The continued gentrification of 23rd and Union, the central business area of the CD. Charles Mudede

Ruth Glass, the great German British urban sociologist, named the urban process by which upper-class Londoners entered and eventually dominated a neighborhood that was initially working-class gentrification. This happened in 1964, when London was mostly white.

The same process began in Seattle's Central District in earnest in the middle of the 1990s. But because race in America is often not unrelated to class, the process had a distinct racial dimension. Whites moved in and blacks moved out. But as the cultural critic Nelson George pointed out not too long ago, blacks can also be gentrifiers, as is the case with black New Yorkers who sold their homes to white New Yorkers and moved to Atlanta, where homes are generally cheaper. But more often than not, gentrification in the contemporary United States has been about the relocation of blacks from the core of a city to its periphery, thus reversing an urban trend that began in the 1950s.

In Berlin, a predominately white city with a large Turkish German community, gentrification tends to be a whites-displacing-whites affair. Which is why the recent gentrification-related tensions and explosions in that city (squatters verses landlords) have the aspect of a class struggle. City Lab has the story:

For every raid on a Berlin squat, we will cause €1 million of criminal damage—that’s the threat made by left-wing extremists in Berlin this winter, after a series of police raids on the city’s “occupied houses,” as squats are known locally

In the past seven days, the extremists proved true to their claim, starting what could be the most destructive single anti-gentrification action any city in Europe has yet seen. On Saturday, a gang of 40 masked vandals smashed up 28 cars in the area near central Potsdamer Platz, leaving some of them in flames. Attacks continued the following night in the southwestern district of Neukolln, when at least 20 more cars were damaged and shop windows smashed in.

It's easy to imagine the panic that would seize our city if organized displaced youth began attacking the cars of the well–to–do who now live in the Central District, because those youth would be black and those car owners would be white. What in Berlin appears only as class tensions, in Seattle would appear as racial tensions with deep roots. But the whites here have nothing to fear. The black youth will not retaliate and destroy their property. The blacks have pretty much left the CD in bitter peace.