very interesting. i especially liked the expressly feminist and queer analysis.

"Centrality and proximity are critical to the survival of women-headed households in the city. Early research from the 1970s and 1980s illustrated that women make more intensive use of urban services including public transportation, parks, social services, healthcare, and other resources that, by their proximity, make juggling family and paid work, especially for low income women, possible. Women also rely heavily on the informal play space networks that they develop in order to help with childcare, eldercare, transportation, and more. Displacement is, therefore, not just an issue of having access to housing, but of having access to those networks and services. When women lose their housing, they also lose babysitters, carpool buddies, and all sorts of other informal helpers who make up the patchwork of care necessary to survive in places with inadequate social services."

"Given its ability to both exploit and exacerbate gender inequalities, gentrification is a process that reinforces women's subordinate position in the home and shores up heteronormativity. With constrained options in the housing market for single women and women-headed households, women are structurally compelled to form traditional domestic partnerships despite the violence and exploitation of domestic labor that typically accompanies these relationships."

"We ought to keep the focus on what gentrification means for the most vulnerable members of the queer community - those who already had the least access or acceptance in gay villages. This framing highlights how gentrification preys on and reinforces existing divisions and hierarchies of sexual and gender acceptance. The over-policing of particular queer bodies in and around gentrifying gay neighborhoods and former red-light districts has meant increased systemic violence against trans women and especially trans women of color as well as queer and trans youth of color. Arrests of trans women on suspicion of engaging in sex work have accelerated in gentrifying areas, leading to incarceration in men's prisons under dangerous circumstances. Queer youth, who are more likely to be living in poverty or experiencing homelessness, are targeted for ticketing or arrest by police enforcing anti-panhandling laws and nuisance complaints. Queer people of color face racial profiling that manifests in stop and frisk tactics or carding and, of course, the greater likelihood of police violence. All of these groups deal with this violence in a context where they know they have little support from the mainstream queer community who may be actively encouraging over-policing of the undesirable unruly queers that threaten their property values and acceptance from the wider society."

"Gentrification has both taken advantage of and intensified long-standing divisions and inequalities within the queer community. Here it relies not only on the class inequalities among, for example, women and men, cis and trans people, white and racialized queer people, but also on the boundaries of social tolerance for gender and sexual difference. In other words, gentrification firms up and depends on homonormativity, a version of queer life that largely conforms to the institutional, political, familial, and sexual norms of heterosexuality, for example monogamy, marriage, parenthood, property ownership, and nationalism. Queer life that does not fit into, or in fact deliberately exceeds these norms, is being gentrified, sometimes literally, to death. In this way, gentrification supports a liberal agenda of gender and sexual tolerance that accepts and even celebrates a thin slice of the queer community at the expense of others. It also benefits from these social and political dynamics in that it capitalizes on the desire for acceptance by some by offering pathways to normativity through property ownership, consumption, and lifestyle choices."

"The home is the major vehicle for wealth creation for average people. It is the single largest purchase most people will ever make and the biggest asset most will ever own."

"One of the points that [Ta-Nehisi] Coates makes clear is that when someone is robbed, someone else gets richer. In other words, the theft of Black labor, property, and wealth is the foundation upon which the wealth of white people is built. I appreciate his insistence on this. It is too easy to focus on the harm of slavery without acknowledging the other side of the coin, which is that it made white wealth and power possible. And still does."

"Historian Robin D.G. Kelley explains that capitalism developed in context already saturated with racism. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of racial capitalism dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide." ( )