Yup. In DC the thing is to buy a beautiful old row home and turn it into four small condos.
Change is good, and the change in DC has been overwhelmingly positive. But DC also has some of the strongest tenant’s rights in the US, and a long history of community organization.
I think it is all about balance. Developers are out to make a quick buck- and that’s fine. But there needs to be other voices in urban planning than the guy who’s only interest is build’n’sell.
It’s considered bad not because the people moving are White or because they want to move, but rather because they are often explicitly moving because a handful of Black people moved into the neighborhood. Many if not most of these people were seeking racial homogeneity, not better schools or a better house.
No. In and of itself, most people have no issue with the process of White people moving into a poor majority-minority area if they choose to. The issue is typically that such changes en masse correlate highly with other things like the displacement of locals, and higher costs of living. Additionally, the larger issue is that those same neighborhoods were typically allowed to decay due to indifference, poor schools, poor police presence, etc. when minorities live/lived there. Over time, as richer, Whiter people move in, those services are afforded to the new population.
Now a big reason for this is that the state largely exists to protect capital and those with capital, but given that those groups neatly overlap with race in this country, you see a lot of racial overtones and resentment when this issue is discussed. The ebb and flow of accountability follows the movement of capital rather than the morality and integrity of those serving the people or any kind of mandate for equality. That is the issue associated with gentrification that people have an issue with. It’s not that some White guy bought a house somewhere he wasn’t “supposed to”, it’s that not being stopped and frisked, having access to a decent school, and knowing that the government will be responsive to your needs is often conveyed with the purchase of the house solely due to the color of his (White) skin.
First, gentrification isn’t a racial term. Second, the term “White flight” is used because it is accurate and descriptive. I’d think you’d be the last person arguing for some PC euphemism.
Wow, thats alot of people.
Can I ask, where do they park their cars?
Because not everyone has the same economic freedom and range of choices over where to move and live where they want; and the exercise of such choices by those who have the greatest freedom and range of choice tends to limit those of those who have less (by raising prices, which makes housing less and less affordable and changes the range of shops and services conveniently available in a neighbourhood). And if that has a differential effect on different racial and ethnic groups, not using the racial terms is not going to change the lived reality of the people who feel they are losing out.
My daughter is not an artist, but…
When she got a 1 bedroom apartment in Manhattan (Stuyvesant Town to be exact), it cost $1200. Affordable. Then she got married and got a 2BR apartment in the same development. It cost about twice that. Then they got a rent increase to over $3500 with a warning that over the next five years the rent would more than double. So she and her husband moved to a newly gentrified section of Brooklyn (Park Slope) where they are now with their son, although in a somewhat larger apartment. I understand that the artistic types who lived further south in Manhattan first moved to Brooklyn and, now that prices in Brooklyn are soaring are moving, gasp, to Philadelphia. The rents there are quite cheap.
But to get to the OP, who have moved into the apartment my daughter vacated? The answer is very likely all the financial people making fortunes on Wall St. Don’t get the idea that the places “freed up” could now be occupied by the people displaced from Brooklyn. There is just no cheap housing anywhere in NYC. There used to be in Rockaway (an hour and a half by subway from Manhattan), but most of that was destroyed by Sandy. I wonder where all the municipal workers (required by law to live within city limits) are living.
But the housing shortage is serious and gentrification does not just consist in shuffling the population but in pushing the poorest out of the city or into more cramped housing.
Poverty and suburbia are not a good combination. At least in the city, there is usually public transit. There are sidewalks. Suburbia–particularly the downscale suburbia where the poor migrate to–often doesn’t offer these features.
Here’s an article that may be of interest: Suburbs and the New American American Poverty.
Exactly the point made by Alexandra Pelosi in a recent HBO documentary called San Francisco 2.0 about exactly that phenomenon becoming widespread now in that city:
Alexandra Pelosi’s latest documentary, “San Francisco 2.0,” examines rapid gentrification in the city as tech companies and their employees have revitalized urban areas yet have driven out longtime residents.
Her project, debuting on Monday on HBO, sets up a vexing problem for the city’s leaders, who are reaping the benefits from an economic boom yet struggle to come up with solutions to displaced residents and homelessness. It’s a problem common to many cities, including Los Angeles, but perhaps most pronounced for San Francisco as it is at the center of the tech economy.
“Everybody is having a really good time in San Francisco right now if you are in the tech, media, new media world,” Pelosi tells Variety‘s “PopPolitics” on SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel. “You’re not having such a good time if you have lived there for generations and your family is being pushed out. Those are the people who are getting hurt.”
I’ve been living in San Francisco for the past 12 years. Gentrification here should be defined as “I’m angry at the people who started moving to this neighborhood starting the day after I moved to this neighborhood.”
Well, yes, this isn’t much different from “my parents were immigrants and that worked out great but now immigration has to stop”. There’s always going to be some element of that. But Pelosi is talking about lower-income long-time residents who are literally being displaced by the moneyed crowds of Google and all its Silicon Valley ilk. I’m certainly no expert on San Francisco, but Pelosi is, and produced the film from the personal standpoint of what she regrets to see happening to “my city”. I have no authoritative opinions on it myself, just wanted to give a heads-up about it. Have you seen it?
