Reframing Gentrification: How Tenant Shopkeepers’ Activism in Seoul Radically Reframed Gentrification

Introduction

In Korea, unlikely protagonists are leading the resistance against gentrification. Tenant shopkeepers, who are shop owners but lack ownership over the properties in which they operate their businesses, are collectively organizing. This organizing, mostly based within the larger metropolitan area of Seoul, has invigorated discussions within Korea around the dispossession that tenant shopkeepers face when priced out of the spaces in which they make their livelihoods. Yet within the gentrification literature, there is little analytical room to capture the tenant shopkeepers’ agency as protagonists resisting gentrification. Tenant shopkeepers are often lumped together with the beneficiaries of gentrification. Other times, these tenants are labeled as “early” or “pioneer” gentrifiers (Clay, 1979: 57–60; Smith, 1996), assigning them to the sinister role of accomplices to gentrification. Therefore, constructing tenant shopkeepers as protagonists in the resistance against gentrification is a radical departure from the proto-gentrification narrative. This departure raises a critical question: How can radical shifts occur in the ways that the problem of gentrification is imagined and the protagonists challenging that social problem are constructed?

I find that two categories of literature shed light on this question: the urban literature that has advanced our knowledge on the social constructionist side of the gentrification story, and the social movement literature on framing. The constructionist literature on gentrification has raised awareness of the contested nature of what is recognized as the problem of gentrification and the malleable boundaries of gentrification’s “authentic” victims. However, the literature offers little insight into how the construction of gentrification can undergo radical change. In order to understand the emergence of new agents of change and the radical shifts they can generate, I incorporate analytical tools from the framing theory within the social movement literature. If the gentrification scholarship is to produce knowledge capable of dismantling the status quo where property owners enjoy seemingly overwhelming power to extract the most profit from their property even at the expense of their tenants, I argue that the literature can benefit from taking the social movement literature seriously (see also Brown-Saracino, 2016: 222–223).

“Collective action frame” or “framing” (using the Goffmanian approach) refers to the interpretive work conducted by social movement actors to “simplify and condense aspects of the ‘world out there’” (Snow and Benford, 1988: 198) in order to diagnose a social problem and propose a roadmap to rectify the situation. In the past two decades, a new line of research within the framing literature has engaged with the theoretical question of how a “radical” redefinition of what we see as a social problem can gain traction when, by definition, a more “moderate” shift that conforms to the sentiments and social norms of the time is likely to ensure better “resonance” with the wider public (Ferree, 2003; Hewitt and McCammon, 2005; McCammon, 2012). More specifically, at the organizational level, this literature has sought to unravel the theoretical puzzle as to why some social movement organizations (SMOs) opt for a radical reframing that “mounts a meaningful challenge to prevailing ideology” (Hewitt and McCammon, 2005: 38) when such a framing choice can risk diminishing resonance and threaten the short-term survival of the SMO.

To investigate this theoretical question in light of my case of a radical reframing of the problem of gentrification, I conducted 15 months of ethnographic research with a young tenant shopkeepers’ SMO called “People Who Want to Run a Commercial Business with Peace of Mind” (Mamp‘yŏnhijangsahagop’ŭn Sangin Moim, hereafter referred to by their abbreviated name in Korean, Mam-Sang-Mo). Mam-Sang-Mo was chosen for its prominent role in reframing gentrification. First, Mam-Sang-Mo steered the radical shift in diagnosing the problem of gentrification as the dispossession of tenant shopkeepers’ livelihoods. Second, Mam-Sang-Mo introduced into the mainstream political agenda demands that can fundamentally rectify the imbalance of power between tenant shopkeepers and property owners—such as rent control in commercial buildings and securing tenant shopkeepers’ long-term tenure rights. In the following sections, before analyzing data from my ethnographic case study, I begin by situating my case within the existing literature and discussing the research design. Then, guided by theory, I analyze the conditions that led to the rise of the radical reframing of the gentrification problem. I then show how the radical frame enjoyed staying power despite pressures to adopt a frame less threatening to the hegemonic property-ownership-based rights regime. I conclude by highlighting insights offered by the Korean case which demonstrate how non-Western cities can present sites for theorizing new locations of resistance, new agents of social change, and novel vocabularies of rights to challenge gentrification.

The Social Construction of the Gentrification Problem

An increasing number of works have analyzed how, in the face of gentrification, a certain group’s rights claim to a specific place, far from naturally occurring, is manufactured. Such rights claims can be manufactured by dictating and policing the norms of what are the “respectable” or “acceptable” aesthetics or activities within a place (Deener, 2012; Martin, 2008; Pattillo, 2007). Even discursive everyday practices, such as the decision to use one nomenclature over another to refer to a place, and how to define the scope and boundary of that place, can be complicit in reinforcing a certain group’s legitimate claims to a place while excluding others (Hwang, 2016). Also, research has uncovered the social construction of gentrification’s victims by demonstrating that a certain racially, ethnically, or culturally marginalized group can be perceived as having more “authentic” claims to a place than other groups with similar traits (Brown-Saracino, 2007). This “authenticity” is something that is often performed and crafted by tracing certain historical roots and developing cultural symbols (Brown-Saracino, 2007; Gotham, 2007; Lloyd, 2006; Ocejo, 2011; Zukin, 2009). Understanding the social constructionist side of the gentrification story shows that it is far from obvious which issues become identified by organizers as social problems and which groups are designated as legitimate victims to be mobilized. (For an overview, see Zukin, 2016.)

