Using Jane Jacobs and Henry George to Tame Gentrification

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12105
• Date: 01 May 2015
• Author: Jason Leslie Combs
• Published date: 01 May 2015

Using Jane Jacobs and Henry George to

Tame Gentrification

By JASON LESLIE COMBS*

ABSTRACT. The solutions that Jane Jacobs proposed to improve

neighborhoods created a paradoxical problem: improvement increased

demand for the amenities of the area, which caused land prices to rise.

The net result was at least partial displacement of the old residents of

the neighborhood with new ones. Jane Jacobs has been criticized for

ignoring gentrification, but she was clearly aware of this process and

tried to find means to counter it. By combining the ideas of Henry

George about land taxation with the ideals of Jane Jacobs about

neighborhood diversity, we can mitigate the negative effects of

gentrification and direct the energy of market forces into producing a

greater supply of desirable neighborhoods.

Introduction: The Problem of Gentrification

The urban lifestyle is making a big comeback. More specifically, matur-

ing Millennials and aging Baby Boomers with empty nests are seeking

out districts marked by high walkability and location efficiency, stream-

ing into city cores and adjacent neighborhoods. There is no need to

recount the figures and statistics demonstrating the change in housing

preferences among these demographic groups here. A plethora of

recent articles and books exist that have already done that (perhaps

most exhaustively in Arthur C. Nelson’s Reshaping Metropolitan Amer-

ica), and more continue to be churned out as the trend becomes more

and more visible (Nelson 2013).

These groups are seeking the kinds of amenities that are lacking in

most of the suburban sprawl that has been constructed in the post-

*Writer and freelance consultant living in Savannah, GA. He has a Masters of City

and Regional Planning (MCRP) and a Masters of Science in Architecture (MSArch),

specializing in Urban Design, from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been

licensed to practice real estate in the state of Georgia since 1999. Email: JasonLeslie-

Combs@gmail.com

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 74, No. 3 (May, 2015).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12105

V

C2015 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

World War II era. As a result, they are being attracted to neighborhoods

with an older framework, whether the buildings themselves are old or

new, gridded and platted before the advent of the car and its dispersive

effects. Therein lies the problem. These neighborhoods are typically

preexisting, hemmed in by the suburban ring, and therefore geographi-

cally restricted in their capacity to accommodate the growing interest in

these areas. As volumes of new residents arrive, the laws of supply and

demand require that housing prices rise. True, there are a growing

number of New Urbanist greenfield projects that seek to recreate tradi-

tional urban frameworks from scratch, but these, too, fail to meet pent-

up demand, and typically fetch a high price.

Jane Jacobs and Gentrification

Jane Jacobs would surely applaud this trend, even if many of the neigh-

borhoods that these new city residents are flocking to do not live up to

her standards of “urban vitality, diversity, and magnetism” (Jacobs 1961:

149), or at least not yet. What is less clear is how she might feel about the

effects, direct and indirect, that this population influx is having on existing

residents of these neighborhoods, and on the urban fabric itself, effects

often labeled gentrification. This term can be very problematic, but Jacobs

did use it herself on occasion, though not in her seminal work, The Death

and Life of Great American Cities. In the “Notes and Comments” section

of her final work, Dark Age Ahead, Jacobs (2007: 214) has this to say:

By the end of the 1990s, gentrification was under way in what had been

even the most dilapidated and abused districts of Manhattan. Again, the

poor, evicted and priced out by the higher costs of renovating, were vic-

tims. Affordable housing could have been added as infill in parking lots

and empty lots if government had been on its toes, and if communities had

been self-confident and vigorous in making demands, but they almost

never were. Gentrification benefitted neighborhoods, but so much less

than it could have if the displaced people had been recognized as commu-

nity assets worth retaining. Sometimes when they were gone their loss

would be mourned by gentrifiers who complained that the community

into which they had bought had become less lively and interesting.

Obviously, she was against poorer residents being pushed out of dis-

tricts, even though it was due to improvements that she believed gener-

ally beneficial. Throughout Death and Life,Jacobsgoesonandon

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