On dates we took the L train at Halsey Street or Myrtle-Wyckoff and rode west into Williamsburg or the East Village, with their hip bars and coffee shops. But on the ride home, I noticed a gradual but seemingly inexorable shift: the transplants — college-educated 20- and 30-somethings who use the city as a playground — would get off one stop later each year. And later, and later.

And in this barely remarkable transformation lies the secret to the political changes sweeping Gotham. The city’s turn to the outré progressive politics of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America isn’t just political. It relies upon a remaking of the cultural fabric: how it feels, how it works.

Board the train in Manhattan, and the ride is mostly transplants; continue east, and they thin out, stop by stop, until what is left is the rest of us: the construction workers, the doormen who service the Manhattan co-ops, the immigrant families, the locals, me. But a year ago, my wife and I took the train home, and the train was packed all the way to Ridgewood. Everyone was going to one of the bars that had opened a few blocks from the house I grew up in. I stood the whole way. I could not get a seat in my own local spot. 

Ridgewood sits on the seam between Brooklyn and Queens: brick rowhouses, German and Eastern European at first, working class without exception. Its public square was a restaurant, Zum Stammtisch. The name means “the regulars’ table.” Decades later, the Germans made way for Hispanic and Coptic families, who opened their own shops like Rico Pollo or Aghapy Deli. My parents, refugees from Egypt, rented here. Later, on the salaries of two teachers’ aides, they managed to buy a house. There was nothing trendy about the place, but it was safe and stable; I was grateful.

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By Richard A. Greenwald

What happened to my neighborhood is the ordinary course of gentrification. The hipster was invented in Williamsburg around the year 2000, when the rents were cheap and the neighborhood was unsafe. That, in turn, gave people economic incentives to move in and experiment with coffee shops, new restaurants, thrift stores, and art studios. 

The development spiked property values and brought an influx of capital to Williamsburg. The average rent in the neighborhood now is about $5,000 a month, up from shy of $900 at the turn of the millennium. It has a Whole Foods. Naturally, then, those same creative and artsy types moved eastward to Bushwick, whose former industrial areas were rezoned as residential and commercial. But over time, Bushwick rents exploded, given the spread of specialty coffee shops, bars, and electronic-dance-music clubs. Rents exploded to an average of above $3,500, up from under $900 two decades earlier. That’s an exorbitant figure to anyone working outside of finance, tech, and law. 

Then, in the mid-2010s, the transplants came to Ridgewood. The change announced itself in an explosion of notable restaurants. Along Forest Avenue, a residential street off Myrtle Avenue, a dozen places have opened in six years, putting Ridgewood on the culinary map. Rolo’s, located in the base of a row house, is considered the best restaurant in Queens. Hellbender, two blocks up, draws the same clientele.

Two years ago, Time Out New York named Ridgewood the fourth-coolest neighborhood in the world. You can browse Instagram for the best restaurants in the Big Apple, and you will often find multiple Ridgewood options listed among them. And, on top of it all, our very own Whole Foods is coming to the old bank I walked past every day. These places, which I now enjoy with my wife, mean I don’t have to take the train to enjoy city amenities. But the change also means I have to make roughly thrice as much as my parents did to afford their home.

Two storefronts on Myrtle Avenue tell the whole story. One is Joe & John’s, a slice shop that serves as a staple of the neighborhood. When the Knicks played, Joe & John’s hosted giant watch parties for the whole neighborhood. Across the street is Topos, a Left-wing café and bookstore that locals studiously avoid.

Walk into Topos, and a poster of Mamdani greets you, flanked by his slate of now-victorious House nominees. A mood board offers the week’s options: an anti-ICE flyer, a women-against-imperialism meeting, a zine calling for the violent overthrow of the government. Keffiyehs are for sale. Young women wear oversized watermelon earrings (a reference to the one-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict); the espresso machine is peppered with magnets blaring “Free Palestine.”

The music might be Australian lesbian techno-pop or spoken word criticizing America or Lebanese. On the shelves: Abolish Rent, In Defense of Looting, The End of Policing. To the right of the register is a small children’s shelf containing works like Mamdani Walks New York City and Sex Is a Funny Word, billed as an introduction to sex positivity for youngsters. The children’s shelf is tucked away because there are few children. There are only transplants, performing politics fluently for one another.

Standing there, I understood what my neighborhood was becoming: a college town. The tight ring of restaurants, the ideological cafe-bookstores, the absence of families — it all comes together. The Ridgewood transplants are forming an adult campus, their own ecosystem to mimic the liberal college experience.

So like a small college town, there is a spectrum of political involvement, but no objection to the Left-wing ideological system. And underneath this ecosystem is the working class being pushed out by skyrocketing rents and narrowing affordability. The transplants virtue-signal for affordability and call for “decolonizing” the United States, but they are the cause of unaffordability, and they are actively colonizing my home. 

When I visited this week, I found a zine called “a new heaven and a new earth” by chariot wish, a self-described transsexual anarchist (capitalization rules are for the oppressor classes). One poem opens: “I wake up every morning in this killing machine called America, and I’m carrying this rage like a blood filled egg, and there’s a thin line between the inside and outside.”

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The socialist conquest of the Democrats

By Alicia Nieves

This poem, located in this bookstore, in this block that I walked thousands of times near my local pharmacy and my local pizza shop: I cannot help but feel the absurdity. But rage and nihilism toward America form the ideological core of the Ridgewood College ecosystem. Even support of Palestine is done implicitly because Palestine is the tip of the spear in opposing the American imperialist project. The Ridgewood system, and the heart of the DSA itself, represents the nullification of the American way that nurtured me and my family. These ideas gain traction in Ridgewood because of the sheer concentration of transplants, who have a shared restlessness about living in America — perhaps because of their rootlessness. They also have a sense of entitlement created by their artistic and educational attainments, and can’t escape financial stress, notwithstanding their expensive degrees. Hence, they fuel the rise of Mamdani and the DSA.

Claire Valdez, who just took the Democratic nomination for the area’s congressional district — unseating a moderate progressive — is the type exactly. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, worked service jobs, and came to New York around 2015 to make art. She did not grow up in Ridgewood and doesn’t, beyond a nominal sense, belong to it. She will soon represent it because the transplants now turn out stronger than everyone else in the Democratic Party. Hers is no longer a congressional seat for a neighborhood, but a congressional seat if the students of Columbia could elect one. 

I learned how far the opportunism runs during this year’s nurses’ strike. My wife was on the line; I stood with her in the cold. The corporate Democrats said publicly they wanted workers to achieve a favorable contract but behind the scenes were mostly beholden to the bosses. Given this, the DSA — with Mamdani, Valdez, etc. — seemed like a good partner for the striking nurses. But upon closer inspection, from the point of view of the DSA, the long-term solution to the nurses’ pay crisis isn’t greater bargaining power or stronger contracts, but the dismantling of capitalism itself (with a side of anti-Zionism). This is almost certainly not what the actual working-class nurses want, but when you’re stuck between two opportunistic parties, you go with the one that’s at least with you, even if opportunistically.

That is the pact the DSA has made with my neighborhood and with the Democratic Party. Ridgewood is a staging ground for an ideology its transplants intend to export. For the DSA, it presents an ideal place to organize, run candidates, and enjoy life largely insulated. They will fight for affordability while actively causing the issue: they aren’t interested in managing gentrification but, again, dismantling capitalism. And when the neighborhood is fully gentrified in 10 years, they will blame capitalism while continuing to serve as its agents, and they will move on to the next neighborhood.

In any other decade, this would be a Hollywood trade story. In 2026, it is a diagnosis.

Young men now quote Bateman the way a previous generation quoted Fight Club’s Tyler Durden, which is to say that American Psycho has migrated into aspirational territory. Young men want to be the novel’s looksmaxxing, empty-sex-chasing protagonist. Mary Harron, who directed the original 2000 film version, keeps telling interviewers she is “mystified” by this. She always understood the novel as satire — specifically, “a gay man’s satire on masculinity.” Harron is a careful reader and a better director, and she still cannot quite say the obvious thing. It is not mystifying at all. A culture that elected Donald Trump twice — Bateman’s explicit role model in the 1991 novel — was always going to lose the ability to distinguish satire from a mirror. The Bateman problem is not that readers misunderstand Ellis. It is that they understand him the way a thirsty man understands an oasis.

The trends that culminated in the valorization of Bateman were already latent when the novel and the Trump presidency were mere gleams in the eyes of ambitious men. When Ellis came on the literary scene, it was as part of a Bennington College cohort that also included Jonathan Lethem, whose work the new film will inadvertently eulogize. Lethem attended Bennington College in Ellis’s class of 1986 but dropped out halfway through sophomore year, having had what he later called an “overwhelming collision with the realities of class” — his bohemian parents, he discovered, had actually been poor; the Bennington students were actually rich. 

Lethem went back to Brooklyn and spent the next 30 years writing the inverse book to everything Ellis produced. Where Ellis’s characters sit sealed inside their class privilege like terrarium specimens, Lethem’s characters can’t avoid their neighbors, can’t unsee the block, can’t pretend the adjacent kid’s trouble is not also theirs. The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem’s breakout book, pays homage to Jane Jacobs, a pioneer of urban community preservation, who valued neighborhoods above all else. Lethem’s Fortress is the great Jacobsian novel of the post-Jacobsian era, a long aching chronicle of the Brooklyn block as moral organism and what gentrification does to it — which is not only to displace people, but to implicate the remaining residents in the displacement.

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The cancelled prophet of the racial Right 

By Richard Greenwald

Call Ellis’s model the city of fear. His urbanism is vertical, predatory, cold; the characters don’t walk, but are driven, their class positions reinforced by every sealed surface. The streets happen to other people — people they don’t look at, people for whom the correct response is either the averted gaze or the raised partition. 

Call Lethem’s model, by contrast, the city of guilt. His urbanism is horizontal, all stoops and sidewalks, the corner store whose owner knows which kid’s mother is sick, and its governing emotion is the impossibility of moral insulation. For a long generation, American urban writing ran an unofficial referendum between these two visions, with every essay on gentrification mentioning Jacobs and her opposing force, the builder Robert Moses, who bulldozed whole neighborhoods in New York City in the name of Progress. Every Jacobs-versus-Moses seminar, every fight over bike lanes and broken-windows policing contests the ground between them. 

The referendum is over. Ellis won.

He won in the obvious places. Bateman’s Manhattan is now the Manhattan that turned SoHo into an outdoor luxury outlet and converted its own middle-class adulthood into an unwinnable quest for success and hipness. He won in the less obvious ones, too: in the Ubered, DoorDashed, Amazon-Primed private-city experience of the educated young, who have been trained to encounter the public street the way Bateman encountered it, as an interruption between secured spaces. He won in the quiet disappearance of the mixed-use retail block, the conversion of the corner bodega into a ghost-kitchen, the diner into a co-working subscription. He won, most painfully, in the Brooklyn Lethem actually wrote about. The Boerum Hill neighborhood — the central nervous system of The Fortress of Solitude — was gentrifying even during Lethem’s childhood; brownstones there cost between $3.5 to $8 million today. Nearby Bed-Stuy lost its black majority during the Eric Adams mayoralty. There, brownstones that sold for $50,000 during the period the novel depicts now trade north of $3 million. The homeowners who cashed out are not, in the main, analogs to the people Lethem’s narrator grew up watching. They are the beneficiaries of the Ellis settlement.

He won, too, in Altadena, a close-knit California community that was a suburban equivalent of Bed-Stuy. A year after the January 2025 fires, nearly 70% of severely damaged homes there show no rebuilding activity, and black and Asian homeowners — Altadena was an anomaly of black homeownership, with an 80% ownership rate in 2023, roughly double the national average — are the most likely to remain stalled. Commercial lease prices in the surviving blocks have spiked. The people who understood Altadena the way Lethem’s narrator understood Boerum Hill’s Dean Street are being priced into storage. The speculators circling the burned lots understand those lots the way Ellis’s characters understood the street: as inventory, passed through tinted glass.

