I'm an immigrant myself and not very familiar with the problem: if gentrification good or bad?
The reason I'm asking is that, to the best of my knowledge, there was a period of "white flight", when urban core was basically left to poor people (or at least that's how I interpret this). My understanding is that at the time that was bad. Now rich people "move back in" and I get a vibe from similar articles that this is also bad. So, which is it?
"The case against it is simple. Newcomers with more money supposedly crowd out older residents. (...) Young, mostly white singletons have crowded into a district once built for families.
(...)
Yet there is little evidence that gentrification is responsible for displacing the poor or minorities. Black people were moving out of Washington in the 1980s, long before most parts of the city began gentrifying. In cities like Detroit, where gentrifiers are few and far between and housing costs almost nothing, they are still leaving. (...) They did find, however, that the average income of black people with high- school diplomas in gentrifying areas soared.
(...)
Gentrifiers can make life better for locals in plenty of ways (...) When professionals move to an area, “they know how to get things done”. They put pressure on schools, the police and the city to improve. As property prices increase, rents go up—but that also generates more property-tax revenue, helping to improve local services. In many cities, zoning laws force developers to build subsidised housing for the poor as well as pricey pads for well-off newcomers, which means that rising house prices can help to create more subsidised housing, not less."
Also, I think it is very funny how most of the criticism of gentrification is done by the white-liberal types and it reeks of classism. The original article says "It’s not unusual to find live chickens running through people’s backyards" like it is a good thing. I can almost read an implicit defense of segregation.
I live in a lower income neighbourhood in the east bay, because prices have risen so fast, and I'm so new, that that's all I can afford.
I've on several occasions been accused of gentrification, sometimes even by close friends or coworkers. But all I can think of is the fact that most of these coworkers are either under rent control, paying less than half I do for a comparable place (and come the fuck on, you work in tech, you don't need rent control), and the other half live in luxury high rises.
I'm a foreigner, I don't always understand race relations. I thought segregation was bad. But apparently my friends self-segregate, and when I dare to live in 'their' neighbourhood, I'm the bad guy.
Life's a lot better when you think of other people as human beings, instead of a weird separate group to be left alone, don't you think?
This may sound blunt, but it's pretty common to be profiled as a symbol of gentrification if you bear a certain appearance. And, although this can often be uncomfortable, as far as race relations go in the US this is probably one of the less problematic buckets to be lumped into.
People are going to draw conclusions based on their internalized sense of the world; you can shape that to an extent by just, y'know, hanging out and talking with your neighbors every once in a while.
Part of the problem is that most people who want to talk about *isms of any kind are not capable of thinking in terms other than binary. In this particular case, you're either the person who is moving in or the person who is moving out, with no consideration given to the large real-estate speculation firm that built the new high-rise condo projects that don't fit the neighborhood, on land probably acquired through some sort of government sale process and/or at least partially funded by grant money.
It's the ol' "searching in the street for the keys you lost in the yard because the streetlight is the only light you have."
Everyone wants an affordable place to live. It takes the power of government to wrench that land out from under people without fair compensation and pass it over at below-market rates to big-business to be redeveloped and resold at higher costs to ultimately increase property and income tax revenue.
I mostly hear feminists and anti-racism/anti-oppression activists argue very much the opposite. Your job is to progress toward being less racist and less sexist. It's about rejecting the view that people are intentionally racist or good people, but rather that we all have countless implicit biases and a system that promotes inequality, and we have to actively move toward _less_ bias.
The idea that some of us just aren't racist/sexist/classist/etc. is very much what is being argued against by "most people who want to talk about *isms".
I just think the binary approach is an incredibly naive, fruitless way of looking at an issue, one that suggests that resolution isn't the goal, but rather the clash between ideologies themselves is.
When you treat the negative spaces of non-activity as equally evil to the positive spaces of activity, you shove people who are straddling the middle away from your side and towards your opposition. That keeps the middle ground right where it has always been, and nothing ever gets better. Mechanically, that's just incredibly stupid.
What's the message of this Salon article? "White people, you're always going to be a part of the problem, and nothing you can do will be considered part of the solution, because your desire to be involved is part of the problem. You are always wrong." Do articles like this make it more or less likely to convert people who have started to think about it? To me, "you're always going to be wrong" is just driving people away. It is too easy to turn that into "then why even try?"
If that's not the message, then someone in one of the sociology departments of universities across America needs to come up with a much better way of talking about the issue, because that's how I and a lot of people take it.
Outside of the recent spat of police shootings, the white-privilege topic is the only one I've personally been seeing coming out of academic circles and into the public. I guess that's part of my privilege that I get to live in a world not surrounded by concern about race. But I'm not a social worker or community organizer or politician or sociologist. I'm a software engineer. I'm busy making a living for myself. That doesn't make me a part of the problem or the solution. That just makes me a person. I'm not asking to be held up and congratulated for not being actively racist. I'm just asking to also not be vilified for keeping my nose in my own business.
That's my point of the issue not being binary. "You're either for us or against us" is a totalitarian rhetoric, one that is not compatible with healthy democracies (though I belabor under no illusion that we live in a healthy democracy).
I'd have to look at the numbers, but I think that a lot of the African Americans moving out of DC in the 1980s were those who had the money to buy a house in the suburbs, often enough Temple Hills in Prince Georges County.
Did the average income of black people with high-school diplomas in gentrifying areas soar because the economy was better, or because they were the only ones who could afford to stick around?
Essentially they found that the more rich and poor people intermingle in their daily lives, the more likely it is for those poor people to pull themselves out of poverty.
In reality, gentrification is short term bad, long term good.
In peoples' minds, gentrification is bad.
Most of the arguments against it are poorly supported and/or disingenuous. But the legitimate ones all refer to the instability created by gentrification.
Gentrification has large short term negative effects. Quickly changing neighbourhoods that rapidly rise in value force people who can't afford them to leave. If you're a lower income family barely getting by as it is, you might resent being suddenly displaced from the place you've lived for 30 years. Hell, if you're a lower income family, you might not be able to afford the cost of moving.
The big problem with gentrification is that we lack viable social supports to help people in transition during periods of gentrification. Too many people want to stick their head in the sand and ignore it, or foolishly try to legislate (or activist) it away.
"In reality, gentrification is short term bad, long term good."
