Addendum: How to Kill a City

The metropolitan paradox

Development, place, and ownership have been on my mind recently, as I’ve begun to think about purchasing a house for the first time.

Purchasing a home is a significant temporal and spacial decision. You are planting an anchor in a specific place for a specific time (likely at least 5 - 10 years, or 5 - 15% of your life). By signing on the dotted line, you are guaranteeing that you can shape a specific place and let that place shape you.

And shape you they will - places influence the economic opportunities we have access to, the arts we can consume, the friends we have, our tastes and customs. Places become a part of us.

We feel ownership of places in the same way we feel ownership of other parts of our person. Even after years of absence, we want to be able to revisit those places - ideally in a form that is not too dissimilar to our memories.

The ability to revisit such places is a prerequisite to self examination. Losing access to a place - either because it has changed, or because you no longer have the economic ability to do so - hurts our ability to know ourselves.

NIMBYism and anti-gentrification sentiment stem from this feeling - people would rather keep an imperfect place alive than see it killed by development. Guaranteeing their continued ability to access a place is more important than the potential upside of better jobs or cleaner streets or a more vibrant community. Since that imperfect place is a part of them, they rightly feel a sense of ownership of it - even if they don’t own a home or plot in the area. Plus communities are largely spacial entities. If a place dies, the social network dissolves at the same time.

There is a fundamental tension between the role of places as a part of our narrative selves and the role of places as economic engines. Anger about gentrification is about far more than this - there are more fundamental issues of power, ownership, corruption, and inequality - but I believe this tension is the root.

Even in an ideal world, it’s a tension we must all face. Progress is inextricably linked with loss.