The TikTok embrace of Bateman is therefore not a misreading, but a graduation certificate. The readers who now quote him admiringly grew up in the city he built — organized around sealed interiors and contempt for exteriors — and correctly identify him as a role model in this new world. Guadagnino’s casting trouble is the final footnote. You can no longer play Bateman ironically if there is no longer a shared moral floor against which the irony registers. The actors who have passed on the role may or may not have theorized it this way, but they have felt it. The character no longer reads as the predator he was designed to be, because the culture has lost its capacity to recognize predation. The only honest performance now would be the straight one, which might be why so many A-list actors have turned down the role. 

Some untidiness, however, mars Ellis’s victory. On Jan. 1, Zohran Mamdani became the 112th mayor of New York City on the most Lethemite platform of the postwar era: a four-year rent freeze on roughly a million rent-stabilized units; the addition of 200,000 permanently affordable units over 10 years; a revived Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants; public grocery stores and free buses; and a pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes. The campaign was unapologetically Jacobsian in its moral grammar — the block as moral organism, the tenant as legitimate claimant on the landlord’s conscience, the city as shared custody rather than asset class. Mamdani’s election, and the wave of younger Gothamites who embraced him, suggest a new playbook for Chicago, Minneapolis, and Boston. Lethem’s vision returned like the repressed: the city of guilt asserting itself as policy after two decades of being merely literature.

Mamdani’s first 100 days have been a tutorial on why Ellis won. The new mayor inherited a $12 billion deficit and has cut it to $5.4 billion, in part by appealing a court order that would expand the city’s rent-voucher program — thus breaking a promise he had made on the trail. He proposed a 9.5% property tax hike that the deputy speaker of his own progressive council immediately branded “not equitable,” opening the first crack of what could become a tax revolt. Former Mayor Eric Adams, in his final weeks, stacked the Rent Guidelines Board with appointees designed to delay the rent freeze; the preliminary vote is not expected until May, the final until June, and any freeze would not take effect before October.

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The Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan released in early April has already drawn the attention of Trump’s Justice Department. The pied-à-terre tax requires the state legislature’s cooperation, which Albany is withholding. None of this is precisely a failure — yet. It is the normal friction of governance meeting the permanent architecture of American urban capital. It is also, without exception, the machinery Ellis described. The real-estate state — the phrase is the author Samuel Stein’s — is not moved by elections. It is moved by ownership, and ownership is a formidable opponent. 

The wave of socialist mayors should be read honestly. It is not the Lethem vision reasserting itself as lived urban reality. Neither is it a victory for Jane Jacobs over Robert Moses. It is the Lethem vision appearing as electoral ethics inside cities whose physical and financial architecture is permanently Ellis. Americans now vote for the city of guilt and live in the city of fear. The vote registers the yearning; the architecture registers the verdict. You can campaign against the real-estate state, but you govern inside it. You can read The Fortress of Solitude on the F train, but the F train is delivering you to a neighborhood that priced out the families Lethem wrote about a decade before the book came out.

Guadagnino’s film, when it arrives, will be an accidental document of this settlement. He will find a Bateman, or he will not; the picture will be well-reviewed, or it will not; Bale’s ghost will be appeased, or it will not. None of that matters. Ellis’s novel, written in 1991 as a scalding joke about a world the author assumed his readers would recognize as grotesque, is now read by those readers as reportage — or even a how-to guide. Lethem’s novel, published in 2003 as an elegy for a Brooklyn block that was already mostly gone, is now read — when it is read — as speculative fiction. The city of fear won. The city of guilt is what we are now obliged to feel about having let it.

Similar stories can be told about Bushwick in New York, Wicker Park in Chicago, East Atlanta, and dozens of other places. In a fable that has achieved canonical status in activist circles, these once-thriving communities were abandoned for the suburbs by their racist white populations as black Americans flocked to cities in search of opportunity during the Great Migration. Negligence and decay crept in, tax bases shrank, property values collapsed, and then at some point, disillusioned by their suburban lifestyle, whites returned, buying up devalued real estate, pushing out long-term residents, and establishing cultural enclaves that failed to respect those who had been in the cities for generations.

I am simplifying, but the myth is simplistic, too — so much so that one doesn’t know where to begin dismantling it. It omits the complex history of Latin American settlement and migration patterns across the United States, and treats white and black populations as monoliths. It ignores the abundance of justifications for leaving American cities in the mid-20th century that had nothing to do with race: the cramped quarters, the filthy rivers, the unbreathable air, the corruption and crime. It overlooks the collapse of urban manufacturing, which made remaining in cities unfeasible for large swaths of the middle class. And it willfully dismisses the massive wave of black suburbanization that coincided with white flight and continues to this day, as documented in Andrew Wiese’s Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century.

Scholars of gentrification tend to define it parsimoniously as a rise in average incomes or real estate prices in previously depressed census tracts. The problem with the scholarly definition is that there is nothing to condemn — for all but the most obstinate, “renewal” or “revitalization” are a cause for celebration. And so, with little evidence, the harm of “displacement” has been adduced: rising rents or property taxes that exceed the resources of people who — to use a phrase almost ubiquitous in gentrification literature — “have been there for generations”.

Opponents of gentrification presume a uniformity among populations that quite simply isn’t there: this is true for who is rich and who is poor, for who leaves a neighborhood and who stays. The mere idea that there are neighborhoods where people remain for generations is largely illusory: in a given two-year period, around 50% of renters will move along with 16% of homeowners, even as mobility in America has declined since the Eighties. Presumptive gentrifiers may just be poor people who look different, and those who move out are just as likely to be going somewhere better as somewhere worse — nobody knows, because the research isn’t there. What seems clear, though, is that the assumption that the poor remain stuck in a given place by intractable poverty until they can no longer afford it is not borne out by reality. In “Does Gentrification Harm the Poor?”, the economist Jacob L. Vigdor finds:

“There is no evidence to suggest that gentrification increases the probability that low-status households exit their housing unit. Poor households are more likely to exit poverty themselves than to be replaced by a non-poor household… Poverty itself is rather transitory in nature: about half of all households entering poverty in a given year will escape poverty within a year.”

Gentrification debates often project contemporary housing shortages backward, presuming that wealthy migration to cities necessarily squeezed out the poor. In doing so, they ignore the staggering population losses big American cities underwent in the 20th century, from which many have yet to recover. St. Louis today is one third as populous as it was in 1950; the same is true of Detroit and Cleveland. All three have seen a public outcry about the evils of gentrification, as have other recovering industrial cities like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. To the extent that they have witnessed upward pressure in land values, two understudied factors are likely at play: first, a new model of lower-density urbanism, with smaller family sizes and increasing numbers of people living alone, and second, capital improvements to largely dilapidated older housing stock. One hundred years ago, a newly built home provided, on average, 242 square feet per person; this number has now nearly quintupled. At the same time, home renovation expenditure has accelerated over the past two decades, and A 2006 study in Chicago , and subsequent research in 2017 estimated up to 15% of home price growth in desirable urban areas was due to renovations. And this was before the pandemic-era orgy of expenditure on open-concept kitchens, bespoke cabinetry, man caves, and wet rooms.

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America’s puritans are back

By Adrian Nathan West

If gentrification retains its hold on the progressive imagination, much of the blame lies with unscientific intuitions about who belongs in a given place that cannot really be instituted as policy unless we’re willing to impose a North Korea-style internal passport regime. It’s not that I’m unsympathetic to the anti-gentrifiers’ sentiments: at the gut-feeling level, everyone knows our cities have changed, and it hasn’t all been for the better. It’s hard to say where the pendulum should come to rest between the grit and grime of, say, Seventies New York and the 2020s playground for the rich, but we can admit that character is a real thing, and when a city becomes unaffordable, much of that character goes away. Besides, I’m with the anti-gentrifiers in my heart; I’d like to hand-pick my neighbors, too. No more would I be forced to watch the effortful excretions of dainty dogs on my morning walk, before their owners scoop up their disjecta in a biodegradable bag; gone would be the parents wheeling double strollers into drinking dens and narcotizing their untrained children with inane videos on iPads turned up loud enough to wake the dead. Men wouldn’t be allowed to jog in spandex leggings, their genitals scrunched up like butcher’s leavings. There’d be more movie theaters and fewer omakase joints, and some kind of red-light district, because everything’s getting too sanitized nowadays. I do understand, though, that mine are the fantasies of a crotchety would-be despot and not a responsible member of a polity.

For some time, the Right has attached blame for housing prices on regulation, and in obedience to the dogma of the wisdom of the market — despite the many unwise choices the market keeps making — they’ve advocated for increased supply until prices fall and demand is met. Lately, this idea has caught on among the bien-pensant sort-of Left as part of Ezra Klein’s asinine “abundance agenda”. Surely more construction is needed; surely, onerous regulations raise prices; but pandemic-era wage increases, years of quantitative easing, and surging costs of materials mean $300,000 is now the lower bound for new construction in many places. For renters in popular cities like Austin, a boom in multi-family construction has brought some relief, but prices remain significantly higher than they were just a few years before, and no developer is interested in driving them down much further. Even mobile homes, once a last resort for the poor, have become painfully expensive for many as private equity firms, often with government backing, have begun investing in them (Frank Rolfe, founder of Mobile Home University, quips in one of his courses that owning a manufactured home park is like having “a Waffle House where the customers are chained to the booths”, because so few tenants can afford to leave). This isn’t gentrification, but plain old-fashioned greed, a word not enough heard nowadays but hopefully primed for a comeback.

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By Poppy Sowerby

Those interested in the disappearance of housing for the poor and less well-to-do should look around for a long out-of-print book, Brian D. Boyer’s Cities Destroyed for Cash. Boyer details how government programs nominally intended to help the poor in the Sixties and Seventies led to a massive transfer of inner-city real estate into the hands of banks and speculators; the dereliction much of this property fell into set the stage for later waves of building fever and the present-day affordability crisis. It is possible that government intervention will do a better job today, but signs aren’t encouraging. As “affordable housing” has become a watchword for politicians, many have imposed requirements for its construction on new developments; but hundreds of municipalities allow builders to avoid these mandates by paying in-lieu fees that go into housing authorities’ budgets, where their real effects on housing supply are minimal. Rent control is back in fashion, but its benefits are equivocal: it’s a blessing for those fortunate enough to receive it, but produces major negative externalities, driving up market-rate rents, discouraging investment, and lowering property tax revenues.

There is another point widely ignored, but expressed pithily by Canadian blogger Michal Durand-Wood: “Housing isn’t meant to be affordable.” For decades, homebuying has been seen as an investment, not just in America, but in many other countries as well; government policies have encouraged it, zoning laws have insulated it, and entire economies have grown dependent on it. But the nature of a good investment is that it goes up in value, and as this happens, affordability necessarily declines. The enemies of gentrification may advocate for blowing this system up, but it turns out many poor people think otherwise — unsurprisingly, since around 40% of poor households own their homes. This struck me particularly on seeing a recent story in The Philadelphia Inquirer about a stalled proposal to build affordable housing in Strawberry Mansion, a rough neighborhood even in a city of rough neighborhoods, with 37% of its residents in poverty and a violent crime rate four times the national average. The fairly modest initiative — 57 units in total, including a 21-unit senior living facility — raised the ire of a community organization that compared it to the 1857 Dred Scott decision declaring African-Americans non-citizens, and with an important deadline missed, the project is effectively dead. Opposition mentioned the threat of density, laughable in an area littered with vacant homes and rubble. More likely, local owners don’t want their precarious home values threatened by affordable developments at a time when the real estate market there has come to life after decades of stagnation.

In the end, the gentrification debate appears yet another manifestation of the American public’s ineradicable Goldilocks disposition. People want better neighborhoods, but don’t want to pay the higher taxes that might fund improvements, and spurn the wealthier newcomers who can do so. They want their own home values to rise indefinitely, but the prices of the homes they hope to move to should remain flat. And why not? In 2020, we wanted crime to drop while reducing arrests and letting more people out of jail; we don’t want to be fat, but we don’t want to diet, so we’ve got an injection instead, and since we don’t like needles, either, our Danish drugmaking friends have obliged us with a pill (maybe if they threaten to take it away, Trump will give up on conquering Greenland). Boomers grouse about the national debt, but will tolerate no cuts to their entitlements to leave something over for their children and grandchildren, and increasingly, they’re even turning against the immigrants whose labor is the only plausible path to keeping Medicare and Social Security afloat. My own homebuying advice, then, is to get a place with a view, because watching our national incoherencies play out in real time will never cease to be engaging.