I would say the opposite. Most of the good effects of gentrification happens in the beginning. Then time becomes a more important factor than gentrification itself. If you can't slow gentrification at that point the bad effects really starts kicking in and you're replacing rather than transforming.
All successful examples of gentrification I've seen is when you gentrify up to a point where regulation gets in the way and then because of that another area starts getting more popular, which then gentrifies up to a point etc...
Any action taken by a member of a class of people that can be thought of as privileged is necessarily bad, to some journalistic mindsets.
Depending on how far you want to follow this you may even decide that gentrification is racist because it drives up property prices as richer, usually whiter, people move in and the original poorer (and therefore usually disproportionately non-white) demographic is priced out of the area.
I tend to think this is bullshit and that places becoming less sketchy/shabby/crime-ridden is good...
Some people like living in cities that have a mixture of incomes, cultures, and lifestyles. Furthermore, some people see the various architectures and institutions of some neighborhoods as a kind of historical treasure. They think, in a sense, that the whole neighborhood, in some form of intactness, belongs on the National Register of Historic Places, or some equivalent.
Some people might also decry a person's smug dismissing of such concerns as a kind of ignorance propped up by privilege. Such a person wouldn't have the liberty of such smugness if they weren't so privileged. But the harm (if there is any) is not the privilege itself, it is the loss of (supposed) cultural treasures.
>> Some people like living in cities that have a mixture of incomes, cultures, and lifestyles.
Me too, generally, I'm not sure I see that as a good reason to hold things in complete stasis though. Particularly where such areas have problems with crime.
>> Furthermore, some people see the various architectures and institutions of some neighborhoods as a kind of historical treasure.
Architecture is good. "Gentrification" doesn't have to involve knocking things down (see London as an example of many, many waves of gentrification not affecting the architecture).
Institutions such as ... ?
>> They think, in a sense, that the whole neighborhood, in some form of intactness, belongs on the National Register of Historic Places, or some equivalent.
What gives people of a set ethnic or class background the right to live in a particular area and exclude other people who are not part of 'their' community? If a privileged white enclave claimed that right we would, obviously and rightly, be up in arms.
>> Some people might also decry a person's smug dismissing of such concerns as a kind of ignorance propped up by privilege.
I'm not American either, but in Canada, the only bad thing about gentrification is the debate about gentrification. The moment that debate starts, any attempt to build a community ends and the neighbourhood becomes a turf war between people who lived there before 'all this' and the people who bought into it..
Is gentrification good? Like a great many things, dose matters. Some gentrification is good, but take it too far and you get SF where even high earning professionals are priced out the minute they consider having children. The result is a workaholic equivalent of the "man camps" that surround oil fields-- a "six figure slum" devoid of all culture and family life save that of 20-something professionals with no kids.
(That was my impression of parts of SF / SV last time I visited: a six figure slum.)
A little vitamin E is good for you too, but too much seems to increase your risk of cancer. Even more will make you sick on shorter order, and even more than that could kill you.
So devoid of the culture you want, not devoid of all culture.
Seems like you confused your personal desires with something meaningful, then decided to drop a backdoor condescension on those of us who don't share your personal desires.
Not a super compelling argument from my point of view.
I'm with api on this. The Bay Area's high cost of living is stifling, and it's resulting in cultural homogeny as the minimum living wage continues to skyrocket.
Meanwhile, Sacramento is a 2-hour-drive away. It has a much lower cost-of-living in general, yet doesn't sacrifice any cultural diversity (in my own observation, at least); if anything, it's even more culturally diverse. It's also telling that a lot of people would rather live in Sacramento and commute to San Francisco (and adjacent Bay Area / Silicon Valley areas) than live in the Bay Area; somehow, the cost of commuting that distance manages to be offset.
Wow commuting from Sacramento to the SF Bay is a thing now? I grew up in the Bay Area (left for College in 2004 and never came back) and that was unheard of at the time. Every time I go back I'm surprised how much has changed.
Gentrification gets a bad name because when landlords realize that yuppies are willing to pay very high rents (double, triple, quadruple, quintuple) to rent apartments in old buildings, they jack up the rents of people who have been living there for decades or even do illegal things to force them out of their homes.
Gentrification would be wonderful if people owned their homes, because they would get the benefit of rising property values. Instead, the landlords get that, and most people have to face the costs of uprooting from their home.
It may be worth mentioning also that many urban neighborhoods were formed in the mid-20th century when many African Americans were excluded from home ownership and suburbanization by explicitly racist laws and practices, such as redlining, blockbusting, restrictive deed covenants, and other practices now illegal and unconstitutional. TNC lays part of this out in the first part of this article http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...
> Gentrification would be wonderful if people owned their homes, because they would get the benefit of rising property values.
Property tax, which in most places scales with assessed property value over time, is essentially a rent you pay to the government to own property, and thereby makes owning property and renting property remarkably similar. In California we tried to fix this issue with Proposition 13, but that ends up causing the same kinds of broken incentives on municipal service costs as rent control does on landlords. The phenomenon of "gentrification" is very general and, I think "fascinatingly", mathematical in nature.
Gentrification, like most social change, is a mixed bag that hurts in some ways, but I think it's more good than bad.
I lived in Philadelphia the last few years and it's gentrifying out from the center. People who worry about gentrification are usually white middle class people seeing poor and racial minorities priced out of a location, but they fail to see what the larger implications of pricing out are. Yes, poor people sometimes are forced to move, but rarely is a poor person's goal to stay in one place. More often their goal is to not be poor and gentrification frequently drags the poor into the lower middle class. I'll give three examples:
1. A friend of mine's father lived in rent-controlled housing just south of center city since the 80s. The area exploded in value in the last decade and he was making less than $15K/year as the area gentrified around him. Last year he was paying $500/mo rent while his neighbors were paying $1400/mo rent. His landlord, unable to evict him or raise rent, offered him $14K--almost a full years salary--to move out. My friend's father was "displaced" but used the money to make a down payment on a $70k house in far south Philly. And if this seems unfair to the apartment owner, keep in mind that he will make that he probably easily made that money back in the last year with raised rent. Everybody won here.
2. Another friend of mine, without graduating high school, lied about her age and got a job at a local bank and at age 19, bought a 3 bedroom house in Northern liberties, getting a good mortgage from her employer and paying it partly by renting out bedrooms. In 2013 her property taxes more than doubled and she was forced to sell the house. But the house she bought for $80k sold for $375k--and at this point she owned most of the house. She complains about the tax increase to this day, but lives in SF now with her husband, a software company research programmer, well established in the upper middle class. They're buying a house in SF as soon as possible, using the money from her Philly house to make a down payment and his income to pay the mortgage. I can't muster much sympathy for her.
