According to Richard Florida, the self-styled urbanist who has made his fortune off the back of creative gentrification, New York City (NYC) and London are still buys –‘This is not the end of cities’, he recently proclaimed. Indeed, he sees the pandemic (and Black Lives Matter) as presenting an opportunity to ‘reshape cities in more equitable ways’. He seems to want his cake and to eat it too?

In this chapter we consider two debates over the future of gentrification in the Anglo-American post-COVID-19 city: de-gentrification versus disaster gentrification. In one gentrification is killed off or goes into decline and we start to experience a post-gentrification city. In the other capital exploits the situation and gentrification continues, even grows. The former predicts doom for the center of Anglo-American cities, as the gentrifier classes move out to the suburbs or small towns or rural locations; the latter predicts the continuation of ongoing waves of gentrification that find ever more creative ways to exploit the urban. The question becomes: post-COVID-19, will gentrification die a sudden death or will it continue as usual, exploiting new niches and mutating as it has done before?

De-gentrification (death of the city)?

There have been proclamations about the demise or death of gentrification since at least the early 1990s. As Neil Smith (1996: 93) said: ‘After the stretch-limo optimism of the 1980s was rear-ended in the financial crash of 1987, then totaled by the onset of economic depression two years later, real estate agents and urban commentators quickly began deploying the language of “de-gentrification” to represent the apparent reversal of urban change in the 1990s’. Smith echoed what The New York Times had said:

Even Peter Marcuse (1993) mooted that de-gentrification was happening in the Lower East Side of NYC, or what he somewhat distastefully called ‘plebeianization’.