New Global Stud 2018; 12(1): 9–20

Nancy H. Kwak*
Anti-gentrification Campaigns and the Fight
for Local Control in California Cities
https://doi.org/10.1515/ngs-2018-0008

Abstract: Gentrification is integral to the functioning of global cities: interna-

tional developers raze old housing and renovate industrial lofts for elite service
workers seeking central-city accommodations. In the process, local real estate
markets heat up and working-class residents find themselves priced out, dis-
placed more often than not to peripheral sites of the global metropolis. In
Californian communities in downtown and the east side of Los Angeles, the
Mission in San Francisco, and Barrio Logan in San Diego, however, residents
rejected this process of involuntary movement, instead arguing for the value of
historically rich, rooted communities. In what appeared to be a wave of anti-
global activism beginning in the 1980s, residents worked to regain control over
their local communities through a variety of strategies including the deliberate
deployment of local culture and arts, and the increasingly savvy use of media
and public relations. With these tools, anti-gentrifiers asserted ownership with-
out property titles, housing rights without mortgages, and community buy-in
without cash deposits. Anti-gentrification movements thus constituted a direct
challenge to the workings of the global city while also feeding into a global
movement to restore political power to the grassroots.

Keywords: Los Angeles, San Francisco, gentrification, global cities, San Diego,
globalization

Gentrification is a symptom of the changing global economy. As cities restruc-

ture to entice mobile corporations and the migratory workforce of a service
economy, urban neighborhoods become vulnerable to a sudden, steep increase
in investment. The results are all too familiar to residents of any major urban
center in the world today: wealthier newcomers edge out established residents
and reduce the heterogeneity of the spaces they occupy, whether in ethnic and
racial composition or in the elite amenities they bring with them. Gentrification

*Corresponding author: Nancy H. Kwak, University of California San Diego, San Diego, CA
92093, USA, E-mail: nhkwak@ucsd.edu

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10 N. H. Kwak

occurs in particular cities because of the global economy, but it also occurs
globally and is studied globally.1
Logically, then, anti-gentrification campaigns challenge the global or glo-
balizing city on multiple levels.2 Anti-gentrification activists argue for local
sovereignty and local particularity rather than ascribing power to itinerant
forces. They are de-globalizers, refusing to cooperate with larger architectures
of the marketplace: instead of developing transnational networks with other
cities in order to compete more effectively for capital and labor, they reject the
placelessness and class inequality endemic to such a system.3 Instead, neigh-
borhood organizers demand urban planning be returned to local control; work-
ing-class residents fight back against evacuation by corporate developers, and
they resist the idea that their houses can be thought of first and foremost as
global commodities. While some scholars point to the rise of municipalism as a
response to the hegemonic processes of the state in the late twentieth century,4
anti-gentrification campaigns add an additional layer by highlighting the poli-
tical fissures within cities and emphasizing the importance of neighborhoods.
For anti-gentrifiers, neighborhoods are not interchangeable, and communities
cannot be liquidated with impunity. In organizing to protect local interests and
to retain local sovereignty at the level of the neighborhood, anti-gentrifiers also
battle a particular form of capitalist urban growth, rejecting both state and
corporate attempts to define legitimate consumption and land value. In
California, three metropolitan areas highlight the issues at hand: in Los
Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco – first, second, and fourth largest in
population for the state, respectively – residents in predominantly working-class
Latinx and non-white neighborhoods struggle to protect their communities from
developers and the middle- and upper-class investors that accompany them.
Conflicts between gentrifiers and anti-gentrifiers reflect a larger pattern of
imbalance between those who invest and profit from real estate, and those who
only pay in as renters. In Los Angeles neighborhoods with less than $500
median price per square foot and proximity to urban amenities, residents have

1 Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin, and Ernesto Lopez-Morales, Planetary Gentrification
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016).
2 For a discussion of the two terms, global versus globalizing cities, see the introduction to
Peter Marcuse and Ronald Van Kempen, eds., Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? (Malden,
MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000).
3 Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001).
4 One example of this municipalism can be found in Pamela Radcliff, Making Democratic
Citizens in Spain: Civil Society and the Popular Origins of the Democratic Transition, 1960–1978
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

