Business is booming at the Roadrunner Grab’n’Go deli outside Joshua Tree national park. Demand for sandwiches, mezze boxes and local vegan cheese has remained high through the summer, even as temperatures soar in a desert landscape that now attracts more than three million visitors each year.
But the shop’s co-owner, Merilee Kuchon, has a problem. Her employees, many of whom grew up here, are struggling to afford to stay. Over the past year, she’s lost at least a dozen staff, driven out by local rental prices that have soared during the pandemic. Now, she’s worried about hiring enough employees to keep the shop going when even more tourists return in the fall.
Gentrification is technically correct…
but this isn’t just a haphazard evolution of some bohemian district becoming cool. It’s more calculated than that…some of the land in the area was bought in the event someone else — like this sandwich shop owner or some backcountry outfitters — put in the work to make the location valuable.
I don’t buy the “inevitability of gentrification” unless we want to accept the inevitability of being hit by a bus if we cross against the lights. It’s avoidable, not inevitable. Better land use policy, managed by land use taxes and hard boundaries, would prevent both the destruction of beautiful places like this and the evisceration of working people’s lives by speculators. It’s not inevitable, unless we accept it to be so. I don’t.
Reading DeLong’s “Slouching toward Utopia,” I realize I am firmly on Team Polanyi and now understand why I have never bought into Team Hayek. Property rights don’t trump human/civil rights or the Maslovian requirements for a good life. The pendulum has some way to swing before we get there, though.