Urban renewal means Negro removal.
–James Baldwin
The concept of gentrification was pioneered by the sociologist Ruth Glass (1912-1990) to depict rapidly upscaling London neighborhoods in the 1950s. What she had earlier called a “middle class invasion” became more coherent in 1964: “Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced.” Glass’s gentrification problematic wasn’t shy about singling out corrupt landlords like Perec “Peter” Rachman (1919-1962). Rachman became so notorious for exploiting tenants in London’s Notting Hill area that Rachmanism quickly entered the Oxford English Dictionary as a synonym for slumlord. Rachmanism combined standard sleazy landlord tactics of allowing mold, rat, and roach infestations with innovations like offering cheap rent to Black Caribbean tenants on the condition they play loud music 24/7, forcing out longer-term white tenants. Then, rather than reward his Black tenants, Rachman would subsequently raise their rent. Ultimately, the low-wealth Black and white tenants were replaced by young white professionals. (See Ruth Glass’s London: Aspects of Change and Jules Birch’s blog post “Revealing the Real Rachman?” for more.)
In 1985, the New Jersey real estate mogul Charles Kushner founded Kushner Companies using Rachmanist business practices. Kushner continued his father Joseph’s practice of buying up distressed property and gentrifying urban neighborhoods in Jersey as he branched out both into the coveted New York market and south to Maryland. By the mid-2010s, Kushner Companies owned a stake in over sixty buildings in New York City, in addition to properties in Jersey and Baltimore. In 2005, Charles Kushner was convicted of tax evasion and witness tampering. While in prison he handed over the management of Kushner Companies to his eldest son Jared. (More background on the Kushners can be found here and here.)
By the time Jared Kushner took over the family business, the Kushners had exhausted all the tools of Rachmanism and had begun taking slumlordism into uncharted territory. For example, the Kushners perfected the deployment of collection agencies and lawyers against their poor tenants. ProPublica has reported on the practices of Kushner Companies at length, and Alec MacGillis writes in an article in 2017 and another in 2025 that Kushner Companies aggressively pursued tenants for small sums of money, and even in cases where tenants were responding to unsafe conditions in the apartments. In one case, Kushner Companies pursued a Baltimore tenant over about $3,000 over the course of years, eventually having the tenant’s wages garnished. In another case, a woman whose apartment had black mold received written permission from the company to break her lease; when she moved out, the company then took legal action against her anyway. (A judge eventually sided with the tenant.) In a third case, a woman whose apartment had maggots coming out of the carpet and raw sewage flowing from the kitchen sink was taken to court after she moved out.
The slumlord paradigm shift from Rachmanism to Kushnerism could only have happened within a transformation from social democracy to neoliberalism that facilitates the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. Neoliberalism allows the Kushners to make money off the desperately poor while avoiding all accountability. This contrasts with Peter Rachman, who construed the poor as an obstacle to making serious money. While it might seem implausible that Kushnerists rely on revenue from fleecing low-wealth people, Neferti X. M. Tadiar’s 2022 book Remaindered Life shows how capitalists routinely extract profit from the BIPOC dispossessed by buying and selling their futures. I’ve argued elsewhere that, as in betting against a stock or a currency, these schemes effectively “short” poor people’s lives, existences already curtailed by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls their “state sanctioned . . . vulnerability to premature death.” The more oppressive this process of shorting or cheapening, the more profit can be made by investors when they subsequently re-engage the asset.
The change from Rachmanism to Kushnerism also reveals how the dominant tendency in capital accumulation has moved away from collecting rents and collecting surplus from labor waged cheaper than it’s sold to collecting data and ascribing value to information. Christian Marazzi began making the case in the late 1980s that the appropriation and selling of information through the capture of human attention was becoming the primary site of extracting profit: hyperreal estate is more important than real estate. In a 1994 Italian work Marazzi wrote: “Communication—and its productive organization as information flow—has become as important as electricity once was in the age of mechanical reproduction.” As a consequence, “cognitive-immaterial qualities” are becoming directly productive.
