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Hoboken Is Burning

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Between 1978 and 1983, nearly five hundred fires ripped through tenements and rooming houses in the square-mile city of Hoboken, New Jersey. Dylan Gottleib discusses the “Hoboken Renaissance.”

Image courtesy of interviewee. May 22, 2024

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This video video describes the author's research for a PhD dissertation at Princeton, focusing on urban transformation in the 1970s and 1980s. The author initially sought to understand the rise of inequality in cities, particularly through the arrival of young urban professionals (yuppies) in places like Hoboken, New Jersey. An important finding was a wave of arson fires that coincided with this gentrification, which were allegedly set by landlords to evict rent-controlled tenants and convert buildings for higher-paying residents.

The author’s investigation, supported by archival research and oral histories, revealed a narrative of violent displacement that had previously been overlooked in historical discussions about gentrification. The influx of finance professionals during this period led to increased property demand, prompting landlords to resort to illegal means to displace low-income tenants.

This video video highlights the scale of the arson crisis, including significant casualties and thousands of displacements. The author argues that while individual landlords may have seen short-term gains, the broader consequences of these practices included deepening urban inequality and a transformation of neighborhoods that catered primarily to wealthier residents.

Ultimately, the author calls for a reevaluation of how historians and sociologists consider the 1980s, advocating for acknowledgement of the complex social dynamics at play during urban redevelopment. The research concludes that revealing these conflicts and the violence underlying gentrification is crucial for understanding how cities change and whose interests prevail in the process. The author emphasizes that cities should be cautious in pursuing similar strategies for revitalization to avoid repeating the cycle of displacement and inequality.

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When I was beginning my research for my PhD at Princeton,

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my PhD dissertation, I was struggling

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to find specific actors who could help me tell the story

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of city's transformation in the 1970s

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and 1980s, who were the people who were doing the work

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of making cities more unequal,

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of revitalizing commercial districts

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and residential areas across the nation.

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And I got some great advice from a colleague of mine

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who said, pour over the US census, the actual statistics

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for say the finance workers you're interested in,

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the professional and managerial workers,

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you'd like to tell their story.

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And I did that. I spent some time with the census

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and I dug into where are those folks moving in the seventies

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and eighties in New York, you could expect them to live,

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say on the Upper East Side, the traditional hunts

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for financiers, right?

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But I noticed something really interesting when I

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mapped where they were moving.

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They were moving in places that I didn't expect.

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Places like Hoboken, New Jersey,

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which is a small working class city

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of about 50,000 people just across the Hudson River from

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Manhattan in the New York area.

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It's about a 10 minute train ride,

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importantly from downtown Manhattan

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and Midtown, where big corporate offices still existed.

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So I use these tools and I see this

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increasing concentration in whole book.

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And I think as a historian, there has

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to be a story there, right?

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What happens when these people arrive?

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And that's when I went to the local archives,

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the Hoboken Public Library, the Hoboken Historical Museum,

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not places that historians are beating

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down the doors to get in.

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But in those archives, I found a shocking

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and really important story of a string of fires,

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arson fires at the same moment

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that these professionals are arriving in the city.

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Um, I literally found this in a manila envelope titled

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Fires in the Public Library.

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I don't think historians had dug through there before,

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but I found this material from tenants rights groups,

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local newspaper clippings,

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and they all argued

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that these fires were in fact, intentional.

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That they were set by local landlords

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to drive out their rent controlled tenants,

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convert their buildings to condos and charge rents five

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or even six times more than they were receiving before.

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And it was part I discovered later

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of a wider shift in urban redevelopment in this period,

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I'd be happy to discuss more, you know,

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as historians we're obsessed with sources,

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and these were some great ones, right?

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It was wonderful to find sheaths of newspaper clippings

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that had been assembled by tenants rights groups.

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It was a wonderful place to start.

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But I knew I needed to supplement

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and kind of contextualize those archival fines

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with reading across urban history.

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That's something I'd already been doing, right?

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And there's a big existing literature on gentrification in

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the 1960s and seventies,

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what I call the first wave of gentrification.

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Um, so I read thoroughly in there,

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and everyone's talking about the artists who come

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to live in lofts in places like Soho.

