, for my Black church/ gospel heads, let’s take a deep breath, and listen to this.

For my meditators despite your belief system.

And for my fellow manifestors:

And now that you’ve listened to that. Let’s think about the future. Let’s talk about my Defying Gentrification framework.

When we can take care of ourselves through our faith (in ourselves first and foremost, no requirements for a higher power here, and if your higher power hates, then trash it) our creation and cultivation strategies and our basic care needs together…

…Then, as a group, we work on all those other things.

If you are one of those groups that’s struggling up above for the first time ever or the first time in a long time, you still have a little bit of your power to turn things around.

How?

Get them lawsuits drafted and that money ready to back up the people who really back you up. Take that money from the police budget. Stay out in the streets on behalf of folks like me at risk of being snatched up off them.

Because instead of controlling bodies, we are now in the business of defending the things like housing, healthcare, parks, transit, and homegrown businesses that do things that feed back into our economies and that trade willingly, freely, and fairly around the world.

You no longer care who we sleep with, what we look like, how we sound, and whether we are perfect.

The slate is wiped clean.

Because we don’t have to gentrify our spaces to have abundance in our towns and cities. And we don’t have to put the undesirables away.

But, we have to fight back and take down those who are in a prime position to break all of it down.

And I believe it’s not too late.

Will you join me?

Mx Sankofa Wuf (because she had no first name and I decided that she could represent the progress that has happened in the 20 years since I first matriculated at NC State on campus) and I right after I finished the video annotation for this post. Oh and yes, she was dancing with me during Currensea too! My Black fellow NC State alumni of a certain time period will resonate with why I named her Sankofa.

Until next time, because there will be a next time,

Kristen