As far as I can tell, to the people saying ‘gentrification is bad’ if you’re a relatively rich white person then you’re bad for either moving into or out of a city. If you move out of the city, then it’s “white flight” and you’re bad and contributing to crumbling city infrastructure. If you move in, then it’s “gentrification” because you’re improving the neighborhood, which raises property values, which then pushes poor people out. People have pointed out a lot of the problems with the standard anti-gentrification arguments, but I think the fact that both gentrification AND doing the exact opposite get similar condemnation is pretty telling as well.
Who is doing the investing? Cash strapped city governments? How will they raise the funds without a tax base of relatively high-earning residents?
I’m fine with subsidized housing, at least in theory. But someone has to pay for it.
Moderating
This sounds like a fine subject for Great Debates.
As with every time this topic comes up. Also ‘long term residents’ who own and sell out at huge profits are generally not deemed ‘assholes’ for not insisting on accepting below market sale prices. It’s just below market rents that are insisted on to avoid being called an ‘asshole’. It’s often paradoxically people paying ‘long term’ owners sums they never dreamed of for their properties who get dubbed ‘assholes’ in those transactions.
No rise in values or rents, no return. No return, no investment of private money to improve anything. If you want a society where people with money have more of it taken away to spend on behalf of the public, that’s a fair opinion (though I don’t necessarily agree). But that would run across everything. That’s the only way to give people improved housing stock without higher rents: take the investment required away from somebody else. But there’s nothing unique about that compared to all the other ‘good’ you can do with more redistribution. The idea of ‘anti-gentrification’ seems to be that there’s something basically different (or ‘bad’) about people seeking a return when they invest in housing stock that’s different from any other place they invest their money. But there isn’t.
Gentrification is bad because it brings the stress and trauma of a forced relocation onto people for whom such stress and trauma can have the most egregious negative effects.
I think the best solution has to involve having the public bear some proportion of the cost of such relocations.
Newer would basically mean it’s newly constructed. Cleaner would mean it’s in better condition and it’s well kept and it’s not pest infested, you know with things like rats or roaches.
To my mind gentrification is a problem, but individual people moving into gentrifying areas are not. It’s not reasonable to ask people not to gentry neighborhoods, given the incentives and given the fact that every potential gentrifier knows if they don’t do it, someone else will.
So the solution lies not in griping at people and telling them not to move in*, but instead, in changing the incentive structure. That’s of course a much bigger ask, but it seems like it’s the right ask.
*To be clear, I think griping at people and telling them they shouldn’t move in is fine and serves many fine purposes, but shouldn’t be thought of as a particular effective solution to the specific problem of gentrification. It’s at best a very long term, soft and indirect solution to the problem that hopes to work by changing how people as a whole think about home living as a whole.
Also btw it should not be a surprise that my family and I are paradigmatic cases of gentrifiers. We moved into a poor neighborhood, in the very same month a couple of fine coffee places opened a block away. And in the three years since, poor people have been moving out.
Sure, but most neighborhoods start that way. How do you ensure it stays that way?
I think in fairness the problem, if that’s what it is, differs significantly in form in places which have rent control. In NY over 1mil rental units are rent stabilized. Whether a neighboorhood becomes ‘up and coming’ doesn’t do anything to rents for RS units in those neighborhoods, the increase is determined city wide (and zero for a couple of years lately). And tenants have the right to renew their leases as long as they fulfill the terms of the lease (and it’s pretty feasible to have other family members inherit them).
So, problem solved? No obviously not. The other side of that coin is a cumulatively serious misallocation of resources, as is caused by any system of price controls. For one thing as you suggest, the issue of non stabilized rents is obviously magnified by one whole portion of the housing stock immune to market signals. Without RS, rents on now RS places would go up, but the horror story rents on non RS would go down and meet somewhere in the middle. And you’d lose all the perverse incentives of RS like no means testing (once you’re in doesn’t matter how much you make), encouraging people to stay in apts too big for them as their situations change, the dynastic passing down of apts (which is really pretty ridiculous), etc.
