Gentrification takes Imagination

Let’s talk about moral philosophy!

During my too many years of post high school education I got to know several philosophers as well as I could bear, and in all that time never met a moral philosopher. So it strikes me as a relatively unexplored field. That attracts me. It’s fun to shine light into previously unseen dark nooks of the world.

What I especially don’t see in what passes for moral philosophy is the flip side of moralizing: they’ll devote pages and pages telling me what I MUST or MUST NOT do, but never offer any ideas about making morality fun. What kind of philosophy is it that won’t tell you how to have a good time?

An unimaginative philosophy, that’s what. It’s an ingredient missing in most accounts of moral philosophy: they account for human failings, but not for human potential. You’d think that imagination plays no role at all in real world moral considerations, when it’s actually everything.

In fact some of the most interesting real world squabbles arise from conflicting imaginings of potential good. An interesting case has arisen in NYC’s East Village. For some time a Mr. Gregg Singer, a real estate developer, has wanted to replace an old East Village public school with a 19-story college dormitory. But locals have resisted, and now P.S. 64 has been declared a historical landmark.

That made Mr. Singer mad. While he sued the city to get the ruling overturned, he announced he would meanwhile use a previously obtained permit to strip the building of its ornamentation and promised to start up a new homeless service on the premises. He created a website showcasing the homeless agency he would start, naming it the “Christotora Treatment Corporation.” The name imitates the name of the Christodora Condominiums, where some of his local opponents live.

Gregg Singer claimed to have been inspired by the knowledge that the condominiums had long ago been a settlement house, established to serve the poor, and by the fact that his own Great Grandfather Louis Singer had once established a shelter for the elderly. But he has made it clear that his intent is to get East Village residents to side with his original plans by exploiting their NIMBY fears of the homeless. As he says of the battered woman who graces the front page of his website, “Yeah – she’s a bum.”

What we have here is imagination at work in unfolding history.

Settlement houses were themselves a work of moral imagination. The idea was that people who were so rich they had nothing but free time could move into poor neighborhoods and set up services for the poor neighbors.

Gentrification is an imaginative evil spawn of the idea of settlement houses. Once you can get rich people to come in to a neighborhood to help the poor, you can get more rich people to move in next to the first rich people, to displace the poor. Pretty soon no poor, not in that neighborhood anyway. Imagine that! People do imagine it, and many go on to the idea that they’re entitled to gentrification, entitled to live without any trace of poverty around them, and NIMBYism is born.

Then comes Gregg Singer imagining NIMBYism forward, turning it into a weapon. His idea for Christotora also springs from knowing one way to make morality profitable, if not fun: there’s money in selling shelter spaces to large non-profit corporations. Not as much as the money you can get from selling dorm spaces to non-profit universities, but it will do as an alternative. Hey, anyway, if you get enough money you can buy the fun, right?

Only the imagining doesn’t stop there. This is the East Village we’re talking about, not Boring Heights. They LIKE the shelter plans; they can see a great future in it. The residents of the condo are even lining up to volunteer at the promised shelter! What book on moral philosophy could have prepared you for that outcome?