3. In Philly I lived in an Ethiopian/Egyptian neighborhood. I worked at a food cooperative on food justice initiatives. However, a few businesses had predated the coop in bringing healthy food to the low-income neighborhoods. As the neighborhoods gentrified these businesses were no longer bringing nutrition to the poor, but they all were making a lot more money; enough to expand and open new locations further out where there's still low-income neighborhoods. The high income stores and restaurants fund the low income ones, while the low income locations achieve their mission. And the low income locations are good investments because it won't be long before gentrification reaches there too.
Now I realize that these are anecdotal stories and many poor people are not as well-positioned to benefit from gentrification. But this should at least establish that simply looking at housing price displacement doesn't tell the whole story.
I think both are a mixed bag. White flight usually means money and business is sucked from the area. Gentrification, specifically in SF's case, means displacing long-term citizens and worry about replacing interesting and eclectic people and businesses, who were doing well otherwise, with boring wealthier people who inflate prices beyond what a "normal" person can afford.
It would be nice to have a vibrant, mixed city with people of all different stripes living together. So, "white flight" leaves only poor people concentrated in one place, while gentrification can push out poor people who can't afford rising prices.
> The reason I'm asking is that, to the best of my knowledge, there was a period of "white flight", when urban core was basically left to poor people (or at least that's how I interpret this). My understanding is that at the time that was bad. Now rich people "move back in" and I get a vibe from similar articles that this is also bad. So, which is it?
"White flight" is bad for the poor that are left behind in a community with less resources.
"Gentrification" is bad for the poor that are displaced.
Ok I'll bite. I live in Miami, go to San FranCisco often. Many of the historically ethnic neighborhoods in Miami are gentrifying. Wynwood the arts district was a historically Puerto Rican neighborhood. Design District which is filled with Prada stores was a historically poor black neighborhood. Overtown is quickly getting encroached by high rise developers because of its proximity to downtown (which is now also getting revitalized).
Little havana is actually getting new construction, but slowly. Little Havana has trailed mostly because the existing housing stock there is all older low slung multi unit housing, and the core of it lacks public transportation. Many of the core Little Havana buildings are technically historically protected, so that limits developers building there. We are seeing mid-rises go up in the area though.
San Francisco is seeing gentrification faster because of market forces dictating that if the money can't go vertical it has to go horizontal and displace the lower-income areas historical residents. SF will need to do something about affordable housing stock soon. Though that gives oakland a huge opportunity to seize that opportunity if they want it.
Last comment: San Francisco "warm" ??? really? maybe Millbrae, but not SF proper.
I had a 10 hour layover in Miami on my way back to Argentina. I walked through Little Havana and it was awesome. Almost everyone speaks Spanish, and there were even a few who didn't speak English, but had probably lived there for decades. (To me this is a plus, not a minus). I asked a guy at the bus stop which bus went back to the airport. "¿Cómo?", he replied? Even at mainstream businesses like Chase Bank, they greet you in Spanish unless you are clearly gringo (as I am).
I look gringo, but speak fluent spanish (half panamanian), and get spoken to primarily in spanish in many large portions of Miami. I know lots of older cubans who've been here 30 years+ and barely speak english.
I think it depends where you are and how much of an effort you make, how friendly you are. I speak French fluently and even in Paris (where people have a reputation for being gallophillic and anglophobic in the extreme) I've had lovely conversations in English, both with locals and with visitors from other parts of the country.
I've also seen people "close ranks" when confronted by the "ugly American" who speaks not a word of French and shouts to make themselves understood. I've even joined those ranks until the person became far too annoying, at which point I offered a brusque and factual, pithy translation, delivered as if talking to a spoiled child.
It felt quite good. I'm not proud of that, but it did.
My experience in Paris is consistent with all of my travels: Make an effort, be interested, be nice, get warmth and welcome in return. Be a douche, get douched right back.
> My experience in Paris is consistent with all of my travels: Make an effort, be interested, be nice, get warmth and welcome in return.
Same here, as an American who never studied French, aside from the French-for-tourists booklet once I was in Paris (which I did try hard to learn).
People were delightful; I did not experience any of the negative stereotype when struggling to communicate with people, whether they spoke English or only French.
Same in several other countries, too, but Paris is particularly noteworthy considering the common (and ancient) slanders on that topic.
People have suggested that Parisians are more prejudiced against French dialects than they are against non-speakers, but I wouldn't know.
I do know that presumably-ugly Americans complained about Paris/Parisians, when I found it/them fantastic.
(I'm looking at your post history out of curiosity, excuse' moi (spell?))
I wouldn't say most - perhaps "many". My anecdata: my wife has a large extended family and quite a few of her cousins and her cousins' kids struggle with English, if they've bothered to learn it at all.
It really is quite an insular society. (I've lived there twice, once as a child, then again for the first few years of my child's life; now live across the river in Ontario. Night and day, culturally.)
Millbrae is often colder than SF, especially compared to select neighborhoods in SF. You need to hit at least Burlingame or San Mateo to get away from the seeping fog of Pacifica/San Bruno/Colma.
The half of Millbrae near Burlingame is almost always warm and sunny. The half of Millbrae near San Bruno is sometimes cold and foggy. As someone who grew up in Millbrae, there's definitely some stratification here.
I think I was thinking of Milipitas. Which is much closer to San Jose right?
I remember last summer going from wearing a sweatshirt in SOMA to it being 90+ in Milipitas the same day.
You were thinking of Milpitas. I was freezing my ass off dropping my motorcycle off at the Millbrae BART station when I had that 1-hour-45-minute-each-way commute.
Sadly I wasn't! But I grew up in Ashland & lived in Eugene for years. Those places both get really hot in the summer, and rainy & (frequently) very cold in the winter.
SF by comparison is just more or less nice and temperate all year long. :)
> Miami officials allowed them a place to go: Brickell. But in the 1970s, it began attracting small banks, and in the decades since has boomed into the “Wall Street of Miami."
The reason why Miami has "avoided gentrification" is multifaceted and complex. But it wasn't due to some top-down city planning, I can assure you.
