One of the most critical aspects of war is not just that violence happens throughout, but that there is generally a goal, and most often, that goal is land. All empires are based on expansion, and even as the planet has already been “discovered,” there are still pieces of land to take from others for various reasons. Military strategies take on many forms, and when the point of a war is not to appear violent, that strategy takes a long time and looks different than anyone can expect. Without quoting various other authors and making this completely academic, I would like to point out that cartels and technoligarchs both rose in the 1980s and 1990s, and the reason was the desire to take back the cities from the “undeserving.”
Cities learned how to neglect their marginalized populations through neglect, conservative cities by outright contempt and liberal cities by doing so many “studies” that everyone “forgot” that requests had been made. No matter how many oppressed citizens came to meetings and discussion groups took place, there was always a reason to stall, and it was always easier to mock those who “dared” to want their own tax dollars used in their own communities. Unfortunately, the “elites” are not very patient people, and their problem was that even after running away from suburbs and renting from afar, retaking the cities was taking too long. They decided that they needed to accelerate the takeover of long-term urban communities and get rid of the populations who kept cities running for decades.
Enter the “drug war,” and this war was terrible not just for the violence enacted on various ethnic communities, but for the rampant smear campaigns about people who were living lives and had formed various political coalitions. See, it was not just the land people sought, but to break up the strong political coalitions formed after years of neglect. By starting the drug war, city governments started painting bleak pictures about neighborhoods that they had neglected, deciding that sending in police instead of resources was a better idea. Meanwhile, more suburbs were getting built and different ethnic groups–including my family and me–were intrigued by the idea of living near “nature,” and we were moving out of the cities. The interesting thing about those two strategies is how the smear campaigns and police violence accomplished the one thing folks were really looking to do, which was lower the property values and break up those noisy community groups who still crowded into city hall meetings.
After all the violence and negative depictions of communities that had existed for years without incident, suddenly in 1989, the Appraisal Foundation was formed, which was a private non-profit entity that created rules of property appraisal, and was given legal standing. This coincided with the Savings and Loan crisis, and based on all the manufactured neglect, negativity, and police violence, there was finally an entity that could “legitimize” saying that the properties in neglected communities was worthless. The “rules” of the Appraisal Foundation are still not available without purchase, despite being considered “laws.” Buying properties to rent in the past was part of the urban experience, but now, there was a legal way to approach long-term homeowners with terrible offers and encourage them to live in the brand-new suburbs, speeding up the displacement process.
Now that the communities were breaking apart, governments “finally understood” that communities with factories and power plants had bad air quality, and they had to make the areas inhabitable for their new populations. Thus, all those undesirable businesses were shut down, but the new populations needed to have work to pay for their new communities. Fortunately, private internet service was starting to take off, and having an internet connection meant that locations no longer mattered for office workers. Enter the technoligarchs, who suddenly stopped wanting to commute to suburban campuses while shopping at big box stores. Tech companies started looking at those long-term communities as colonizers of old, and because everyone was giving ludicrous amounts of money to tech, the companies and employees started buying “distressed” properties.
Now, city governments finally had what they truly wanted: “desirable,” well-paid populations walking around the highly visible downtown areas, rising incomes, and a growing industry to keep feeding municipal tax bases. All it cost were the livelihoods and connections of people who had been fighting to improve their communities for years. Seeing advertisements for property and land in areas where the empire is enacting violence further proves that people have learned nothing, even when the violence was brought to their own front door.
