After Tompkins Square Park

Degentrification and the Revanchist City

Bibliographic Data

ID23337337
AuthorsN T Smith (0000-0002-2142-3841, corresponding author), Neil Smith (0000-0002-2598-9965)
Year1996
Pages93-107
Publication date1996-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueRe-Presenting the City (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherMacmillan Education UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/978-1-349-24439-3_5
OpenAlexW2345794067
ISBN9781349244393
LanguageEN
Citations received60
References cited3

After the stretch-limo optimism of the 1980s was rear-ended in the financial crash of 1987, then totalled by the onset of economic depression two years later, real estate agents and urban commentators quickly began deploying the language of ‘de-gentrification’ to represent the apparent reversal of urban change in the 1990s. ‘With the realty boom gone bust in once gentrifying neighborhoods’, writes one newspaper reporter, ‘co-op converters and speculators who worked the streets and avenues... have fallen on hard times. That, in turn, has left some residents complaining of poor security and shoddy maintenance, while others are unable to sell their once-pricey apartments in buildings where a bank foreclosed on a converter’. ‘Degentrification’, explains one New York realtor, ‘is a reversal of the gentrification process’: in the 1990s, unlike the 1980s, ‘there is no demand for pioneering, transitional, recently discovered locations’. Those few real estate deals that are transacted, he suggests, have retrenched to ‘prime areas’.1 ‘In the 1970s, the theory was that a few gentrified areas would have a contagious effect and pull up neighboring districts’ but ‘that didn’t happen’, says another commentator. Most bluntly, in the words of census bureau demographer Larry Long, ‘gentrification has come and gone’.2

Annexation · Boom · Bust · Census · Economic growth · Economic history · Economics · Estate · Gentrification · Keynesian economics · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Population · Real estate · Recession · Sociology · Speculation · Demography · Engineering · Finance · History · Law · Urbanization and City Planning

Tools

Open DOILibgen