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Um, people who are working to renovate

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with government money in places like Harlem,

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cities like Toronto.

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There's a kind of international literature about this.

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First, back to the city movement, people

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who renovate brownstones, they're socially liberal,

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they're interested in historical diversity.

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But what I found was that my story,

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I was finding in the archives of violence, of fires

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of intense increases in price

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for a very different demographic.

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People who had a lot more capital yuppies,

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the young urban professionals I write about

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that hadn't been told.

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And so that's when I really started digging in,

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doing interviews with people who remembered the events,

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uncovering oral histories

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and other primary source materials in Hoboken,

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and seeing could I tell a story that expanded

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that existing literature on the sixties

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and seventies to a different era when the political economy

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shifts in favor of finance and professional work,

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and this process of urban change intensifies,

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but we didn't know much about.

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So that's really got me pushed,

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pushed me further into the research, was

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to pursue this missing story

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that historians had really told.

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Yet this is of course, a period of crisis

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for American cities decline

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and crisis is how it's usually narrated, right?

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Cities continue to lose population jobs capitals flowing out

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to the American south, to the sunbelt, to the west abroad.

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But what I discover and argue here is that a small number

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of neighborhoods, places like Hoboken,

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but you know, Boston's back bay, Chicago's north side,

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we see the earliest stages of another type of crisis, one

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of over investment.

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So the professional

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and finance sectors, which are seen as maybe this great hope

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to revive these cities', fortunes do indeed begin

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to grow in the late seventies

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and early eighties, particularly as deregulation of finance

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makes these more profitable centers of the economy.

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So for example, in New York, over that period,

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you just mentioned about 90,000 financiers arrive in

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New York City, right?

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Hired by Wall Street Banks, recruited from colleges

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to do the work of financializing the economy.

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And they all need somewhere to live, ideally close

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to their jobs where they're working 10, 12 hours a day.

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And so these yuppies, as I call them, is the term

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of the time, but one I've adopted, right?

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These young urban professionals look to places

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where they can live in close proximity to their jobs,

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but they've got much higher wages than the first wave of,

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say, brown donors or artists who'd come before.

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And so speculative landlords

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and developers realize, wow,

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there's this incredible demand from the new population

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who is moving to the city, but we've got a problem, right?

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We've got, particularly in New Jersey, and parts of,

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and New York still had rent control

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or rent stabilization laws,

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which protected existing tenants, many

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of them low income in Hoboken, many

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of them Latino from displacement.

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You couldn't just say, please leave,

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you couldn't raise their rent 200%.

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It was literally illegal.

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So, you know, they try various things.

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They take advantage of renovation, exclusion.

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So if they rip out an old sink

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and put in a new one, that's one way to displace your tenant

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because you can then raise the rent

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for the cost of the renovations.

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But that's too slow. They can't capitalize on this crush

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of interest in, housing and Hoboken places like it.

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So what do they do? My research reveals that they turn

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to arson paying, young, often young people, it seems

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to start intentional fires in these buildings.

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And these landlords will go to the length

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of actually threatening to use fire before doing it.

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And they'll tell their tenants,

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I'm gonna burn you out if you don't leave.

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And some tenants leave willingly, but many don't.

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And even after threatening

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to burn down the building, they still do.

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So, and I've uncovered records, contracts of sale that say,

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we'll, buy, the developer will tell the landlord, we'll,

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buy your building under the condition it's delivered.

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Vacant that is cleared of all inhabitants

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and fire was a deadly, very effective way to do that.

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So the scale of this is pretty remarkable.

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Um, as you say in the,

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that roughly five year period when fires are a weekly

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occurrence in Hoboken,

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56 people die in these intentional fires.

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Um, my research determined maybe 8,000 people are displaced.

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Um, some of those willingly and it

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because, well willingly, they're coerced

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because of the fear of future fires.

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Some directly as buildings are destroyed.

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Um, some just from the trauma

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of losing family members decide to decamp to Puerto Rico

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or to other neighboring towns

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that are not experiencing this yuppie surge.

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So it's incredibly destructive and incredibly traumatic.

