Capital City: Gentrification And The Real Estate State

Several years ago, my roommate and I were evicted from our small, ground-floor apartment in the west end of downtown Toronto.

- Samuel Stein

Our landlord, who lived in the apartment above us, pushed us out so that he could jack up the rent. It was two years before Vogue magazine would name the area the second hippest neighbourhood in the world, citing a “verifiable artery of indie patisseries, homegrown labels, and hidden from-view galleries.” Even then, it was hard to imagine how much more clogged with well-heeled hipsters Toronto’s arteries could get.

Of course, we weren’t that different from them. We were in our early 30s, working salaried jobs in health care and community legal work (ironically, I was a tenant organizer). In contrast to many tenants, like those organizing rent strikes in nearby Parkdale today, we had the means to relocate within the neighbourhood and pay a slightly higher rent. Samuel Stein, the author of Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, might have described us as both “consumers” of gentrification and its victims.

Stein defines gentrification as a process where “capital is reinvested in urban neighborhoods, and poorer residents and their cultural products are displaced and replaced by richer people and their preferred aesthetics and amenities.” It’s a process that requires both producers – investors, landlords, and developers – and consumers – homeowners, tenants, shoppers, café patrons, bar hoppers. And Stein argues that it is city planners who make sure that both demand and supply exist, using state tools to spur on gentrification. It is a political process, not merely an economic or social one.