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A homeless man sleeps near King’s Cross in London, Britain.
A homeless man sleeps near King’s Cross Station in London. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA
A homeless man sleeps near King’s Cross Station in London. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

Gentrification isn't a benign process: it forces people from their homes

This article is more than 7 years old
Dawn Foster

Few things are more likely to make your latte taste bitter than being confronted with the human reality of gentrification.

Invariably, on leaving King’s Cross station in London every morning, the first person to speak to me is not an editor or colleague, but a complete stranger who explains they’re homeless and would appreciate any change.

It’s rare to see the same person twice: many homeless people sit outside the station whatever the weather. The Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh perhaps sees a different King’s Cross to me, focusing on the joys of private members bars and snooker clubs in this area. As with many places in London, King’s Cross has changed a great deal in the last five years and gentrified considerably. Unsurprisingly, many people have been wary of this, not from fear of progress but from fear of displacement and financial exclusion masquerading as “progress”.

Ganesh accuses the critics of gentrification of tipping into “a voyeur’s enthusiasm for squalor, an insistence on tenements and grime as features of the authentic urban experience”. I’ve met many people living in run down estates and facing eviction, and none of them praised the disrepair of their homes: they would welcome renovation. What they fear is that if their estate is considered run down, it is not repaired but demolished and their homes disappear in a haze of brick dust.

What’s common in Ganesh’s argument – and the pigheaded refusal to believe that gentrification is anything more than an increase in independent coffee shops – is a complete absence of engagement with those affected. The critics of Ganesh’s imagination are not people made homeless by demolitions and evictions under the guise of “regeneration”, but unaffected people nostalgic for a past London.

The people of the demolished Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle don’t merit a mention, nor do residents facing an uncertain future in the nearby Aylesbury Estate. And no wonder. Few things are more likely to make your symbolic latte taste bitter than being confronted with the human reality of gentrification: homeless children, people flung far from the areas they grew up in, and communities being forcibly torn apart and ejected.

This week’s report from Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the 2017 Homelessness Monitor: England, threw this into sharp relief. So-called “out-of-area placements”, where homeless people and families are housed in other boroughs and sometimes halfway across the country, account for 28% of all homelessness placements, up from 11% since 2010. The number of families in bed and breakfast accommodation has risen by 250% since 2009; and nearly 58,000 people were accepted as homeless by their council in 2015/16 – 18,000 higher than 2009/10.

This is a crisis, and anyone arguing it is not has no grasp of statistics never mind a moral compass. It is a crisis that is due, in part, to gentrification – but also to the attitude that excuses or erases the violence of gentrification. It’s more comfortable to argue that gentrification is little more than a slight sprucing up of a place and the growth of independent shops offering to relieve you of your cash, whose perks you can enjoy if you’re flush with cash and don’t feel your job or housing is precarious.

But gentrification isn’t just coffee shops and more brunch options: it is the growth of capital in local property with the attendant displacement of the community. Evictions, even if they aren’t physically violent, are mentally so. Being forced to leave your home is not just disruptive and stressful, but a clear message that you are unwanted and so are all the others like you.

A city is more than a playground for people with disposable income, not least because those serving you coffee and cleaning the schools and hospitals your children need also have to live there if it is to function. Gentrification isn’t a benign process: it forces people from their homes and displaces them to make way for capital. While you’re rich enough to enjoy the perks of rising house prices nearby, gentrification seems fine. But eventually, you too are likely to be priced out and displaced.

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