This blog started as a series of articles I wrote for Deserted News. As I explored the cities, spaces, and places in the Salt Lake Valley from a radical lens, I realized that alongside the ever-expanding institutions of capitalist city-building (real-estate, finance, developers, local/regional/state/federal government, etc.), the forces advocating for property owners and capital were becoming more vocal and engaged in the processes of city-building.
These forces include both the NIMBY’s (Not-In-My-Back-Yard) of the East Bench and the YIMBY’s (Yes-In-My-Back-Yard) of central Salt Lake City. Both groups, while unapologetically supportive of the current order of things, advocate for a different sort of capitalist accumulation, represent a different variation of capitalist ideology, and support and align with a different sort of capitalist.
While the argument against white upper-class NIMBY’s is a straightforward one (their racist and classist tendencies are open for all to see), the YIMBY crowd has begun to cloak itself in faux-progressivism, calling themselves “supply-side progressives” (literally “pro-capital progressives,” a contradiction of terms) and bemoaning the racist legacy of zoning. And yet, the consistent message from their camp has been to deregulate private development and provide more and more public subsidies to help capitalist developers meet their bottom-line. Despite their recognition of historically racist urban policies, they remain blind to the contemporary racism of city governments, businesses, and the capitalist system as a whole.
Against both the more traditional forms of capital, manifest in financial institutions, business associations, and sitting in all levels of government, and pro-capitalist activists, this project aims to develop critical urban analysis of the Salt Lake metropolis defined as the entirety of the valley, not just Salt Lake City (SLC). While SLC, as the urban core of the valley, experiences heightened tensions over (re)development, social movements (both potentially liberatory and explicitly reactionary), and is generally far more reported on than any of the surrounding cities, this does not mean that the rest of the valley is any less important to understand. Alongside articles looking into specific developments, topics, and issues, I also hope to publish more general analysis of spatial politics and the geography of the peoples, cultures, and economies of Salt Lake.
The first few posts will be reposts of older articles from Deserted News but new content is on the way!
Follow the project on Instagram @deconstructsaltlake