1) Large, dense, growing, diverse, economically thriving, economically and racially integrated cities with robust tax bases are a positive social, economic and environmental good, both for those who live in and move to them and for society at large. For the contemporary left in particular, robust and growing cities offer the opportunity to provide robust and growing social services and to achieve significant environmental gains. Left urban politics today should accept urban growth both as a fact to be reckoned with and as a value to be promoted. It is likely not possible for us to halt urban growth and freeze cities and neighborhoods in their current configurations, but if it were possible it would not be desirable. Attempts to "preserve" cities from outsiders in the name of some misguided nativism are unimaginative, unambitious and counterproductive.
2) The post-white flight, pre-gentrification status quo of American cities was horrific and reflected a tremendous moral and political failure in this country. There is nothing natural or desirable about housing segregation--on the contrary, it is the central pillar of structural racism in the US today. There is very, very little about what, say, Bed-Stuy was like in the 1980s that's worth feeling nostalgic for. The return of the middle class to American cities is both a good thing and a big opportunity: a city with a middle class is a city able to provide jobs and social services to its working class. To argue that the best we can hope for is to exclude the middle class so as to preserve or regain the pre-gentrification status quo is to accept defeat on an almost unimaginable scale.
3) To the extent that the politics of urban housing can be analyzed in terms of class conflict, that conflict is between landowners, who want property values and rents to go up, and renters, who want property values and rents to go down. It most certainly IS NOT between "the community" and "developers," much less between one group of renters (say, white people) and another (say, minorities). Framing the conflict in those ways closes off productive solidarities and produces misguided politics.
4) Development is primarily an effect rather than the cause of rising rents. Bushwick wasn't low-rent in the 1980s because no one had decided to build condos there--no one wanted to build condos there because it was low-rent. Today, people build condos here because rents are rising, not the other way around. A politics aimed at stopping development is futile *at best* (rents aren't going to stop going up because you blocked a condo) but more likely counterproductive (rents are going to go up even faster as more people compete for a fixed quantity of housing).
5) The proper level at which to make most decisions regarding urban land use is the city, not the neighborhood or "community." Community control is at best NIMBY-dysfunctional and at worst racist-exclusionary. A city where the Bushwick community board can ban development is also a city where Park Slope can exclude affordable housing, and the Park Slope community board is always going to be a heck of a lot better connected and organized than the Bushwick one.
6) If you think the programs we need to maintain a working class in a growing, economically thriving city--affordable housing programs, new public housing, and transit infrastructure investment, among other things--will be hard to win, well, yeah, I agree. If you think they're *impossible* to win, that a growing city will necessarily be a neoliberal dystopia of working-class displacement and the best we can hope for is a desperate rear-guard action to preserve the status quo by blocking development and opposing new housing, well, first of all you've already given up, and second of all you'll lose even what you hope to preserve. If the contemporary left isn't strong enough to win the universally beneficial housing and transit programs it won decades ago, it's certainly not strong enough to reverse the tide of history and bring us back to the 1980s. We either face the challenges and opportunities of the growing, economically diverse city or we accept defeat and go home; there's not a third choice here.