The variegated ways in which the victims of gentrification are constructed are also highlighted in the resistance against gentrification that is occurring beyond the fences of residential communities. Studies have, for example, uncovered resistance by those who are organizing to preserve the Puerto Rican community gardens in the Lower East Side (Martinez, 2010); by commercial shopkeepers who are organizing to preserve their businesses, which they see as representing the countercultural identity of Venice Beach (Deener, 2012); and, to some degree, by artists in Chicago’s Wicker Park who have claimed the role of safeguarding the area’s neo-bohemian spaces (Lloyd, 2006). (For an overview of new territories of gentrification, see Brown-Saracino, 2017: 517–519.) Especially in cities beyond the West, where the term gentrification has not historically been part of the local lexicon and is therefore unencumbered by the boundaries traditionally set by the term, scholars have documented how unlikely protagonists are being recruited based on unique senses of entitlement rooted in the local context (Chen, 2011; Chen and Szeto, 2015: 441–443; Ley and Teo, 2014; López-Morales, 2015; Nijman, 2008; Weinstein and Ren, 2009).

In the case of Korea, the vibrant resistance that reinvigorated the debate over rights of the current occupants of a space came from tenant shopkeepers, a group that is overlooked in previous theories of gentrification and undetected by measurements of gentrification that focus narrowly on the displacement of residents. It is important to note that the construction of tenant shopkeepers as gentrification’s victims is also a breakaway from the local practice of anti-eviction mobilization in Korea. In fact, the anti-eviction movement in Korea has historically been associated with the resistance of the urban poor against large-scale development projects to convert slum settlements and old neighborhoods into apartment complexes (Davis, 2011; Shin, 2018). However, the term “gentrification” when transliterated into the Korean lexicon is not invoked in the context of this time-old movement of the urban poor resisting their displacement to make way for apartment developments. Instead, gentrification has largely become associated with tenant shopkeepers’ dispossession and displacement since the term gained traction around 2015. According to Lee (2015b), who surveyed all major newspaper articles published in Korea through the year 2015, 76% of the articles that mentioned gentrification were published in 2015. The timing of this surge in the popularity of the term gentrification corresponds to precisely when tenant shopkeepers emerged in the spotlight as anti-gentrification protagonists. (For examples of media coverage that links tenant shopkeepers to the gentrification problem, see Doo, 2015; Lee, 2015a.) In short, seen from either the Western or the Korean perspective, the case of Seoul’s tenant shopkeepers surging as the victims of gentrification represents a radical departure from previous conventions of constructing the problem of gentrification.

Such a shift demands an explanation. Yet the constructionist literature on gentrification offers scant guidance to explain the social shift—the dynamic process that thrust tenant shopkeepers into the role of agents of change. Therefore, here, I turn to the social movement literature to understand the radical shifts that reframed the problem of gentrification in Korea. ¹

Radical Reframing and Resonance

Framing scholars have long grappled with the question of how a radically new way of framing a social problem (such as gentrification) can gain a foothold within a society. First, it must be noted that what framing scholars mean by “radical” does not refer to an inherent property of a frame. Rather, radical is a relational concept that indicates a departure from institutionalized ways, social norms, and cultural sensibilities. For example, in the context of the women’s jury movements, a case for the right of women to perform jury duty could be made by claiming that women innately have rights equal to those of men—in other words, by directly challenging the prevailing gender roles and radically reframing them. On the other hand, the same case for women’s right to jury duty could be made by claiming that it is women’s “caring” role as mothers and wives that makes them qualified to serve as jurors—a moderate framing strategy that conforms to the existing gender roles (McCammon, 2012). Given that the choice to pursue a radical reframing has the potential to offend the cultural sensibilities of the wider public and alienate powerful players who might have become allies under a more moderate framing, a natural question is ‘Why do some social movements pursue a radical reframing at the risk of diminishing resonance?’ The literature provides two primary explanations to address this puzzle.

