Portside

Johannesburg’s inner city has seen dramatic change in the past 20 years. As apartheid began to collapse, laws that kept the black majority out of cities were first disregarded and then repealed. As black people moved in, whites fled to suburbs. The inner city dramatically degraded, with neglected buildings, fewer services and crime. Now this image of downtown Johannesburg is beginning to shift, with the arrival of property developers who are creating affluent enclaves.

Culture Clash's play about money, manipulation and red-baiting ending with destruction of a closely-knit LA Latino neighborhood over fifty years ago rings true today as the present economic power of developers and the drive to profitably exploit vulnerable communities within the central city and drastically change their ethnic, class and cultural composition continues to steadily displace the long-time residents of many neighborhoods.

The new Detroit renaissance does not address why the city declined in the first place. It does little to address poverty, unemployment and access to resources for the vast majority of the city’s residents. What’s worse, the gentrification of downtown Detroit contributes to greater inequality and polarisation, which are growing challenges for cities around the world.

In exceedingly expensive housing markets like San Francisco and New York, even the tools supposedly designed to preserve affordability for average working families, such as Below Market Rate set asides for supposedly “affordable housing,” are being used to benefit the upwardly mobile. San Francisco and other cities are effectively subsidizing upper-middle-class people to move in, paving the way for gentrification of historically low-income neighborhoods.

'Then comes the Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can’t discover this! We been here.'