Kushnerism relies on information to intensify exploitation in property businesses through techniques like the use of data-derived algorithms. Select Kushnerists have ridden information and algorithmic capitalism beyond the slumlord border and become media-lords. In Jared Kushner’s own case, he bought the weekly New York Observer, made famous by its publication of “Sex and the City,” in 2005. The stated reason for purchasing the celebrity and media-focused paper was to expand the newspaper’s online presence. In doing so, Kushner mimicked the modus operandi of his role model and the godfather of media-lords, Rupert Murdoch. Under Kushner’s ownership, the Observer championed the billionaire class, highlighting their philanthropy and their big-ticket “development” projects. One of the most spectacular purchases in New York real estate history was written about in the Observer: Kushner’s own purchase of 666 5th Avenue in 2006. Trump’s son-in-law bought the property for $1.8 billion—at the time the highest price paid for an office building in the US. Adam Piore speculates that the main impulse behind the purchase was Kushner’s desire to beat the recent $1.5 billion purchase of 1211 Avenue of the Americas. Perhaps, then, the goal was to draw consumer attention to and elicit clicks for Kushner Companies. Only a few years later, the Kushners sold most of their stake in 666 Fifth for $525 million, suffering a big loss. They were able to secure financing for future projects partly because of their guaranteed revenue extracted from remaindered lives in their slumlord businesses—revenue streams now bolstered by information capital.
For Kushnerists, all charity is undeserved. But what they never acknowledge is that neoliberalism was designed to make billionaires and large corporations the largest recipients of handouts. For US-based slumlords the most obvious example of this is Section 8 housing vouchers. This government assistance is transferred directly from low-wealth renters into the pockets of Kushnerists. While the rich actually pay much less into assistance programs and in taxes than they did previously, one function of remaining government support is to keep aid recipients alive longer so that Kushnerists can continue to make money oppressing them.
Building on Kushner Companies LLC’s purchase of the Observer—which left the print world to go entirely online in 2015—Jared Kushner became increasingly fixated on integrating data and information. As was reported in the business press when he joined the Trump White House, Kushner had major investments in big tech. Beyond his investments in Amazon and Cadre, in 2016 Kushner joined Steve Bannon as a leading proponent inside the Trump circle of using the data manipulation company Cambridge Analytica. In one of tech’s biggest breaches, Cambridge Analytica harvested fifty million Facebook profiles to build software to influence the 2016 presidential election. They used this information to concoct MAGA memes like “Crooked Hillary.” As company whistleblower Chris Wylie explained, Cambridge Analytica used the data from their Facebook hack to create a “psychological warfare mindfuck tool.” After the election, Jared Kushner bragged to Forbes that data collection and information shaping was central to Trump’s victory: “We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months….So we brought in Cambridge Analytica.”
With Cambridge Analytica and their own operations at the New York Observer, the Kushners continued their focus on consumer attention as more profitable than the money made from real estate and exploiting waged workers. While feudal landlords made money from renting their fields, and industrial laborlords underpaid workers in their factories, media-lords like the Kushners turn to data-mining companies like fetch.ai. After all, priming human attention had just handed Jared Kushner’s father-in-law the US presidency and, with it, the opportunity to enrich himself at public expense. Perhaps, then, for Jared Kushner, this became more important than making money as a slumlord. But no matter how far into cloud capitalism Kushnerism ventures to extract profit, it never completely severs its ties to dispossessive gentrification.
Kushner had already been friends with the Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel when he tapped him to join the White House transition team in November 2016; he became much closer to him afterwards. However, Kushner did everything in his power to hide his connection to Thiel (and Palantir CEO Alex Karp), including not disclosing any of his investments in Thiel’s businesses when he entered the White House. Now, as of fall 2025, Kushner’s connections to big tech are more explicit—he recently launched a start-up that “[helps] large business and governments apply AI to their operations.”
On February 15, 2024, Jared Kushner infamously said of Gaza that Israel should “move the people out and then clean it up,” referencing its “very valuable property.” In interviews the slum- and media-lord provided rationales for this genocide-to-gentrify sequence by insisting that Hamas was turning duped, gullible Gazans into “human shields” and “hostages.” In a strange acknowledgement of the effectiveness of manipulating human attention, Kushner suggested that Hamas had mobilized the support of Gaza’s Palestinians against their own will and contrary to their material interests. Without Hamas in power, Kushner has argued, “regular Palestinians” would reject the call of national liberation and rediscover their hustling businessperson within. (Or what Foucault called “entrepreneurs of the self.”)
Kushner’s signature foreign policy achievement had been the Abraham Accords, designed primarily to bring Israel closer to Saudi Arabia and the UAE and, secondarily, to marginalize the Palestinian cause among the major Arab powers. Kushner’s desire to divert attention away from Palestinian liberation and statehood together with Gaza activists exhausting all peaceful means to lift Israel’s sixteen-year blockade led to the October 7, 2023 attack by the Al-Qassam Brigades and other Gazan decolonial groups. Israel’s response was genocidal, something that was condoned, and often even applauded, by Kushnerists. Jared Kushner has used the symptomatic verb choice “exfoliate” to describe efforts to rid himself of troublesome acquaintances and unreliable tenants. It’s not hard to imagine his signature vapidity allowing “exfoliate” to slip out in private to describe the annihilation of Palestinians.
