Privileged gentrifiers tolerate squalor rather than embrace collective identity

Evidence

I’m struck by a detail that Schulman recounts about her building, where she finds that “the ‘old’ tenants who pay lower rents are much more willing to organize for services, to object when there are rodents or no lights in the hallways.” Despite entreaties from the older tenants, “the gentrified tenants are almost completely unwilling to make demands for basics. They do not have a culture of protest” Schulman struggles to account for this “weird passivity that accompanies gentrification.” I would venture that the newer tenants, though they were troubled by the conditions, ran up against the wall of individualism. Once they understood that something was not just their problem but a collective problem, requiring collective action and identification with a community to be solved, it was preferable to them to just drop it. That is, even rats and dark hallways were not too high a price to pay for the ability to keep the doors of the self shut to outsiders, to change, and to the possibility of a new kind of identity. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 516

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the hidden class politics of ‘culture of protest’ — wealth buys the luxury of non-participation, treating even rats as affordable collateral for self-enclosure.
• QUESTION: Directly fuels the reader’s privilege critique of Odell: her own prescriptions (a park, free time) appear to assume the same individualism she diagnoses here in gentrifiers.