Market stalls selling suet pudding and old copies of Hillary Mantel started shaking to the sound of Vera Lynn’s “There’ll Always Be An England”. At five past one, down they came: a swaggering, carnivalesque procession of red and white, horns and whistles. The Faversham middle classes, some who had adorned “Lefty” badges to make it clear they were most definitely not part of this spectacle, looked on with horror and trepidation.

“Some silly bint threw water at us,” said a gleeful, puffed-out man, holding aloft a billowing St George’s Cross that would not have looked out of place on the Third Crusade. Today he had come, like 100 or so others, because he was “fed up of sitting on his sofa and not doing anything while the country fell apart”.

This was the third protest in Faversham since the summer of flags, one which seems to have dredged up the town’s — and the county’s — deepest divides. Faversham lies just south of a no man’s land of Dickensian marshes. To one side are the Medway towns, gradually blending into London’s Zone-5 sprawl. To the other lies Thanet, a spiritually renowned corner of Kent made famous by David Seabrook, the crime writer and Proust scholar fascinated by its faded Carry On stars and strain of occult far-Right politics.

Since the 1900s, Faversham has attracted waves of Cockneys to its hop farm and local brewery — the oldest in the country — who have come to form a tight community in its villages and housing estates. It’s a settlement that one former resident likened to the mosquito trapped in amber in Jurassic Park, waiting to unleash the DNA of a long-forgotten East End into the Kent hinterland. Into this world, perhaps unwittingly, have come the recent “Down from Londoners”. This has led to an interesting if incongruous mix. Bob Geldof lives in a Benedictine nunnery, a stone’s throw from a council estate where jolly men in white vans toot horns at neighbors and discreetly sell them drugs. Flags — Palestinian, Union Jack and the Saint George’s Cross — delineate a sort of informal segregation.

The civic life of Faversham is dominated by a progressive set of Lib Dems and Greens, now bolstered by a parapolitical body known as “Faversham Against Racism”. It was set up to counter another group — “National Emergency Faversham Division” — which have helped organize this weekend’s march. Local politics are no longer about bins, but a battle for the town’s soul that echoes far beyond the Kent countryside. If you want to understand the forces unleashed when a political order dies, the two-party system fragments, and a shared reality collapses into future visions wavering between a multicultural paradise and all-out civil war, then visit Faversham.

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Inside Middle England’s reactionary shires

By Fred Sculthorp

Despite all this, locals still insist Faversham is still a lovely place. And they’re right. Yet it’s this undeniable charm that makes it all the more unnerving — even relatable — when trouble does flare: scuffles outside the artisan butcher, a Labour councillor’s window smashed in. A place that seems to linger between the Cotswolds and the start of a J.G Ballard short story about what happens when the precarious fabric that holds together provincial life in Kent life starts to unravel.

All this seems to have stirred something deep within the locals. Samantha, a gently spoken woman in her thirties, was putting up “international bunting” on the morning of the first protest back in October when one of the protestors accused her of being a paedophile. Something inside her clicked. A week later she was standing in a car park with three other strangers in the early hours of the morning, determined to put what had been unleashed over the summer back in its bottle.

“The Ninjas”, as they’re affectionately known, have so far taken down over 400 crosses of St George. In other parts of the country, councils have leaned on shady men in vans to take them down. But this highly sophisticated operation is not only done for free but against the will of Reform-run Kent County Council, which insisted the flags stay up. It sees them run decoys, share knowledge with surrounding towns and end up in standoffs on A-roads.“It’s just very upsetting to see lots of flags that were put up by an organisation of known fascists and racists,” says Samantha, who sees a fringe minority exploiting the grievances of the town. “I didn’t think that was who we were in this country.”

But in Faversham, this particular attempt to abate the tension doesn’t seem to have worked. “Lefty scum, off our street” chant the protesters as they sweep through town. “Fuck off” roars a plump, James May lookalike outside one historic pub. “I hope someone gives them a kicking,” he cries as the rearguard of protesting mobility scooters whizzes past. Up ahead, a crew from CNN are angling to get a picture of their leader, a smart man in a black peacoat, who looks like a guilty real estate agent about to go on trial.

It’s Harry Hilden, who, depending on whether you live in a Victorian semi or one of the town’s suburban estates, is either the devil incarnate or a local hero. He’s one of Faversham’s, and indeed England’s, more foreboding creations since last summer. God and Mixed Martial Arts are his hobbies; as a teenager he was jailed for gang violence, though there’s no evidence his later activism is anything but peaceful. Indeed, he’s amassed 11,000 Facebook followers, or half the population of Faversham, through a mixture of neighborhood-watch-style posts and Rupert Lowe impersonations, all leavened by a vision of England re-Christianized by AI-generated holy warriors. Just this week, he was in Poland on its independence march, and it’s this ritual of unabashed nationalism that Hilden now intends to bring to Faversham on a Saturday afternoon.

Local critics argue that Hilden is just a short-lived social media nightmare, destined either to be swept aside by Labour’s promised reform of the asylum system, or else nobbled by the authorities. But as we head to Acacia Court, a former care home and now asylum accommodation for unaccompanied minors that straddles one of the town’s estates, a more complex dynamic of support emerges.

On the estate, a sprawling monotone suburb that’s a far cry from quaint Faversham, families have gathered on their front lawns in support. “The community doesn’t feel safe,” says Dawn, 42, watching from her front lawn as a car emblazoned with “Stop The Boats” pulls up. “This is all happening because people don’t feel like they’re being heard,” she continues, alleging problems with older teenagers staying at the hotel “ogling girls” and asking locals to buy them alcohol. “We’re a tight knit community and Harry is standing up for us. I think he’s a local hero.”

The Faversham protest is redirected by police, away from a thin gray line singing in gentle harmony outside the asylum accommodation. Just up the road, a family of four come out on the lawn and watch the counter-protest. “Those upper-class idiots don’t understand what’s happening up here,” says the father, an easy-going man with a beer belly. They would have joined the protest, but they’re worried about their jobs. Is their support for the protest just about the asylum hotel? “I think everyone is just fed up,” says the father. “I expect Reform will win the next election and get a grip on immigration, but then they’ll find another way to screw us over.”

Around the corner just outside the asylum accommodation, CNN is trying to interview Paul Golding, a former BNP man who has a grimmer prophecy. “I believe violence is inevitable against what’s happening to the English,” he tells the flustered-looking American reporter. In the background, “MissusKent”, another political influencer who has emerged since the summer, is singing what sounds like Lily Allen if she were interested in mass deportations.

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Hilden addresses the crowd. “Be more like Poland!” he tells the small gathering. “You can see how much they love their country in their eyes.” Hilden has his fans. “I got to shake his hand!” says an excited young boy with his mum. As that cynical father implies, across the estate this is about more than Reform, whose rise people here seem broadly indifferent to. Rather, it’s Tommy Robinson’s march on London in September that changed everything. And if Robinson, in Britain’s fraying multicultural settlement, is now regarded as a “community leader” for sections of the white working class, then Hilden can perhaps be seen as the local chapter of that new interest.

It’s a response to the rise of other sectarian political influencers, who now speak for Britain’s multicultural tribes as the old Westminster system collapses. And stylistically, it’s no different. Whether it’s Akhmed Yakoob in Ladywood, or Harry Hilden in Faversham, both waver between bolshy street-level provocation and cozy community sermons built on vague appeals to family and faith. Taken together, it’s a quasi-theocratic, communal identitarianism bubbling up from the provinces, and which Westminster politics has no means of mediating. Here the democratic individual has been subsumed into the post-democratic “interests” of the local community, mobilized along ethnic and religious lines in an attempt to assert their interests in anticipation of the coming collapse of the present political establishment.

All the while, politicians are doing their best to harness these new forces. Hilden has already met with the local MP, the shadow-cabinet member Helen Whately, to discuss the communities’ concerns. Meanwhile the local Reform Party have established their own links, as they seek to overthrow Conservative power in a seat that’s almost always voted Tory. “I think they want his credibility, his connection to the local area,” says the mayor Josh Rowlands, who himself has met with Hilden in an attempt to lessen tensions.

But Rowlands is bleak about the new political landscape that has emerged since the summer. “I think it will take something really bad until something is actually done,” he says. “National politics still doesn’t really understand what’s happening in places like Faversham.” Considering the rise of someone like Harry Hilden, it’s easy to see what he means. Still, back in the pub by the station, there’s a fun and jovial mood. Some of the marchers are knocking back pints, and a crowd is pouring in after Faversham beat Sevenoaks 4-0. “If they had just left the flags up, people would have eventually lost interest” says one of the market stall owners.

But it’s too late for that. “I can tell you this movement has just begun,” Hilden proclaimed on social media the day after the protest, addressing his message to the council and Faversham Against Racism. “Why don’t you start actually working for the common people of the town, and not the people who bring wealth into it and fit your little messed up Left-wing agenda. Then all these marches will stop.”

Eventually, this surging tide of gentrification engulfed Gabriela. Two months ago, she had to move from Condesa to another flat, about five kilometers away across the capital’s massive urban sprawl. “They told me they would not renew my lease because the owner wanted to tear down the building. I imagine they are going to build a new building — and if they follow the other buildings on the street, they will build luxury apartments or Airbnbs to be used by foreigners.”

Gabriela, who has studied in the United States, understands why many Americans might want to flee their car-oriented and often-costly cities. But she admits to anger at seeing so many gringos — often working remotely from their new homes — take over her native district. “Mexico prides itself on being very welcoming but it’s impossible to compete with American salaries,” she says. “Of course it is fantastic when you can live a much more affordable life. But when I was a kid, the only foreigners who came to Mexico City were people interested in our culture since it was deemed the most dangerous and polluted city in the world. Now so many of them come here, but they are not interested in our country.”

Such complaints are far from unusual — and laced with cruel irony at a time when Mexicans north of the border are being hunted down, detained and deported. Visiting Mexico City early last year, I was amazed to hear so many American accents in its most prosperous enclaves. Friends told me there was growing fury over an “invasion” that exploded after the pandemic, when the nation had comparatively loose restrictions. Anti-gringo graffiti and stickers began appearing. Then came three demonstrations over the summer in Condesa, culminating with protesters attacking boutiques, cars, coffee shops and taco restaurants aimed at tourists. Some chanted “Fuera Gringo!” (Gringos Out!); others held signs saying things like “Gentrification is colonization!” and “Learn Spanish, dog”.

Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum — who is facing fresh demonstrations over corruption following the murder of a popular mayor — quickly condemned the display of xenophobia. And Mexico City is far from the only place to face protests over rapid gentrification that pitches rich against poor, local against newcomer, localism against a globalization. There have been similar complaints in other tourist hotspots where short-term lets inflame such issues. Last month, for instance, I was investigating this issue in Lisbon, where the typical price for a home has surged to 21 times median household income — making it the least affordable European capital for local people.

The shift in Mexico City’s image can be traced to 2016, when The New York Times unexpectedly labeled it the world’s best place to visit. The first substantial wave of gringos  — a word which in Mexico refers specifically to Americans — arrived in central areas like Condesa, Polanco and Roma the following year. A pair of natural disasters inflamed the influx. First, in 2017, the city was struck by an earthquake, leaving homes damaged. Many local families moved out and house prices fell. Then numbers soared during the pandemic — and gentrification started to ripple into adjacent districts.

In Condesa, perhaps one in five homes are now an Airbnb or other tourist house. And while there is limited data on numbers of foreign residents — many use tourist visas — last year 56% more temporary-residency permits were issued to Americans in Mexico City than five years earlier (though foreigners make up a tiny minority of Mexico City’s 9.2 million people). All this in a city that saw the lowest rate of new house-building of any Mexican state over the last decade, notwithstanding its Left-wing leadership.