First, under the influence of the so-called “cultural turn” in the larger social movement literature (Della Porta and Diani, 1999; Johnston and Klandermans, 1995), many framing researchers have focused on analyzing how structural and cultural shifts can create opportunities for a certain framing of a social problem to gain prominence. These works emphasize that a frame’s resonance is neither “simply a property of the frames themselves” nor “a resource waiting to be discovered” (Ferree, 2003: 310); instead, the social context in which a frame is embedded matters for a frame to “strike a responsive chord.” For example, by examining structural variations created by constitutional court decisions in the 1970s, Myra Marx Ferree (2003) demonstrates how abortion rights advocates in the USA and Germany came to perceive disparate framing strategies as opportune for espousing their pro-choice stances. Along these lines, scholars have also examined how a previously marginalized frame can become mainstream based on shifts in the structural discursive fields (Stienberg, 1999), the law (Pedriana, 2006), or discursive opportunity structures (Coy et al., 2008; Ferree, 2003). According to this line of research, radical shifts in the structural and cultural conditions can open up opportunities for the emergence of a radical reframing.

On the other hand, the literature has also shown that the agency of the framing agents matters for imposing a radical frame and shifting the societal debate on a social problem. For example, the ideological convictions of the activists or the organizational culture and identity of an SMO can push these framing agents to deliberately go against the hegemonic or mainstream frame (Ferree, 2003; McCammon, 2012; Oliver and Johnston, 2000; Polletta, 2005; Reese and Newcombe, 2003). Frame choices are therefore not entirely dictated by the structural and cultural context, but are also a product of compromises between manifold organizational actors who each exercise agency to push a certain frame over others. From this perspective, the establishment of a radical reframing of a social problem can be the result of a choice made by organizers and activists based on their ideological stance or worldview.

In the following pages, I will examine the structural and cultural shifts in the larger Korean society that opened up an opportunity for a radical reframing of gentrification. At the same time, I will illustrate how an SMO’s agency mattered in seizing that opportunity. Further, through this case, I will also elucidate the mechanism by which the radical shift in framing gained resilience once embraced by the SMO. Specifically, I will examine how the radical frame withstood moderating pressures to modify the frame to be less threatening to the established power holders.

Methods

I conducted a total of 15 months of participatory research from May 2015 to July 2016 with Mam-Sang-Mo, a young SMO established in 2013. Despite its moderate size—its membership includes around 600 to 800 tenant shopkeepers, and the SMO hires two to seven full-time staff activists depending on the point in time—Mam-Sang-Mo was selected because its emergence played a significant role in disseminating a radically different version of framing the gentrification problem. In addition, I conducted a total of 20 semi-structured interviews with member tenant shopkeepers and an additional 20 with activists as well as other SMO actors, state officials, and policy makers to construct the multi-institutional field in which this framing process is embedded.

During my ethnographic research, I attended street protests and vigils and conducted guard duty at occupation sites resisting eviction orders. Eventually, I was accepted into the routine weekly meetings among Mam-Sang-Mo’s staff activists, where the very issues of framing the gentrification problem and of who to include and exclude as the victims of the problem were discussed. Such ethnographic data combined from multiple access points enabled the researcher to capture the discussions behind framing choices along with the fractures and multivocality surrounding framing that can be filtered out in official accounts or in interviews with key figures. I took detailed field notes and from these notes identified reoccurring frames used in the field. This process was crucial for analyzing the different ways of framing the problem of gentrification that were pushed by some and fought by others.

In addition, to fully understand the motivations and justifications behind promoting one frame over another, I interviewed tenant shopkeepers and activists. I timed the interviews toward the end of my fieldwork when a rapport had formed and shared experience accumulated with the interviewees, which allowed me to sample tenants of different socio-economic statuses as well as those who voiced and utilized different types of frames as their primary frame. I also interviewed government officials and policy experts to see which of the frames were resonant in different circles. Each interview took between 1 and 3 hours and was conducted in a location of the interviewee’s choice. The interviews were conducted in Korean and transcribed afterwards into English. In the following analysis, I use pseudonyms for the names of the individuals as well as the names of the businesses of the tenant shopkeepers. ²

Structural and Cultural Shifts

Smith (1979) emphasized the importance of tracking the movement of capital for understanding gentrification. Likewise, in order to understand the rise of tenant shopkeepers’ organizing against their displacement, it is crucial to understand how shifts in the macroeconomic structure influenced the flow of investment capital which in turn triggered the disruption of cultural practices between landlords and tenant shopkeepers.

Initially, in the Korean context, investment capital flows were concentrated on residential apartments in Seoul. These newly built apartments emerged as the most secure and lucrative investment commodities with the support of what scholars refer to as the “developmental state.” The phrase “developmental state” refers to a state that actively meddles in the market by steering corporations to serve a country’s industrial development. The Korean developmental state, like its other Asian counterparts, offered subsidies and market protection to large corporations—referred to as chaebol in Korean—in exchange for entering risky industries and meeting production quotas set by the government. (For literature on the development state, see Amsden, 1992; Chibber, 1999; Evans, 1995; Wade, 1990; Woo, 1991.) Less examined is the developmental state’s involvement in urban development (exceptions include Doling, 1999; Park, 1988; Yoon, 1994). Here, the state intervened by offering large corporations incentives to enter the apartment building business (Park, 1998: 279; Park et al., 2012). These incentives included policy measures and a pricing scheme that supported the high returns of newly built apartments as an investment commodity, attracting chaebols into the apartment-building industry by ensuring its profitability (Park, 1998; Park et al., 2012; Yang, 2018).