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And what's interesting is the yuppies who move in are kind

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of ly unaware of

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or about their role in this one.

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Stockbroker gives a quote to a local newspaper, says,

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you know, I don't want anyone to be burned,

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but I wouldn't mind a nicer element

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of people in this town, right?

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Understanding that yes, this is a violent remaking,

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but well, maybe it's all

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for the good if people like me can afford to live here.

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Now, I think there are two potential answers.

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There's a disciplinary gap between historians

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who focus on the sixties

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and seventies when it came to gentrification, right?

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And then sociologists who studied,

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or what they've called super gentrification

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and say the recent period in two thousands

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and 2010s in cities like London or New York, right?

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They work on the recent period interviewing subjects,

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doing the statistical analysis.

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Sociologists historically were working on the sixties

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and 70 thinking about for authenticity

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and how that brought young people to new neighborhoods.

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But there was a gap in the middle

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that had just not really been looked at, right?

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And my work on the shifting political economy of

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that period, the rise in finance

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and professional work led me to that time period

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and made me feel like it was incumbent upon me

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to fill that gap, right?

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To talk about the second wave that the sociologists had sort

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of missed and the historians hadn't caught up to.

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So that's one reason. The second reason is that many

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of our narratives across different disciplines about the

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1980s tend to kind of efface the complexity

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of the period under an umbrella of neoliberalism, right?

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It's a term that does a lot of theoretical work to explain

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how markets were promised to

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enter every sector of American life.

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Um, whether you're on the right

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and you don't care about inequality

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or you're on the, you're a new Democrat

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and perhaps you care about inequality,

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but you think you need to do it

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through unleashing the private sector.

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Either way, we talk about this era in terms

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of neoliberalism, and I think it's a useful frame,

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but there's something kind of bloodless about it.

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It's very rarely put into actual place

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and understood how it operates on the ground.

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It's one thing to look at Reagan's policies at a national

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level or Margaret Factors

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pronouncements in a national level.

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It's quite another to see at the neighborhood level

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how the new sort of actors were called into being

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by neoliberalism actually go about their day, right?

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Where do they live? How do they consume,

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how do they make sense of their social position in the newly

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unequal society that's being remade?

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And that's the story I want to tell in this article

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and in my book more broadly, is how do,

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how are these big shifts in political economy?

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What, what's the social history of them?

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How do they take place in real places?

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What are the conflicts that erupt

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as different constituencies struggle

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to find a place in a city that's being violently remade?

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Arson is an incredibly hard crime to prosecute.

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Mere evidence of economic gain

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for a landlord isn't enough to convict someone.

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So local prosecutors can't just link landlords

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who burned down their buildings in theory and economic gain

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and say, we've got a case.

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They need to find the torch, the person who is paid off.

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But these are frequently young teenagers who are, you know,

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slipped a dollar bill and they throw 'em all top cocktail in

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a building, they're never gonna find them.

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So that's one thing, right? It's hard to prosecute it.

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Another reason these go un prosecuted

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and largely unpunished is

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because I do think local prosecutors have a

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sense of ethnic bias.

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They, in interviews with me, the DA for the county told me,

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you know, there are some sort of ethnic rivalries

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or hot-blooded, Latin machismo are to blame here.

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It wasn't about real estate redevelopment.

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So what are things that actually ended this crisis?

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Well, one, at the federal level

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Congress investigates in the early eighties, this rash

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of gentrification arson, including in Hoboken.

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They actually hear testimony about Hoboken

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and they upgrade the penalties for arson as well

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as the resources devoting to fighting it at the

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national level with the FBI.

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And that money does trickle down to local law enforcement.

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So they do begin to take it more seriously

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and investigate it more rigorously.

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Two, interestingly,

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the developers set their sight on a new area,

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just one city over in Jersey City,

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which passes new pro development laws that send that flood

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of development one town over to the kind of hulks

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of industrial buildings that now can be converted

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to apartments and conveniently

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don't have any tenants inside.

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But finally, and most importantly,

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the reason these arsons end, I think is the social movement

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that arises Ian Hoboken.

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Um, there's a first led by Latino tenant activists

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who are suffering the brunt of these fires.