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These are familiar concerns in many cities: an influx of foreigners seeking fun, freedom and fewer financial shackles, before becoming a focal point for generational fury over housing inadequacies and political ineptitude. Yet while the new arrivals have put pressure on costs — property prices have risen eightfold in under two decades in prosperous Polanco — the tensions are also cultural. It was no coincidence that the initial protest took place on 4 July: US Independence Day. Behind the volley of demands for rent controls, or effective regulation of short-term lets, locals are angry over the arrogance of many Americans in their city. “When I was in Condesa, the people who lived there spoke Spanish,” says Vanessa Gonzales, 49, a hairdresser driven out last year after her salon’s landlord demanded a near-tripling of rent. “Now it’s all English, English, English. We’re Mexican but you go to the restaurants and menus are in English.”

When Gonzales first opened a salon near her home in Condesa 15 years ago, almost all her clients lived in the district; now barely one in 10 remain. And, as she explains, many Mexicans “do not love American people” for economic, religious or historical reasons — a feeling intensified when strutting newcomers refuse to respect their culture. Fernando, a taco seller working with his two nieces, tells me that gringos complained about the smell of his food, the umbrellas over his stall and even how he clogs up the street. “They’re not even from here,” he says, “and they complain that this commerce should not be here.”

There are even more brazen examples too. A young American model sparked outrage last year after posting on Instagram that people should stop giving money to traditional street musicians playing automated organs since they were “polluting with their noise.” Another American in Condesa — a long-term resident married to a Mexican man and running an Airbnb in their home — tells me she was horrified to hear a group of “vile” young Americans discuss their cocaine use recently while standing in the queue at her local bakery. “This was so incredibly offensive in a country that has been ravaged by drug violence,” she says. “Although most guests at our Airbnb have been very pleasant, it sums up the arrogance of some of the people coming here.”

This seems to be the key issue — along with corrosive suspicions that rich foreigners get favorable treatment in their city. One podcast featured someone who spoke about trying to make a booking at a popular restaurant in Spanish and being told there was no room: only to get an English-speaking friend to call back and be told there was an available table. There are even scandalous claims that some restaurants have toned down the heat in their salsas.

True or false, there is a unique edge to this Mexican outrage at gentrification, since it comes at a time when the White House has dispatched controversial federal enforcement units to find and deport undocumented migrants. “Whenever I open YouTube I get this fucking Pam Bondi ad where she says don’t come to the United States illegally because we will catch you,” says Sebastian Rojas, a musician who was born in Condesa, but who moved after being “strangled” by high rents. “At the same time you see all these gringos living like kings and enjoying the beauty of the best parts of our city.”

Emilio Guerrero Alexander, a filmmaker, makes a similar point in response to claims that Americans are entitled to gentrify his city when millions of Mexicans go to the US. “This is not a two-way street,” he says. “Some people are unlucky to have been born in areas where there is lots of criminal activity and murders so they go north to escape this misery. They just want safety and a better life for their families. But the Americans coming to Mexico City are people who realized — mostly during the pandemic — they will be richer here and buy more with their dollars… They are coming to have fun and don’t even try to get into our culture. Some do — but sadly it is just a minority.”

Even some Americans tell me they supported the protests against them. “It makes sense that people are upset,” says Shaynn, a charity worker who has lived in the city for four years. “I do my best to be conscious about where I spend my money, the kind of housing I live in, how I pay or hire people — but my being here definitely has a negative impact, which is something I grapple with. Anyone earning in a foreign currency, especially dollars, and spending in pesos negatively impacts on people living here by increasing prices.”

Such ambiguities are also apparent among Mexicans. In one luxury spa, for instance, a therapist tells me she supported the protests despite feeling hypocritical. “We have to treat them like special guests because they come with money, so it feels like I am betraying my own culture,” she says. “And I hate seeing gringos coming to the city and paying huge amounts of rent when we can’t afford to live in these most beautiful parts because they have raised the costs so much.”

This woman also has relatives living north of the border. “It feels a bit icky,” she admits. “My family has friends who aren’t citizens in the US and they are being profiled the whole time. Our government sees all these Americans as bringing money into our country, but I do feel some resentment when I hear these people saying how much they love Mexico City, how they love having such fun here and how it’s so cheap. It feels like we are being colonized.”

This word is heavily loaded in a nation colonized by Spain for centuries, and then invaded by the US in 1846 and 1916 — and the fact that it kept cropping up in my conversations underlines the depth of disquiet about gentrification in the Mexican metropolis. “I support the protests since it feels like we have been colonized again, predominantly by Americans,” says Armando, 25, working in a Roma boutique selling $130 hoodies.

Not that everyone agrees. Eduardo Garcia, 64, a writer and podcaster, argues that though the demonstrations reflect genuine grievances over high rents and the conversion of buildings into short-term lets, they got out of hand and damaged the nation’s image. “The protests left a bad impression,” he tells me. “A lot of small businesses, a lot of the waiters such as those here, benefit from the high number of foreigners coming to the city. If foreigners think twice about coming to Mexico and feel unwanted, they could hurt these people.”

Protests against over-tourism in places such as Spain suggest they do not deter arrivals and have little long-term impact, but can lead to small behavioral changes, such as switching to hotels. Yet studies indicate the capital has seen hefty price rises in its swankier parts, with a single room in Condesa or Roma Norte now costing $1,000 or more — higher than average monthly wages. One report, published last year by the National Academy of Sciences, revealed average house prices quadrupled over two decades before 2022, while the country’s per capita income declined relative to inflation. “Gentrification in Mexico City,” the authors concluded, “is impacting housing accessibility and displacing its residents.”

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Given international trends, some suspect these shifts are an inevitable consequence of our globalized economy. Garcia, who is married to an American, says his country was cut off from the rest of the planet when he was growing up, with its low trade, poor-quality domestic consumer products and tourism limited to beach resorts. “Now Mexico is competing with the world, producing better products, and is attractive to foreigners,” he continues. “I saw these changes and like these changes. I believe in the strength of Mexican culture — and there is nothing to be afraid of foreigners coming into your country and changing it a little bit.”

His stance is supported by the economist José Alberto Lara-Pulido, head of the center for sustainability at Ibero American University. “Gentrification is tough,” he says. “It has a relationship with xenophobia because a lot of people from the US came to the richest areas of Mexico City, prices of houses have risen and local people are being pushed away. There is fear of real-estate speculation. But for me, it is just the market working and a big city should welcome people from all over the world.” Foreign business owners defend themselves too, claiming they create jobs, pay decent wages and assist local suppliers. “The frustration is valid but misdirected,” says Fahra Bellak, a 40 year old from Edinburgh who runs a thriving bagel shop in Roma Norte. “Farmers tell me they come into the city and make four times as much as in rural areas, which helps sustain their farms. We buy our eggs from an organic farmer — when we started it was seven trays a week, now it’s more than 60, so he says I’ve helped him grow his farm. Our coffee guy says the same.”

Regardless, the authorities are responding. Following the protests, Mayor Clara Brugada proposed a 14-point plan to regulate rent prices, protect residents, and build affordable social housing. Critics, however, point out that existing rules to limit occupancy of short-term lets to a maximum of six months a year are rarely enforced, while Sheinbaum, during her own tenure as mayor, has faced accusations of fueling the boom — after signing a 2022 deal with Airbnb to lure digital nomads and tourists.

Lara-Pulido argues that Mexico’s real problem is not gentrification but rampant inequality in a land where about half the population work in the informal sector; where inflation has long been high; where the economy is dominated by a handful of huge corporations; and where it is hard to start or close a business. “There are much bigger issues with our economy,” he stresses. “A lot of young people cannot afford houses with these rising prices but the solution is not regulating prices or controlling Airbnbs but the creation of a more prosperous economy.”

In Mexico, as in so many places, these issues are divisive. A self-proclaimed “social warrior” since his student days 50 years ago, veteran housing activist Enrique Gonzales labels the anti-gentrification protests as a publicity stunt, used to divert attention from other important issues such as inadequate security, healthcare and infrastructure. “Mexico has a long history of hospitality and welcoming people from other societies,” he says. But, like many others, Gonzales is ambivalent about the tide of American arrivals given events north of the border. “The gringos here are happy, they feel safe, but the Mexicans in the US are all scared, hiding in the shadows.”

Earlier this year, his daughter Emma, 39, had to leave her home in Texas after two decades amid the immigration crackdown, leaving behind her 12-year-old daughter. She hopes to return soon after obtaining US citizenship. Yet to her father’s shock, Emma tells me she likes Trump for his straight-talking style — even as she supported the anti-American protests in Mexico. “These people, the gringos, are taking something that does not belong to them,” she says. “This is why there is war in the world. It’s not because they are American but because they are pushing up prices and changing the economy. It is already very hard for people like me and they are making life harder.”

Both the Gonzales and their beguiling city ultimately show how the arguments over globalization, housing, migration, populism and tourism that strain our own societies are being echoed across so much of the planet. “Our culture is changing, our way of life is changing,” adds Enrique. He is right, of course — but the big challenge of our era, one that even divides this family, is over the best solution.

“Let’s have him, Ed,” shouted the father, taking his place on one of the chipped, fold-down wooden seats next to me. Like him, the crowd seemed to back Chattey, a spry super middleweight from Ealing with only two fights and one win to his name. Tonight would not be his second. Not far into the third round, Grannum sprung a surprise left hook that cracked the younger man’s cheek. He sank to one knee, as the crowd let out something between a gasp and a groan. By the time Grannum had been declared the winner, 10 minutes later on points, my neighbor had already headed to the bar, his lad in tow behind.

Come to York Hall most weekends and you’ll witness the same, thick-scarred brawlers, punching, ducking and weaving at what The Times once called a “faded palace of the pugilist”. That, in itself, is surprising. Compared to Wembley or Wimbledon, this is a strange sporting icon, with its rickety chairs and scratched chocolate floorboards, especially when similar London institutions have stumbled and died. But then again, York Hall is different from Smithfield and Billingsgate and countless of empty East End pubs. Unlike them, it’s a place that has retained a certain vitality and energy — qualities associated with boxing itself — that has enabled it to keep the developers at bay and continue to welcome new Londoners eager for the ring. More than that, though, this scruffy spot surely offers something else: cocksure authenticity in a town, and a sport, that can sometimes feel so cold.

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For a place commonly touted as the “home” of British boxing, York Hall gives off an unassuming air from outside. Bordered to the side by a community arts space, and in front by public gardens that surround the nearby Young V&A museum, its handsome neo-Georgian exterior gives little indication of the blood, sweat and tears that have been spilled here since it first welcomed professional boxers in the late Forties. That’s hardly surprising: built in 1929, York Hall actually started life as a public baths, serving the many Eastern European Jews who then called Bethnal Green home. It’s a dual identity that’s endured ever since. During the week, it functions as a leisure center, while also hosting business conferences, trade shows and weddings.

But on Saturday, York Hall’s main hall turns into a kind of lion’s den, where up-and-coming practitioners of the “sweet science” put their mettle to the test, amid an echoing cacophony of screams and shouts from a baying crowd. In this corner of East London, boxing runs deep, right back to Daniel Mendoza, a Sephardic Jew who went from working in a tobacco shop to becoming one of the most feted prizefighters of the 18th century. Despite the era’s ingrained antisemitism, one fight was watched by the future King George IV, while the fighter himself used his winnings to found a boxing academy.

Jeff Jones, a local historian, details other tales of local boys made good. Like Mendoza, who basked in his nickname of “The Star of Israel”, many East End heroes have enjoyed deliciously evocative labels. Scour the annals of the early 20th century and you’ll find names like Kid Froggy and “Bombardier” Billy Wells. In the Twenties came another Jewish fighter, Ted “Kid” Lewis, who was in 2014 named by ESPN as one of the 50 greatest boxers of all time.

There aren’t many tobacco shops in Bethnal Green these days — but otherwise little has changed, certainly compared to other establishments swept away by East End gentrification. One way of understanding this, surely, is to appreciate that York Hall changed with the times, or anyway that it hosts a sport that bonds beyond language. For just as Jones has described boxing as a “way out” of East End poverty for generations of young Jews and Irishmen, York Hall welcomes more recent arrivals too.