Yet when global financial crises struck the Korean housing market, the state was no longer able to sustain the value of newly built apartments. In fact, the image of the apartment as a prime investment commodity took several hits during the two global financial crises—the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and the 2007–2008 Global Financial Crisis. In the aftermath of each global financial crisis, a surge of vacancies in newly built apartment buildings lasted for several consecutive years even as the government implemented measures to boost the real estate market (Kim, 2008: 7–8). This signaled to the property investors the need to diversify their real estate holdings and venture into alternative real estate-based investment commodities.

Therefore, when the vicissitudes of the global market introduced uncertainty into the strategy of capital accumulation through the apartment real estate market in Korea, the property investors adapted swiftly by turning to alternatives. Investment in commercial buildings (sangga kŏnmul) that can be rented out to tenant shopkeepers surfaced as a prominent candidate for such alternative investment, partly owing to the high rental-income-to-price ratio of commercial buildings compared to residential buildings (Kookmin Bank Report, 2013: 4). (For a similar shift in investment trends in Hong Kong, see Ip, 2018.) As a result, the structural shift that led speculative money from individual investors to begin spilling into the commercial building sector in the 2000s marked the beginning of intensified non-residential gentrification in Korea.

The flow of investment capital into commercial buildings also prompted a cultural shift in the relationship between the property owners and tenant shopkeepers. Property investors started disrupting a unique cultural practice among tenant shopkeepers in Korea called “right-money” (kwŏlligŭm), which led to heightened grievances among tenant shopkeepers. Right-money refers to a large one-time payment made by an incoming tenant to an outgoing tenant when the lease on a commercial property changes hands. The amount of right-money is decided in the market based on supply and demand. If the location of the business becomes unpopular, the right-money can decrease, or even disappear altogether. Conversely, if the incumbent tenant shopkeeper successfully increased the desirability of the place of business—increasing foot traffic in the area or putting the location on the cognitive map of the wider public—the next incoming tenant is likely to be willing to pay a higher amount of right-money. Through this mechanism, the amount of right-money partially captures the intangible value added by a tenant shopkeeper to the commercial real estate. With commercial real estate increasingly being targeted as an investment commodity during the 2000s, property investors deployed a new tactic: buying commercial properties and terminating leases with existing tenants without first securing their replacements. This way, through the removal of the existing tenant ahead of time, the landlord is able to later request a higher monthly rent from the next incoming tenant in exchange for ridding that tenant of the cost of right-money. The property investors had discovered how the practice of exchanging right-money between tenants could be subject to exploitation.

The prevalent practice of right-money exploitation generated a condition of intensified dispossession for tenant shopkeepers. Mam-Sang-Mo came to refer to the tactics invented by property investors to exploit right-money as “melting right-money into the rent” or “right-money theft” (kwŏlligŭm yakt’al). Because of these tactics, tenants faced not only displacement from their shops but also the loss of the necessary lump sum money to make a right-money payment at another location. In other words, tenant shopkeepers became stripped of the means to continue their livelihoods elsewhere. As a result, tenant shopkeepers faced a condition where their life chances were critically undermined at the point of their displacement. Ultimately, it was this disruption of right-money exchange, itself precipitated by non-residential gentrification and capital flows into commercial properties, that was the final trigger that galvanized tenant shopkeepers to organize.

Radical Reframing to Rebalance the Rights to Profit of Property Owners With the Rights to Livelihood of All Tenant Shopkeepers

Mam-Sang-Mo seized on the opportunity offered by the structural and cultural shifts of the time by pushing forward a radically new way to frame the problem of gentrification, what I refer to here as the “exploitation frame.” The exploitation frame made the conceptual shift of expanding the boundary of gentrification’s victims to include potentially all tenants, not just the petty operations that cater to the urban poor. Within the existing literature, to the extent that tenant shopkeepers appear at all as victims of gentrification, it is the “petty” operations that cater to the urban poor residents—the dry cleaners, the corner liquor stores, and the bodegas. By contrast, within the exploitation frame, the distinction between who is and is not “petty” ceases to be significant in determining the “authentic” victims of gentrification.

The rationale behind this radical reframing is well articulated in a lecture given by one of the organization’s activists. I accompanied the activist Min-ji when she was scheduled to give a lecture on the rights of tenant shopkeepers to a group of university students who were part of an intercollegiate organization studying the issue of poverty. In this lecture, Min-ji emphasized how Mam-Sang-Mo avoids using the term “yŏngse shops” (translated as “petty shops”) to frame the gentrification problem. Min-ji asked the audience “Who benefits from the spurious division between small and large operations?” Her answer, “the ultra-rich landlords.” After her lecture, I pointed out to Min-ji the irony that she had spoken at a forum on poverty yet had advocated for the rights of those who might not currently be poor but who, in her words, could “slip into poverty.” However, Min-ji was more concerned about helping the students and tenant shopkeepers themselves to see the common struggle of tenant shopkeepers against gentrification. Min-ji reiterated to me her view that the current emphasis on discerning the legitimate “petty” tenants “serves only to thicken the fat pockets of the ultra-rich!”

