Politics of Staying Put

Carolyn Gallaher is Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University. She is the author of On the Fault Line: Race, Class, and the American Patriot Movement, and Loyalist Paramilitaries in Post-accord Northern Ireland.

• Acknowledgments1 Staying Put in the New DC2  From Bullets to Cocktails, a Capitol Transformation3  Gentrification and Its Discontents4 The Rental Housing Conversion and Sale Act of 19805  Sample Conversions and Metrics of Analysis6  Displacement Mitigation and Its Limits 7  Markets, Politics, and other Obstacles to Low Income Home Ownership8  ‘95/5’-The TOPA Sidestep9  Is TOPA the ‘Politics of Staying Put’ We Want?List of InterviewsAppendix 1: Glossary of TermsAppendix 2: A Short Primer on Condominiums

“A semi-ethnographic examination of efforts in one U.S. city to curb gentrification by harnessing the paradoxical power of the condominium to mitigate turnover even as it generates it. The Politics of Staying Put is a deeply researched study of tenant empowerment that makes an important contribution to debates in the social sciences about displacement, neighborhood governance, and apartment living, challenging the dominant view of the condo as yuppie. Rich fieldwork and case studies illustrate how communities can - and cannot - successfully challenge the market in an era of rapid urban transformation.”-Matthew Gordon Lasner, author of High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century“The Politics of Staying Put is an engaging, well-researched book on a fairly under-researched topic. Gallaher provides an in-depth case study of condominium conversion and a policy designed to dampen the negative outcomes associated with this process. She illustrates conditions and outcomes that do not fall neatly in categories typically used to discuss and critique gentrification and neoliberalism, thereby complicating our understanding of the role of condo conversion in displacement. This book is an important theoretical contribution to the literature.”-Lance Freeman, author of There Goes the ’Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up "[Gallaher] analyzes the dynamics of gentrification, examining the tension between established neighborhoods and a booming real estate market in Washington, DC. Unlike the many critics of neoliberalism, Gallaher concedes that the market economy is likely to endure, and she concludes that real estate markets, if properly regulated, can allow some middle-class residents to 'stay put.' But Gallaher's detailed study also notes that government efforts to rein in Washington's real estate market, while not without their successes, have thus far proved insufficient to prevent rising prices, displacement, and gentrification.... [H]er finely detailed examination of the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act leads her to conclude that critics of neoliberalism...have overstated their case."--Journal of Urban History