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 Anti-Gentrification Campaigns 11

seen seismic shifts in price beginning in the 1990s and accelerating rapidly in
the past decade. Neighborhoods like Silver Lake, Echo Park, Highland Park to
the north of downtown, East LA and Boyle Heights to the east, Koreatown to the
West, and downtown itself experienced unprecedented median home value
appreciation.5 In San Diego, older, central neighborhoods like South Park,
Golden Hill, Barrio Logan/Logan Heights, and Lincoln Park enjoyed similar
boons. And in San Francisco, Realtor District 9 dominated new condominium
development. Within RD 9, the Mission District experienced a 47 % increase in
housing price from 2004 to 2014 – second only to Duboce Triangle’s 52 %.6 All of
these rising prices yielded windfalls for developers, homeowners, and “house
flippers.” (California led the nation in number of homes “fixed and flipped” in
the 2010s, and LA San Diego, and San Francisco came in at fifth, sixth, and
second largest numbers of “flips” in the nation in 2013.)7 Unlike owners and
investors, renters did not experience these sharp increases as opportunities. For
them, “hot” real estate markets resulted mostly in affordability crises.
In a larger historical context, anti-gentrification campaigns can be thought
of as part of a much longer struggle to secure affordable, decent shelter and halt
involuntary displacement. Beginning at the turn of the century and accelerating
with the creation of the Federal Housing Administration in 1934 and the promo-
tion of white, middle-class homeownership after World War II, renters have
struggled to articulate their rights as community builders.8 Precedents to anti-
gentrification campaigns can certainly be found in the rent strikes, squatter
housing movements, and anti-urban renewal campaigns of the 1950s, 60s, and
70s, and parallel comparisons can be drawn with the forced removal of “slum”
and “shack” dwellers across the globe through the latter half of the twentieth
century. And since at least the 1960s, urban sustainability advocates demanded

5 “Los Angeles Gentrification Maps and Data,” accessed February 2, 2018, http://www.govern
ing.com/gov-data/los-angeles-gentrification-maps-demographic-data.html.
6 Georgiana Mihaila, “San Francisco Gentrification all Mapped Out: See Where Prices Went Up
51 %,” accessed March 21, 2014, https://www.propertyshark.com/Real-Estate-Reports/2014/03/
21/san-francisco-gentrification-all-mapped-out-see-where-prices-went-up-51/.
7 Alexander E. M. Hess and Thomas C. Frohlich, “The Best Cities to Flip a House,” accessed October
18, 2013, http://247wallst.com/special-report/2013/10/18/the-best-cities-to-flip-a-house-2/3/.
8 For the history of tenant movements, see Ronald Lawson, ed., with the assistance of Mark
Naison, The Tenant Movement in New York City (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1986); Peter Dreier, “The Tenant’s Movement in the United States,” International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research 8, no. 2 (1984): 255–79; Ronald Lawson, “The Rent Strike in New
York City, 1904–1980: The Evolution of a Social Movement Strategy,” Journal of Urban History
10, no. 3 (1984); Pierre Hamel, Henri Lustiger-Thaler, and Margit Mayer, eds., Urban Movements
in a Globalising World (London: Routledge, 2003); Roberta Gold, When Tenants Claimed the City:
The Struggle for Citizenship in New York City Housing (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014).

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12 N. H. Kwak

policies that would provide cleaner, healthier living for people in their current
homes – not through relocation or clearance. Cumulative with these other
movements, then, anti-gentrifiers connect rights with time (how long have
people lived in a community?) with intangible place-making practices (how
have people made the community a desirable place to live?), and with basic
needs (how badly do people need their homes?).

