The Streetcar Effect: Capital, Revitalization and the Battle over Gentrification in a Sunbelt City

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how, after three decades of failed attempts to revitalize Tucson’s downtown, reinvestment increased rapidly amid the Great Recession and the elements that seemed to have coalesced to build momentum. The findings presented herein center on the early stages of contemporary gentrification and redevelopment to expand our analysis of those state actions that create the possibilities for each. As such, this dissertation expands on our understanding of the economic cycles that lead to gentrification by looking specifically at actions fostered by the state that create the possibility for profit in Tucson’s downtown. The political priorities and possibilities envisioned by governments and quasi-governmental agencies shape the scale and content of redevelopment in Tucson’s downtown. Through these three central papers, findings demonstrate that active state intervention in the property market plays a critical role in both producing the conditions for redevelopment and spurring downtown investment. Specifically, public incentives function as gap financing (Appendix A), allowing local developers to gain construction loans in a credit-constrained city. In the case of investment attributed to the streetcar (Appendix B), much of the purported $1 billion in investment is from public coffers to the disadvantage of actual transit riders. Finally, these more contemporary actions are rooted within a long history of property dispossession in the United States, a process supported by the state against racialized peoples – a process that is maintained, in part, through patterns of uneven development that foster redevelopment and displacement (Appendix C). Taken together, these three papers extend the theorization of the so-called entrepreneurial state and the new techniques to channel public investments in a way that drives tax revenues into a pauper-state’s coffers. Yet, these moves are not simply about the state’s role in driving innovative redevelopment schemes. Rather, these papers discuss what’s at stake in urban revanchism as well as, and through, the on-going pathologization of nonwhite land and property.