More than gentrification: geographies of capitalist displacement in Los Angeles 1994–1999

Abstract

Little is understood about displacement in urban contexts. While some of the difficulties are methodological, the more serious problem is conceptual. Outside of the rent gap hypothesis or the philosophy of property rights, there has been little theoretical inquiry into the causal dynamics of displacement. In this article, I present a study of evictions in Los Angeles that addresses these conceptual and empirical shortcomings. A spatial analysis of more than 70,000 georeferenced evictions between 1994 and 1999 documents the existence of four distinct geographies of displacement, each produced by separate types of causal circumstances. Gentrification explains only one of the four displacement geographies, while the other three are nongentrifying or pre-gentrifying contexts and more appropriately described through growth machine models, global city theory, and financial restructuring. The extent of displacement in pre- and nongentrifying areas reinforces Mark Davidson’s emphasis on Lefebvre’s production of s...

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 64 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.