Cultural Production and the Arts

What distinguishes gentrification and anti-gentrification movements from some of
these other moments and places, however, is the importance of cultural production
in defining neighborhood value. From its beginnings, gentrification has been
understood as a phenomenon intertwined with the sale of a distinctly urban
culture, with the production of an aesthetic perceived to be in short supply in the
suburbs. When Ruth Glass first coined the term “gentrification” to describe the
transformation of working-class mews to upscale residences in London, she did so
with an eye to the cultural and aesthetic appeal of the city.9 In the US, Sharon Zukin
observed the cachet of “loft living” for middle-class urbanites in 1960s and 70s New
York, and Aaron Shkuda detailed the central role of art in SoHo’s transformation
from vacant industrial space to studios to luxury enclave.10 This sort of emerging
urban culture of cool was bound together with the remaking of cities like New York
as epicenters of a global service economy. Arguably, adaptive reuse of industrial
spaces in SoHo or Williamsburg worked because these sites blended the aesthetic
appeal of cast-iron architecture, high ceilings of abandoned factories, and proxi-
mity to artist studios with spacious floor plans, easy access to jobs and amenities,
and in the case of Williamsburg, adjacency to breathtaking waterfront views.
It is important to remember that not all declining urban neighborhoods in
American cities suddenly saw an upswing in property value or housing demand
in the 1970s or even as late as the 2000s; in fact, fewer gentrified than not. Even
in cities successfully pivoting to a global service economy, not all neighbor-
hoods “turned” at the same time or even at all. The difference between those
neighborhoods that did and those that did not gentrify can be traced at least in

9 Specifically, Ruth Glass noted the importance of the restoration of historic homes and a
“switch from suburban to urban aspirations.” Ruth Glass, London: Aspects of Change (London:
UCL, 1964), xxxi.
10 Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Rutgers University Press,
1982). Aaron Shkuda, The Lofts of Soho: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980
(University of Chicago Press, April 2016).

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 Anti-Gentrification Campaigns 13

part to a general appraisal of cultural assets.11 Clashes between gentrifiers and

anti-gentrifiers were not merely turf wars but rather a fundamental conflict in
definitions of cultural value and its relationship to investment: mobile affluent
workers purchased gentrifying properties that would conceivably appreciate as
interest in the neighborhood (and its culture) grew. Gentrifiers saw their pur-
chases as risky but potentially rewarding individual investments; culture was a
generalized asset that imbued single properties with monetized value.
For anti-gentrifiers, culture was a more nuanced category: it might be an
urban chic of more recent vintage caused by an influx of artists in response to
vacated industrial and commercial properties (as in the new art district along
Third Street in Boyle Heights); it might be the outcome of a city’s deliberate
recruitment of artists and installation of art in order to stimulate new invest-
ment (as in Downtown LA’s arts district); or it might be the hard-earned legacy
of a community built by long-time residents (as in the historic murals threaded
through the Mission District in San Francisco or in Chicano Park in San Diego).
The first two might be categorized as part of the marketing of global cities,
both the result of an urban growth machine motivated primarily by corporate
profits and churning out a placeless aesthetic. In the last decade in particular,
Boyle Heights residents have organized highly effective methods of resistance
in response, calling attention to the use of artists and art as a way to disguise
displacement and eviction. They have led marches, assembled community
meetings, made protest art, and used social media with great effect. For
instance, the Boyle Heights Alliance Against Art-Washing and Displacement
(a combined effort by Defending Boyle Heights and School of Echoes), Defend
Boyle Heights, and Union de Vecinos closely followed, publicized, and cri-
tiqued the work of an art institution (Self-Help Graphics) and an art gallery
(PSSST). Some arts collectives like Ultra-Red described their anti-art washing
campaigns as “the art of resistance,” and Ana Hernandez, a member of Union
de Vecinos, declared the influx of artists an act of theft: “They are stealing our
culture, our ideology and our values that we have conserved for many years.”12
These actions were not without racial tensions, as both white and Latinx anti-
gentrifiers deployed the language of global cities with reconfigured meanings:
communities like Boyle Heights were wealthy in culture and history. They
had tremendous community assets. Long-time residents had made costly

11 Peter Marcuse and David Madden have written about these failures in In Defense of Housing:
The Politics of Crisis (London: Verso, 2016).
12 Carribean Fragoza, “Art and Complicity: How the Fight Against Gentrification in Boyle
Heights Questions the Role of Artists,” KCET, July 20, 2016. https://www.kcet.org/shows/art
bound/boyle-heights-gentrification-art-galleries-pssst.

