Gentrification and State Violence

Terra Graziani, Andrew Szeto, and Erin McElroy

Published in Issue 4.1 // Conversations

Keywords: Abolition, carcerality, prison industrial complex, organizing, San Francisco Bay Area

Abstract:

In this conversation, Andrew Szeto and Terra Graziani share more about their coedited chapter, “Gentrification & State Violence,” one of seven chapters comprising the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s 2021 atlas, Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance published by PM Press. Here Erin McElroy (also a Counterpoints editor) asks them how they conceptualize the interconnectedness of gentrification and state violence and what Lacino Hamilton has nominated ‘the gentrification to prison pipeline.’ Graziani and Szeto contextualize several contributions in their chapter which explore the criminalization of homelessness, Black culture, and sex work, while also exploring ongoing abolitionist work against the prison industrial complex.

https://doi.org/10.54825/PXOK7533

Andrew Szeto lives and works in San Francisco. They were a member of Critical Resistance’s Oakland chapter and have worked for the SF Tenants Union. Terra Graziani is a researcher and tenants’ rights organizer based in Brooklyn. She founded the LA chapter of AEMP and before this was part of AEMP in the Bay Area. She has worked in the tenant movement at organizations like The Los Angeles Center for Community Law and Action, the Eviction Defense Collaborative and Tenants Together. She is currently a doctoral student at CUNY Geography. Erin McElroy is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin focusing on intersections of property, eviction, technology, data, and empire in the US and Romania. Erin is also cofounder of the AEMP and is an editor of the Radical Housing Journal.

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Topics: abolitionismhomelessnessprison industrial complexresistanceUnited States