When Bourgeois Utopias Meet Gentrification: Community and Diversity in a New Urbanist Neighborhood*

Abstract

Scholars have recently begun to explore how social and politically liberal gentrifiers make sense of the classed and racial inequalities linked to gentrification. In this article I ask how residents of one new urbanist “bourgeois utopia”—the Mueller Development in Austin, Texas—experience and give meaning to their neighborhood in a context of gentrification. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews I explain how new urbanism has reimagined and marketed “diversity” and “community” to middle-class and wealthy consumers and provides these to affluent people as neighborhood amenities. I show how residents draw on diversity ideology and multicultural capital to neutralize what they see as their neighborhood’s role in gentrification. In doing so this article adds to our theoretical understanding of how contemporary urban development exploits pursuits for the social good as rhetorical tools to assuage privileged guilt while promoting profitable enterprises.

Notes

1 Developers sell affordable homes at market rates. The Mueller Foundation (the nonprofit organization that manages the Mueller Affordable Homes Program) achieves “affordability” by taking a second lien on homes purchased through the program. This second lien reduces the buyer’s initial mortgage amount by about 22%–30% of the home’s market value. If buyers do not default on the initial 30-year lien, the second lien comes due after 30 years. The disadvantage from the buyers’ perspective is that the Mueller Foundation retains “ownership” over the home’s appreciation. If buyers sell their Affordable Home before paying the second lien in full their share of the home’s appreciation is limited to 2% of the initial purchase price per year that they owned the home. The remaining balance on the home’s appreciated value is reinvested by the Mueller Foundation into the Affordable Homes Program.