For many, gentrification is a localized term mired in race and class politics, but to Smith (2002) it is the “global urban strategy” for capital accumulation (p. 437). The financialization of housing is yet another way capital mitigates its periodic crises while heightening inequalities and worsening housing conditions (Fernandez and Aalbers 2016; Fields and Uffer 2016). In the United States, gentrification is central to these debates; many view it as a capitalist strategy, one that unfolds at the crossroads of federal housing policy and the private housing market. Numerous scholars dissect this dynamic that unfolds between governmental policies and private market processes (Hackworth and Smith 2001; Lees 2003a; Marcuse 1985; Wyly and Hammel 2004). For example, Sarmiento and Sims (2015) link the construction of affordable housing with furthering gentrification and displacement. Social movement leaders, researchers, and policymakers agree that gentrification pushes up rents and prices out low-income working-class populations because they cannot afford the increased rents in neighborhoods they call home. Displacement, in particular, takes center stage (Bridge, Butler, and Lees 2012; Lees, Shin, and Lopez-Morales 2015, 2016;  2015). Neil Smith’s rent-gap theory, premised on this observation, argues that the widening difference between potential rent and current rent of land drives gentrification (Smith 1987). Gentrification studies face methodological challenges related to tracking displacement, what Slater (2006) calls a “massive undertaking” (p. 748). Slater (2006) goes on to quote Newman and Wyly: “In short, it is difficult to find people who have been displaced, particularly if those people are poor…. By definition, displaced residents have disappeared from the very places where researchers and census-takers go to look for them” (p. 748). Certainly, important insights can be gleaned from formal records and retroactive analysis of displacement, but this leaves the household circumstances leading up to displacement in the shadows. Few examine what happens before displacement and consequently miss intimate and overlapping uses of homes, the affective economy of dwelling in homes, and how such complexities are disrupted in gentrifying neighborhoods. In other words, in thinking about gentrification, we need to shift away from simple rent increases to the shadier practices that contribute to displacement even before rents increase and gentrification is fully visible.

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