Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US West by Ryanne Pilgeram

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US West by Ryanne Pilgeram Jennifer K. Ladino Ryanne Pilgeram, Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US West. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2021. 194 pp. Hardcover, $99; paper, $30. Even if you have never been to Dover, Idaho—or to its better-known neighbor, Sandpoint—you might recognize its story: a small town in the US West, built on the expulsion of Indigenous peoples and resource extraction, turns to real estate development to survive in a changing economy. In Dover’s case, the timber mill that had sustained the community for decades closes down, giving way to an elite housing development, which sociologist Dr. Ryanne Pilgeram dubs (following protocols in her discipline) “Mill Lake.” The question at the heart of Pushed Out is: Why would longtime residents [End Page 81] of Dover vote for this change when the costs—loss of access to natural places they’d long loved, rising housing costs that don’t raise their own property values, and a town fraught with socioeconomic rifts—don’t seem worth it? Pilgeram spent her formative years in Dover, and she tells its story with sensitivity, nuance, and grace, as well as an evenhandedness that treats the town both as a particular place, with particular people, and as a microcosm of broader changes in the West, a cautionary tale that scales across the region. The title, Pushed Out, seems misleading at first, since this isn’t a story about out-migration; most residents of “old Dover” still live there. Rather, it speaks to the way some voices are “pushed out of conversations about how the land can or should be used” (24). The title thus reflects the book’s attention to the constraints on the agency of small-town residents in rural areas. Pilgeram’s book refuses the trend in rural sociology of overrepresenting the amenity migrants—those who acquire first or second homes in economically depressed areas like Dover and bring their financial and cultural power with them—and instead focuses on the quieter voices of residents who have watched their town change before their eyes. Pilgeram’s diligent work interviewing several dozen residents and coding the data pays off in this riveting polyvocal narrative that honors individual stories and resists demonizing any single “bad actor.” If there’s a villain in this book it’s capitalism, particularly the way this economic system colonizes space and delivers economic, environmental, and social benefits to a select few at the expense of most everyone else. Pilgeram frames this boom-and-bust tale with David Harvey’s “spatial fix,” a theoretical concept she simplifies (but not reductively) in ways that make her narrative as accessible as it is engaging. The use of historical materialism to approach economic, social, and environmental changes in the West is a compelling way to conceptualize the region’s conflicts and tensions—from dispossession of the Kalispel peoples and ongoing settler violence, to robber barons, to extractive industries, to growing class tensions in rapidly gentrifying “New West” towns. I haven’t seen WLA scholars deploy Marxian geography in quite this way. Also interesting for WAL readers is Pilgeram’s discussion [End Page 82] of Mill Lake as a “simulacrum for an American West that never existed” (7). The quest for a romantic “Rocky Mountain lifestyle” (14) revealed in this real-life town’s story resonates with fiction by writers such as Mary Clearman Blew (Jackalope Dreams) and Percival Everett (Grand Canyon, Inc.), as well as with certain Annie Proulx short stories. Pushed Out is, of course, nonfiction, and it speaks to urgent changes in the contemporary West. Rural Idaho is growing at a breathtaking pace, and many towns are already facing similar challenges as Dover. Pilgeram’s book offers an important message: there’s nothing natural or inevitable about capitalism as we know it. While I wish she’d gone on to more fully envision alternatives—the final pages felt like a teaser for what could have been a longer, more extensive vision—the book’s closing reminder that we can imagine, and enact, different futures is a hopeful and necessary one. Jennifer...