Painting the "history of Brickell" as some sort of strategy to avoid gentrification is comically false. Brickell and those small banks therein were largely built with laundered drug money. The -- mostly commercial & real estate focused -- banking sector in Miami is not what the author would have you picture. While the cocaine cowboy days are long over, Miami feels less like a mini-wall street and more like a sofa to shove money under if you happen to live in a less stable nation; and the investment capital flow in this city represents that.
To the degree Miami has avoided gentrification [and what was the demolition of the Orange Bowl but that?], it is because there are so many attractive alternatives for the gentry. Unlike San Francisco, most of Miami's border is just lines on a map. But for a roadsign there's nothing to alert the driver like a bridge over the bay.
Also unlike San Francisco, Miami grew around the automobile as primary transportation. Houses come with parking.
Finally, the primary attraction of Miami is water, and to the degree urban life is attractive it tends toward the velvet rope variety rather than slumming in shared public space.
Indeed, Miami Native here. (Live in Bay Area Now) This article comes to the conclusion it was looking for that is in fact false and not rooted in reality. Brownsville/Overtown/Liberty city were not intentionally left as rundown ganglands there have been attempts to clean them up but all have failed. Also Little Hati is downright dangerous to enter. [1] And of course Little Havana is still Cuban, it's well maintained generally safe and all that the Cubans who had to leave their country have left (Besides Hialeah). Also Lets not forget that ~70% of Miami is Cuban and they really value their heritage (my wife is Cuban)
The dominance of Cubans as part of the demographic is quickly slipping. So many more argentines, venezuelans, colombians, nicaraguans, and brazilians are here now. Agreed that brownsville/overtown/liberty city are all still dangerous. Wynwood was dangerous 5-6 years ago!
> Painting the "history of Brickell" as some sort of strategy to avoid gentrification is comically false
I didn't get that impression from the story. It said that Brickell helped avoid gentrification, not that it was intended as such. Rather, I understood the story to imply that if cities allow new building fairly freely, then gentrification is less likely to happen; SF doesn't allow it, while Miami does. Miami in fact sounds like the "default" from the article's perspective, so Brickell isn't a clever strategy, it's almost "doing nothing."
The main diff between Miami and San Fran which might explain the lag in gentrification(b/c believe me they want it) is the abundance of good paying white collar jobs. A large proportion of the opulent condo towers that have gone up during the boom/bust are owned by wealthy foreigners who use them as 3rd or 4th homes.
To be clear, there are hundreds of towns in the USA that are doing the opposite of gentrifying.
Go visit Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
Go visit Danville, Virginia.
Go visit Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Go visit Harrison, Arkansas.
Go visit Atlanta, Georgia. *
There are hundreds of towns that have lost all the industrial and agricultural jobs they once had, and the people have sunk into deep poverty. Many of these areas now face an epidemic of meth, which seems to be how people in these regions deal with the hopelessness they feel, now that the jobs are gone.
*I mention, Atlanta, which is a large region. There are, of course, many areas of Atlanta that are gentrifying, but if you travel around the city at all, you also find huge neighborhoods that have sunk deeper into desperation. I am old enough that I can remember how affluent Atlanta was in the 90s, and I can remember how crime-ridden New York City used to be. The reversal of fortune is really remarkable. Nowadays I feel safe on New York subways, even late at night, whereas I no longer feel safe on Atlanta rail lines, even during the day (depending on the line).
Atlanta native here, I want to support this view. I'm very happy to have moved to Silicon Beach (Santa Monica) because I finally know what it feels like to not want a concealed firearm on me all the time. From a statistical point of view, the YoY murder and assault stats in Atlanta are running about twice what they were last year. From a personal point of view, after almost 3 years in the LA area I don't have a constellation of stories from my social group involving violent crime. It seemed like everyone I knew in Atlanta had a story about violent crime impacting their life, no matter how tony their address was.
Don't get me started on the meth. I love how my "gentrified" friends out here swear up and down how Breaking Bad is such a wonderful show, yet I cannot even attempt to watch an episode because I've seen too much of that up close.
I lived in the Collier Hills area for 6 years and violent crime never impacted my life. Having only ever ridden the Red/Gold lines of MARTA and mostly during day, I only ever felt unsafe when people with obvious mental issues were yelling on the train - although I never saw violence. Parts of Atlanta are perfectly safe, and parts of Atlanta are a sad depressed economic wasteland.
I love Atlanta, but let's be real: the northwest side of town is getting better but it is hardly "perfectly safe". People have been held up at gunpoint on 10th Street where I walked daily, literally across the road from Georgia Tech, in the middle of the day. My old house in Home Park -- about a mile from Collier Hills? -- was broken into in broad daylight. A house three lots down the street was raided by police because some criminal organization was being run out of it. At an apartment complex I lived at in the same area (10th and Northside), the apartment next door to me and a bunch of others were broken into. In the parking garage at that same apartment complex, a Georgia Tech student was shot in the chest during a random crime and very nearly killed. These are just the incidences that I remember and that I have a fairly close connection to, as a counter to your own, more fortunate anecdote.
Echoing Kelsey's sentiment, I also grew up in Atlanta, lived in Home Park, and while I wouldn't say that I felt unsafe while I lived there, I now live in an actually safe place. It's unbelievably different. People actual walk around. I see women walking alone. I don't see sketchy people, I don't have to lock my doors (my house in Home Park actually had two deadbolted doors before you could get inside). The red line prior to five points is well known to be the safest line, but people still harass you on it. I don't know when you lived in Atlanta, and I was only taking Marta the last three or four years that I lived there, but it's definitely not good/safe public transit.
After being called a "Harry Potter looking mother fucker", "white ass sumbitch", "saltine fuck" etc. on MARTA, I can tell you that no, it's unpleasant. Most of the people I know who told me not to take MARTA were middle-upper class African American people.
You live near Five Points and don't feel unsafe? Are you inside the Georgia State bubble, or on the courthouse side? I've been followed a number of times after coming out of Five Points MARTA. I've had four people follow me and call me a "Harry Potter looking motherfucker" who only left when I passed a cop. I mean I got used to the city and knew what to do/where not to go, but the paths I had to take and where not to go were usually only a block of difference.