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14 N. H. Kwak

investments. Newcomers were not simply participating in a housing market;

they were trying to profit from others’ cultural down payments. It was not clear
even among anti-gentrifiers, however, how that culture should be weighed,
evaluated, and owned.

Racial and Ethnic Identities

The third category of cultural production – the hard-earned legacy of a commu-
nity built by long-time residents – requires lengthier discussion given its pre-
valence in anti-gentrification struggles in California cities. It is here also
that some of the ethnic/racial dimensions play out most clearly. Cultural pro-
duction – street art, foodways, music – transformed struggling neighborhoods
into places of ethno-racial, historical meaning. Much has been written about the
importance of “place makers”: Natalia Molina, for instance, discusses the way
entrepreneurs in Echo Park transformed restaurants into “a crossroads, a phy-
sical and social space” that “collectively helped to define the areas where they
did business as ethnic spaces.”13 In San Francisco’s Mission District, multiple
generations of artists covered underserviced streets and alleys with vibrant
murals that joined diverse histories and a pan-Latinx arts movement with
political critique; “formats such as art performance, music, and local sports
organizations [were] crucial because they open[ed] spaces, counter-sites, and
conditions of possibility where Latinas and Latinos [could] publicly imagine new
ways of constructing racial, ethnic, gendered, and economic identities,” in the
words of Mary Romero and Michelle Habell-Pallan. Or as Cary Cordova summed
up, art was “never neutral, and its origins map[ped] cultural shifts and the
dynamics of power.”14 That collective definition of community identity could
be inter- or multicultural in character, as when Boyle Heights leaders organized
the annual Friendship Festival bringing together Mexican, Japanese, Black, and
Jewish participants in various activities including an arts program, art exhibit,
food sales, and parade.15

13 Natalia Molina, “The Importance of Place and Place-Makers in the Life of a Los Angeles
Community: What Gentrification Erases from Echo Park,” Southern California Quarterly 97, no. 1
(2015): 69–111.
14 Cary Cordova, The Heart of the Mission: Latino Art and Politics (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 10.
15 George J. Sánchez, “What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews: Creating
Multiracialism on the Eastside during the 1950s,” American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (September
2004): 642.

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 Anti-Gentrification Campaigns 15

Cultural production and art became important ways for communities to

assert ownership without property titles. In San Diego, Los Angeles, San
Francisco, and also other sites like Santa Ana (in Orange County), East Austin,
and across the southwest, cultural production often occurred in public spaces
rather than in art studios or private galleries.16 In the specific cases of Barrio
Logan, the Mission District, and Boyle Heights, for example, Latinx artists
produced murals that joined together social commentary with expressions of
ethnic and local identity. In San Diego, the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa
Park, the Centro de Salud, the Barrio Station, and Chicano Park all linked art
with community and urban space.
Of the four, Chicano Park was perhaps the most arresting in symbolic and
historic significance as well as in visual impact. The Park’s origins could be
traced back through a century of exclusion and marginalization: after the
Revolution of 1910, Mexican migrants moved north to settle in the multiracial
barrio of Logan Heights.17 From the early twentieth century on, the neighbor-
hood was disproportionately Mexican – by some accounts, roughly one quarter
of the city’s Mexicans lived in the industrializing neighborhood adjacent to the
bay.18 City rezoning in the 1930s brought heavy industries like shipbuilding and
chemical storage to the area, a trend that then led to further rezoning and an
influx of more noxious industries in subsequent years.19 The expansion of the
Naval Base removed waterfront access, and the construction of the Interstate 5
in 1964 exacerbated problems with environmental degradation even as the
freeway literally split the community in half. A second freeway interchange
connecting the Coronado Bridge to the city further subdivided the heart of the
community in 1969, replacing homes with overpasses and pillars. The final straw
came in the form of a 1970 city plan to build a new highway patrol station under
the bridge. At this last assault, community leaders rallied and organized mass
occupation of the 7.4-acre site. Protesters demanded conversion to a public park,
and they stayed for twelve days until the city acquiesced. Ground was broken in
1987 and the park completed three years after.
The real accomplishment of the park lay not in the physical infrastructure of
greenery and park benches, however, but in the murals on cement pillars

16 Daniel D. Arreola, “Mexican American Exterior Murals,” Geographical Review, 74, no. 4
(October 1984): 409–24.
17 Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr, Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San
Diego (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 45–46.
18 Ibid.
19 Lawrence Herzog, Where North Meets South: Cities, Space, and Politics on the United States-
Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 178.