Once the problem of gentrification was reframed to recognize the precarity faced by all tenant shopkeepers, a different type of solution to tackle the problem emerged within Mam-Sang-Mo. Whereas the demands of previous anti-eviction social movements were tied to the need to protect the “urban poor,” Mam-Sang-Mo advocated for demands designed to safeguard all tenant shopkeepers, “petty” or “large,” from dispossession and displacement—for example, demands for commercial rent control, securing tenant shopkeepers’ long-term tenure rights, and protection of right-money. The policy solutions deriving from the exploitation frame are a radical departure from the current legal system in terms of who is recognized as worthy of protection. The Commercial Building Rental Relation Protection Law in Korea uses a combination of the amounts of monthly rent and key money (pojŭnggŭm) paid to the landlord to define a cut-off above which the putative non-petty tenant shopkeepers are eliminated from the category of those worthy of protection against the landlords. However, as Min-ji pointed out in her lecture, this provision of the legal system endows landlords already making large amounts of monthly rental income with nearly unregulated power over their tenants. By demanding the extension of these protections to all tenant shopkeepers, Mam-Sang-Mo proposed the radical idea that the profit-maximizing impulse of the property owners be tempered with the livelihood needs of the tenant shopkeepers.

When the activist Min-ji was speaking to the member tenants of Mam-Sang-Mo in one of the organization’s educational sessions for members, she explained how she, as a tenant-shopkeeper-turned-activist and a founding member of Mam-Sang-Mo, first came to realize the shared plight of all tenant shopkeepers regardless of the size of their operations.

I met Chan-su for the first time in 2013. He was not your usual yŏngse (petty) shop owner whereas I truly fit that category, running a small café in a residential neighborhood on the urban periphery. I immediately felt this distance from him when he told me how much he pays for rent. I was thinking to myself, ‘How could anyone ever afford to pay that!’ Then one day Chan-su invited us to his restaurant. His working hours were crazy! He would work all night and sleep at odd hours. In terms of long working hours and unfair treatment from his landlord, he was just like us yŏngse tenants. This is how we [Mam-Sang-Mo] came to agree to not use the term yŏngse tenant. (Field note from 28 October 2015)

This quote demonstrates that meeting other tenants through organizing was an eye-opening experience for the tenants and activists. Due to the broader structural and cultural shifts described earlier in this article, the reach of gentrification had expanded into previously untouched urban pockets, affecting tenant shopkeepers of all sizes and social classes. As a result, a diverse group of tenant shopkeepers found themselves, unexpectedly, in a shared struggle against rent hikes and right-money theft. The radical reframing of the gentrification problem was a response to the new dynamics on the ground that were themselves the result of the larger structural and cultural shifts.

Within Mam-Sang-Mo emerged a broad coalition based on shared empathy toward one another. Discursively resonant signifiers such as yŏngse (petty) shop owner, which singled out small operations as gentrification’s sole victims, ceased to be compatible with Mam-Sang-Mo’s construction of the gentrification problem. ³ Instead, the exploitation frame united the diverse tenant shopkeepers by challenging the formerly prevalent view among tenant shopkeepers that rent hikes and right-money theft were just “bad luck”—something that a tenant shopkeeper had to learn to avoid by somehow discerning the “bad landlords” from the “good” ones. The exploitation frame exposed the systemic structural injustice of the property owners’ dispossession of their tenants’ livelihoods in order to squeeze out further speculative profits.

Mainstreaming the Radical Shift: How Agency Matters

The rise of a frame containing a radically different vision of the problem of gentrification was not just the result of structural and cultural shifts. Equally important was the agency exercised by Mam-Sang-Mo. Here, I demonstrate the on-the-ground work that Mam-Sang-Mo performed to promote the exploitation frame to the general public.