And Five Points used to actually just have gangs hanging out on the sidewalk before they cracked down two years ago. I've been threatened, but never attacked, on MARTA, but I'm a big guy (6' 5" and 210 pounds while I was taking MARTA), and nearly all of my female friends had a "a couple of people tried to block my exit and stop me from getting to my car" stories. My fiancee had two guys wait outside of the station exit gates saying "Here, kitty kitty" at night -- and that was at Sandy Springs MARTA. The east/west line is way worse.
I've never felt unsafe on MARTA rail. But Five Points? When I worked at 101 Marietta, every one of my MARTA-ing co-workers had a story of working late and getting mugged on the way to the train.
Atlanta is far better now than it was in the 90s. You may be remembering the 90s "Olympics Version" of intown Atlanta that most people from the Atlanta Suburbs saw.
I have been here since the 70s and it's striking to see how much better Atlanta is today than it was in the 90s. I also suspect you live out in the suburbs and not in Atlanta?
There are definitely areas of the burbs that have declined sharply in the last decade (ie: Gwinnett Mall area). I honestly think this is suburban downtrend will continue as the city prospers and people move intown to avoid the 75/85 parking lot system.
Agreed on Atlanta, I live here, I love my city but theres parts of it where gentrification has been attempted and failed hard. East Atlanta feels like little more than a place for robberies, rapes, and murders to happen.
I've been to Danville, just long enough to look around but not long enough to mingle. What I remember most is the beautiful old residential neighborhoods with big, lovely old houses that natives considered "expensive" and "overpriced" at, oh, $120K. I remember the big old brick tobacco buildings downtown. The place seemed to be crying out for gentrification - those buildings looked just like the places that startups love to inhabit. But being a small town with no notable tech industry or universities in the immediate area, it's hard to imagine it becoming a success story like Durham appeared to have.
"Atlanta" in-town is pretty cleanly segregated with black and white. I'm not sure I agree that it is doing "the opposite of gentrifying".
in-town white neighborhoods (most north of I-20) have seen massive increases in property values in the last three years or so, probably causing "gentrification" as more whites move into border neighborhoods like grant park, old 4th ward, and reanoldstown
suburban atlanta (the vast majority of "atlanta") has also seen steady property value increases, at least in the northers suburbs. (roswell/alpharetta)
Maybe it's just the Chicagoan in me but when I hear "The wrong kind of people were going to move into the neighborhood but we put a stop to that!" I do not think "Sweet! Let us eat traditional food and play traditional music to celebrate this victory for justice."
It's all about money -- if San Francisco suddenly started allowing a lot of new high-rise residential developments to go up, it would cause existing property values to decline (because there would be more options). This would cause a lot of people who own property to lose money, so even the new, wealthy owners in gentrifying areas have an interest in preventing new development from happening.
I'm not saying that this is the right thing to do -- only that there is a reason people resist new development when pricing is based on a limited supply of housing in desirable areas.
It's a bit more complicated. If they allowed building more, property values wouldn't necessarily go down because more people would simply move to the city from other parts of the country, keeping both demand and property values high. One thing that would definitely happen is the character of SF would change a lot, more so than it already is. Perhaps, that's the right thing to do, but I can understand people who live there and are not looking forward to their city looking like Singapore/Chicago/Generic Skyscraper filled city
But that's the thing; the character of the city is going to change no matter what because people with money are going to come in and buy out existing residents anyway. So it's already going to be a bunch of rich yuppies and there's nothing anyone can do about that -- but what's happening is the lack of housing in SF causes prices to rise in surrounding areas as well, which prices lower-income folks out of the market and forces them to move further and further from the city.
If you want to preserve the character of the neighborhoods, you need dense residential areas that allow high-rise condos - it prevents the rich techies from going out and buying a row home for $1.3 million because they can get a sweet, brand-new condo for the same price in a better area. This keeps long-time residents in their homes, thus helping to preserve the culture of the neighborhoods.
The entire NIMBY movement can be boiled down to "Yes, we all agree these things need to be built. But I don't want them being built near me because they would cause my property value to decrease." It's a textbook case of the tragedy of the commons.
>The entire NIMBY movement can be boiled down to "Yes, we all agree these things need to be built. But I don't want them being built near me because they would cause my property value to decrease."
What evidence can you offer in support of this claim with respect to San Francisco specifically?
Because I can certainly see situations in which citizen objections to building projects would be perfectly warranted even without regard to property values: if a builder wanted to raze a block at the corner of 19th and Dolores and build a 50-story residential tower in its place, for example.
As evidence I present the highest housing prices in the country, the relatively low population density of San Francisco, and the city's notorious reputation for particularly onerous approval requirements before construction can go forward.
Yes, a big problem with predicting what effects large building projects will have on a specific area within a metropolitan area is that they impact both supply and demand, not only supply. At the level of a whole metro area, demand is impacted more by the general economy, but whether people choose to live in Manhattan vs. Brooklyn vs. New Jersey (or SF vs. Oakland vs. San Jose) is intertwined with type of housing available, perceived neighborhood features, etc. You can model the net effects of an intervention, but the models are somewhat sensitive to assumptions.
I don't think that SF has a problem attracting demand. Neither do Manhattan or Brooklyn for that matter -- both are prohibitively expensive at this point unless you're a millionaire. Manhattan demand is a bit different in that it's driven globally: a Manhattan apartment (and one in London, and one in Hong Kong) is seen as a must-have among the newly-wealthy Chinese upper class. You know how there are now more millionaires in China than in the US? They all have a Manhattan apartment that they rarely use.
SF doesn't quite have that issue yet -- but IMO housing prices are a big reason why startups are looking outside the bay area more seriously these days.
You're right, but given the prices in the SF market, there are only so many people able to buy a $1 million+ home. It wouldn't be hard to increase the supply to the point where prices start to decrease significantly, especially if you start to build a decent inventory of non-luxury units (not everyone needs or can afford a doorman).
The city can keep its buildings and force its citizens to move, or it can keep its citizens and change the buildings. Both can not remain unchanged. I for one would choose the people.
Another piece of the formula is the state constitution forbidding increases in property taxes. If these real estate holding corporations faced profit pressure in the form of property tax, they would be more inclined to reinvest.
That's a start, but all of those buildings are in a largely commercial area that's pretty inconvenient to get to for anyone not working downtown. There's also not a lot of NIMBY resistance because few people live there right now - once you move into established residential neighborhoods, large projects are next to impossible.
Increased supply is increased supply, and what are desirable and undesirable neighborhoods change. If property owners feel their investment is threatened by increased supply, they aren't going to be mollified just because the new supply is a couple of miles down the road rather than a couple of blocks.