“My city”. That sounds an awful lot like what Fiveyearlurker was talking about. Or as they say in LA: I’ve got mine, you can live in Riverside.
I have not seen the actual film, but I’ve seen her interviewed about it, and she’s not the first one to bemoan change in SF. Or where I live, for that matter-- it was nothing but orchards for decades and decades. Then people found that the land was more valuable for housing. Things change. News at 11. And let’s keep in mind that we’re talking about a city that, for all intents and purposes, didn’t even exist 200 years ago. Who’s to say what it will be like 200 years hence?
Why is this new city culture worse than the one that preceded it? Just because you use the word “ilk”?
I’m not saying it’s necessarily worse. I don’t know. The part about “lower-income long-time residents that are literally being displaced” certainly suggests that it’s unfair to the long-time residents who are affected. And there’s certainly evidence that economically integrated communities are healthier for society overall than economically segregated ones – like the fact that building subsidized housing within ordinary communities tends to have better outcomes than creating low-income ghettos. I think the film’s point is the problem of money dominating larger societal interests.
It’s an emotionally evocative phrase like “my country”, but otherwise its merit or lack thereof depends on what objectives you’re driving.
Re-assessment is plenty to do the job. As gentrification grows, so does property value, sometimes exponentially. While some states, notably California, protect postpone property-value increases in taxes until a house is sold, many do not. And of course this does nothing for businesses and residential renters, who make up a large part of traditional neighborhoods.
I move all the time for all sorts of reasons. Until last year, I lived on the outskirts of the Mission in San Francisco (ground zero for the gentrification debate) and I moved because my rent went up and I had another kid and I could no longer afford the kind of place I needed in that neighborhood. The neighborhood didn’t owe me anything.
As far as the “ilk” in this neighborhood. I’m not a techie (well, I’m biotech, but I don’t think that’s what people mean when they say “techie”) and I never found the “gentrifiers” to be anything but nice people. They like brunch and “dive” bars.
I might be leaving San Francisco soon, but it’s more because it’s not particularly friendly toward families with kids than anything else. And that’s fine, if that’s the sort of city it wants to be. And if it’s not for me, I move. No harm, no foul.
What does this have to do with building "subsidized housing? SF is a hotbed of technological innovation, and the folks at the center of this innovation what to live there. What’s wrong with that?d You can stand in front of the tide as its coming in, but that won’t stop it. Tell us why your plan to slow things down is better than what is actually happening.
Move to Overland Park Kansas. One of the top rated cities in the country for families with excellent schools and you can find an apartment for about $500 a month. Houses start around $150,000.
American cities are in a position they haven’t found themselves in in decades: more people are wanting to move in than they have the infrastructure (particularly housing) for. Cities have three choices:
Manhattanization: grow upwards. Densify. Taller buildings. Families live in attached dwellings instead of single family houses.
Los Angelesization: sprawl outwards. Build single-family houses are far out as you can. Try to build highways to keep up. Deal with the enormous traffic jams that result.
Santa Barbaraization: don’t grow at all. Small houses become worth 1 million+. Regular folks are either completely forced out, or get grandfathered in with rent control provisions. New non-rich residents are definitely kept out.
You can get parts of each, but you can’t get none of it, so cities have to choose. Here is Seattle the city is effectively choosing mostly Manhattanization, but there definitely seems to be a vocal cohort who is trying to choose none-of-the-above, which just isn’t going to work.
Their is another way although I dont know how to describe it except for decentralization.
Here in Kansas City many corporate headquarters are located away from central Kansas City and are in the suburbs. For example Sprint has its massive headquarters here in Overland Park with 17 buildings encompassing 3,900,000-square-foot (360,000 m2) on 200 acres for around 14,000 employees. Same with many other companies so you have commuting often from downtown to the suburbs or from suburb to suburb.
So in Kansas city hardly any major corporate headquarters are still downtown anymore.
I’m not sure how you see that as distinct from LA-style sprawl, unless the nodes are so far they’re aren’t really functioning suburbs of KC, in which case it isn’t really about how KC is growing.
I think the big difference is that LA is a single city with a single government, whereas the KC example consists of distinct political entities (not unlike Southeast Michigan). Los Angeles grows by annexing successful, new localities and forcing them to participate in Los Angeles. KC (and Detroit) don’t have that ability, meaning that bad governance is limited to a smaller population, and good governance can be emulated by neighbors.
Growth for business is critical, but growth for the sake of growth of a political entity is nonsense and serves only to strengthen a single government instead of having diverse governments. Certainly some efficiencies can be gained by having a single water supply system, but regional cooperation models can serve, too, for example. Who cares whether or not Santa Barbara grows or not, except for outsiders that want to have a Santa Barbara mailing address? Can its tax base meet the needs and wants of the people that already live there? What’s wrong with letting Montecito grow on its own?