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They join up with the brown stoners,

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those socially liberal folks, many white middle class people

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who arrived in the sixties who are part of the new left

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and said, Hey, this is a horrible crime against

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a community we care about.

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And they unite and they elect an anti-development mayor,

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this sort of wacky fellow Thomas ti, who's, you know,

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the kind of guy who stands in the street corner

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with a megaphone, sailing the powers that be.

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But he becomes the mayor of Hoboken

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and vows to stop gentrification.

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And he put places a moratorium on all new development,

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particularly condo development

12:35.815 --> 12:38.835
and does what he can while in office to slow the tide.

12:39.925 --> 12:42.825
But ultimately, I think it's just landlords decide this

12:43.105 --> 12:45.465
tactic is providing too much bad publicity,

12:46.085 --> 12:48.745
and they're worried about selling these condos.

12:48.745 --> 12:49.865
They're converting by fire

12:50.085 --> 12:52.145
as the social movement calls attention to

12:52.655 --> 12:54.345
this horror in the city.

12:54.765 --> 12:56.185
So they switch tactics

12:56.185 --> 12:59.105
and they just use economic means of displacement to

12:59.625 --> 13:01.425
continue this regime of transformation.

13:01.525 --> 13:03.785
And now Hoboken is utterly transformed.

13:04.285 --> 13:06.185
Um, if you go there on a Saturday night,

13:06.185 --> 13:09.945
it's 28-year-old stockbrokers enjoying one too many pints

13:09.945 --> 13:11.985
with their mates, as you would say in the uk.

13:12.485 --> 13:15.745
Um, it's utterly a refuge of the young urban professional

13:15.805 --> 13:18.105
who we just begin to see arriving in the eighties.

13:18.445 --> 13:21.465
And it's just as expensive as parts of Manhattan.

13:21.805 --> 13:23.385
My conclusions are one, we need

13:23.385 --> 13:26.945
to take the eighties seriously as a moment when,

13:27.585 --> 13:29.825
economic transformations happen at the broadest level

13:30.175 --> 13:33.625
that have real consequences in cities in America

13:33.645 --> 13:34.785
and indeed around the world.

13:35.115 --> 13:37.185
Those that are experiencing financialization,

13:37.985 --> 13:39.545
a concentration of brain power

13:39.605 --> 13:43.825
and capital in these cities is championed by some as a way

13:43.825 --> 13:46.265
of reviving cities in an era of crisis.

13:46.405 --> 13:47.545
And indeed, there were very few

13:47.545 --> 13:48.825
choices for cities in this period.

13:48.885 --> 13:51.545
I'm not denying that, but the results are

13:51.545 --> 13:52.585
deepening inequality.

13:52.585 --> 13:55.065
Something that we know all too well from the subsequent

13:55.065 --> 13:58.705
decades is that yes, it may spur a real estate revival

13:58.725 --> 14:00.945
to attract these young professionals to your city

14:01.445 --> 14:05.225
to increase financialization, to lure financial

14:05.225 --> 14:06.585
and professional firms to your city.

14:06.655 --> 14:09.345
Fine. But often that comes at the cost

14:09.345 --> 14:11.785
of low income residents quite directly,

14:11.785 --> 14:14.345
as I demonstrate here, not just in the sense

14:14.345 --> 14:16.985
that equality's rising because some are not doing so well

14:16.985 --> 14:20.025
and some are enjoying increased wages and wealth.

14:20.725 --> 14:23.305
No, there's a direct relational aspect.

14:23.885 --> 14:26.905
Um, you might call it plunder as the

14:27.445 --> 14:29.785
elites literally take over the spaces

14:29.855 --> 14:32.785
that were once inhabited by people who arrived in the city

14:32.785 --> 14:34.825
to work in these industrial jobs that have now left

14:35.085 --> 14:37.625
who are watching social welfare evaporate

14:37.625 --> 14:39.505
to be eviscerated in the 1980s.