Consider Yaser “Yasiiboy” Al-Ghena, winner of the final fight the night I visited. Born in Syria, but raised in Finchley, Al-Ghena cited his old boxing gym as playing a pivotal role in helping him turn his life around after falling in with a bad crowd. “Getting kids off the streets is integral to what we do,” Tony Burns, the legendary trainer at Repton Boxing Club, explained before his death in 2021. “This is somewhere they can come and they’re not getting into trouble. They are actually enhancing themselves, learning self-control as well as learning to box, and that’s bringing the right stuff out of them.”

And where Al-Ghena crowned his victory by becoming the English super-lightweight champion, York Hall has hosted more famous names too. Plenty of young fighters here — Anthony Joshua, Ricky Hatton, Carl Froch — have gone on to become world champions. In truth, though, I think York Hall endures less as a starmaker: and more because it refuses to abandon sluggers like Chattey and Grannum. This, after all, is not Caesar’s Palace or Madison Square Garden, or any other distant pay-per-view fortress. Rather, it’s a small hall boxing venue with a capacity of just 1,200. It’s precisely this lack of size that provides York Hall with its unique atmosphere, where it’s not uncommon for boxers to rub shoulders with punters. I once saw Robbie “The Camden Caretaker” Chapman, a handsome light-heavyweight with blonde dreadlocks, entertaining the rabble by the bar after a points loss. The self-professed “best looking journeyman in boxing” was still in shorts as he talked, a towel loosely draped over his shoulder, his defeat already in the past.

York Hall, in short, is an extension of the sweat, spit and sawdust of the boxing gym, lending it an intoxicatingly genuine air. Contrast this with November’s farce at the AT&T arena in Texas, when social media menace Jake Paul duked it out with a 58-year-old Mike Tyson in a Netflix special as depressing as it was gaudy. If that was boxing at its most manufactured, then York Hall, for all its peeling paint, represents the sport at its purest. In an age where professional sport has been increasingly commodified, these grass roots must surely count for something.

Spend time watching the crowds at York Hall, and you’ll encounter everyone from a young family on a night out to old boys reminiscing about some once-bright prospect. The boxers that attract the most raucous support have traditionally come from East or Greater London. When I first went to York Hall, in the early 2000s, any bout involving Romford’s Kevin Mitchell, a skilled if slightly ill-disciplined featherweight, could be guaranteed to blow the roof off. On my latest visit, though, it was Lauren Parker, a former European female super-flyweight champion from Stevenage, who generated some of the loudest noise. Willed on by a large group of fans, they unfurled a large banner bearing her “Lionheart” nickname over the balustrade.

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The shabbiness of York Hall prompts enthusiasm in other ways. Fighters often bring armies of friends and family with them: from financial necessity as much as anything else. According to Steve Goodwin, a promoter whose company puts on the majority of shows at York Hall, most boxers need to sell around 60 tickets each to help cover the $20,000 required to stage a fight night, accounting for production, ambulances, medical teams and security. It is often a point of contention for the fighters, who question why, as professional sportspeople, they must effectively pay to play.

And if the boxers at York Hall are skint, the venue itself has problems too. It came close to closure in 2004, after the local council deemed it “out of date”. Two decades on, the British Boxing Board of Control, which oversees fights nationwide, still considers it unfit for purpose. Fighters and promoters alike have conceded that the changing rooms need gutting.

Local campaigns have saved York Hall for now. But even if the lockers are fixed and the flooring replaced, the future remains unclear. Can a place as tumbledown as this survive the regeneration of East London? To be sure, its grotty bar, sticky underfoot through endless spilled pints, feels light years away from the Bethnal Green Tavern, a five-minute walk away, where before the Chattey fight I eavesdropped on an earnest conversation about dadaism in the music of Brian Eno. Then again, even this paragon of traditional London has had to change with the times. A night at the boxing no longer comes cheap, with a ringside seat costing just shy of $70, some $20 dearer than when I first visited. This doesn’t appear to have deterred punters, but that could change amid cost-of-living fears.

Yet through it all, like a plucky fighter who’s done the hard yards in the gym to make up for a shortfall in talent, York Hall is much greater than the sum of its parts. If nothing else, it has that splendid Twenties setting to fall back on, with promoters often finding that the cheapness of provincial leisure centers doesn’t make up for the magic of Bethnal Green. I felt that magic once more that cold night in December, when the fights were done, and the doors to Cambridge Heath Road were flung open once more. Storm Darragh was still in high dudgeon, but up ahead I spotted the father and son from earlier in the night. They were still sparring, as if the squall was merely a breeze.

The progressive Mission District in San Francisco has become ground zero for a form of Lefty nativism that scorns newcomers and most forms of economic growth. In a city renowned for its inclusive diversity and technological innovation, it is here that a bitter racialised activism has taken root.

Roberto Hernandez, self-styled “mayor of the Mission” and candidate on the ballot in local elections this year, is one of those activists. He has been waging a decade-long war to keep the neighbourhood, in his words, “a Latino barrio”. He has campaigned furiously against shuttles for tech workers, new restaurants and bars, and even a low-cost bike-sharing programme — all in the name of battling gentrification and those developments that might alter the demographics of the predominantly Latino area.

Plans for hundreds of new housing units at vacant lots or blighted areas were defeated by a Hernandez-led coalition. Developers pitched nearly 400 below-market rate homes as part of their proposals, but Hernandez has said that he opposes anything that is not built at “100% affordable” rates. He demands vouchers for any black or Latino resident priced out of the city to first return before new residents are allowed to arrive.

“Delay, delay, delay,” said Hernandez of his strategy for stopping a proposed mixed housing development on South Van Ness Avenue by 26th Street. “Until we kill it,” another activist added.

In a barn-burning speech in 2015, Hernandez decried the influx of thousands of privileged “white techies” who he said gallivant around Dolores Park with the audacity to openly drink wine and smoke marijuana in full view of cops.

The hostility towards those perceived as racial outsiders is palpable. Several non-Latino small business owners, have cited ethnic intimidation from neighbourhood groups in the Mission. In one instance, an organisation tied to Hernandez helped block a Russian immigrant-owned bakery from leasing a vacant storefront previously occupied by a Mexican panaderia over the baker’s lack of Latino heritage. The pressure worked — over the last four years, the location has remained boarded up and bereft of any tenants.

Meanwhile, the Hernandez faction has placed onerous restrictions on various forms of policing and ploughed hundreds of millions of dollars into failed homeless assistance programmes — the results of which are now world famous, as images of the city’s urban decay and untreated addiction-mental health crisis routinely go viral.

The Mission is now hardly gentrified. Rather than a hotbed of investment, 56 storefronts are empty and lots once viewed as prime real estate sit abandoned, accumulating trash and graffiti. Car break-ins and burglaries abound and drive-by shootings by gang members, once a relic of the distant past, have returned over the past year. The mass transit BART station is now a daily market for stolen goods, with young men hawking electronics and shampoo bottles still featuring their tags from the Best Buy and Walgreens stores.

New elections, then, represent an opportunity to shift this status quo. With the mayor’s office and several pivotal supervisor seats up for grabs, Hernandez and other far-Left candidates are vying to represent the Mission. Jackie Fielder, who has called to defund the police and restrict building projects, similarly never skips an opportunity to tout her candidacy on identitarian grounds as “a queer, Indigenous-Latina”. Fielder or Hernandez are favoured to win, but unlike previous years, these types of candidates might not be a shoo-in.

Because for the first time in recent memory, moderate liberals seeking pro-growth policies, less bureaucratic obstacles, and commonsense policing have organised and are pushing back. They have been on the march over the past two years, winning elections to remove the city’s anti-law enforcement District Attorney and several education commissioners who prioritised renaming schools over the basics of teaching children. Despite the doom loop narrative, change may be on the horizon.

The far-Left campaigns, however, offer the tempting allure of scapegoat politics. They blame nebulous landlords and tech workers and “gentrifiers” for every affliction facing the city, claiming that only they alone can finally prioritise the Mission’s true “natives”, as Hernandez has argued.

Such storylines not only sidestep scrutiny of the failed policies of the past decade, but obscure a more vibrant history than these one-dimensional identity politics might suggest. The Mission’s past is rich with cycles of migration and economic growth.

Once home to indigenous communities, the land next saw the arrival of Spanish missionary explorers who gave the neighbourhood its name with the first Catholic church. The gold rush brought waves of Scottish, German, Italian, English and Scandinavian arrivals, migrants who built the ornately decorated Victorians that line the main boulevards. Successful merchants and traders constructed stately homes, while the business corridors of Mission were self-sufficient centres of commerce. Following the 1906 fire, the neighbourhood swelled with those displaced by the disaster.

The Irish arrived in large numbers by the turn of the century, filling its eastern factories and warehouses with working-class labour. St. Peter’s Church in the Mission — now one of the largest Spanish-speaking congregations in the Bay Area — was once a bastion of the strong Irish majority.

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The American corporations stoking illegal immigration

By Lee Fang

It was not until after the Second World War that many residents of European descent began moving out to be replaced by immigrants from Latin American countries. The Latino migration has its own storied and fascinating history, one that is vital to the Mission’s identity. It is a community that has welcomed asylum seekers and those displaced by foreign conflict, and produced wonderful Mission-centric food and music inspired by far-flung cultures. The Chipotle burrito is said to have been inspired by local taquerias.

Hernandez, to his credit, has helped organise the widely attended Carnival, a daylong parade displaying the many cultures that make up Latin America, an event that has become a signature festival of the community. And he has pushed for vital job training and arts programmes for Mission youth, efforts that should be applauded. Yet he myopically views the neighbourhood as a territory claimed by one racial group, to the exclusion of all else. The post-dot-com arrival of Asian and young entrepreneurs as well as artists of every ethnic background should be welcomed equally. The stubborn rejection of new housing and business is a race to the bottom, ignoring credible economic research which shows that depressing the housing supply actually raises housing costs.

Many fear that any new influx of residents might threaten the neighbourhood’s character. But such anxiety is fuelled by the same concerns over any ethnic change. For an ultra-progressive sector of San Francisco, the mindset is downright reactionary.

The mix and blend of cultures and backgrounds is what makes the neighbourhood unique. The grand Lutheran church on 22nd Street and the breweries on Potrero Hill were built by 19th-century German immigrants. Now, the church is a Buddhist temple and nunnery, and the largest local brewery was recently purchased by a yoghurt billionaire of Kurdish ancestry. The most popular Mission burritos now include a Filipino fusion variety. Among the most generous donors to philanthropy in the neighbourhood are software developers born to Taiwanese and Indian immigrants, as well as white Americans born in New Jersey and Illinois who now call San Francisco home.

The anger at the arrival of white neighbours is misplaced. Decades ago, the inverse arguments were made to denounce “white flight”. Such double-standards only serve to create a nasty racial barrier, where superficial differences take precedence over behaviour.

At a forum earlier this month, taking place at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, the progressive candidates jostled for racial authenticity points, repeatedly reminding the audience of their Latino heritage and competing to fight the influence of outsiders, especially housing speculators and landlords. Hernandez opened his remarks with a nod to the venue, noting that he helped open this institution, a testament to his ethnic appeal.

Left unmentioned, though, were the venue’s humble roots. A century ago, it was Shaff’s Furniture Company, a small business run by German-Jewish immigrants who were known in the community for their relief efforts directed towards refugees fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. And here is the irony at the heart of the Mission’s politics. For a community so transfixed on identity, its representatives fail to appreciate the actual history and diversity of the neighbourhood. Focusing on ethnic scapegoats and powered by racial chauvinism, it is fiddling while the Mission burns.

But internal migration to Texas did kick in, and then some. Newly released census data shows that between 2020 and 2023, nine of the 10 fastest growing cities in the US with a population of 20,000 or more were in Texas, and Georgetown was on the list having grown by 40.1% during that period. Today, census data puts the population at 93,612. Other towns grew at an even faster clip: Celina — outside Dallas — by 143.2% and Fulshear — outside Houston — by 142.7%. Now the possibility of social and political change seems  very real — a popular T-shirt/bumper sticker reads “Don’t Californicate my Texas”. The country singer Creed Fisher (whose oeuvre includes such classics as “Girls with Big Titties”), released a song about the same anxiety: that exiles from the sunshine state will vote for the very same policies that caused the conditions they fled from, changing Texas forever.

