notes.husk.org/likes images.

Image: Metahaven.

Quote: Neil Smith, Gentrification In Brief - a Marxist geographer writing in the 1980s about gentrification on the Lower East Side, NYC:

“Die Yuppie Scum” isn’t a very good analysis of gentrification. Even yuppies have very limited choices in the housing market, albeit far more choices than the poor. By contrast, the owners of capital intent on gentrifying and developing a neighbourhood have a lot more “consumer choice” about which neighbourhoods they want to devour, and the kind of housing and other facilities they produce for the rest of us to consume. There is a huge asymmetry between the power of multi-millionaire capitalist corporations in the market and the “power” of someone trying to rent a flat on an average city income. So while the question of consumption and the availability of consumers is by no means irrelevant, it is secondary to the far greater power of capital.

Found via The ‘Fucking Hipster’ Show: Mocking hipsters in the service of capital. by Anthony Galluzzo, Jacobin magazine, 9 May 2013.