In the hands of Kushnerists like Amazon, Google, and Palantir (all with substantial real estate portfolios), the “exfoliation” of Palestinians in Gaza exemplifies Patrick Wolfe’s depiction of settler colonialism as “destroying to replace.” But the reliance on AI and information capital to destroy both Palestinians and the Gazan lithosphere and atmosphere pushes it beyond what Wolfe imagined; Kushnerism on the ground in Gaza is both genocidal and geocidal. In addition to the theft of water resources throughout the occupied Palestinian territories—used increasingly for energy-devouring AI and data centers—the IDF’s carbon footprint is massive, causing irreparable harm to the biosphere. Consider this geocidal circuit: water stolen from Palestinian land by the state-owned Israeli water company Mekorot is used for IDF information servers to ultimately locate olive fields and greenhouses to obliterate. Or this genocidal circuit: data is harvested from Gazan Palestinian’s cell phones and social media accounts and subsequently sold to tech companies to then, following what Palantir’s Alex Karp calls their “killchain,” construct LLM software to turn humans into data points in order to kill and maim these same Palestinians. Money is made at several places in these pointillistic procedures, but Kushnerists seem to be laying the groundwork to profit in even more heinous ways when they strategize to build beachfront condos, Saudi-like highway networks, and surveillance infrastructure on top of a genocided people and geocided land.
This is no exaggeration. This post-genocide/geocide vision was made explicit on August 28, 2025 with the leaking of a plan called the “GREAT (Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation) Trust,” a culmination of Kushnerism. This document from the Trump administration was leaked by the Washington Post. At the beginning of November 2025, there are no indications that the US and Israel are moving away from implementing the GREAT Trust in the second and third stages of the current ceasefire. Reportedly receiving input from the nefarious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, this gentrifying delirium marries Kushnerism to Trump’s Gaza Riviera dystopia. The GREAT Trust involves “voluntary” relocation of all Gazan Palestinians in exchange for digital tokens (with crypto options); six “AI-powered smart cities,” a manufacturing hub named after Elon Musk, and those drooled-over waterfront condos. The proposal also claims that if fully implemented the Trust “will increase the value of Gaza by $324B.” It goes without saying that the emphasis in the GREAT Trust on “value added” and “portfolio diversification” leaves no room for discussions of Palestinian decolonization or the right of return. Indeed, there might not be that many Palestinians left to demand rights after the full implementation of Kushnerist gentrification in Gaza.
In ultimately managing to profit from genocide, Kushnerists have completely exploded the paradigm of Rachmanism. While the argument that military-industrial and AI-industrial capitalists make a killing slaughtering Palestinians has been proffered by Francesca Albanese in her courageous “From an Economy of Occupation to an Economy of Genocide,” Albanese somewhat underplays the ways Kushnerists systematically profit from Gazacide. In order to grasp the ways Gaza gentrification means Palestinian genocide—borrowing from James Baldwin’s “urban renewal means Negro removal”—we need to maintain our focus on the intimacy data integration capitalism has with Kushnerism.
A mic-dropping arrogance impels Kushnerists to explicitly blame the victims of genocide. This stands in contrast to the discretion of Rachmanism, which preferred to operate in the shadows while bribing or threatening opponents. For example, Jared Kushner strains credulity when he identified excessive handouts to Palestinians as the main cause of their suffering. Sneeringly criticizing these “entitlements,” in an interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman, he fallaciously argued that “Palestinians have gotten more aid money than any other refugee group in history by a factor of one hundred.” What Kushner doesn’t say is that much of the insufficient aid that does end up in the hands of Palestinians is spent on necessities produced by Israeli and Euro-US capitalists, many of them Kushnerists.
Peter Rachman paid fines to the London authorities. As Alex Gibney’s documentary Slumlord Millionaire shows, the New York City Housing Authority issued several violations to Kushner Companies LLC but never followed up on collecting fines, much less to check that management repaired dangerous, life-threatening conditions. In one of these code violations, a woman’s ceiling collapsed directly over her bed, leaving brick and cement debris. This caving-in of buildings in what came to be known as “Kushnervilles” foreshadows the presence of Kushnerism in the Gaza genocide where, among many other horrors, IDF-deployed and Palantir-directed Lockheed Martin bombs bring ceilings and roofs down onto sleeping Palestinian families—leaving them buried in what the National Committee for Missing Persons calls the world’s “largest mass grave.” So in Gaza we can witness some of the ways Kushnerism returns to its slumlord roots, even as these poisonous roots are transmogrified by information capitalism.