14:40.045 --> 14:43.345
So I want us to focus on the 1980s, not just in this,

14:43.365 --> 14:44.705
as I said, bloodless sense

14:44.705 --> 14:46.705
that neoliberalism transformed society,

14:47.285 --> 14:48.945
but in terms of social history

14:48.965 --> 14:50.625
and the material history on the ground,

14:51.265 --> 14:53.125
To show us how real people played out

14:53.125 --> 14:54.565
these conflicts in real space.

14:55.305 --> 14:58.365
And perhaps that cities shouldn't look to this method

14:58.385 --> 15:00.725
of revival as the way to,

15:01.345 --> 15:03.285
revive their mound cities, right?

15:03.285 --> 15:06.285
Selling out to interests that'll attract elites,

15:06.285 --> 15:08.805
maybe a bank shot to increasing real estate prices,

15:09.305 --> 15:11.605
but very real consequences, particularly

15:11.625 --> 15:12.685
for working class people

15:12.685 --> 15:16.165
and people of color who have a right to the city as well.

Uncovering Urban Transformation and Inequality Dynamics

00:00:00 - When I was beginning my research for my PhD at Princeton, my PhD dissertation, I was struggling to find specific actors who could help me tell the story of city's transformation in the 1970s and 1980s, who were the people who were doing the work of making cities more unequal, of revitalizing commercial districts and residential areas across the nation. And I got some great advice from a colleague of mine who said, pour over the US census, the actual statistics for say the finance workers you're interested in,
00:00:33 - you'd like to tell their story. And I did that. I spent some time with the census and I dug into where are those folks moving in the seventies and eighties in New York, you could expect them to live, say on the Upper East Side, the traditional hunts for financiers, right? But I noticed something really interesting when I mapped where they were moving. They were moving in places that I didn't expect. Places like Hoboken, New Jersey, which is a small working class city of about 50,000 people just across the Hudson River from Manhattan in the New York area.
00:01:04 - importantly from downtown Manhattan and Midtown, where big corporate offices still existed. So I use these tools and I see this increasing concentration in whole book. And I think as a historian, there has to be a story there, right? What happens when these people arrive? And that's when I went to the local archives, the Hoboken Public Library, the Hoboken Historical Museum, not places that historians are beating down the doors to get in. But in those archives, I found a shocking and really important story of a string of fires, arson fires at the same moment
00:01:37 - I literally found this in a manila envelope titled Fires in the Public Library. I don't think historians had dug through there before, but I found this material from tenants rights groups, local newspaper clippings, and they all argued that these fires were in fact, intentional. That they were set by local landlords to drive out their rent controlled tenants, convert their buildings to condos and charge rents five or even six times more than they were receiving before. And it was part I discovered later
00:02:09 - I'd be happy to discuss more, you know, as historians we're obsessed with sources, and these were some great ones, right? It was wonderful to find sheaths of newspaper clippings that had been assembled by tenants rights groups. It was a wonderful place to start. But I knew I needed to supplement and kind of contextualize those archival fines with reading across urban history. That's something I'd already been doing, right? And there's a big existing literature on gentrification in the 1960s and seventies, what I call the first wave of gentrification.
00:02:41 - and everyone's talking about the artists who come to live in lofts in places like Soho. people who are working to renovate with government money in places like Harlem, cities like Toronto. There's a kind of international literature about this. First, back to the city movement, people who renovate brownstones, they're socially liberal, they're interested in historical diversity. But what I found was that my story, I was finding in the archives of violence, of fires of intense increases in price

