ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Sam Beck takes us to Williamsburg, in Brooklyn. He focuses on the people who occupy an urban space defined by three different populations, all of them in-migrants during the dramatic changes brought about by gentrification and displacement that materialized from the 1990s to 2017. Beck describes how each social group was involved in an effort to locate, reproduce and sustain itself within Williamsburg usually in competition with the others and how each sought to control a geographic domain of its own. By emphasizing the class aspects of gentrification and the importance of contesting the private ownership of property under capitalism, Beck sees the symbolic, cultural, space as a viable arena of resistance to counter the hegemonic power of neoliberalism manifested by the economy of gentrification and displacement that produces ethno-racial cleansing. He calls activists who fight gentrification to identify and alter government policies to reduce or deflect the conflicts they produce by stabilizing and expanding the availability of affordable housing and creating unity that cuts across ethno-racial, religious and class lines. Beck, however, points out that outing individuals and households in affordable units provided by luxury housing developers may relieve the pressures of displacement, but it will not solve the efforts to stabilize community. He ends his chapter by asking us to understand resistance to gentrification as resistance to displacement, and he emphasizes the need to continue the struggle for cultural continuity.