Certainly, there are California transplants who intend to do just that. But the overall picture is more complicated than it appears. First, some Californians who move to Texas are conservatives. Second, migration into Texas is from all over the US. And third, Texas has already changed forever.

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Democrats are hooked on Hillbilly Horror

By Daniel Kalder

Georgetown is an excellent case study. When I first visited, it was the seat of archly conservative Williamson County, the Yin to the Yang of Travis County, which was home to all the hippies and nudists and slackers of Austin. The town was everything you’d expect in Texas: a picturesque courthouse, lots of churches, sheriffs with guns on their hips, harsh penalties for marijuana possession and a Walmart as big as an aircraft hangar. I remember eating at a barbecue joint where the staff wore T-shirts that said “Keep Georgetown Normal” — a direct riposte to the famous slogan Keep Austin Weird. Later, the restaurant was converted into a church.

Georgetown was also a bit snobby. It was home to the first university in Texas, a private arts college with a meticulously maintained campus. There were old families with deep roots, such as the Wolfs, whose surname is now attached to a shopping centre and a subdivision built on what was once their land. Then there were the Stumps, who practised law and had an office on the town square: Stump, Stump and Stump. One Stump was very involved in St John’s United Methodist Church, which was founded by Swedish immigrants in 1882. They had a Swedish-language service early on Christmas morning for descendants of the original members. But most impressive of all was that Williamson County was “dry”, meaning restaurants in Georgetown weren’t allowed to serve alcohol.

It all feels like a lost world now. Things began to change with the opening of Sun City, an “active adult community” for people aged 55 and over that brought an influx of retirees. Sun City was my first exposure to that bizarre American style of authoritarianism, whereby free people submit to strict rules about what colour their doors should be, what kind of plants they can grow in their gardens, and so on.

The inhabitants of Sun City wanted places to go in the evening, so it wasn’t long before the whole dry county thing was abolished and upscale restaurants selling alcohol appeared. My wife and I visited one of them for our anniversary. I remember watching a diner with a personal oxygen tank sipping on some wine. The vibe was snooty and stifling, although rumour had it that Sun City was not quite as buttoned up as it seemed to be. I once met a nurse who told me that the “active adult community” was active in more ways than one and had an unusually high rate of STDs. “They have swinger parties,” she said. To be honest, this is so similar to a myth that swirls around a notorious Florida retirement community that I think it’s an urban legend. But it’s a good story.

More McMansions appeared in my in-laws’ neighbourhood, and new subdivisions were added to the town. During the first decade after my arrival the population grew by 20,000. In 2016, when Clinton ran against Trump, I realised that change went far deeper than the liberalisation of alcohol laws. Much to my surprise, the lawn signs in my in-laws’ neighbourhood seemed evenly divided between Trump and Clinton. There was even a “This House Believes…” sign down by the nature trail. But it was during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 that I really understood how much Georgetown had changed, when there was a major standoff over the Confederate monument in front of the courthouse. One week I’d visit and there would be a crowd of protestors petitioning for its removal; the next, a motley crew dressed in Confederate uniforms would be there defending it. In the cemetery, little Confederate flags appeared by the graves of soldiers who had fought against the Union.

Ultimately, the monument stood — although efforts to remove it continue. Despite that, the protestors seemed much more at home on the square than the recalcitrant Confederacy cosplayers. Whereas once I used to see a burly man casually strolling about with an assault rifle over his shoulder, I now saw a “woman-owned bookshop” that celebrated inclusion and LGBTQ voices. A fancy confectionary shop opened, as did a winery that also sold artisanal olive oil. It became commonplace to see people weaving in and out of the shops, drinking wine in the open. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why this irritated me so much until my son asked if the powers that be in Georgetown would be quite so relaxed if a group of Mexican day labourers started knocking back Corona beers in front of the courthouse, or if a trucker turned up and started swigging whiskey from a bottle in a brown paper bag.

This question brought the new class politics into sharp focus for me. In the days of the old Georgetown families, the big houses were located on streets that ended in little houses. The working and upper classes lived close to each other and knew each other. Perhaps they went to church together. Fast-forward 20 years and the new wealthy were moving into giant air-conditioned boxes in expensive subdivisions while the working-classes had to move out to Jarrell or Killeen, or squeeze into the new apartments they were building in Georgetown.

But it was only when the shop “Cozy Cannabis” opened just behind the courthouse that I felt it was time to shut Georgetown down until we could figure out exactly what was going on. This was a luxury cannabis-themed wellness shop owned by a “canna-mom” who promised “a curated and safe line of legal hemp products” designed “to uplift the mind, body, and spirit of every person who walks through our doors”. Cozy Cannabis also organised events such as “sound healing”, “chakra balancing” and a “cacao ceremony”. In Austin, fine, go for it, enjoy your vibrations. In California? I wouldn’t blink. But in Georgetown?

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The rise of California's vanlords

By Matt Feeney

To witness so much change in such a short space of time is extremely disorientating. If you can go from a dry county to canna-moms in less than 20 years, then Californication can seem inevitable. In 2020, Williamson County elected a Democrat Sheriff for the first time since the Eighties. At the last general election, Biden narrowly beat Trump.

And yet, I’m not so sure that the arc of history bends toward chakra balancing and White Dudes for Harris Zoom calls. For a start, Georgetown is popular with tourists, so what happens on the square doesn’t represent the locals any more than Piccadilly Circus represents the “real London”. The Democrat Sheriff was elected, at least in part, because the previous one was a reality TV star mired in scandal. The Methodist church in town founded by Swedes disaffiliated from the United Methodists over the liberalisation of their stance on gay marriage and gay bishops. The state representative is a Republican.

But even if Georgetown is fated to be fully Californicated, you don’t have to drive far to enter Trump country. Travel further south, and you will find counties that voted Democrat increasingly leaning Republican. I even recall that when Robert “Beto” O’Rourke ran against Ted Cruz, he polled higher among native Texans than among those born outside the state. All those “new arrivals” may have had a lot to do with keeping Ted Cruz in a job.

The truth is: Texas is always changing. The state was still electing Democrat governors until 1995, while prior to 1961 it had not elected a single Republican to statewide office since Reconstruction. Austin didn’t get weird until the Sixties, and even then, the famous slogan wasn’t coined until the year 2000. Elon Musk is bringing SpaceX to the quiet town of Bastrop and Jeff Bezos is installing a clock under a mountain in West Texas. This is change I can get behind. When I walk around Georgetown, I occasionally feel mild nostalgia for the sleepy town I once knew, but then again, I left for Austin after two months. What makes Texas an interesting place to live is its contradictions — metropolis and country, technology and religion, wealth and poverty — and these are accelerating. So, yes: please don’t Californicate my Texas, but otherwise, let that rough beast slouch forward to be born.

The release of 2021 census numbers helps to explain why, for millennials in our core cities, the “G” word has become so politically charged. One recent data-blog showed the steeply rising number of residents in professional jobs across London and Manchester. The changes will have been plain to see if you have lived in these places over the past decade, with estate agents popping up on formerly run-down high streets and artisan bakeries appearing in railway arches.

Long-term residents and those on the public-sector frontline often see the shift as a mixed blessing at best. But anxieties are most acute, in my experience, among those doing the gentrifying. The term, after all, describes a moneyed caste pushing out “authentic” locals. Ruth Glass, the formidable Marxist sociologist who coined contemporary usage of the word, described the phenomenon as “displacement”. And many of those doing the displacing — whose politics tend also to be Left-leaning — feel a deep unease about their role.

This guilt is sometimes absorbed internally, but on other occasions it’s deflected elsewhere — at everyone from oligarchs and developers to hipsters and yummy mummies. At the real gentrifiers. And this imagined class is easily illustrated, such as through the Nine Elms Sky Pool, the Dalston Cereal Cafe and the Deptford Job Centre bar. These developments represent the most decadent aspects of modern urban renewal, and encourage people to conclude that it’s something only ever done by other people. (Curiously, the above feelings rarely dampen the appetite for craft beer and sourdough, or spur people to become regulars at the nearest flat-roofed pub. But that’s a debate for another day.)

I am a gentrifier myself. That is: I’m a former young professional who moved to London for work in the early 2010s. I haven’t felt especially flush as I’ve bumped around London’s private rental market over the past decade. But I guess, without realising it, I have been able to pay higher rents than previous waves of residents in the same areas. In this sense, I am “part of the problem”. But I increasingly wonder if this mood of penitence is helpful. This isn’t to downplay the absurdities of the London housing market. Or to deny that such absurdities bring with them an often-ugly social reality, with visible affluence a stone’s throw from homelessness. It’s more that the way gentrification is discussed, as an urban cancer wantonly infecting hearty postcodes, seems very narrow.

I first questioned my attitude to the phenomenon a few years ago, when I heard a parliamentary candidate in an economically struggling town mention the possibilities of gentrification. As the only Londoner in the room, I looked around incredulously, expecting people to be on their feet in anger. Yet the audience gazed back with interest. The candidate did not talk of it as a catch-all solution, and no one broke into spontaneous applause either. But I was struck by the fact that, in an area that had seen its high streets boarded up and its economy ravaged after the 2008 crash, gentrification was not the dirty word it had become in London.

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Why do we pretend to be working-class?

By Chris Clarke

To extend this thought, let’s revive the reportedly abandoned slogan, “levelling up”. The need to rebalance the national economy is acknowledged, in principle, by Left as well as Right. And addressing regional inequality will require, most agree, the attraction of skilled sectors to the places which currently have the fewest opportunities. Hence, the “left behind” towns which successfully level up will be those who persuade their younger populations that they don’t need to move to the nearest metropolis to advance their prospects. If they manage this, then they’ll start to attract skilled workers from elsewhere, too. House prices will rise, as the demand to live in the town increases. And cultural and commercial changes will follow, to cater for the new resident base. The area will begin to gentrify, in other words, once it “levels up”.

Writing in 2017, Dave Hill, a critic of the anti-gentrification zeitgeist, pointed out that ending gentrification in London is not difficult: “Boroughs could stop collecting rubbish…and let packs of dangerous dogs roam public parks, snarling, biting and defecating freely on the grass,” he wrote. “Southwark could close Borough Market. Lambeth could rip out Windrush Square. Sadiq Khan could…launch a campaign called London Is Closed. [This] would soon limit the capital’s attractions, deter foreign investment and eventually bring its population down.” Hill’s argument, acidly put, is that gentrification is a problem of success. Londoners should be careful what they wish for. His contention is underscored by a recent MRP poll, which found that only 11 of the UK’s 367 council areas say their communities have improved in recent years. Ten of these are in — you guessed it — Inner London. The remaining one is Manchester City Council.

At what cost, some might ask? How many people have been pushed out to achieve these polling results? Indeed, even if Hill is right and regeneration is a net positive, you could argue that central London has, in the past 20 years, become a victim of how sought after it is, experiencing “gentrification overkill”. In the late 20th century, boroughs such as Lambeth or Brent benefited from an influx of additional social capital and spending power; from groups who’d once have been too scared or snobbish to live in inner-city areas that had become hollowed out. But, by the 2010s, this had reached a tipping point. If we compare 2011 and 2021 census data for non-UK born populations, we find that much of Inner London is bucking both the national trend and its own history. Boroughs are either getting less diverse or flatlining, with newer waves of migrants settling in parts of the UK where housing is affordable. For Londoners who pride themselves on their city’s multiculturalism, this will be worrying.

Another piece in the puzzle is social class. Gentrification reflects the unromantic fact that more and more Brits do desk jobs. If our cities are gentrifying then that’s partly because our whole economy is, and has been for decades. The true history of the capital is like that of a room repeatedly wallpapered, as its inhabitants move “up” in the world. The road names in the Square Mile — Poultry, Cheapside, Milk Street — reveal a gentrification process going back centuries. And, like the increasing tendency to renounce middle-class identities, the anxiety about gentrification comes from changing material circumstances. The very term “gentrification” insinuates membership of a new nobility, of modern-day squires and duchesses. Few, in a country which aspires to meritocracy, welcome this association. But the reality, however squeamish some feel about it, is that a larger and larger proportion of the population do non-manual roles — and that these people need to live somewhere.

