A local academic who studies gentrification¹ tweeted recently that he was “fascinated by how tenant groups have adopted NIMBY tactics and narratives”² (NIMBY is short for Not In My Back Yard). This would be a fascinating trend if it was true.

What is true is that in opposing developers and their developments, one typically has something they’re trying to preserve. For NIMBYs that something is usually a segregated, exclusive community, rife with the luxuries low-density, high-value housing provides such as low through traffic and separation from poor, dispossessed people whether through distance or by use of fences, walls, and gates. While I can’t speak for the tenant group in question (Wasatch Tenants United), I do stand against many of the planned and underway developments in Salt Lake as a matter of opposing gentrification and capital. Rather than preserve segregation and luxury, anti-gentrification strives to preserve affordability and neighborhoods which have long been home to people of color and other either currently or historically dispossessed people. To conflate anti-gentrification with NIMBYism is to equate the fight to protect the exclusivity of the upper classes with the fight to protect the crumbs the lower classes have been allowed to have, crumbs gentrification aims to reclaim.

What would have been a better critique of current anti-gentrification actions is that they haven’t provided a positive vision of the city they’d like to see instead of our current capitalist reality. What would Salt Lake look like if people were free to produce the spaces they lived in? In which they had the free time through the reduction (or abolition) of work to build connected, social neighborhoods, build community? What would life look like if people were free to live their lives according to their needs, passions, and desires, rather than according to the false needs of capitalism (the need to pay for housing, food, experiences, etc. in fact any of the things in life that must now be bought)?

What anti-gentrification is currently missing, or is just yet to articulate, is the realization that gentrification will continue until the current order of things is totally destroyed, a truth we must incorporate into the actions, strategies, tactics, and goals we bring to bear in our struggle.

– brick