Place-Based Rights and Gentrification: A Vulnerability Approach

This article revises dominant philosophical critiques of gentrification by arguing that placebased accounts identify real moral stakes but do not yet discriminate sharply enough among the different processes gathered under the label of gentrification. Occupancy-based views rightly emphasize the wrong of expulsion and the disruption of located life-plans; recent place-based theories deepen the analysis by distinguishing claims to home, residency, and community. Yet these approaches remain vulnerable to two related difficulties. First, they face a symmetry problem: because many residents, including affluent incumbents, can invoke settled plans, attachments, and community, place-based claims alone do not explain why some cases of neighborhood change are especially wrongful. Second, once these claims are generalized, they place pressure on the theory to justify some form of neighborhood closure or local veto, a pressure that their proponents themselves must resist. I argue that the missing element is vulnerability. Gentrification is paradigmatically wrongful when it proceeds under conditions of both powerlessness and lack of options: affected residents lack effective influence over decisions that structure neighborhood transformation, and they lack viable ways of remaining in place or relocating without excessive burden. The article also clarifies why the value of community should be understood through association, participation, and vulnerability rather than through a freestanding right to neighborhood preservation. This vulnerability-based framework preserves what is compelling in recent place-based arguments while supplying a more discriminating principle for distinguishing clearly wrongful cases of displacement from merely unwelcome, or even permissible, forms of urban change. The article concludes by offering a moral topography of neighborhood change that differentiates clearly wrongful, conditionally wrongful, and generally permissible transformations.