An interview with gentrification researcher, Adam Almeida
Why resisting gentrification doesn't mean resisting improvement, why it's a bad thing for London and what we can do about it.
A few weeks ago we ran an issue with the headline The gentrification of London: Beyond sky pools and cereal cafes, which looked at some of findings from a new report by Runnymede and CLASS (the Centre for Labour and Social Studies) called Pushed to the Margins: A Quantitative Analysis of Gentrification in London in the 2010s, an attempt to define gentrification and quantify its impact.
There was a lot of conversation around that issue, with people discussing the merits of gentrification, the reasons behind it, and what could be done about it (if anything). So we contacted one of the researchers behind the report, Alan Almeida, to ask him about his work and put some of these more knotty questions to him.
Tell us a bit about yourself and how you became involved with the research of gentrification.
I guess the first thing to start with is my accent, which is clearly not from this country. I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, and came to London in 2017 to do my Master’s degree, and then I just kind of stuck around.
When I moved to London, I was already interested in some of the questions around gentrification. My family still live in a very ethnically Portuguese neighbourhood, so seeing how the neighbourhood that I came from changed, especially in the past ten years, made me begin to question the underpinnings of gentrification and the impact on communities like mine.
So when I moved to London I remember feeling, ‘oh my god, this city is like gentrification on crack’. At the same time, as part of some of my work for grad school, I started to collect ethnographic data on gentrification movements that were happening in my neighbourhood in Elephant and Castle. From there I began to develop some knowledge and understanding of the issue and the scope of it in London. So that’s kind of how I got interested in the gentrification of the city.
And how did you become involved with the Pushed to the Margins report on gentrification?
CLASS had a job posting for a research project on gentrification. I thought it was perfect for me so I applied and, thankfully, got it.
I was the research analyst behind the report, so what that meant was I was transforming all the data, providing an analysis, writing up the report and meeting with external actors in order to build and expand it.
We all know what gentrification feels like and looks like; we can all recognise when an area’s been gentrified, but I wanted to know: What does that look like? And how do you measure the changes that are happening, and how does that affect people on the macroscopic level?
Is it just the Goldsmith students of New Cross and Peckham, and the creative in Hackney? No, because we’re seeing gentrification in places that a hipster wouldn’t be caught dead in. So I wanted to broaden the understanding of what gentrification means and how it takes different shapes by catering to different audiences throughout the city, and looking at that varied experience.
Gentrification gets used as a pejorative term, but it also gets used as a positive term. It’s this very loaded word but it’s also an amorphous word that is hard to pin down. Is that what you wanted to try and do with this report: to put some kind of borders around the term and be able to say “This is what gentrification actually means and this is what’s actually happening”?
Exactly. Traditionally the term has been too fickle. People say it’s a good thing, “Oh finally this area is getting gentrified”. I think that was more common at the start of the 2010s. But now we’re starting to see some realisation about what the actual effect is. It’s really difficult to find homes that are affordable near transit stations, to find homes close to the geographic core, to find homes where you grew up and where your parents still live. All of this stuff.
I think there’s a misunderstanding that resisting gentrification means resisting improvement. Of course we want people to live in communities that are healthier, that are thriving and engaging and allow space for development. The issue is that usually that necessitates people within an area being pushed out.
There’s also that danger of slipping into the idea that, if all these coffee shops move into the area, then coffee shops must be inherently bad. Coffee shops aren’t inherently bad! The issue is when these coffee shops cater to a demographic that is purely aspirational and not reflective of the people who actually live there.
So, you know, they’re charging amounts for coffee that the people living in the council flat behind the shop wouldn’t be able to afford and so you have to ask, who is this really for and what is the underlying motive? How come this gets celebrated not just by the council but also by the media, who say things like ‘up and coming restaurant in Peckham’?
When we posted our issue about the report, two real themes came out of the conversation around it. First, that gentrification is kind of inevitable, that it will happen no matter what and; second, gentrification is simply a good thing, that it symbolises improvement and should be welcomed. How do you answer those kind of arguments?
Well, I think that would be a very convenient thing for the developers and the councils if gentrification was inevitable! They would certainly want us to believe that, but it obviously isn’t. So I think there’s this misconstruing of the idea of change.
Of course areas always change, people are mad that Brick Lane has changed, but that area used to be a Jewish area, and there was an Irish community there, and it was the Huguenots before that. It’s completely right that that area shouldn’t stay the same. There should be change, there should be dynamism to areas. The issue is that that the changes are, more likely than not, for the worse, and make life more difficult for working class people.