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16 N. H. Kwak

holding up a freeway above. Organized by artists Victor Ochoa, José Montoya,

and Salvador Torres, the group of muralists who eventually came to work on
Chicano Park drew from Mexican artistic traditions while also building an ethos
of community solidarity and political activism. This solidarity was not merely
symbolic; roughly 300 Barrio Logan residents helped paint the large murals.
Each image served as a visible protest of the emphasis on movement over place,
and on the development of mass infrastructure without regard for equitable
distribution of costs and benefits.20 Culture was a response to and a rejection
of planned inequality: the images stood out in sharp relief against the smog of
daily commuters and provided a vivid reminder of the communities living at the
tailpipe of urban growth. Ultimately, the muralists were so effective at arguing
for the importance of Chicano/a culture in San Diego that two members of the
Chicano Park Steering Committee Josephine Talamantez and Manny Galaviz
were able to successfully apply for the park’s listing as a National Historic
Landmark in December 2017.21 Borrowing from Neil Smith, if “gentrification
had evolved by the 1990s into a crucial urban strategy for city governments in
consort with private capital in cities around the world,” then anti-gentrifiers
learned how to fight for their neighborhoods with a public-private partnership of
their own.22
Residents in the Mission experienced a similar trajectory. The ethnic com-
position of the Mission had taken shape in response to a similar series of city-led
programs. Urban renewal dislocated older communities and attracted Mexican
migrants and immigrants to the area even as lack of access to mortgage funds
chased away earlier European American residents. The Mission went from 11.6 %
“Hispanic” to 22.7 % in 1960, to 44.6 % in 1970.23 By the 1960s, the Mission had
already become an important center for a vibrant arts movement including the
Chicano Art Mural Movement and Precita Eyes Muralists Association that stimu-
lated one of the largest collections of murals in the US, the Mission Cultural
Center for the Latino Arts, the Galería de la Raza, and an annual Carnaval.
Ironically, this same cultural wealth became part of the appeal of the Mission to
white gentrifiers in the dot-com boom of the 1990s to 2002 and then again after
the housing market crash in the late 2000s: according to researchers at UC

20 Eric Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 161–71.
21 Gary Warth, “Chicano Park named National Historic Landmark,” San Diego Union Tribune,
January 11, 2017.
22 Neil Smith, “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy,”
Antipode 34, no. 3: 427–50.
23 Ocean Howell, Making the Mission: Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2015), 231–232.

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 Anti-Gentrification Campaigns 17

Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project, the Mission’s gentrification was at an

