The Inadequacies of Growth

03/30/2019

If you attend one of the many Candidate forums for Peoria’s At-Large City Council seats, you’ll likely hear the dull piano that accompanies John “Growth™” Kelly as he prattles on about the wonders of tax abatement and deregulation. “GROWTH!” he says: so much he must own the trademark for the concept. A perennial candidate, the retired, libertarian septuagenarian made his career as a financial planner for investment bank Morgan Stanley. From the tall towers of the banking world–far removed from the masses–Mr. Kelly has foreseen the true path to growth and prosperity; and, he’s convinced Peoria, IL is blind to these wisdoms and desperately needs him to lead the sightless masses to the promised land.

Positions and Exchange Fetishes

Mr. Growth™–as he prefers to be called–can be boiled down to three basic political goals: deregulation, tax abatement, and a reshuffling of the local tax code.

Mr. Growth™’s plan is to create tax abatement zones in so-called “blighted”¹ neighborhoods. His initial area of interest is the North Valley but says he would support it across Peoria. Under Mr. Growth™’s plan, Property A & Property B both pay the same real estate taxes. If the owner of Property A repairs the roof or adds a new wing thereby increasing its property value, that owner will not pay taxes to the increase in value for 10 years. Now, Property B’s value may improve because of its proximity to Property A, but the owner of Property B would be responsible for the increase in the real estate taxes to Property B. Of course, the existing property owners and businesses in the North Valley may not be able to afford the repairs or increased taxes forcing them to relocate elsewhere. Mr. Growth™ has said the tax abatement would not apply to other municipal taxes (like TIFs do), e.g., school district, park district, etc.

Kelly also admits his economic ideology is very similar to the Reagan policies of trickle-down economics, a largely debunked economic theory that believes by giving capitalists very low taxes, that they’ll automatically reinvest their tax savings in the economy making it available to the workers. History has largely shown this to be untrue, reaffirming Marx’s observations of capitalists largely hoarding their wealth unless forced to redistribute it. Trickle-down economics, deregulation, globalization, and deindustrialization combined equals the neo-liberal² policies of both the City of Peoria and the federal government at large for the past four decades. But, Mr. Growth™ is clear that the free market is not to blame. “The market creates cities. It’s a natural occurrence. To the extent cities don’t work, there’s something nonmarket screwing it up.”³ It’s this peculiar, libertarian-capitalist ideology that fetishes the market or the power of exchange value above all else.

However, the real jewel of John Kelly’s plans is reshuffling the tax code. In a December 2002 editorial in the Peoria Journal Star, he lays out his true tax vision. Mr. Growth™ calls for the abolition of property taxes and quadrupling of land taxes. Here, the problem above is exaggerated to extreme proportions. Currently, the value of land in the North Valley is less than a $1 a square foot. Under this tax plan, capitalists could buy up existing properties (including rental properties) for cheap with relatively low taxes. If they build new properties or make minor improvements, they don’t pay any taxes on property, but the value of the land will steadily increase, possibly displacing the residents already existing in these neighborhoods. This type of process could lead to a positive feedback loop whereby new owners increase the value of land while the existing neighborhood picks up the lack of new tax income until they are outpriced and displaced, creating more real estate to be bought up on the cheap. How would the old, sick, or disabled on fixed incomes be able to survive under this tax code?

Of course, the questions of the efficacy of tax abatement in actually accruing new investments, businesses, and jobs are pertinent to this discussion. Tax incentives are easily manipulated. Capitalists routinely use incentives to compete cities against each other, driving up the incentives until the only one who benefits is the capitalists themselves, not the cities, and certainly not the residents. Remember, the money from incentives lost would be going toward new infrastructure or a better transportation system. It’s not known whether these investments would remain after the abatement ends. Perhaps more important, is why give these incentives to businesses without sound business models? John Kelly seems ambivalent to what or who goes in these investment zones, relying on the market to decide.

Saviorism

But, what is to be done with blighted communities? How else besides these forms of tax schemes will capitalists be convinced to invest in these neighborhoods? It’s not to say neighborhoods should remain trapped in time or that residents do not support new investment in their communities. Neighborhoods changing over time is a natural occurrence. The question is, do the new residents (and the new investments) want the old residents as neighbors? One would think it pertinent to ask the residents of “blighted” communities these questions.

It should come as little surprise that Mr. Growth™ hasn’t actually asked the members of these “blighted” communities whether this is something they want. When asked by the Peoria Journal Star⁴ how much time he had spent reaching out to residents of the Southside, North Valley, and East Bluff (the areas he plans to target with these proposals), Kelly admitted he hadn’t spent any.

