I know I wasn’t clear, but I meant legally get rid of rent control. 
A guy could make $200k/yr by having 20 landlords pay $10k each.
So when Magic Johnson puts his money into urban area redevelopment, making money off of the gentrification around the Staples Center - does he lose his blackness? How about his prior ownership of over 100 symbols of oppression - Starbucks?
Econ tip - places are affordable because there is not demand. There is not demand because the location and the asset is not desirable. Making it MORE desirable will cause demand, and raise the price.
The minority owners win, the poor renters lose. It is that simple.
Certainly there can be too much of a good thing with gentrification. My neighborhood used to be a bit of an industrial wasteland. Now most of the old decrepit warehouses have been replaced with luxury condos or renovated into beer gardens and indoor rock climbing centers, all connected by a vibrant waterfront. That’s generally a good thing.
OTOH, the Hudson River NJ waterfront is becoming an unbroken string of Toll Brothers 20 story condos from Jersey City to Fort Lee. That creates a lot of pressure on narrow roads and 100 year old water mains. There is also the somewhat absurd phenomenon of as soon as a waterfront condo with a view of Manhattan is sold, construction starts on a new one a bit closer to the water, obstructing the old one’s view.
Having lived in and around and worked in NYC for the past 18 years, I think that the gentrification starts with artists renovating old warehouses and brownstones, and then the “uncreatives” build giant glass boxes with Starbucks and Trader Joe’s on the ground floor.
I would guess that in the year 2035, having a waterfront view would be SOOOO 2015 and having a city view will be the new thing. Then these waterfront condos will be the next Section 8 housing and in the year 2050 will be torn down to build the latest fad.
This upheaval may be good or bad, but if we decided we wanted to stop it, how do we do so? And if we do, are we sure that 2018 is the sweet spot to keep it?
Unfortunately, the alternative probably involves pushing all of that pressure on the infrastructure out to a place that’s even less capable of finding solutions. People are coming whether the NIMBYs like it or not, and they’re going to have to live somewhere, and it’s probably better in the long run that they live in condo towers along the Hudson than in tract houses in the Lehigh Valley.
San Bernardino is certainly undergoing gentrification as more people move in seeking affordable housing but also wanting the amenities of a nice place. The middle and upper middle class will gentrify areas that used to be lower middle class and lower class. The lower classes will find their low rents hit by buyouts of housing stock by people able to afford a mortgage instead.
That article is referring to Riverside, Moreno Valley, and Ontario. Only the last is even in San Bernardino County and is at the far west side. The City of San Bernardino is as much of a shitshow as it has ever been, and nobody is gentrifying anything there. It’s basically a big warehouse district with a bunch of decaying neighborhoods and an irredeemably corrupt city government.
Stranger
San Jose has a very lax rent control law, which I think is very good. First it only applies to buildings over 4 units and 30 years old. Also it only limits rent increases to 8% a year, which is quite reasonable. If you think you need to raise the rents more than that, you dont know what the hell you are doing anyway.
It only really prevents speculators from buying a building, doing some cosmetic upgrades, doubling the rents and selling again. That is bad for everyone.
Because the long time residents may not be able to find affordable housing elsewhere. Also, when you’ve really put down roots in a place, having to leave can be something of a trauma.
A return on an investment isn’t necessarily measured in money. Just not adding dozens or hundreds of new homeless families to the existing population of them could reasonably be considered a good return.
I genuinely hate to say this, but it isn’t the concern of a landlord whether tenants having to move because they can no longer afford rent is a tragedy. The real problem here is income inequality and the challenges (which are only going to increase) in vocational opportunities, which is a larger problem that results in destructive gentrification. It is going to become an even larger problem with an aging population entering retirement with less savings and an increasingly fragile social net combined with fewer family connections. Invoking some kind of generic disparagement about ‘gentrification’ is not particularly helpful, unless the idea is that we should send all of the elderly people without large retirement savings to ‘Bakersfield’, which I’m increasingly convinced is just a euphamism by the o.p. for sending people out in the corn field in the vein of It’s a Good Life.
Return on investment is a financial term that specifically refers to the measurement of profit in proportion to investment. You are discussing a different issue which for lack of a better term might be called socioeconomic homeostatis; the ability of people in a neighborhood to keep up with economic and social changes. This is, again, a larger societal problem than just hipsters and yuppies moving into Brooklyn and converting old apartment bulidings into expensive lofts or building waterfront condos.
Stranger
Sorry to reply so late, but I don’t necessarily agree that the stress and trauma gentrification puts on poor people outweighs the benefits of a bigger local economy, rising wages, lower crime, and other ancillary benefits like more access to healthy food options, public transportation access, and better schools (among lots of other benefits too numerous to list).
I would argue that gentrification gives poor people more opportunity, not less. The solution to poverty isn’t to give people money, because that money just ends up in the hands of people who increase rents to compensate for their tenants extra government money. The solution to poverty is to add more services, like housing which is owned by the government instead of slum lords who are subsidized by the government. You can’t gentrify a government-owned apartment building!
The police act as the militarized arm of real estate developers, and liberals turn into Murray Rothbard the second you question their civilizing mission:
It’s one of their weaker efforts if you ask me, but you might be interested in this Citations Needed episode about the casual use of settler-colonial rhetoric in real estate advertisements and the liberal press. My favorites include “urban pioneers,” “Chicago safari,” and cafe and restaurants with cutesy colonial names like The Hinterlands or The Outpost. Even in this thread you see the same logic that European settlers used – these savages weren’t cultivating the land properly, but then we came in and made it productive and safe.