“advanced stage” because of its location and its “cultural richness.”24 Part of its
appeal could also be attributed to the aesthetic value of its housing stock: the
area had a large collection of Victorian homes – homes that were “often highly
desirable to wealthier residents due to their architectural value.” In addition, a
1988 city ordinance permitted the conversion of industrial spaces to “live/work”
units as an effort to provide artist communities with affordable housing.
This wealth of cultural assets yielded devastating housing losses for work-
ing-class residents in the Mission: statistical surveys showed roughly 925 house-
holds were evicted from 1990–1999, making the neighborhood the site of the
most evictions across the city; rental rates went down from 87 % of all units in
1980 to 76 % in 2013, and the non-white population dropped from 71.8 to 57.3 %
from 1990 to 2013.25 It was all the more ironic, then, that the California Arts
Council designated the “Calle 24 Latino Cultural District” one of the state’s 14
cultural districts in its 2017 “Visit California” tourism campaign, just as those
same Latinx populations were being priced out and evicted from the
neighborhood.26
Anti-gentrifiers had little political capital to cash in with city government,
and instead fought back with the same cultural capital they had invested in their
communities. Artist Josué Rojas organized a solo exhibition and community
project, in 2016 entitled “¡Géntromancer!,” and he explained the logic of his
work as follows: “People invested heavily in creating the community of this
neighborhood. It’s important to come together and form creative responses to
threats.”27 Meanwhile, an Anti-Eviction Mapping Project began as a strategy to
target web-savvy tech industry workers and to challenge them first, to visualize
displacement, and then to sign an anti-eviction pledge. The map creator Erin
McElroy’s appeal – “Don’t be awful” – called upon the humanity of potential
gentrifiers while offering resources and giving voice to those dealing with
precarious situations. In demanding recognition of the human stories behind
seemingly faceless real estate transactions, anti-gentrifiers once again offered an
alternate assessment of value. Rather than thinking of these movements as
“weapons of the weak,” they should perhaps be taken at their word as direct

24 UC Berkeley Case Studies, “Community Organizing and Resistance in SF’s Mission District,”
(The Urban Displacement Project, 2014), 6. Full report here: http://www.urbandisplacement.
org/case-studies/ucb#section-46.
25 Ibid.
26 “California’s 14 Cultural Districts,” http://www.visitcalifornia.com/feature/californias-14-cul
tural-districts.
27 Caille Millner, “Art brings healing as the Mission fights gentrification,” San Francisco
Chronicle, September 30, 2016.

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18 N. H. Kwak

challenges to the logic and operation of global cities.28 These efforts have only
gained momentum with national and international news coverage.

Complications and Conclusion

Can we conclude, then, that we are witnessing the rise of de-globalizing cities
and de-globalizing urban processes in the current decade? It is too early to
predict a clear victor, but there is abundant evidence that a struggle is under-
way. While anti-gentrifiers obviously seek the successful defense of neighbor-
hoods, even the most optimistic cases – where a neighborhood is able to defend
an ethno-racial, historic community despite the interest of much wealthier
investors – should be seen as a complicated victory by inconsistently anti-global
entities.
There are at least two issues that make them so: first, the language of
“heritage landscapes” and ethno-racial spatial identity can mask or even be
used to justify class exclusion. Upwardly mobile, young Latinx may decide to
move back to the “barrio culture” or to preserve the “Aztlan” of Boyle Heights,
Logan Heights, or the Mission in a process dubbed “gentefication by Chipsters”
(gentrification by the gente, or people in Spanish, and Chicano hipsters).29 Their
effects on the local housing market and on affordability crises can be the same
as their white counterparts, however, and it is not clear that their call to ethno-
racial solidarity is actually local in content or effect.
In many cases – for instance, in the reference to Aztlán – these “gente-fiers”
are indisputably anti-local. While cultural production might be tied to specific
blocks and neighborhoods, the cultures themselves are unabashedly transna-
tional, international, and global, evoking Latin American, Angeleno, Mexican,
Chicano, and other identities in the case of Boyle Heights, Echo Park, Logan
Heights, or the Mission District.30 A defense of these communities’ right to exist,
to resist displacement, can be understood as a defense of these larger global
networks. In a related vein, many gentrifying neighborhoods are international in

28 This concept comes from James Scott’s classic text, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of
Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
29 Jennifer Medina, “Los Angeles Neighborhood Tries to Change, but Avoid the Pitfalls,” New
York Times, August 17, 2013.
30 Anthony Macías, Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los
Angeles, 1935–1968 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 265–66. See also Macías, “Black and
Brown Get Down: Cultural Politics, Chicano Music, and Hip Hop in Racialized Los Angeles,” in
Sounds and the City: Popular Music, Place and Globalization, eds. Brett Lashua, Karl Spracklen,
and Stephen Wagg (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