Uncovering Urban Transformation and Inequality

00:03:11 - People who had a lot more capital yuppies, the young urban professionals I write about that hadn't been told. And so that's when I really started digging in, doing interviews with people who remembered the events, uncovering oral histories and other primary source materials in Hoboken, and seeing could I tell a story that expanded that existing literature on the sixties and seventies to a different era when the political economy shifts in favor of finance and professional work, and this process of urban change intensifies,
00:03:42 - So that's really got me pushed, pushed me further into the research, was to pursue this missing story that historians had really told. Yet this is of course, a period of crisis for American cities decline and crisis is how it's usually narrated, right? Cities continue to lose population jobs capitals flowing out to the American south, to the sunbelt, to the west abroad. But what I discover and argue here is that a small number of neighborhoods, places like Hoboken, but you know, Boston's back bay, Chicago's north side,
00:04:18 - of over investment. So the professional and finance sectors, which are seen as maybe this great hope to revive these cities', fortunes do indeed begin to grow in the late seventies and early eighties, particularly as deregulation of finance makes these more profitable centers of the economy. So for example, in New York, over that period, you just mentioned about 90,000 financiers arrive in New York City, right? Hired by Wall Street Banks, recruited from colleges to do the work of financializing the economy.
00:04:49 - to their jobs where they're working 10, 12 hours a day. And so these yuppies, as I call them, is the term of the time, but one I've adopted, right? These young urban professionals look to places where they can live in close proximity to their jobs, but they've got much higher wages than the first wave of, say, brown donors or artists who'd come before. And so speculative landlords and developers realize, wow, there's this incredible demand from the new population who is moving to the city, but we've got a problem, right?
00:05:21 - and New York still had rent control or rent stabilization laws, which protected existing tenants, many of them low income in Hoboken, many of them Latino from displacement. You couldn't just say, please leave, you couldn't raise their rent 200%. It was literally illegal. So, you know, they try various things. They take advantage of renovation, exclusion. So if they rip out an old sink and put in a new one, that's one way to displace your tenant because you can then raise the rent for the cost of the renovations.
00:05:52 - of interest in, housing and Hoboken places like it. So what do they do? My research reveals that they turn to arson paying, young, often young people, it seems to start intentional fires in these buildings. And these landlords will go to the length of actually threatening to use fire before doing it. And they'll tell their tenants, I'm gonna burn you out if you don't leave. And some tenants leave willingly, but many don't.

Arson, Gentrification, and Urban Transformation

00:06:20 - to burn down the building, they still do. So, and I've uncovered records, contracts of sale that say, we'll, buy, the developer will tell the landlord, we'll, buy your building under the condition it's delivered. Vacant that is cleared of all inhabitants and fire was a deadly, very effective way to do that. So the scale of this is pretty remarkable. as you say in the, that roughly five year period when fires are a weekly occurrence in Hoboken, 56 people die in these intentional fires.
00:06:55 - some of those willingly and it because, well willingly, they're coerced because of the fear of future fires. Some directly as buildings are destroyed. some just from the trauma of losing family members decide to decamp to Puerto Rico or to other neighboring towns that are not experiencing this yuppie surge. So it's incredibly destructive and incredibly traumatic.
00:07:24 - of ly unaware of or about their role in this one. Stockbroker gives a quote to a local newspaper, says, you know, I don't want anyone to be burned, but I wouldn't mind a nicer element of people in this town, right? Understanding that yes, this is a violent remaking, but well, maybe it's all for the good if people like me can afford to live here. Now, I think there are two potential answers. There's a disciplinary gap between historians
00:07:52 - and seventies when it came to gentrification, right? And then sociologists who studied, or what they've called super gentrification and say the recent period in two thousands and 2010s in cities like London or New York, right? They work on the recent period interviewing subjects, doing the statistical analysis. Sociologists historically were working on the sixties and 70 thinking about for authenticity and how that brought young people to new neighborhoods. But there was a gap in the middle that had just not really been looked at, right? And my work on the shifting political economy of
00:08:25 - and professional work led me to that time period and made me feel like it was incumbent upon me to fill that gap, right? To talk about the second wave that the sociologists had sort of missed and the historians hadn't caught up to. So that's one reason. The second reason is that many of our narratives across different disciplines about the 1980s tend to kind of efface the complexity of the period under an umbrella of neoliberalism, right?
00:08:57 - how markets were promised to enter every sector of American life. whether you're on the right and you don't care about inequality or you're on the, you're a new Democrat and perhaps you care about inequality, but you think you need to do it through unleashing the private sector. Either way, we talk about this era in terms of neoliberalism, and I think it's a useful frame, but there's something kind of bloodless about it. It's very rarely put into actual place