Again a fully rational discussion would be about more subsidizing of some people, broadly, by taking away more money from other people, broadly. The reason ideas like rent control/stabilization can persist is the political illusion that it’s something other than that, or that it’s only taking from the ‘greedy’, (people who invest in stocks to make money aren’t ‘greedy’, just people who invest in real estate), etc.
But again I’m not sure it’s true ‘gentrification is worse’ in NY than the vast majority of other places in the US (SF is the only other major city I believe) which don’t have (much) rent control. Depends in part on actually establishing what’s bad, net, about ‘gentrification’, which is less than obvious.
The underlying issue is income inequality. There’s no anti-gentrification measures possible that doesn’t make things progressively shittier for people who can’t afford to move on from renting run down apartments in undesirable neighbourhoods.
While I do get the negative impact for people that may be displaced, it seems like there are only a couple options for where that development money goes:
1 - Re-build in existing areas (negative impact on existing residents that can’t afford the new reality)
2 - Build in undeveloped areas (negative impact on bambi and friends)
The problem with gentrification is that it harms existing residents who see their neighborhoods change and their rents rise. The good thing about gentrification is that it helps new residents by allowing them to live in desirable places at more reasonable prices. Why should we care more about the existing residents than the new resident?
In economic terms the Coase theorem suggests that gentrification is good for a society’s economy.
That’s not a realistic plan.
The reason rents are low are because people don’t want to live there. Pump money into the neighborhood and make it a better place to live and rents will go up. Which is normal; the reason money was put into the neighborhood was because people thought they could recoup their investment via increased rents.
You could have a government program that overrides these basic economics. The government can pump money into a neighborhood and lock in pre-improvement rents. But why should people be entitled to pay low rents to live in what is now a high rent neighborhood?
*** It causes a community to be less affordable.**
True, but the community is only ‘affordable’ because it is a shithole.
*** It prices out long time residents.**
True. But those who own can see a short term gain. Those who rent will have to find other squalor.
*** It is profit driven, and not community driven.**
True, but why is that bad? Developers make profit, builders make profit, agents make profit, new stores and other things are created…all of which are taxed. The new community is a better one and a wealthier one. The neighborhood will have better schools and will have a better tax base, and residents city-wide are better off. A rising tide lifts all boats, so to speak.
Bad neighborhoods will stay bad and get worse until investment comes in and that can only happen if there is profit to be made.
The question is this: Who benefits from a neighborhood staying in decay?
revitalization is the first step towards gentrification. By making the neighborhood more desirable, you are pushing up demand for housing and rents will rise and then the whiteys move in then the neighborhood is all shot to hell with gentrification. starbucks and wegmans on every corner.
And somebody else lived there before them, and somebody else before them, etc. Cities change from the day they’re built onward.
Pilsen is a neighborhood nearish to downtown Chicago that is predominantly Hispanic but undergoing considerable gentrification. Where in Mexico is the Pilsen that the neighborhood is named after? Trick question, it’s in the Czech Republic. Pilsen was built in the 19th Century by/for Czech immigrants and only later became Hispanic.
Poor neighborhoods weren’t always poor, many were built as middle or even upper-class neighborhoods but something changed; factory closed, for instance. The single-family houses appropriate for a more prosperous neighborhood were sub-divided into apartments (or replaced by newly-built apartment buildings) for the landowners to keep making money, or in some cases merely to stay afloat. In my experience, a significant part of gentrification is middle-class people buying the surviving 19th or early 20th Century subdivided buildings and turning them back into single-family houses for a lot cheaper than they could buy a similar-vintage house in an established neighborhood.
Gentrification also occurs when we suburbanize rural areas.
I’m pretty sure there’s a middle being excluded between “a neighborhood staying in decay” and “WASPs move in and run out all the poor people.” I’m not sure if it’s a middle that can be forcibly implemented in regions where landlords smell potential profit, but I’m pretty sure such a middle theoretically exists.
My guess is that the middle is the people who already live there are incentivized to clean up and repair the dwellings themselves.
I would never tell someone else that they can’t sell their own property. You realize how un-american that is. It’s not up to the people buying and selling to figure out where the displaced people should live next.