NEIGHBOURHOODS FOR SALE
Documentary exposes dark effects of gentrification and how to change it
One can almost feel the ghost of Jane Jacobs hovering over this well-meaning documentary. Its mild title — Push — refers to the way the urban poor are thrust out of neighbourhoods they can no longer afford. Gentrification, it’s often called, to which one of the film’s experts responds: “If only. It’s much deeper than that.”
As director Fredrik Gertten succinctly sums up, we are living through a time when large corporations can buy up huge swaths of inexpensive housing, make some modest renovations and then hike the rents so that the current dwellers can no longer afford to live there. It’s a multinational issue on an international scale; Push finds examples in Canada, Germany, Chile, Korea, Spain, Britain, Italy — basically anywhere there are cities.
One result is that neighbourhoods empty out while the buildings remain, devoid of human
life but still generating equity for the owners as prices rise and one absentee landlord sells to another. But as one interview subject notes: “Gold is not a human right. Housing is.”
That would be Leilani Farha, a mild-mannered Canadian whose highfalutin title of UN special rapporteur on adequate housing belies her lack of power on the world stage. When she presents her findings to a sparsely attended conference, more people are looking at their phones than listening to her news that the global value of real estate assets now dwarfs the GDP of the planet. And her meeting with Blackstone, the U.S.-based firm that over five years became the biggest private owner of low-income housing in Sweden, is summarily cancelled by the company with no mention of rescheduling.
The film finds community groups (and sometimes squatters) pushing back in small ways. But Farha concludes that the state has to regulate the financiers so that people around the world can afford adequate housing. In some jurisdictions this may also require pension-fund reform, since some of these asset pools grow their wealth through the likes of Blackstone’s real estate (mis)management.
Push doesn’t hide its politics any more than Gertten’s last doc, Bikes vs Cars. “You can make money by destroying the world,” says economist Joseph Stiglitz. “And there’s something wrong with that.” But even leaving aside issues of right or wrong, Push provides a fascinating primer on why the cost of urban housing — whether in Toronto and Vancouver or Berlin and Barcelona — continues to skyrocket. In its mildly upbeat closing, it even suggests ways to change it.