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By Fred Skulthorp

The rising number of middle-class jobs does become an issue if it’s happening faster in some places than others. And this, according to the data-blog cited at the start, is in fact the case. While the blog found that “the professionalisation pattern is clearly visible [beyond] big cities like London”, it also revealed that different areas are professionalising at different speeds. Of the 30 local authorities becoming middle-class quickest, for example, 13 were in Greater London or Greater Manchester. The rest were mostly commuter towns around the capital, or university cities such as Cambridge, Bristol, Warwick and Exeter.

The issue, then, if we’re talking about the increasing number of white-collar jobs, is not necessarily gentrification itself but the uneven spread of gentrification. You could argue — and perhaps there’s an undergraduate essay question to be set on this topic — that the goal of policy-makers should simply be that every UK classroom contains a representative economic and demographic cross-section of the population. If that’s not happening, then governments must intervene.

Does the above question matter, to anyone except gentrifiers already beating themselves up? The debate, I’d say, has wider implications. For one thing, it reveals the extent of geographic polarisation. Very different conversations are happening in different parts of Britain. One analysis I conducted in 2021 looked at parliamentary seats according to various deprivation metrics. The 100 English seats with the highest housing deprivation were almost exclusively in London. The 100 seats with the highest employment deprivation were, in most cases, a long way from big cities. Just eight seats featured on both lists (most of them, interestingly, in Birmingham). To put it bluntly, deprivation in half of the UK means you can’t get a decent house, and deprivation in the other half means you can’t get a decent job.

Another interesting element was party politics. Seats with high housing deprivation tended to swing towards Labour between 2010 and 2019. Constituencies with the fewest barriers to housing shifted Tory — including places which are deprived according to most other metrics. And a recent study by Ben Ansell showed a more specific consequence of this. It estimated, at constituency level, support for house-building — a topic that’s become especially charged over the past year. Enthusiasm was greatest in Labour-held city seats with high housing deprivation: places with transient communities, a precarious rental market, visible street homelessness, high internal inequality and pressure on services thanks to overcrowding. Constituencies where gentrification is, as we like to put it these days, “a thing”. Londoners may feel betrayed by the lack of enthusiasm outside the big cities. But is it really a surprise that those with a completely different experience of the housing market are less convinced about the need to build?

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The secret millennial class war

By Chris Clarke

The gentrification debate can feel myopic. To those living in places where well-paid work is in short supply, it may look like navel-gazing from people who’ve had too much of a good thing. Those in its midst, on the other hand, feel the claustrophobia of rising rents, or see their local economy becoming prohibitively expensive over just a couple of years. The fallout from the Liz Truss mini-budget, which affected home owners and private renters alike, has created an intense focus on the housing issue. Young residents in cities have become vocal critics of Nimby-ism by older generations, and planning — not an especially sexy subject a few years ago — has become a wedge issue in some areas. The risk, for mainstream politicians, is that house-building becomes the next big culture war topic, splitting the country along generational or geographical lines.

There is a temptation for politicians to throw their all behind this, attacking the gilded lives of those in one area or another. But those who successfully bridge the electoral divide will be those who identify the thread that links the two. Gentrification is proof not that our authentic urban centres are being invaded, but that exceptionally high levels of regional inequality benefit no one.

Beneath the fluttering red and gold lanterns on Gerrard Street, drivers unload vats of rapeseed oil fresh from China, for cooking up batches of deep-fried pork balls and the like. In the windowless Lo’s Noodle Factory in a passageway off Wardour Street — nicknamed “alleyway place” in Cantonese — three men churn out 2.5 miles of ho fun a day. And at Little Newport Street, a client is directed on how to skip on the pavement by an employee of the Hong-Ning medicine clinic (a sign in the window reads “Forget Viagra, Think About Herbal Male Tonic”).

Geoff Leong, who arrived from Hong Kong aged ten, now runs Leong’s Legend (its kitchens are in the basement where Ronnie Scott ran his first jazz club) and Dumplings Legend (site of the Mont Blanc restaurant, which played host to Belloc, Chesterton and Conrad in the early 20th century). He says the industry is now so “cut-throat” that “you’ve got chefs being poached left, right and centre. The entire team is like an army, so when the head chef goes, they will take everybody with them.”

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By Etan Smallman

This time, he headed to New China to enjoy the type of sizzling Sichuan meal that would have been unheard of in London in decades past. “They had this incendiary braised beef dish that was so delicious. You were on fire when you ate it. The quality of cooking has really gone up. Now we’re shifting away from the crispy seaweed thing. I noticed non-Chinese are ordering real Chinese dishes.”

Many restaurants once had their main menu in English, with a second, featuring the real deal — gelatinous beef tendon and gristly pig’s knuckles — reserved for Chinese customers in the know. But while the kitchens have risen to meet the challenge of more adventurous British palates, many family restaurants are now facing stiff competition from deep-pocketed international businesses as interested in global brand-building as viable enterprises. Haidilao, China’s biggest hotpot chain, now has a 10,000 sq ft branch on the edge of Chinatown.

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“When you change Chinatown into a neighbourhood that is totally dependent on footfall and this superficial grab-and-go blend of businesses,” says Aitken-Turff, “that affects what happens to the other businesses. A tourist comes to ‘do’ Chinatown. I think it’s a revolting phrase — come, grab a bubble tea, snap a selfie under the gate and disappear.”

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Yau successfully led the charge against McDonald’s breaching the ornately decorated gates of Chinatown, but has been less capable of preventing the proliferation of the betting shops she feels prey on the area’s low-income workers. She says although she understands that in the heart of London, capitalism will win out, she would like to see the council put in safeguards to ensure “Chinatown should remain Chinatown”, adding: “At least 80% should be Chinese restaurants.”

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Andrew Leong, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, says Chinatowns are essential sanctuaries that reduce racial tensions and help new arrivals acclimatise: “These physical communities are a symbolic and logistical site of belonging, especially with the recent increase of people from Hong Kong escaping from the PRC.” But Caroline Knowles, professor of sociology at Goldsmiths and author of a report on London’s Chinese migrants for the Runnymede Trust, is pessimistic about its future. “I think that if it survives, it will be owned by private equity, it will be hugely glossy and more Disneyfied,” she predicts. “It will be a simulacrum of itself. I don’t think it will have any real connection with the grittiness of Chinese business and restaurant life, which was based on migration from China. I think it will become just like the rest of central London — expensive and plutocratified.”

Young Engels documented the condition of the working class in England primarily through his adventuring in Manchester, and the self-organisation of the working poor in the city helped shape his Communist Manifesto.

Jeremy knew I would like to add the Engels brick to another brick in my possession: one from the Haçienda nightclub, founded in May 1982 and co-owned by the record label Factory Records, and their most successful act, New Order. The club closed in June 1997 and was subsequently demolished.

Between these two bricks a remarkable story can be told, beginning with the rise of Manchester as a global industrial powerhouse trading in textiles. In the early 1870s it was one of the ten wealthiest cities on earth, but 100 years later a post-industrial malaise hit the city hard. Then, during the so-called “Madchester” music explosion in the latter half of the Eighties — when the Haçienda played a pioneering role in the birth of electronic dance music — Manchester became the most talked-about music city in the world. The International Music Summit estimates electronic dance music festivals and clubs, globally, now have an annual value of $2.5 billion.

The Haçienda is more famous now than ever, celebrated in books, documentaries and films including 24 Hour Party People (starring Steve Coogan playing Tony Wilson, the highest profile member of the Factory Records family). This month, the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Haçienda will be marked with a “rave in a car park” underneath the block of apartments built on the former site of the club.

Manchester in the early Eighties, along with so many other places — Detroit, Manhattan, Liverpool, Birmingham — suffered from rising unemployment, an exodus of its population, and a landscape of urban decay. In 1982 there was an estimated 20 million square feet of empty industrial floor space, much of it old cotton mills.

As well as a jobs crisis, Manchester had an identity crisis too. With the textile industry disappearing, what would come next? “Cottonopolis” as the city was dubbed, was being wiped off the map.

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Music began to occupy and enliven the city. Derelict warehouses turned into rehearsal rooms, bedrooms into record label offices, and basements into clubs, venues, and record shops. Before the Haçienda, Factory, for a short while, hosted live music in an unloved part of the city called Hulme, but then began to release records by groups including Joy Division, then, after the death of singer Ian Curtis in May 1980, New Order.

In 1982, Factory Records and New Order took over a former yacht warehouse in order to build a venue, the Haçienda, on the edge of the city. An advert in the Manchester Evening News a few days before the Haçienda’s opening included the pledge: “To restore a sense of place”. I love the ambition of that, but local fanzine “City Fun” was sceptical; they had already dubbed it “Wilson’s folly”.

In its early years the Haçienda hosted plenty of very decent live acts (from Cabaret Voltaire to Curtis Mayfield), a reading by William Burroughs, and screenings of Kenneth Anger films. The club struggled financially in the early years, but fortunes changed when the owners poached a new general manager, Paul Mason. I was one of a small handful of resident DJs, and DJ-only club nights were prioritised over live music.

We pushed a mix of music that gave the club a point of difference, an edge. A successful club becomes truly special when it begins to draw-in devoted music fans and the sparkiest local characters, and acts as a catalyst for all manner of creative activity.

In 1988, Haçienda DJ ‘Little’ Martin Prendergast was one of four young men featured in i-D magazine who were described as examples of the big new thing: “a surreal youth cult” wearing flares and turned on to Sixties psychedelic music and contemporary Black American dance music. Manchester was also asserting its musical power through other clubs in the city and local bands including Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses. By the beginning of the Nineties, German TV crews and Japanese music journalists stalked the Haçienda dancefloor, and Newsweek in America made Manchester music a front cover story.

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Ecstasy was part and parcel of a Haçienda night out in that era. This drew drug dealers into the club, and the Haçienda became lucrative turf that gangs battled over. In July 1989, Claire Leighton died after taking ecstasy in the club. A year later, the local police began to take steps to persuade local magistrates to close down the Haçienda. The club employed the celebrated QC George Carman — who the previous year had successfully defended Ken Dodd against charges of tax evasion — and the Haçienda was reprieved.

Through the Nineties, endless police and gang pressures and escalating costs led to the closure of the club. The ripples of creativity emanating from its four walls were everywhere in evidence though. Laurent Garnier launched his DJ career in the Haçienda in 1987, and it changed his life; he went back to his native France and was instrumental in nurturing club culture in Paris and beyond. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d’honneur for his work in music.

What remains unarguable is that the ambitious aim to create a sense of place was achieved in the lifetime of the club. In the Eighties the Central Manchester Development Corporation was set up to bring investment into the city. It was a struggle, but the emerging music scene changed minds by making Manchester a place to be. From 1990 doors opened, investors were interested.

Since then, former New Order bass player Peter Hook has taken ownership of the Haçienda brand and successfully commercialised it. This summer, in addition to the car park event, the Haçienda Classical project — DJs with an orchestra playing a Haçienda-themed selection of retro hits — is on the road.

Central to the impact of the Haçienda experience was that it was unpredictable, aspiring to a leadership role in a cultural revolution, and revelling in a forward-looking music policy. But 25 years since its closure, the nostalgia-soaked Haçienda-themed nights aren’t any of those things.

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Nevertheless, a sense of occasion surrounds the rave in a car park, with a classic line-up of DJs, representing various eras of the club’s lifespan. And after two years of grim Covid-related lockdowns, there’s no way anyone could begrudge younger generations some partial taste of history or older people a reminder of their happiest days.

In truth, the fortunes of the Eighties golden generation have been mixed. One of the four young men featured in i-D, Stephen Cresser, was a Haçienda “ace face” who has since been long-term homeless and a heroin addict.

The fortunes of the city are also mixed; along with the regeneration and the herds of cranes currently signalling new builds throughout the city centre, Manchester has a plethora of social problems, including poor literacy levels and horrific air pollution. The desire for self-assertion and self-expression among new generations is as strong as it ever was though.

