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.
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?