I don't think that's the issue -- it's just people specifically not wanting those types of developments to "ruin their neighborhood". I bet if you asked them, they would say "Oh, yeah, those new towers are great for the city! But I don't want them here because this is a quiet, walkable area and I don't want that to change." Problem is, each area says that, so it's hard to find areas where the homeowners actually want this kind of development. Developments end up in commercial areas, but you can only convert so many commercial areas to residential and still have room for you economy to grow.
I wonder how they are able to legally prevent new development just because it will decrease their land value.. Can such an argument hold up in courts? If it was because of safety or congestion issues, it makes sense. But how is maintaining existing land prices a valid reason for preventing new developments..
No one argues "You can't build here because I would lose money." That would be dumb. Instead, they argue "You can't build here because reason $x", because they would lose money.
My city Allentown, PA has a very late white flight that occurred in the 80s and 90s. We had a donut economy where the suburbs had all the money and shopping and downtown was a rust belt city that had mostly mutli-family converted homes with low-income.
Protesters claim of gentrification is happening. My stance is center city Allentown is not where we dump low income people and for people to have a "better life" they must move to the suburbs. You can have a "better life" and live in our cities. Our schools have an almost 50% transfer rate for children. This means that 50% of the children that started in September will finish their school year at a different school.
I will take diversity over homogeneous non-gentrification. This word is to ambiguous and and not clear in telling anything.
That left me wondering if the author, Scott Beyer, works for some developer PR firm. All leading up to this call to action:
All this, of course, suggests an ironic aspect of urban housing markets that is misunderstood by most government officials and NIMBYs: “if a city wants to preserve, it must build.”
Which I heard as "Hey San Francisco, let Simon Property Group develop this area into a techie zone, we'll make money and it will take pressure off the other neighborhoods because we'll be the cool place to be!"
Follow Scott Beyer's byline to his blog to his about page:
"My book will argue that cities should instead embrace “Market Urbanism.” This phrase was invented in 2007 by Adam Hengels, a development consultant who founded the Market Urbanism blog [where the OP appeared]. He defines it as the intersection between capitalists and urbanists, and his contributors describe how municipal governments repeatedly harm economic productivity. My book will package his ideology into a series of proposals..."
So it seems like he's taken a development consultant as his role model and is fitting his observations into an already-decided ideology and action plan. That's why the article seems so one-dimensional and ignores obvious facts.
I don't disagree with all of his conclusions. But I think that his piece was so glib as to be meaningless.
He essentially promises that, by lifting building restrictions, you can preserve ethnic neighborhoods from gentrification (for what that's worth), because development will be channeled elsewhere, e.g. into high-rises that the professional class (in his reading) favors.
Just writing it down exposes how facile this is.
And that doesn't even get into other problems, like the unguarded analogies between San Francisco and Miami ("warm-weather cities").
1. There are virtually no tech jobs to bring people into the city. 2. Public transit is terrible. 3. Lack of white-friendly english-speaking small businesses. 4. Crime. 5. Cost of living is not low enough to negate the above points.
There are other things to consider, like the climate of Miami is not even remotely as mild as SF, the people are fairly horrible, there are no large tech employers, there's nothing attractive to average people about the area (South Florida is kind of a shit hole in general).
Basically, any place in Miami a tech hipster would move is simply too expensive without giving them anything they would enjoy in return. Even Wynwood quickly gets tiring for non-artist non-musician hipsters.
I'm a native of Miami and I think the article is right. The joke here is that Calle Ocho will be part of Brickell in 20 years - Brickell is creeping south.
Personally, as much as I like San Francisco I prefer Miami's slow road to gentrification. It seems accidental, but it's a model other cities could use. Create your Brickell and leave the rest alone.
The writer has no clue about SF, and yet pontificates as if he knows something.
Mission (in SF) was not historically a Latino neighborhood; it was originally Irish.
He picks 1 example (8 Washington) and proceeds to paint the entire city with it. Did he not bother to look a little south at SoMa, with its tall buildings?
I think the author misses the point. Miami can fit the rich people all in one neighborhood because there aren't so many of them. San Francisco is sitting on an enormous bed of prosperity, and has little cheap land around it. There's not enough room for all the rich people, let alone everyone else. You can't just say, "Toss them in the Marina." (Of as some might prefer, "Toss them off...")
I wish there was an easy answer, because none of the surrounding areas wants to locally address low income housing. My hunch is this needs to be handled on a State level to avoid the NIMBY syndrome. I don't think rent control or shaking down new developers to include a few below-market rooms solves much in the face of such an overwhelming supply and demand imbalance.
I love in Miami; there are A LOT of rich people here. These people are actually rich too, as in 6 figure salaries are what they consider just well off. The majority of them are ultra wealthy Latin Americans or Europeans who live here part of the time and maybe have their kids go to high school here where they basically live on their own in huge apartments.
The sad thing is there is actually shortage in housing and the rents are getting extremely high while wages are absolute shit. It doesn't help that every new apartment complex that gets built are marketed as "luxury" apartments for the ultra rich. There are two separate markets for renters here. When you can build ultra luxury appartments and rent them for $5000 - $10000 a month, there is no reason to construct more lower to middle class housing.
The foreign money was a problem in NYC too. Lots of new buildings with empty apartments owned by international buyers. I like to view myself as a capitalist, but this seems like a break-down of the system. I'm not sure if the problem is regulatory overhead making low-cost housing impossible to build, or what, but it does cause resentment.
I've been living in Miami for about 8 years. I love Miami :) but,
Miami is great but the city overall still depends on the car culture.
Population Density + Car Culture is never good.
The moment people are too lazy that they have to drive one block to get groceries; now thats a problem.
Yea, the Brickell is great and all but I would never live there unless I worked there.
The area has allowed other areas to stay "ethnic" with the expense of poor planning, for me getting in and out of Brickell is a odyssey and I only live 2 miles away.
I can't image what it is for someone who commutes there every day.
Miami lacks the public transportation other cities have developed.
Unless the public transportations keeps up, Miami will just be a vacation home for the rich not the "hub of the Americas" as it is always dubbed.
