Justin Carder moved to Oakland almost 10 years ago, when Art Murmur was still new, and he remembers people already having discussions about gentrification in Oakland.

He opened E.M. Wolfman in April 2014, on 13th Street in the heart of downtown Oakland. He built the bookstore by hand with the help of some supportive friends.

In the last three years, he has had a front row seat to a changing downtown. He has seen the many nonprofits that used to occupy downtown space become displaced. He says it’s terrible for organizations offering social services to have to move to areas that aren’t as accessible.

Just like Hollie Hardy, Carder is holding his breath. He doesn’t know how long he will be able to keep the bookstore open. “I’m at the total mercy of my landlord,” he says. “As soon as he sees dollar signs, I have nothing to negotiate with. As soon as he decides to raise my rent, the project is over…

“That’s capitalism, man.”

That’s the view geographer Neil Smith takes in his landmark theory of gentrification, first published in 1977, but regaining ground as a new wave of gentrification sweeps the nation.

Gentrification’s defenders, Smith says, make it seem like a consumer-driven phenomenon: People with financial freedom flock to an organically revitalizing urban area because they want something less stale and more vibrant than the suburbs to which they’ve grown accustomed.

It’s that kind of sunny outlook that led the New York Times to print, in 2015, that Oakland was “enjoying a gentrification boom.” (In the version of the article that exists online, the word “enjoying” is conspicuously absent.)

Smith says that gentrification is instead an inevitable part of unrestrained capitalist markets.

Capitalism, of course, relies on cycles — supply-demand, boom-bust — and Smith depicts gentrification as one of its most reliable ones.

Oakland, it seems, was doomed before it even began.

According to Smith, the cycle begins around the time someone like Oakland’s Julius G. Kellersberger shows up with a vision. City planners and private developers put untouched land to use, which, of course, then immediately begins to depreciate.

Greed drives the cycle forward. Property owners in some areas, desperate to slow that depreciation down, invest heavily in maintenance and upkeep, keeping their property values stable so that their investments might someday yield a profit.

Others aren’t willing to make that investment. They either cut their losses and flee, or else convert the property into rental units. After all, a landlord doesn’t need to keep the value of a rental property high; even an under-maintained building can produce a steady flow of rent checks.

Either way, pouring money into a property can’t fend off depreciation forever. Over time, more property owners have to start renting out their spaces. And the more rental units in a neighborhood, the more poorly maintained those buildings become — to maximize profits despite a declining property value.

Before long, outside developers stop coming in altogether, and investment — public and private — vanishes.

Neighborhoods that avoid going full-rental find the same fate, Smith says. Racist housing practices guarantee it.

Throughout the 20th century, he explains, financial institutions were guilty of blatant, discriminatory redlining. The practice meant equating bad neighborhoods with non-white neighborhoods.

For example, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, established in 1933 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, used markers like the type of building, or its age, to determine the quality of a potential investment. Given just as much weight in their assessments was the “threat of infiltration of foreign-born, negro, or lower grade population.”

As Smith tells it, the only people to which banks and lenders would offer low interest-rate loans or low down-payments to get them started were potential property owners in the suburbs — which, then as now, more or less means white people.

Everyone else was left holding rapidly depreciating properties they’d soon become unable to afford to maintain, or even live in.

Oakland already lived through this harsh chain of events through the 1950s and ’60s. Now they’re reliving it.

In 2013, researchers from Berkeley’s Greenlining Institute and Oakland’s Urban Strategies Council together concluded that “the nation’s recovery is redlining African American and Hispanic families across California.”

That year, those demographics made up over half of Oakland’s population. But they received just 10 percent of the money housing lenders had to offer Oaklanders.

Blockbusting, another racist housing practice, only makes things worse. Smith explains how real estate agents used declining property values in white neighborhoods to take advantage of white panic over “ethnic changes.” The more non-white families in a neighborhood, the better the return — they could buy cheap from white families eager to leave, and sell as high they could to non-white families simply looking to move into more well-maintained neighborhoods.

Whites take flight, and again, investment vanishes.

Either way, whether a neighborhood devolves into rundown rentals or foreclosed properties, the result is the same: total abandonment. Landlords can’t sell, nor can they collect enough rent to cover the cost of property taxes or utilities.

Buildings become empty shells.

The phenomenon could be seen in the decades after the 20th-century decimation of West Oakland; it could be seen in 1990s Downtown by people like Paul Corman-Roberts and the San Francisco transplants of the era.

It’s what today’s developers are seeing right now.

“Much abandoned housing is structurally sound and this seems paradoxical,” Smith writes. “But then buildings are abandoned not because they are unuseable, but because they cannot be used profitably.” (Smith’s emphasis.)

Smith says this abandonment can be triggered by a sudden strict enforcement of building codes — something not unfamiliar to modern-day Oaklanders in a post-Ghost Ship landscape.

He also notes, in a brief aside, that this might be when a neighborhood begins to burn.

“There is a certain incentive for landlords to destroy their own property through arson,” he writes, “and collect the substantial insurance payment.”

(See the Tower’s coverage of two separate building fires in Oakland here and here. At press time, federal agencies had officially classified the two fires, and two other similar fires in the area, as arson. No one has yet been charged.)

This neighborhood abandonment marks the peak of what Smith calls the “rent gap.”

It’s the difference between what a property is worth as-is, and what it would be worth if it were wiped clean, a blank canvas on which a developer can paint their own vision of profit.

When that rent gap is high enough, Smith says, gentrification begins, kick-started not by individuals wanting a taste of some authentic culture in a revitalizing town, but by some kind of collective social action.

On first glance, this might sound like an organic swell of entrepreneurial artistry, but Smith would consider this a blip compared to the real culprit.

After all, Smith says, anyone with big plans in a given neighborhood is still at the mercy of the public and private institutions that will decide whether their ideas are worth the investment.