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 Anti-Gentrification Campaigns 19

human composition, with first- and second-generation residents from multiple

nations. In addition they are transnational in capital flows, with residents
sending remittances to other urbanizing parts of the world and knitting together
disparate cities into a global financial network.31 Ethnic and racial identities
complicate the question of who can claim rights to the neighborhood and local
community.32
Second, the issue of environmental pollution and sustainable communities
complicates assessments of anti-gentrification campaigns as anti-global in
character. While it makes good sense to demand a right to the city – in this
case, more accurately a right to the neighborhood – it makes less sense to
characterize the overlapping struggle for sustainable neighborhoods as a
strictly local project. Gentrifying neighborhoods are not only conveniently
located in transportation hubs; they are the sites of some of the worst air
and soil pollution. Boyle Heights, for instance, sits at the juncture of an
enormous transportation juggernaut with four freeways and six freeway seg-
ments of the 5, 10, 60, and 101 meeting above and around it. The East LA
Interchange is the biggest freeway interchange not only in the city but by some
accounts, the world. Chicano Park sits under the 5 freeway in an industrial
corridor next to a Naval Base and the Port of San Diego. Up until 2002, a
chrome plating firm Master Plating contributed to elevated levels of hexavalent
chromium, and according to the California Environmental Protection Agency,
Barrio Logan ranked in the top 15 % of census tracts for diesel pollution, top
3 % for hazardous waste and impaired water bodies, and top 5 % for overall
pollution burden in 2013.33 Chicano Park sat in the > 70 to 80 percentile for
PM2.5 concentrations from 2012–2014 data from CalEnviroScreen 3.0, while
fifteen miles north in the more affluent community of La Jolla, that percentile
dropped to > 30 to 40.34 Even the Mission District in San Francisco, while
significantly better off than East LA or Barrio Logan in San Diego, still strug-
gles with its proximity to the 101, pollution generated by ever-increasing
population density and restaurant industry. According to one 2013 study by

31 Sarah Lynn Lopez, The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and
Urban USA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
32 Scott Saul, “‘Gente-fication’ on demand: the Cultural Redevelopment of South Los Angeles,”
in Post-Ghetto, eds. Josh Sides, Andrea Asuma, Robert Gottlieb, and Edna Bonacich (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012) 147–73; Mareike Ahrens, “‘Gentrify? No! Gentefy? Sí!’: Urban
Redevelopment and Ethnic Gentrification in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles,” Aspeers 8: 9–26.
33 Deborah Sullivan Brennan, “Barrio Logan grapples with pollution,” San Diego Union
Tribune, June 15, 2014, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-barrio-logan-grapples-
with-pollution-2014jun15-story.html.
34 CalEnviroScreen 3.0PM, https://oehha.ca.gov/calenviroscreen/indicator/air-quality-pm25.

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20 N. H. Kwak

MIT researchers, the Mission District had six times the rate of Chronic
Obstructive Pulmonary Disease hospitalization as the Outer Mission. Overall,
many of the sites being defended against gentrification are some of the most
polluted, toxic neighborhoods in American cities today. The movement to
preserve these places, then, necessarily includes discussion of global problems
with air pollution, soil contamination, and exposure to dangerous chemicals –
problems that occur at the global level and that require global solutions.
More optimistically, global aspects of anti-gentrification movements can
prove beneficial for activists, too. As more communities become aware of the
struggle for affordable and decent shelter in other parts of the world, their
campaigns gain momentum and a sense of larger purpose. The internet makes
it possible to spread ideas quickly at low cost, and not surprisingly the medium
has generated an outpouring of creative protest. Filmmakers like Andrew Padilla
shared his experience bringing his film, “El Barrio Tours: Gentrification in East
Harlem” to the San Diego Latino Film Festival in 2012. Bloggers and podcasters
like There Goes the Neighborhood share information about gentrification in Los
Angeles. One San Francisco after-school arts program even co-created and put
on a musical entitled “City Not For Sale” with K through 5th graders – an
experience then shared with the world through a vimeo upload. It is clear that
anti-gentrifiers are advancing a vision of local control that communicates glob-
ally – perhaps transforming the very idea of the global city itself.

Acknowledgements: Special thanks to Ian Klaus, Michele Acuto, and Elana

Zilberg for comments on this article.

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