Neighborhood Transformation Amid Neoliberalism and Gentrification

00:09:26 - It's one thing to look at Reagan's policies at a national level or Margaret Factors pronouncements in a national level. It's quite another to see at the neighborhood level how the new sort of actors were called into being by neoliberalism actually go about their day, right? Where do they live? How do they consume, how do they make sense of their social position in the newly unequal society that's being remade? And that's the story I want to tell in this article and in my book more broadly, is how do,
00:09:58 - What, what's the social history of them? How do they take place in real places? What are the conflicts that erupt as different constituencies struggle to find a place in a city that's being violently remade? Arson is an incredibly hard crime to prosecute. Mere evidence of economic gain for a landlord isn't enough to convict someone. So local prosecutors can't just link landlords who burned down their buildings in theory and economic gain and say, we've got a case.
00:10:30 - But these are frequently young teenagers who are, you know, slipped a dollar bill and they throw 'em all top cocktail in a building, they're never gonna find them. So that's one thing, right? It's hard to prosecute it. Another reason these go un prosecuted and largely unpunished is because I do think local prosecutors have a sense of ethnic bias. They, in interviews with me, the DA for the county told me, you know, there are some sort of ethnic rivalries or hot-blooded, Latin machismo are to blame here.
00:11:00 - So what are things that actually ended this crisis? Well, one, at the federal level Congress investigates in the early eighties, this rash of gentrification arson, including in Hoboken. They actually hear testimony about Hoboken and they upgrade the penalties for arson as well as the resources devoting to fighting it at the national level with the FBI. And that money does trickle down to local law enforcement. So they do begin to take it more seriously and investigate it more rigorously.
00:11:30 - the developers set their sight on a new area, just one city over in Jersey City, which passes new pro development laws that send that flood of development one town over to the kind of hulks of industrial buildings that now can be converted to apartments and conveniently don't have any tenants inside. But finally, and most importantly, the reason these arsons end, I think is the social movement that arises Ian Hoboken. there's a first led by Latino tenant activists
00:12:03 - They join up with the brown stoners, those socially liberal folks, many white middle class people who arrived in the sixties who are part of the new left and said, Hey, this is a horrible crime against a community we care about. And they unite and they elect an anti-development mayor, this sort of wacky fellow Thomas ti, who's, you know, the kind of guy who stands in the street corner with a megaphone, sailing the powers that be. But he becomes the mayor of Hoboken and vows to stop gentrification. And he put places a moratorium on all new development,

Urban Transformation and Inequality in the 1980s

00:12:35 - and does what he can while in office to slow the tide. But ultimately, I think it's just landlords decide this tactic is providing too much bad publicity, and they're worried about selling these condos. They're converting by fire as the social movement calls attention to this horror in the city. So they switch tactics and they just use economic means of displacement to continue this regime of transformation. And now Hoboken is utterly transformed.
00:13:06 - it's 28-year-old stockbrokers enjoying one too many pints with their mates, as you would say in the uk. it's utterly a refuge of the young urban professional who we just begin to see arriving in the eighties. And it's just as expensive as parts of Manhattan. My conclusions are one, we need to take the eighties seriously as a moment when, economic transformations happen at the broadest level that have real consequences in cities in America and indeed around the world.
00:13:37 - a concentration of brain power and capital in these cities is championed by some as a way of reviving cities in an era of crisis. And indeed, there were very few choices for cities in this period. I'm not denying that, but the results are deepening inequality. Something that we know all too well from the subsequent decades is that yes, it may spur a real estate revival to attract these young professionals to your city to increase financialization, to lure financial
00:14:06 - Fine. But often that comes at the cost of low income residents quite directly, as I demonstrate here, not just in the sense that equality's rising because some are not doing so well and some are enjoying increased wages and wealth. No, there's a direct relational aspect. you might call it plunder as the elites literally take over the spaces that were once inhabited by people who arrived in the city to work in these industrial jobs that have now left who are watching social welfare evaporate
00:14:40 - So I want us to focus on the 1980s, not just in this, as I said, bloodless sense that neoliberalism transformed society, but in terms of social history and the material history on the ground, To show us how real people played out these conflicts in real space. And perhaps that cities shouldn't look to this method of revival as the way to, revive their mound cities, right? Selling out to interests that'll attract elites, maybe a bank shot to increasing real estate prices,
00:15:12 - for working class people and people of color who have a right to the city as well.

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