The idea that Ross Perot would fix any of these problems is pretty unlikely. Capitalism isn’t equipped to deal with situations like this. Maybe a social democracy with confiscatory wealth redistribution could help, but don’t count on that happening in America any time soon.
Having seen gentrification is places like New York, Hoboken/Jersey City and Boston, I would tend to agree. Yes, some people get priced out of their decrepit homes, which are often bulldozed and replaced with Yuppie Ghettos on the Hudson. But what you do get are run down, often dangerous buildings being replaced by larger, nicer ones with greater capacity. The shops, bar, restaurants and services that move in provide jobs and actually make the neighborhood a place that people want to live in.
And, quite frankly, it’s something that has to happen. You can’t freeze neighborhoods in some arbitrary year and just keep building new ones on the periphery. You’ll just end up with something like Detroit.
Barceloneta for the 1992 Olympics: people got expropiated out, sometimes given other housing in exchange but of course the new housing was in other areas of town, away from the friends and neighbors they’d known their whole lives. The Olympic Village was, unlike most of Barcelona, not designed as mixed-uses; it is seen as “a comercial desert” and scary to walk around at night.
Bad for the old neighbors and not particularly desirable for new ones.
Other areas in the Barcelona metro area get gentrified slowly; part of it is new buildings replacing old ones, part is old ones getting revamped. These revamps take place both flat by flat, and eventually the common areas; usually the common areas get done after several neighbors have already fixed their flats and they want things such as, oh, common electrical connections which can support their updated electrical without danger. Some of the prettier old buildings are acquired by the cities or by nonprofits and revamped for public use. There’s a renewal but it’s organic. The new buildings are restricted to the height of their neighbors: the new houses look new but don’t scream at you, and like the old buildings have stores or small businesses on the ground floor. Part of this comes from lessons learned: many developers have figured out that a place doesn’t just have to look attractive at noon but at midnight.
The same word, the same place, two completely different situations.
Sounds like gentrification to me.
I lived within 2 miles of this place when I was younger (now live about 3 miles from it as an adult), and went to high school down the street ( 5 blocks). That entire area was a shithole (yep, i’ve said it). When I was in high school there were 2 Cabrini buildings left, they used my [public] high school as a magnet for it and it was terrible, metal detectors never on, many people brought in weapons, gang violence (especially when it was warm) and not to mention lots and lots of drugs. Once they tore that abomination down, the crime in the neighborhood lifted, it looked nicer, the high school cleaned up and there are many many new stores and buildings, not to mention the biggest aspect. A neighborhood nobody would go near if they had a choice, now became SAFE! First hand look at the positive impact of gentrification.
Gentrification works out for the greater good.
I don’t know if I would call the Barceloneta Olympics example “gentrification”. To me, gentrification has an organic quality where the neighborhood gradually improves with an influx of high income residents and accompanying services and stores.
The Olympic Village sounds more like use of eminent domain to make bad, short-sighted land use decisions.
Not that the two can’t go hand in hand. One form of gentrification I’m not crazy about is plopping a giant glass skyscraper in the middle of an otherwise dumpy neighborhood. They always make me think of the novel High Rise by J.G. Ballard.
Check out the contemporary luxury of the Cast Iron Lofts in the prestigious “SoHo West” neighborhood of Jersey City:
Well, the reason for the selectively cropped pictures is that “SoHo West” would appear to consist of mostly vacant lots and old industrial buildings, conveniently located between where Rt 78 feeds into the Holland Tunnel and the Hoboken NJ Transit rail yards.
That’s not really gentrification though, as there was nothing there before. A better example would be Pavonia Newport in Jersey City to the East. It has a very corporate feel. Mostly a big mall, some office towers (mostly back-office operations for investment banks) and a bunch of luxury high rise buildings where the residents come home after work and shut their doors.
That would disqualify my second example as well then, since there is no influx of “accompanying services and stores” where the reason for the new stores is a higher average income. The stores change, but they’ve changed more to reflect a more-diverse ethnic background than a higher income; higher-range stores are becoming more and more concentrated downtown and in malls (the highest range ones are downtown).
I’ve noticed that mixed housing causes a whole set of other issues. The developer of a luxury condo will be required to - or agree to in exchange for other concessions - to include some affordable rental units in his luxury condo.
Then the freakout starts because the residents of the affordable units don’t have access to the luxury amenities like the spacious lobby with concierge services, the gym and swimming pool. All which the luxury residents pay a lot of money towards. And those affordable apartments are smaller than the luxury units and lack the expensive finishes. It becomes a scandal and everyone starts screaming discrimination because the developer isnt subsidizing a luxury lifestyle for his affordable unit tenants.
It’s counter-productive.
Years ago, when I was poor - this was in the early 1980s — I was right out of college and living in NYC on minimum wage. And I was living in a horrid roach infested tenement building that happened to be located in what had lately become desirable area. And it was a horrid railroad flat apartment, i was one of the lucky residents that had my own bathroom actually in my apartment.
And my landlord offered to buy out my rent controlled lease. I saw this as an opportunity to jump-start a better life for myself. But I was young and I thought I might need some help navigating in buy-out. So I went to a place that offered housing assistance to low-income people.
But all they were interested in doing was helping me dig in and fight my landlord tooth and nail for my right to continue to live in squalor ( a “right” I already had, NYC rent control was super-strict back in the day). When I told them I actually wanted to take the buy out and move, it was like I’d walked into Catholic Charities and asked for help with an abortion. So I did it myself. And I never regretted it.
And I want to add that I know people that have hung onto their rent controlled apartments for years. And none of them are remotely poor and most of them have used to money they save on market rent to do things like buy second homes. I see why they do it, they’re legally allowed, but it’s kind of disgraceful.