While I generally agree with the overarching argument, it also ignores the fact that a SF "tech ghetto" would not be the same as a Miami "banker ghetto". Tech is compromised of mostly liberals, and many of those liberals wants neighborhoods with a sense of culture. They are not people who want to be siloed away in their ivory towers and gated communities. They might want new construction, but they also want new construction next to Duboce or Mission Dolores. New construction don't tend to build those kinds of community amenities. Mission Bay is experiencing a construction boom, but if given a choice, almost everyone I know would rather live in the older areas because Mission Bay is sterile.
The article points out that Miami and San Francisco both have Latino populations, as if it were some reason why they should remain similar cities. But in fact, Miami's Latinos are not similar at all to San Francisco's. San Francisco is made up of about 15% Mexicans, where Miami has a majority of Cubans along with other Central Americans, and about half of the population is Hispanic. All of Miami is Hispanic, and really only the Mission is in San Francisco. Miami is also missing the large Asian population.
Don't forget that San Francisco is 550 miles away from the USA/Mexico border. Miami is on the coast and is a much easier destination for new immigrants.
SF's population is also about double that of Miami.
The mission isn't even historically Hispanic. So it doesn't have the flavor as might the Mexican neighborhoods in san jose. The mission has been one of the historical destination neighborhoods for new immigrants who settle in SF. So the mission does not have a stereotypical ethnic look and feel.
The one thing can be said about the mission is that along with old Chinatown and excelsior they are the immigrant neighborhoods, but the characteristics of the immigrants to these neighborhoods have changed over time and only old Chinatown has held on to its ethnic look and feel, but looking at it through that lens is unhelpful. If we look at Beijing of today, it has not retained the look of the hutongs. Cities change. That said, The new immigrants to these neighborhoods are now not foreign but urban domestic.
The author's point is that if cities aren't careful about planning, then they will lose having chickens running through people's backyards? Does it make me some kind of Downton Abbey snob to question just what kind of "loss" that is?
Miami, with an average elevation of 6 feet above sea level, will be underwater in the next several decades. Storm surges already threaten the keys and the coastal lagoon, and this pattern is only worsening as drainage on the mainland is impacted by industry and global climate patterns cause more energetic storms, and average sea level rise.
SF, with an average of ~90ft will be much safer from this particular threat - although California will at the current rate, without serious intervention, be desert, on similar timescales.
Long term investment does not make sense when you are faced with a risk of it all ending up in the sea.
I agree that Miami will be underwater eventually. As for it being a reason for anything, I completely disagree. On your logic, nobody would be in SF because the next "big one" is coming. People generally dont give a shit.
There's a difference between earthquake risk, which is more of the "one large, recoverable, event" ilk, and the sea eating the land, which is pretty hard to come back from, particularly when you've built everything on porous limestone and sand. Dig a hole pretty much anywhere in Florida and you can watch the tide in it.
"People" generally don't, but property developers do.
It's also not "eventually", it's "imminently". You don't need the entire city to be underwater for it to be uninhabitable - you just need the sewer system to be below sea level, and you are quite literally up shit creek.
I believe you need to rethink what the word 'imminently' means. The most aggressive timescale out there from the National Climate Assessment suggests a 4 foot rise during the next one hundred years. If that started today, its less than a half inch a year. Thats hardly imminent. Thats not even in your lifetime you see the 3 foot mark.
A century is imminent as it is, unless you think only in single-life timescales, and a two foot rise will be enough to make Miami economically unviable - as above, sewerage - and fresh water - will be severely impinged by a moderate rise.
That's 50 years, even with current models. If Miami is to survive, it needs new infrastructure, now - and even that will only hold for the short term. The only long term option would be a massive caisson building effort, building a huge concrete sheet wall around the city, buried deep into the strata, down to below the porous limestone it's built atop - at least 20 feet deep in most places. Even then, you'll have issues with sinkholes due to water being removed from the strata... in short, abandonment is where Miami will end up. Nothing else makes sense.
Sea level rise is accelerating beyond our most aggressive models currently, due to ice shelf collapse - Antarctic and Greenland ice shelves are vanishing much faster than anticipated, and will likely all be gone within the decade - expect new models over the next 18 months to predict some rather radical outcomes entirely within our lifetimes.
California is running out of water and has a few years left. Thats imminent. Florida sinking in 50, 100 or 200 years is not. A large percentage of tech folk are highly mobile and as such, florida sinking in even 20 years will not dissuade them from moving here as the vast majority of them are renters anyways. I dont doubt its something to think about and sealevel is definitely rising, I just was contradicting your answer that the one obvious answer is sea level rise. If you put it in percentages of why people move here, I doubt its even in a 5% range.
I have warning that a hurricane is coming, and can easily get my ass out of town when it gets there. I have no warning whatsoever (maybe 10 seconds if the early warning system bulks up) that "the big one" is coming, and my chances of dying in that are far greater.
The mean may be ~ 90 feet, but I doubt the median is. Lots of big hills, and lots of near sea-level flats. The article specifically talks about Mission Bay as an ideal place for development - it's all land reclaimed from the bay.
Well if you are going for the obvious reasons, I guess the insane amount of tech related investment and subsequently generated wealth plays significant role in this but what people quite often forget is the local government. I would recommend everybody to talk to a builder here in SF and get their stories. It is quite eye opening. The local government puts roadblocks to new developments claiming that it would destroy the original look of the city, yet there are areas where this is not an issue. Look around in the business district. On the top of that it plays the different sides against each other, tells to people that the gentrification is purely caused by tech workers. I need to look into Miami more but I guess there is less tech investment and there are no roadblocks against housing projects.
I wonder whether the author only thinks gentrification isn't happening because he doesn't see too many non-Cubans. My understanding is that in the areas he talks about, old buildings are in fact being replaced with high-rise condos left and right.
If almost everyone in Miami is Cuban, then the gentrifiers will also be Cuban.
Harvard economist Edward Glaeser; author of the book Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier; has written about this as well as many others such as Economics Nobelist Paul Krugman who cites Glaeser).
The problems with the high rents in today's cities is through the use of politics to artificially increase the value of land through zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status. These laws that increase the cost of land serve as a hidden tax on the poorer segments of society to subsidize the wealthy.
The primary thesis — that if you just put up a bunch of luxury high-rise apartments in mission bay, gentrification of the mission would stop — strikes me as absurd.
Way overly simplistic. Lots and lots of people with $ in SF still like the not-rich feel of neighborhood like the mission. SF culture doesn't turn into Miami culture just because you put up a bunch of tall buildings.
