From Commons to Capital: The Creative Destruction of Coastal Real Estate, Environments, and Communities in the US South
In the decades following World War II, real estate development proliferated along the coastlines and waterways of the US South. But while histories of the Sunbelt recognize the role of vacation and leisure-based development in the region’s economic transformation in the second half of the twentieth...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Association Française d'Etudes Américaines
2021-02-01
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| Series: | Transatlantica |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/16278 |
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| Summary: | In the decades following World War II, real estate development proliferated along the coastlines and waterways of the US South. But while histories of the Sunbelt recognize the role of vacation and leisure-based development in the region’s economic transformation in the second half of the twentieth century, the social and environmental effects of coastal development remain under-examined. This essay uses a case study of Daufuskie Island, a barrier island on the South Carolina coast, to demonstrate the ties that bound capital accumulation, racial injustice, and environmental degradation together in the making of the modern South, and to call attention to the critical role of local governments in facilitating the most predatory and unsustainable features of real estate capitalism. It shows how, in burgeoning real estate markets, local tax administrative and enforcement powers served as a form of “accumulation by dispossession” integral to the growth and expansion of capitalist land systems, dismantling of non-market modes of land use and exchange, and forced incorporation of local populations into a low-wage, seasonal economy. |
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| ISSN: | 1765-2766 |