First and foremost, Mam-Sang-Mo played the role of creating public venues to air flesh-and-blood stories illustrating the exploitation frame. Mam-Sang-Mo’s member tenant shopkeepers were encouraged to share their testimonies with the media, at hearings of the National Assembly, and out in the streets at protests. A tenant shopkeeper who was evicted from his pig intestines BBQ restaurant, and who is now a veteran member of Mam-Sang-Mo, once told me about the time he gave testimony at the National Assembly. A picture from that day shows all the tenant shopkeepers who went to give their testimonies wearing their daily restaurant uniforms. The pig intestines BBQ restaurant tenant repeated for me his testimony in which he described how he was evicted from his restaurant. This tenant’s landlord evicted him from his shop, a restaurant that was popular among nearby college students, without compensating him for his right-money. Even worse, at the former location of the tenant’s restaurant, the landlord opened on the spot an almost identical pig intestines BBQ restaurant himself with only minor changes to the menu and the interior décor. The tenant’s landlord had literally appropriated the idea, time, and monetary investment of the tenant. The tenant’s testimony highlights how the successful operations can actually present landlords with the greatest opportunity to exploit and cash in on the added value created by the tenants. This point is contrary to the conventional wisdom that the closing of a tenant shopkeeper’s operation in a gentrifying area is the “natural” working of the market that shakes out “unsuccessful” or “outdated” businesses. Mam-Sang-Mo harnessed such cases with clear messages to frame gentrification as a problem of tenant shopkeepers’ sweat equity being exploited. Mam-Sang-Mo even reappropriated an old Korean adage, “the bear performs the talent (chaeju) and Mr. Wang collects the fee,” as a metaphor for the predatory nature of the landlords’ attempts to absorb the increased value of their properties, which the landlords themselves had little role in making.

Second, in order to effectively promote the exploitation frame, Mam-Sang-Mo also played the role of translating, for the general public, what right-money means for a tenant shopkeeper’s ability to continue working. Mam-Sang-Mo fed the media with numerical data on right-money based on internal surveys of its member tenants when no comparable data were available. Eventually, the Seoul City government funded a survey in 2015 which reported Seoul’s tenant shopkeepers’ right-money to be on average US$66,824 (Korea Appraisal Board, 2015)—more than three times Korea’s average annual household net-adjusted disposable income per capita (US$19,372) (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2015). Mam-Sang-Mo initiated the data collection that generated a public awareness of the significance of tenant shopkeepers being able to recoup some amount of their right-money upon displacement.

Finally, Mam-Sang-Mo harnessed right-money theft, a moment of significant loss and dispossession for tenant shopkeepers, as a symbol of the landlords’ exploitation of tenant shopkeepers’ sweat equity. In reality, right-money does not perfectly equate to sweat equity investment in a place made by an individual tenant shopkeeper, and the Mam-Sang-Mo activists were well aware of this fact. It is virtually impossible to disentangle the contribution of any one individual tenant shopkeeper to the increased value of a place from other contributing factors, such as the collective efforts of the other tenant shopkeepers in the area or such external factors as transportation or infrastructure development or the opening of a hospital or shopping mall nearby. Nevertheless, right-money offered a symbol of landlords’ exploitation of tenants’ sweat equity. When this symbol was combined with the numerical data on the magnitude of the right-money paid by the tenants and backed by the testimonies of the tenants, it proved effective in conveying to the general public the gravity of the hardship inflicted by a landlord’s exploitation of right-money.

The resonance of the exploitation frame with the larger public was confirmed when right-money, an informal practice among tenant shopkeepers that was previously obscure to the larger public, became successfully politicized and then legalized in 2015. When I first visited Mam-Sang-Mo’s office, I noticed that the walls of the stairways leading to the office were covered with pictures showing the traces of the fierce legal advocacy campaign that Mam-Sang-Mo launched during the winter of 2014 when the legislature was in session. The activists proudly pointed to the pictures of the daily protests they held on the cold winter mornings at the front gate of the National Assembly. One activist explained, “it is important to be protesting when the congresspersons pass through on their way to work.” Mam-Sang-Mo also kept the pressure on by sitting and waiting in the hallways of Congress while closed-door negotiations were taking place over how to revise the Commercial Building Rental Relation Protection Law. As a result, when congress revised the Commercial Building Rental Relation Protection Law to codify right-money into law for the first time in history, it was considered a monumental symbolic victory for Mam-Sang-Mo. While loopholes in the law continue to enable landlords to exploit an incumbent tenant’s right-money, this victory affirmed to Mam-Sang-Mo, in the terms used by one activist, that they were “on the right side of history.” In other words, the official recognition of right-money—one of the main demands of Mam-Sang-Mo—brought legitimacy to Mam-Sang-Mo’s version of reframing the gentrification problem.

Resilience to Moderating Pressures on the Radical Frame

Because a radical shift in framing a social problem often poses a threat to the entrenched power structure—in this case, the property-ownership-based rights regime—the radical reframing is always exposed to moderating pressures. At the time of my fieldwork, the exploitation frame faced competition with multiple moderate frames within Mam-Sang-Mo. Instead of curbing the profit-maximizing drive of landlords by taking into consideration the livelihood needs of the tenants, these moderate frames proposed to narrowly enhance the rights and protections of a small subset of tenant shopkeepers. Tenant shopkeepers whose merits were most easily translatable to the broader public—in other words, the most resonant and sympathetic victims of gentrification—were chosen for this purpose. In what follows, I demonstrate the resilience of the radical frame against these efforts to co-opt it.

