By Noah Streng
Republished from Michigan Specter.
If you’ve ever seen an episode of HGTV’s Good Bones or any other “house-flipping” show, you’ll know that like all reality TV shows they depict dramatized situations as a way of increasing the stakes and encouraging viewers to keep watching. However, when watching these types of shows, it is important to recognize what narratives they are promoting. Whose voices and stories do they center? What underlying assumptions are left unchallenged?
In the strange world of reality TV, there’s an entire genre dedicated to “home improvement” where wealthy individuals will buy homes in “rundown neighborhoods’’ and “make them beautiful again” (all while making a significant profit for themselves, of course). These shows like to promote the idea that the house-flippers are courageous underdogs venturing into an uncharted and dangerous land to save target homes from the scary, filthy people who live in them. Euphemisms like “up and coming” and “transitional” are often used to describe low-income, minority neighborhoods starved for investment.
In a dramatic scene from an episode of HGTV’s Good Bones, the gentrifiers are seen “scouting” a house that they bought and breaking through a window because the doors of the house are locked — a sign that people have been staying there. The scene depicts the gentrifiers as being frightened by the possibility of encountering a squatter and being disgusted by the house’s “filth.” However, what’s never asked or included in these shows is questioning why the person living in that house needed to squat in the first place.
Did the state fail to provide them affordable housing? Are they suffering from a mental health issue and lack insurance? Did they get evicted from their former home? Instead of analyzing the root causes of this person’s housing insecurity and seeking to address it, the squatter is demonized as singularly responsible for their failures. Not only that, but the content of these characterizations is highly racialized, contributing to the white supremacist and colonial themes of the show.
These shows almost never consider the perspective of the tenants evicted by gentrifiers who rip their apartments out from under them. In some cases, there will be depictions of scary, drugged-up squatters who are illegally occupying the gentrifiers’ new passion project. In an article titled ‘We Bought a Crack House,’ house-flippers Catherine Jheon and Julian Humphreys detail their “brave” story of buying a house for $560,000 and encountering the tenants — whose home had just been sold by their landlord without consent — still living in the house when they arrive. Some of the home’s residents are experiencing problems with drug addiction, and are even caught by the gentrifiers using crack in an upstairs room.
What’s not mentioned here is how poverty, and these people’s recent condemnation to homelessness by their landlord, may have influenced their decision to use drugs to cope with the immense hardships they face. When Jheon and Humphreys ask the former tenants to leave the home so that they can start renovating, the tenants refuse, citing that they have nowhere else to go and that this is their rightful home. Jheon writes about her frustration with this, as every day she can’t renovate the home is money lost. In the end, she and Humphreys bribe one of the tenants to leave the house and call the police to forcibly remove the rest of them.
This is a classic example of how law and the media intersect to legitimize the violence of colonization and gentrification which continues in our cities today. The poor are demonized and gentrifiers are portrayed as innocent white saviors who are just trying to make a living — but they are doing so by displacing poor, housing insecure black and brown people. The police advance these projects of colonization by using their monopoly on violence to aid gentrifiers in their mission of displacing community residents so that their house can be fixed up and eventually sold to a rich white family.
While seeming innocent on their face, these shows can have devastating effects on the lives of the millions of people in the United States who experience housing insecurity. Not only do these television networks make money off of stories of tragic displacement of poor people, but they frame these stories in a way that valorizes gentrifiers and legitimizes a landlord’s right to hoard property and force destitute people into homelessness. Oftentimes, the excuse that gentrifiers will use when evicting tenants is “it’s our house now.” However, this statement is highly ideological and reinforces the social dynamic between property owners and the property-less in our capitalist society.
Who controls housing is not something that is natural or written in the stars. It is a power arrangement forged by the deliberate decisions of actors within an economic system that prioritizes profit over human life. House-flipping shows are just one part of the larger media trend of legitimizing societal oppression.
TV companies make political decisions when they choose to only highlight the voices of landlords, realtors, and house-flippers over tenants and the housing insecure. The depiction of low-income, predominately black people as filthy, dangerous, and lazy — rather than victims of a violent, exploitative, and racist economic system — feeds into the narrative that gentrification is good for society at large. How the media depicts people’s interactions with the law and frames which laws are just has real consequences. When the media chooses to center the story of the colonizer over the colonized, it legitimizes the displacement, land theft, and systemic impoverishment that millions of people face every day.