At the same time, the residents of these neighborhoods are largely poor and people of color, but Mr. Growth™ has stated multiple times he thinks most forms of inequality don’t exist anymore. At the March 25^th NAACP of Peoria candidate forum, Mr. Growth™ grew almost apoplectic when asked a question about support for the LGBTQ community, “I’m not going to carve out something [civil rights] for LGBTQ people–I don’t even know how you’d do that,” he said with a breath of impatience. This was followed by him berating the audience of mostly people of color from the Southside about the problems… on the Southside; he then stated, “I don’t want to say: these people are different than these people… I thought we were past all that!” Mr. Growth™‘s paternal, savior mentality views structural inequalities as mere squabbles between children, and not serious concerns of the residents of these neighborhoods. Yet, he’s asking them for their vote.

The de-territorialization of Growth

It’s clear John “Growth™” Kelly places a great deal of value on the land and property in these neighborhoods but not on the people actually living there. Perhaps the most ironic part of his campaign is his self-framing as a radical outsider fighting the machine politics of Peoria. His slogan “A Whole New Approach” is actually a metastasized version of essentially the same policies Peoria has had for decades, and many of his fellow candidates also support it. Sure, his tax abatement plans are more indiscriminate and less nuanced, but giving capitalists tax incentives has been strategy #1 for Peoria with often hilariously bad outcomes. John Kelly’s strategy of removing any government oversight only unleashes the full forces of de-territorialization on the last scraps of these neighborhoods, leftovers from 40 years of neo-liberal exploitation and deindustrialization.

This concept of deterritorialization (conceived by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari) is important to understanding how gentrification works in communities. It should be noted that Territories are not so much geographical designations, but a plane of immanence, a feeling, an affect, even an identity. It can apply to both physical things and abstract concepts. It is not static; but, a continuous becoming whereby they shift and change. Territories have “men as their parts…” which internalizes “them in an institutional model at every stage of action, transmission, and motricity. Hence the social machine fashions a memory [or identity] without which there would be no synergy of man.”⁵ As Cæmeron Crain so eloquently phrased it “Humans are not so much territorial as territorializing.”⁶ Now that territorialization is understood, let’s explain deterritorialization. It is not a new process, but it is constitutional for a capitalist system to sustain itself. Through deterritorialization, the coding which defines a territory is decoded and displaced with an exchange value. This exchange value creates the foundation for a reterritorialization⁷ where the people who make up the now decoded territory no longer have a place there.⁸

In our example, the residents of the North Valley have territorialized this space. There are certain affects or identities that flourish here. Gentrification is the deterritorialization of neighborhoods.⁹ Existing structures, property, people are decoded into new exchange values, and displaced according to the desires of these new values. The gentrification of neighborhoods has largely had a negative effect on the residents that are re-territorialized. Once again, deterritorialization is not new or an abstraction; it is a natural process that is part of the human condition. At the same time–and this is important to repeat–the question is not, do residents of “blighted” neighborhoods want new investments? The question is more, do the new investments want the residents? Are the re-territorialized residents going to find themselves welcomed or forgotten?

Mr. Kelly’s answers seem to suggest a disinterest, almost hostile attitude to the nuanced concerns of the residents of the Southside, North Valley, and East Bluff. Contrary to his campaign motto “A New Approach”, Mr. Growth™’s policies are just the most extreme forms of the same programs which have decimated Peoria for decades. Anyone who truly cares about these neighborhoods or Peoria would do well to vote against John “Growth™” Kelly.

1. I generally place the word ‘blight’ in quotes, as the word is heavily loaded with racial connotations.
2. I define Neo-Liberalism as a capitalist economico-politico system, beginning in the mid-1970s, where taxes were cut on the wealthy and corporations, regulations (especially in financing) were largely rolled back, a fetish for privatization of traditionally government or non-profit fields (education, defense, etc.), the outsourcing of jobs through globalization and the subsequent shift in the West from relatively stable, middle-class union jobs to unstable, low-wage nonunion jobs, and the hypercarceration and hypercriminilization of poor communities but particularly communities of color.
3. . Kelly, John. “Editorial on John Kelly’s Ideas for Peoria.” Peoria Journal Star, Dec. 2002.
4. https://www.facebook.com/journalstar/videos/271752813518619/
5. pg. 141. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis. Translated by Robert Hurley et al., Penguin Books, 2009.
6. Crain, Cæmeron. “What Is a Territory?” The Mantle, 22 July 2013, www.themantle.com/philosophy/what-territory
7. According to Deleuze & Guattari, every deterritorialization is always already a re-territorialization.
8. Imagine walking into a biker bar. You receive stern looks and a threatening atmosphere. You have entered a place you can’t territorialize. In other words, your identity is incompatible here.
9. It is not to say these neighborhoods have not already experienced deterritorialization in the past. At one point, these communities were thriving, supported by strong union jobs and local schools. Deindustrialization, white flight, and austerity policies have re-territorialized it into its current form.