The city’s landscape has changed again. Just like the community in Lower Manhattan that included Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, which gave life, art and energy to the area but was soon driven out by creativity-crushing property developments, so the secret places and cheap spaces of city centre Manchester are disappearing. It’s a process that’s accelerated in recent years as the Manchester city-region has attracted more than £5 billion of Chinese investment.

Perhaps I need to add to my brick collection with one that sums up the modern Manchester of high apartment blocks, acres of retail, and five-star hotels. I’ll look for a shiny brick, possibly hollow, and probably unaffordable.

Now, though, many of the opinions that were held by the Left-leaning devotees of mung beans and carob in my youth have become the preserve of the Right — and especially of its weirder online subcultures. Here, enthusiasm for raw milk and animal protein (especially, for some reason, raw eggs) join an aversion to touching shop receipts and views such as “feminism has harmed men and is actively anti-civilisation” and “democracy is fake“, as well as a range of even more pungent anti-progressive talking-points.

Perhaps the two food chain talking-points that recur most frequently and vehemently, though, are hostility to soy (which has become a metonym for emasculation due to its rumoured feminising content) and to “seed oils” such as canola, palm and sunflower oils.

And when a new California startup announced this week that it’s taking aim at environmentally destructive vegetable oils, it received disgusted pushback from Right-wing health-freaks. Zero Acre Farms, with backers including the Branson family and Hollywood actor Robert Downey Jr, said yesterday that it’s raised $37m to launch a new, “healthier” substitute for vegetable oil, made “by fermentation”.

It was launched with a rallying call to the seed oil haters. It didn’t go down well: biotech industrial complex wants to destroy farming and sell you synthetic garbage! It’s a familiar refrain to me, having grown up around eaters of health food. But unlike in my childhood, today this line of argument no longer comes from the Left.

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This reaction, and the broader political realignment on health food, both make more sense when you dig into the business of fat: who makes and sells it, who eats it — and who gains or loses.

Until the industrial era, human-edible fats were mostly obtained from dairy products or rendered meat. The dawn of science and large-scale manufacturing, though, inspired innovators to seek new sources of oil — and new ways to use industrial byproducts. In the process, mechanical methods were invented for extracting palatable vegetable oils, especially from seeds.

In turn, a new ecosystem of scientific research and marketing sprang up to promote the benefits of these new, industrially-produced ingredients. “Tonight’s the night Mrs Ed Flynn starts Polyunsaturating her husband”, declares a mid-Fifties advert for Mazola corn oil in National Geographic. According to this advert, “medical authorities” advise replacing “solid fats” — by which is meant lard and dripping — with “more highly polyunsaturated vegetable oils”, which scientific authorities now declared to be healthier and more beneficial.

I’ve seen the manufacturing of “medical authorities” from the inside. Of all the many jobs I’ve held, in the course of my extremely chequered employment history, hands down the most unpleasant was a brief stint as marketing executive at a small PR outfit that specialised in “nutraceuticals”. That is, chemically-derived additives for the junk-food industry.

The company’s work proceeded roughly as follows: on behalf of nutraceutical manufacturers, it would arrange for scientists to produce “studies” showing that the chemical in question had health benefits, or didn’t cause the harm it was being accused of. Then hapless 20-somethings (me in this case) would try and persuade journalists to write enthusiastic articles about this newly laundered “science”.

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Such hapless 20-somethings would also be in charge of responding to angry letters, written in all caps, from consumers suspicious that they were being lied to. Which they weren’t. At least, not exactly. And yet what they were being fed had the same relationship to truth as aspartame does to sugar. The work felt profoundly cynical. I didn’t last long.

What I learned from that brief, inglorious experience was that the tinfoil hatters are, to an extent, right. Big Business really does use scientific discourse to launder the reputation of deeply questionable food additives, in the name of profit. And this was once a standard talking-point for Left-wing junk-food haters.

The rant would segue from grumbling about “processed food” being unhealthy, to a broader attack on the immense, well-funded commercial infrastructure dedicated to pushing high-fat, low-nutrition products into the nation’s shopping trolleys. In other words: the evils of junk food stand for the evils of Big Business, and a scientific establishment seemingly in hock to its commercial interests. In practice, the critique of processed foods is a profoundly anti-capitalist, anti-technology one. But now, the modern Left has expelled anti-capitalist, anti-technology voices entirely, instead embracing science, technology and Big Business as key delivery partners for its vision of utopia.

This has been a long time coming. Back in the mung bean days, the Anglophone Left was still the historic, improbable blend of well-meaning bourgeois idealists and the industrial working class. But as de-industrialisation shrunk and dispossessed that industrial base, the bourgeois half of the coalition grew dominant: a process commentators have for a decade now condemned as “the gentrification of the Left“.

People in glass houses are famously advised not to throw stones. And as the progressive worldview has become more monolithically elite in class terms, it’s also lost its antagonism to Big Business. Perhaps the hinge decade for this was the Blair era, when “social enterprise” emerged as a policy watchword and everyone sincerely believed that business could and should be a force for good. And in the grisly aftermath the 2008 Great Crash, the radical, anti-capitalist Left of yore both enjoyed its last hurrah and suffered utter defeat.

Far from helping to hold Big Finance to account, progressive ideology instead served to kill the anti-capitalist Left as a political force. The Occupy movement famously found itself paralysed by woke purity spirals: its participants spent so much time arguing about identity they never coordinated any kind of effective political action.

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With anti-capitalism now effectively neutered, wokeness has been domesticated as the house ideology for a new, socially-conscious capitalism — the kind that today receives full-throated endorsement in the Financial Times. Unsurprising, then, that the food industry is falling enthusiastically on new ways to dress the marketing of ultra-processed foods in the garb of scientifically-endorsed health — which now gives it a progressive sheen. The populist twentieth-century junk-food marketing message of healthy, affordable abundance has given way to an anxious twenty-first-century one of health, environmentalism and moral purity.

Consider “Veganuary“: a kind of secular Lent founded in 2014, that encourages people to eschew animal-origin foodstuffs in favour of a “plant-based” diet, in the name of saving the planet. This festival is enthusiastically promoted by retailers of “plant-based” foodstuffs, a market predicted to see explosive growth by 2030. Whether “mycoprotein” (aka fungus grown in vats) or synthetic “meat” made from soya, such products frequently contain large volumes of just the industrially-produced oils once heavily criticised by Left-wing opponents of junk food. So “Veganuary” is, in truth, a month-long PR festival for the ultra-processed food industry, complete with articles citing scientific studies that underline the health benefits of this way of eating.

Who can tell how many such studies are “sold in” by hapless 20-somethings miserably employed in food PR firms? Certainly the progressive emphasis rarely seems to be on cooking from scratch. That’s the preserve of dissident mutterers, expelled from polite discourse to fulminate out in the badlands about Big Business, Big Pharma, fake science and the perils of junk food. As one response to Zero Acre put it: “you want us cooking our fake vat-grown “meat” in fake microbe-extruded oil product in a pod somewhere”.

“Health” subcultures are increasingly Right-inflected, because what’s left of the resistance to industrial capitalism is also Right-inflected. But will the new defenders of natural food against the ravages of technocapital give up to commerce, like their progressive predecessors? Perhaps in another decade, this backlash will have been assimilated and regurgitated as Based Gainz Ready Meals. Let’s hope the new anti-capitalists are nimbler in avoiding this fate than their mung bean-eating forebears.

But Bait has become a surprise hit; it will be rippling out to more venues across Britain until the end of the year. As a fisherman without a boat, the gruff but drily funny Martin (Edward Rowe) is facing an existential crisis. He long ago sold the family cottage to a middle-class couple who now hawk it out as an Airbnb, the fridge ready-filled with fizz and local cheese. But he grumbles about how these London toffs have decorated the place with nautical paraphernalia (“All bloody ropes and chains — looks like a sex dungeon”) and has no time for their claims to be re-energising the community: “You pay slave wages then piss off to the Maldives,” he fumes. So whose Cornwall is it anyway?

The writer-director Mark Jenkin, a Newlyn native, has spent 20 years, on and off, bringing the film to fruition. The idea, he says, can be traced back to 1999 when “the whole world came to Cornwall” to see the solar eclipse. That prospective version of Bait involved a civil war between the locals and the incomers, while a later draft concerned a fisherman making a video to preserve his way of life to show it to his unborn child. What has remained in the finished Bait, two decades on, are the germs of both ideas: class tensions, neglected and struggling communities exploited by tourism, and the sense of a way of life fading from view forever.

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Chief among its accomplishments is bringing the community itself into focus. “There’s a tradition — and it’s not just in Cornwall, it’s in a lot of the regions — where you use a specific location as a backdrop for somebody else’s story,” Jenkins says. “And it’s usually a story where somebody arrives who’s troubled, and they don’t realise they’re troubled, but through interactions with ‘simple folk’ they simplify their life. I wanted to bring the Cornish people to the foreground rather than being in the background and being a short-cut for simplicity or stupidity.”

Perhaps it’s for the best that it took so long for Bait to reach the screen. The film’s observations about the characters and their landscape have a baked-in depth and richness. Jenkin invites us to notice the self-sabotaging hauteur of Martin, and the way that his battles over territory are reproduced on every level — in a miniature war about parking spaces, or in a dispute about the pool table at the local pub. Brexit is mentioned only in a brief radio debate overheard in passing but it isn’t a stretch to say that the film has absorbed many of the tensions that led Cornwall to vote overwhelmingly to leave the EU. In Martin’s feelings of abandonment, alienation and resentment, Bait gives some idea of how such a situation could have come to pass.

Depending on the circumstances of each screening, it is likely that Bait will turn the subject of privilege, entitlement and ownership back onto the viewer. I happened to watch it at an independent cinema in a shabby-chic corner of east London that has been only marginally resistant to gentrification itself. After watching this story of a man battling pretentious Londoners for control of his livelihood, I crossed the road to a former greasy spoon that has undergone a hipster makeover. In the same cramped booths where labourers once sat elbow-to-elbow over their full English, I thought about Martin and his desperate bid for livelihood while I nibbled on tenderstem broccoli with fennel, capers and yogurt, and waited for a dirty vegan burger.

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Many of the people who see Bait will do so in similarly pampered surroundings, though its tour has taken it also to the sorts of communities, Cornish or otherwise, to which its characters’ predicaments most strongly pertain. But the subject of communities being overlooked, trampled or eradicated in the stampede for gentrification, second-homes, buy-to-rents and Airbnbs will be one of the pressing issues of any movie that seeks to engage with the current turbulence in our landscape.

In US cinema it has been investigated by Ira Sachs, first in Love Is Strange, his film about a middle-aged married gay couple who have to live separately when straitened economic circumstances force them out of their apartment, and more acutely in Little Men, in which an Argentinean dress-maker in Brooklyn is gradually squeezed out of her shop when her landlord dies and his family takes over the property. Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give also examined the place where liberalism collides with real estate, as a liberal Manhattanite played by Catherine Keener agonises over the poor (“I want to give something to someone,” she says vaguely) but can’t disguise her impatience for her elderly neighbour to die so that she can knock through into her apartment.

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These movies give at least equal weight to the dilemmas of wealthy liberals but it is in a spate of films from the BFI, the distributor of Bait, that the presence of overlooked communities has most strongly been represented in recent cinema. In 2014, the BFI instigated diversity directives to establish a plurality of stories, perspectives and talent. The “three ticks” initiative, set up to “recognise and acknowledge the quality and value of difference”, asked a series of questions of all productions seeking funding, such as, “Is the project telling us something we do not already know?” and, “Does the project have the potential to open doors which have historically been closed?”

The directives were rolled out to other UK funding bodies (such as Ffilm Cymru Wales and Northern Ireland Screen) and the result has been a wave of films representing gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and geography in surprising ways. Among them were God’s Own Country, about a Yorkshire farmer who falls for a Romanian labourer, I Am Not a Witch by the Welsh-Zambian director Rungano Nyoni and Beast, a thriller set in Jersey, which has been virtually untouched by film or TV since the heyday of Bergerac.

It is Bait, though, which has inspired in audiences a uniquely visceral and protective response. Its resemblance to a neglected artefact lying for decades in a fisherman’s shed can’t have hurt. It looks like it has been lost for the longest time. Perhaps that’s why it speaks to us.

Bait is on release