I think Detroit is generally considered a failed city, is it not?
Detroit, Flint, Baltimore, Memphis, Milwaukee, Oakland, Stockton, Cleveland, Newark.
In addition to the already mentioend Detroit there is:
[ul]
[li]Birmingham, AL[/li][li]Cleveland, OH[/li][li]St. Louis, MO[/li][li]Toledo, OH[/li][li]Memphis, TN[/li][li]Scranton, PA[/li][li]Baltimore, MD[/li][li]New Orleans, LA[/li][li]Tucson, AZ[/li][li]San Bernardino, CA [/li][li]Gary, ID [/li][li]Lansing, MI, [/li][li]Camden, NJ[/li][li]Fresno, CA[/li][li]Harrisburg, PA[/li][li]Providence, RI[/li][li]Salem, NJ[/li][/ul]
That’s just off the top of my head of cities with poverty rates exceeding 20% and severe problems with declining revenue bases, largely from more wealthy residents leaving for better maintained suburbs or better employmnet elsewhere.
Nobody wants to live in a shithole city with no promise of improvement, and pumping money into “revitalizing” a neighborhood without attracting property owners who can provide a tax base upon which to recoup the costs of said injection is a nonstarter for reasons obvious to anyone who understands civic finance. It’s an unpleasent reality that people who are not well employed or on fixed incomes are often forced to move or pay rents and costs above what they can afford, but again, that calls for developing mixed income housing and addressing the sociatal problem of wealth inequality rather than simply insisting cities should somehow “revitalize” existing neighborhoods for the residents who can barely afford to pay the taxes on depressed property values they own. “Gentrification” is part of the cyclic process of decline and renewal that every city goes through and if managed properly is a net benefit, including to residents for whom the value of their property increases rather than continuing to decline.
Stranger
So if these cities gentrify then they’ll do much better. Will let me at least give you an example of a city that has done well without gentrification. That would be Bakersfield, CA. It’s a predominately working class and it’s actually thriving despite some social ills such as crime and poverty. There’s not a single gentrified neighborhood there, and if you go outside it’s downtown area it’s pretty much donut shops, trailer parks, and inexpensive apartment complexes. And go to Wikipedia and take a look at its demographics. You’ll immediately notice that it’s population is growing and not declining. Now compare that to NYC.
Gary is in Indiana not Idaho. And Tucson and San Bernardino are actually doing well without a single shred of gentrification. The richest people there are middle class folks.
Jesus, your idea of the perfect American city is Bakersfield? You can have it, and we’ll through Salinas in, too, for the bargain.
Stranger
What’s wrong with Salinas.
Detroit, Flint, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Chicago (if you like your “edge” with a side of murder)
LOL, I used to live in Salinas. There’s a LOT wrong with it.
Uh, it has an over 20% poverty rate, and despite being (technically) in Monterey County has continued to have depressed home prices since before the 2007 home mortgage crisis to the extent that most residents cannot afford to move, but still has disprorportionately high rents and other costs of living, as well as violent street and property crime rates much higher than the state or region. Outside of agriculture I think its biggest industry is prison. And all of this despite being “The Salad Bowl of the World”, once one of the most prosperous agricultural communities in the state. Salinas is basicially an exemplar for what a lack of development or planning does to a potentially promising city.
You don’t actually know anything about city planning or development, do you? You just know that ‘gentrification is bad’ because costs go up when neighborhoods or cities attract wealthier property owners.
Stranger
Speaking as someone from there, I can definitively say that Oakland is neither a failed city nor is it cheap. It’s cheaper than neighboring SF, but it’s still pretty pricey.
And I should also point out that gentrification is a form of class warfare. You realize that gentrifiers are prejudice against the working class and even minorities as well. And because of gentrification the working class is now a dying breed. If you lived in a Rust Belt city back before 9/11 you could work a factory job and make a good living that way without any formal education. That was when the American dream was alive and proud. Now the American dream is halfway in it’s coffin, and don’t expect Trump to bring it back. Gentrification has only benefited those burnt out Millennial hipsters working some high end professional occupation. And those people right there have no American dream. If Ross Perot were president he’d bring back the American dream and get the USA back to a hard working nation. And let’s not forget automation will only get more people sitting on the couch than actually going to work.
I don’t think that most people would agree with you that crime, poverty, donut shops, and trailer parks can be considered “thriving”.
sigh You have cause and effect completely backward here. Gentrification isn’t the reason “the working class is now a dying breed.” That is a result of the fact that many of those jobs (including the formly high paying blue collar jobs working automotive assembly that attracted so many people to Detroit) have moved to areas of the country or overseas with lower labor costs, or have just been eliminated through automation. Notice that the “Rust Belt” cities in which working class jobs have disappeared are not, by and large, areas where so-called gentrification is especially problematic; it is in areas in which large numbers of professional white collar jobs have developed and have forced lower earning white collar workers who don’t or can’t commute to move into once less affluant or decaying neighborhoods.
Stranger
Assumption not grounded in fact.
I think you’d have to work awfully hard to find any correlation and there’d be a lot of other issues higher up on the list than gentrification.
Political opinion not grounded in fact.
*Bakersfield, California - Wikipedia
Look under historical population and you’ll see that Bakersfield’s population is doing nothing but booming. And and not a single gentrified neighborhood exists in that city. Bakersfield is a real success story. NYC is not.
And Oakland used to be a lot cheaper than it is now.
You seem to be using only one criterion, population growth, to determine thriving and booming. The are many other factors that should be considered.
But the Rust Belt cities have in fact lost many jobs. Take Detroit for example unemployment is high and the folks who could possibly find a job is someone so affluent. Now as I explained earlier sensible revitalization could just work instead of gentrification. It’s a fact that gentrification does price out long term residents and many have ended up homeless as a result. Therefore gentrification indeed has negative consequences and I could cite more references explaining so. And I’m sure anyone living in a gentrified neighborhood wouldn’t even think about helping anyone on the street. And the working class is fading away and I’ll tell you right now that the underclass, which arguably differs from the working class, is on the rise. The suburbs are getting expensive as well, and what’s worse the cost of living has risen astronomically, and as I always tell people the more you raise the cost of living the less people you’ll have to afford it. And last but not least the U.S. is running out of affordable places to live in.
I started out the thread assuming that the OP was a supercool SJW who knows all about foraging from dumpsters, how to dress appropriately for an antifa meeting/riot, and was into that newest band before I’ve even heard of them.
Now with this information that Bakersfield is viewed as a great place to live, I’m just terribly confused. Is Modesto now viewed as a great place for a romantic weekend getaway?