Other points:
Japantown is nothing more than a mall and a name on a map -- there is no neighborhood there.
Conversely, Chinatown really isn't changing much; it resists gentrification. The explanation I have heard, which seems likely, is that most of the buildings and restaurants have been owned by the same families going way back, and they are reluctant to sell or lease to outsiders.
> Chinatown really isn't changing much; it resists gentrification.
That's debatable. The Empress of China, a landmark restaurant of Chinatown since the 60's, closed at the end of last year to make way for offices. A six-floor building with some 62,000 square feet of space inside Chinatown's scant 24 square blocks is no small matter.
On the contrary, Chinatown is changing rapidly, and the Chinatown we know today will likely be gone very soon. It will soon transform into a Disneyland caricature of itself aimed at tourists, as North Beach has.
The remaining population is increasingly composed of elderly people. Younger people tend to move to outer neighborhoods in SF, or to Daly City or the other peninsula suburbs, as Chinatown is actually a ghetto despite also being a romanticized tourist attraction. More recent middle class Chinese immigrants avoid Chinatown for the same reason and go directly to the suburbs.
E.g. http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/sf-chinatown-restaura... -- the Imperial Palace restaurant estimates that 75-80% of its customers are elderly. The restaurant is empty most of the time and on the brink of financial failure as the customers' fixed incomes do not allow them to eat out very often. Many other restaurants report a similar situation.
Places like the R&G Lounge have already remodeled, raised prices, and transformed in character from neighborhood restaurants to very expensive high end restaurants for yuppie tourists. Those that do not do this will perish.
Definitely; I agree with you on the demographic trends, but for the moment it's still pretty much the same chinatown as always IMO -- definitely not gentrifying in the way the mission is. Yet.
Here's a concise explanation: SF is close (enough) to East Asia and is a convenient sink for the money laundering / "investment" you can do through real estate.
Similarly, Miami in the 80s was close enough to South America to be an easy sink for the money laundering / "investment" you can do through real estate.
When ~1/3 of new construction is unoccupied & held as investment it sure seems like the driving force at the margin.
I moved from SF to Miami. Its definitely gentrifying, you only need to look at the Wynwood district to see that. Areas where you could have bought a warehouse for next to nothing in the past are now selling for insane amounts, almost like rodeo drive.
The reason why its not gentrifying faster is a combination of two things, demand and sprawl. Unlike SF, we can build up and out. In SF you cant do either, so you are forced to push people out.
I don't think the writer understands what gentrification is, or what the "creative class" looks for in their environment. Brickell's high rises are neither.
The kind of people that gentrify places like SF, or Brooklyn, or a thousand other places around the world apparently aren't there in Miami.
Because they would never want to be found dead in a place like Brickell.
Miami has an abundance of affordable housing alternatives outside the urban core. These are attractive in the same way that Silicon Valley's bedroom communities are except that their affordability makes them even more so. San Francisco is gentrifying because it is the least expensive desirable location.
This. The more desirable suburbs of SF (Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton) have housing stock that sells for 10-20% more per square foot than housing in prime San Francisco itself. Is there any other major city where this is true?
That would depend on your definition of "prime San Francisco". North Beach, Russian Hill, and Telegraph Hill are the most expensive per sq foot in the bay area. Pacific Heights and Presidio Heights are equivalent to any of the more expensive parts of the peninsula and valley...
On the east coast here so not at all really familiar with SF's makeup: who exactly are the NIMBYs? What's their demographic makeup? Are they lifelong residents who have 100% dedicated themselves to SF and everything about it (and it's showing due to their municipal political power)?
It would probably benefit the author to actually do some research on what they're talking about. While I realize he's going on his own personal experiences, all of the areas around Miami have been undergoing gentrification since at least 2005:
"But nowhere is the change being felt more than in Overtown. At one time the economic and cultural capital of black Miami, it is now among the nation's poorest neighborhoods. Average income is about $12,000 a year. Crime is rampant in the community of 9,000 that sits in the late-morning shadow of Miami's glittering downtown skyline."
"In the last few months, two major mixed-used developments have been approved in Overtown, the first in decades: Lyric Promenade, a $93-million project that will include a 150-room Hilton Hotel, a blues club, market-rate condominiums and apartments; and Crosswinds, a 1,000-unit condo and apartment project that will include office and retail space. Crosswinds, a for-profit venture on city-owned land, was conceived by the non-profit Collins Center for Public Policy, which asked developers to submit plans that would help revitalize the area."
and
"Much of the new housing will be priced well beyond the reach of most residents of Overtown, where homeownership is barely 10%. In June, tempers boiled over when tenants of a low-income apartment building in Overtown were sent eviction notices shortly after an upscale high-rise developer acquired the property."
"Overtown is located right in the heart of downtown Miami. Given its deserved reputation as a dangerous, crime-ridden area, Overtown creates a unique situation for the city of Miami. While growing in popularity over the last decade, it cannot be argued that unless Overtown cleans up its act, it will hold back the city in terms of economic development and potential"
"While it does not seem as though this was project was ever meant to actually benefit residents of Overtown, it is important to step back and view the facts without bias. Unfortunately, at this point, with the information available, the future of Overtown looks like one of major disappointment and resentment. Overtown will become home to wealthier residents as new infrastructure continues to be built with little consideration given to the current population."
Both. It's sinking because the water table has dropped. And the sea levels are rising, ever so slightly. But mostly it's going thirsty. The Biscayne aquifer can't keep up with demand. They've paved over it, diverted the rainwater that does fall into the Atlantic and saltwater is contaminating the remaining aquifer.
And the government, rather than plan on fixing it, just keeps putting it off for later generations. They keep referencing the Dutch land reclamations efforts in the past without actually noticing how much work and time (centuries) the Dutch put into blocking out the sea.
Many (most?) west coast cities are land locked against ocean, mountains, bays, military posts (San Diego), and other land features. This restricts growth and magnifies shortages of real estate.
Miami has some confinements along it's borders but it's nowhere near as confined as San Fransisco and other west coast cities. This fluff piece is anecdotal and offers no real support of it's conclusions other than the author's loosely defended personal opinion.
The reason I'm asking is that, to the best of my knowledge, there was a period of "white flight", when urban core was basically left to poor people (or at least that's how I interpret this). My understanding is that at the time that was bad. Now rich people "move back in" and I get a vibe from similar articles that this is also bad. So, which is it?