The most prominent moderate frame that emerged during my fieldwork was what I refer to as the “cultural defender frame.” Within this frame, gentrification is an economic problem that, if unchecked, will harm the long-term vibrancy of the local economy. Seen this way, the prime victims of gentrification are tenant shopkeepers who add “cultural diversity,” “uniqueness,” and “aesthetics” to the city—a category of tenants that shares the qualities of the “creative class” lauded by Richard Florida (2002). This cultural defender frame had wide appeal to policy makers, political elites, city boosters, and consumers. Most prominently, local governments such as the local district government of Sŏngdong were forerunners in disseminating this version of framing the gentrification problem. The Sŏngdong district government, situated in an area populated with artisan tenants who sell leather shoes and other handmade goods, even passed an ordinance nicknamed the “ordinance to prevent gentrification.” When I visited the local government office of Sŏngdong district, an official who masterminded the celebrated anti-gentrification initiatives explained the philosophy behind their action:

Areas that are facing gentrification in the current day are places with unique cultures, or are inhabited by people with unique perspectives or creative thoughts. They would start selling these unique products in these small spaces. That is what attracts people to the area. Soon after, the housing prices will increase. In such cases, artists, social innovators, and small commercial business people are the ones who contributed to the appreciated value of housing. We started with the idea that it is unfair for homeowners and property owners to take all the benefits from the appreciated real estate value. For growth to be sustainable, the appreciated value needs to be shared. (Interview from 15 May 2016)

For a local government to side with tenants against the entrenched power of property owners was radical in its own right. On the other hand, the cultural defender frame promoted a moderate social change by cherry-picking the “culturally valuable” or “aesthetically pleasing” elements among the tenant shopkeepers to offer special protections. Focusing resources on the protection of cultural defenders was less threatening to the property owners and their interests than attempts to alter the balance of power between tenant shopkeepers and property owners—such as commercial rent control and guaranteeing right-money compensation for all tenants.

From Mam-Sang-Mo’s perspective, adopting a moderate frame like the cultural defender frame could open up opportunities for the SMO to align with powerful elite allies in the government and policy circles. Yet Mam-Sang-Mo’s case demonstrates how a radical frame, once adopted, exhibits resilience to such moderating pressures. During the time of my fieldwork, moderate frames that compromised the scope of the social change envisioned by the SMO faced resistance from within.

The tension around the cultural defender frame within Mam-Sang-Mo was highlighted during my fieldwork when three artist/tenant shopkeepers, who were Mam-Sang-Mo members and co-owners of a shop that I will here refer to as Café Z, became fervent promoters of the cultural defender frame. Café Z could have been called “gentrifiers” under a more conventional class-based frame that pits the petty tenants against the rest of the commercial operations. Café Z, a two-story operation accented with modern high ceilings and walls covered with the artwork of their in-residence artists, drew other similarly trendy operations to the neighborhood, making the neighborhood a hotspot for young hipsters and professionals. Café Z’s very presence contributed to tipping the class base of those who occupy and enjoy the neighborhood. However, within Mam-Sang-Mo, as demonstrated earlier in this article, the exploitation frame embraced tenants of all socio-economic classes as a matter of principle. Under Mam-Sang-Mo’s exploitation frame, Café Z, too, found a narrative to explain their struggle against dispossession and displacement.

However, consistent with the observations of framing scholars who have pointed out that movement leaders do not always have “tight control” over a frame’s evolution and reception (Snow and Benford, 2000: 625; see also, Oliver and Johnston, 2000; Stienberg, 1999: 740), resourceful members like Café Z were not merely passive receivers of the frame offered by Mam-Sang-Mo. The Café Z tenants, in particular, propagated the cultural defender frame that aligned with the prevalent discourse used by elite allies—such as the local governments examined above—and appealed directly to other struggling creative-type tenants like themselves. By retuning the framing of the gentrification problem as one of chain stores displacing the gatekeepers of culture, Café Z became the paragon victim under this frame. According to the Café Z tenants’ framing of the gentrification problem, the verdict on Café Z’s landlord was not only that he was displacing his tenant, or doing so in a way that would extort the right-money, but also that he was playing a role in stifling culture. During my fieldwork, I attended many events held by Café Z at their store—talks and seminars with invited pundits and academics—where keywords like “cultural diversity” and the “cultural ecosystem” were heavily used to frame the problem of gentrification and highlight Café Z’s victimhood.

