Gentrification – Justice: not so much

Laws and institutions are not unbiased entities. They are designed and administered by people. People have agendas…personal and social agendas…which typically goes back to personal. They are not designed in a vacuum in which all desire for advantage is removed from the writers and designers. Institutions are social constructs. It is typically the rights and advantages of the designers that the institutions are designed to protect (these privileged few).

The institutions are the tools of these privileged to maintain their concentration of wealth. The language of the institutions legitimizes their wealth (which is why this discussion can even exist) and their pursuit for it. It is the unequal access to wealth that allows this privileged group to mobilize their disproportionate resources to change (amend) the language of the institutions by giving them an advantaged voice. (Mill’s idea of the “Tyranny of the Majority” may inform this.)

There can only be a just distribution (redistribution) of wealth if individuals, within this empowered group, decide that they will move toward an outcome in that direction (for that particular and specific purpose).

The gentrification of urban centers seems to me an example of unjust distribution in which resources desired by middle-upper class Americans are systematically redistributed from the lower income residents to those with greater wealth. I only say systematically because there seems to be a pattern. I don’t suggest that there is, or isn’t, a conspiracy (aka “The Plan”). The distributive mechanism is wealth, and the motive is also wealth (by developers and city governments).

Whether the government is big or small - or with no government at all – there is no real solution in the institutions. There are only solutions in people - people who are willing to step outside the letter of the law and make truly ethical choices. With this, ethics seems very personal. I am just as justified to accept the portion that my company or government allocates for me as anybody…but it is up to the individual to make a different choice...not just on big issues (like tax evasion), but on little day to day issues that ad up to the sum of our lives.