So the people came to Brick Lane, who fled persecution or oppression or instability and were able to find a refuge… And now there’s a Chanel store in Spitalfields where there were Jewish fabric stores or book stores.
So, on the topic of whether or not it’s inevitable; I think that what needs to come han-in-hand with all this change is strengthening things like our right to housing, to improving things for tenants and improving security of tenure and support for small and medium sized businesses and enterprises. Because when people have a secure foundation, then they’ll also feel invested in improving the area. If they have a stable foothold then they’ll feel more positively about the changes that are coming into the area because it doesn’t feel like it’s forcing them out.
The movement at Brick Lane that’s happening right now is really beautiful and it speaks to a new understanding and a new collectivism around what’s important, what we want from our cities. Especially at a time when Covid has ravaged the Bangladeshi community. When Bangladeshi people are, I think, the ethnic group that’s most likely to live in overcrowded conditions, what does it mean that there’s a giant new development that looks like it could be in Stratford, or White City or Croydon? It’s just nondescript, in an area that’s so integral to public understanding and international perception of London.
What about this idea that it’s a wholly positive thing, Can you have an area’s improvement without forcing people out?
Well, if we think of gentrification as displacement at its core, then there’s never a good amount of displacement. There’s not a good amount of “we moved just enough people to get kind of the mix of the area right.” So I think that’s the first thing to say.
Of course, there’s a possibility of development that improves an area and speaks to things like introducing new transit lines that help people get home safer and connect them to employment opportunities. The issue is that improvements to the neighbourhood have to come in and increase security for working class people, and that’s just not being seen.
So, I think the idea that it’s a good thing is something that’s very pervasive. Someone will say, “Well, they tore down the Heygate estate and that place was a dump, it was dangerous, the residents wanted the redevelopment” but at the end of the day it’s not the same populations who are moving into the new flats that are being built there. It’s 86 flats out of I think 3000 they built that are social-rented which is a fraction of what we used to be 100%, socially rented [editor’s note: it was actually fewer than that: 74 social-rented flat out of 2,500 units].
It’s the same thing with schools. People talk about schools improving when rich people move in because they have more ability to advocate. There’s studies of schools in South Hackney in the 2000s of people moving into Victoria Park village, and when middle class parents were starting to select schools that they considered to be good it put a lot of stress on the school population. What it meant was working class kids were excluded from the process because middle class families were able to buy much closer to the school, and so the catchment area was shrinking because the number of pupils was increasing. So, sure, that school improved. But for who? It improved as a school for middle class parents and their children, rather than as a school for kids regardless of their class or race.
Every student should be able to go to a school, it shouldn’t have to be the introduction of wealthier, white people into an area for the council and the government to improve the area. There should be a way to improve people’s lives without having to have wealthier people there in order to cater to that, it’s ludicrous.
What’s the reception to the report been like? Has it achieved what you wanted it to?
The reception has been really interesting, because it’s been resoundingly positive. We’ve got in a lot of coverage in the major newspapers, which is really great that it’s resonating with people. As the researcher who did this work, it makes me feel good that I was able to speak to the experience. At the same time it’s heartbreaking because it paints a really sad and kind of perilous picture of what it means to live in London in the present day.
I think as someone who’s a London transplant, I wanted something that Londoners would read and recognise and say, “Yep, that’s exactly what I thought was happening. This doesn’t surprise me”. I wanted that confirmation and I wanted primarily to broaden the understanding beyond the coffee shops, beyond avocado toast and all that kind of stuff and get across that we need to focus less on these one off places that are taking the piss, and that are a small fraction of the issue.
Of course people feel hypersensitive to it, but I think what we need to understand is that this is a coordinated effort and that it relies on developers, the councils, international capital… So there’s a real globalised coordinated effort going on in order to profit off of the lives of others.
If someone’s reading this, is there anything they can do as an individual? Because it’s very easy to say ‘Oh, it’s the council’s job to sort this out’ but is there anything a person can do to contribute to the level of diversity and fairness within their area?
The most important thing I would say is, just be aware of the history of the area. Learn the history of the area and contribute to the community. I think people can be scared to live in a community with other people, especially when they feel like they don’t have a lot of shared experience, they speak different languages, or they’re born in a different country.
But ultimately I think, because it’s such an institutionalised, systemic thing, that it really takes coordination and mobilisation on the part of the public. You know you can’t fight anything just one on one, and I don’t want people to think they can personally fight gentrification in their area, because that’s not how it works. It would be you against global capital, and if one person could defeat that, then they would have already!
You can follow Adam on Twitter here. And CLASS here.
The Battle for Brick Lane website has all the details about the Truman Brewery campaign. And you can follow the Spitalfields Trust on Twitter here.