However, when Café Z bolstered the legitimacy of their resistance by embracing the cultural defender frame, contention over this frame surfaced within Mam-Sang-Mo. In multiple conversations, I heard complaints about Café Z’s attempts to differentiate themselves from the rest of the member tenants. One Mam-Sang-Mo tenant member expressed this frustration by asking, “Why is it culture that they are fighting for, and right-money for us?” This question captured the irritation with the cultural defender frame shared by many members within Mam-Sang-Mo who were providers of basic and standardized products and services—such as corner stores, liquor stores, or dry cleaners. These members were not positioned to frame themselves as cultural trendsetters like Café Z and therefore risked being excluded from the legitimate victims category under the cultural defender frame. The moderate frame that focused on protecting independent artist/tenants against corporate takeover had the effect of marginalizing some of Mam-Sang-Mo’s most disadvantaged members from representation. Therefore, despite the wider resonance of the cultural defender frame among reform-minded policy makers, city boosters, and the general public, the frame sparked dissent within Mam-Sang-Mo. Within Mam-Sang-Mo, “culture” became a loaded term, a code for the type of cultural capital that some tenants exclusively held yet which many others lacked. In the discussions during the weekly meetings among the staff activists that I attended, a few activists within Mam-Sang-Mo expressed that they saw it as their role “to help” Café Z “drop the fancy cover of culture” and “find their own language as tenant shopkeepers.” Because it had been organizing under the inclusive radical frame, Mam-Sang-Mo’s membership had already grown to encompass a broad and diverse base of constituents and therefore the radical frame developed resilience to moderating pressures.

Conclusion

This article seeks to explain the emergence in Korea of tenant shopkeepers as agents of social change who are challenging the entrenched power of the property-ownership-based rights regime. Through their organizing, these tenant shopkeepers are developing novel rights claims that recognize their dispossession and displacement from their shops—the source of their livelihoods—as a social problem. Through the analysis of this case study, and by drawing insights from the framing literature, I contribute to the development of theories on when and how social power can be galvanized to challenge gentrification from a radically different angle than has been previously attempted.

Drawing from the framing literature, I show that shifts in the structural and cultural conditions were vital for creating opportunities for a radical reframing of the gentrification problem. These shifts generated hype around investing in commercial properties, which then triggered property owners to disrupt the cultural practice of right-money exchange between tenant shopkeepers as a way to squeeze out further rental profit. While the structural and cultural shifts are beyond the control of individual social agents, the agency of Mam-Sang-Mo was crucial in seizing upon these shifts. Here, I demonstrate how the agency of the framing actors and their on-the-ground work mattered for effectively translating a radically different way of framing the gentrification problem to the general public.

Most importantly, I unravel the mechanism by which a radical vision that challenges the status quo can gain staying power against the pressures of co-optation. I show that a radical frame develops resilience once it brings together a broad base of constituents and mobilizes grassroots power under the frame. The co-optation of the radical frame often takes on sophisticated forms. In Mam-Sang-Mo’s case, the moderate frame promoted narrowing the scope of the social change initially envisioned by the radical frame to only the most sympathetic actors who represented such seemingly innocuous values as culture, history, and creativity. However, Mam-Sang-Mo’s radical vocabulary of rights had already nurtured and empowered members of all stripes, including the most disadvantaged among Mam-Sang-Mo’s membership, who rallied against their exclusion from protections and rights. Therefore, this radical frame was resilient against the moderate frame that was more palatable to the powerful property owners and city boosters.

My study of the Korean case contributes to the gentrification literature in two major ways. First, by adopting the analytical lens of moderate and radical frame, it enables an examination of how and under what conditions a radically different approach to tackling gentrification can gain grassroots support and staying power. I am in agreement with other gentrification scholars, like Japonica Brown-Saracino (2016: 222–223), who believe that serious engagement by the gentrification literature with the social movement literature could lead to a potentially fruitful cross-conversation. Second, my case study contributes to complicating the picture of the social agents that can be organized to challenge gentrification. When tenant shopkeepers are uniformly relegated to the limited role of “early” or “pioneer” gentrifiers or are homogeneously depicted as welcoming changes that bring cosmetic upgrades and heightened security to their streets, it obscures the potential agency of tenant shopkeepers as protagonists challenging gentrification. The relative dearth in the gentrification literature of explorations into the multiplicity of the agents affected by and resisting gentrification has had the effect of making gentrification seem inexorable. ⁴ By highlighting the potential of tenant shopkeepers in Korea to make headway in harnessing a new vocabulary of rights which fundamentally challenges the imbalance of power between tenant shopkeepers and property owners, this research explores how gentrification can be tackled from multiple fronts.

Finally, my case study demonstrates that non-Western cities can provide promising sites for developing theories of social change within the gentrification literature. As the fastest rates of urbanization are occurring in Asia and Africa, hyper-commodification in these regions is encroaching on ordinary people’s everyday lives at an alarming speed and scale (Goldman, 2011; Shatkin 2014; Wang et al., 2017; Weinstein, 2014; Weinstein and Ren, 2009). At the same time, gentrification has not historically been part of the local lexicon in cities outside the West. Under such conditions, a wide range of possibilities exists for radically new ways of reconstructing and reframing the problem of gentrification (see Ley and Teo, 2014). Through the Korean case, I show how urban experiences from geographies that were previously considered peripheral to urban theorizing can help us identify new locations of resistance and new agents of change.