I’m a huge fan of gentrification and specifically rural gentrification. We need to do what we can to encourage it at every step. The people who end up leaving will then go to gentrify a place that is worse and it will move through local communities. Getting wealth more evenly spread through out country is a great thing.
When has this ever happened?
New York, San Francisco, LA, Denver, Boise, Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston.
Just to name the ones I’m familiar with off the top of my head.
Sorry, I should have specified rural gentrification.
Ok, how about Rancho Cucamonga, CA, Almaden, CA, Parker, CO, and Pocatello, ID.
Phoenix, large parts of Northern Virginia, the rural areas Northwest of Philly, Las Vegas. It’s a pretty big list. In fact most developed areas in the United States have some history as a rural locations.
I’m not familiar with their histories, but they also don’t strike me as particularly rural. Rancho Cucamonga has a population of almost 200,000. Can you provide some cites giving the circumstances?
(Also, last minute @Martin_Hyde, the areas overtaken by metropolitan areas are not what I call rural. All metropolitan area growth has been gentrification by that definition.)
I would say it is gentrification. Gentrification isn’t limited to situations where journalists at the New York Times and The Atlantic complain about wealthy white hipsters moving into majority minority urban neighborhoods, it can also include situations where rural Virginians were displaced by upper middle class professionals in Northern Virginia, or rural ranchers in the Valley of the Sun.
I wouldn’t argue that. I would just say that by definition rural is outside of metropolitan areas.
84% of the United States’ inhabitants live in suburban and urban areas,[3] but cities occupy only 10 percent of the country. Rural areas (villages) occupy the remaining 90 percent. The U.S. Census Bureau, the USDA’s Economic Research Service, and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) have come together to help define rural areas. United States Census Bureau: The Census Bureau definitions (new to the 2000 census), which are based on population density, defines rural areas as all territory outside Census Bureau-defined urbanized areas and urban clusters.
I don’t think we should get too bogged down in census definitions of rural–I’ve actually tracked them for years and they are ever-shifting and have little actual relationship to anything to do with rural cultures, rural economic realities, rural healthcare issues, rural education issues etc. The Census literally considered areas around Welch, WV to be urban until around 2010 when it’s one of the most profoundly rural places anyone could ever hope to experience. The Census definition of rural is also out of sync with many other government programs designed to address rural issues.
Also if we want to go down this route most of the areas mentioned in the beginning of this thread (e.x. Bozeman MT) would not remotely qualify as rural. I’d also note the proposed 2020 definitions have gotten so arcane as to be of even less value than the arguably “troubling” definitions used in 2010 and 2000.
I think for the purposes of presenting Census data it’s probably fine, but when people talk about rural issues those tend to mean a certain thing, which have little correlation to what the Census is talking about.
I guess I’m unsure what you’re looking for at this point. Most of the current examples of places that got expensive so people were pushed out to crappy places which they then made nice are currently “nice” places.
Let’s start with one of my original examples. When I moved to Denver in 2001 they were complaining about people from California that sold their house and then moved to Denver and over paid for a house and did it in cash because it was so much cheaper than California. This was driving up housing costs and pushing locals out. Now Denver is one of the most expensive urban areas in the country (typically top 20 but I’ve seen some top 10s) and those locals who were pushed out along with new people who can’t afford Denver have moved out into the country surrounding Denver. Parker, CO in 2001 was 23,000 now its 58,000. Average income (household) has increased from $74k to $113k. So even if Denver was too Urban for you in 2000 Parker shows how the prosperity flows down.
In LA the poor people used to live in East LA. When it got too expensive in the 70s they moved out to the rural area which was Rancho Cucamonga (other parts of the IE too), now Rancho is getting crazy expensive and I know people who live up the 15 up to Barstow that now commute back to their jobs in Rancho. Today it’s urban but when the spread began it was poor people getting pushed out of their homes that then gentrified the new location.
For another California example I grew up in a small farm in Northern Santa Barbara County. When I left for Denver the population was 77k. As LA has gotten crazy expensive its pushed people first up to Oxnard and then Ventura and then since Santa Barbara is expensive they jumped Santa Barbara and moved to Santa Maria where the population is now 110k. This in turn has grown smaller local towns where Guadalupe, CA was 6,000 and now has grown to 8,000 while average income has gone from $31k to $51k.
To use the example from this thread Bozeman, MT has seen their population from from 27,000 in 2000 to 53,000 and average income grow from $33k to 55k. Boise is seeing a huge round of population growth and gentrification and while it is only “rural” in the sense of being a relatively small city in fly over country there are people getting pushed out into Northern ID and they are seeing a similar story.
We aren’t seeing that story play out in a lot of other parts of the country but we should be encouraging this trend and the infrastructure growth that goes along with it. Having yuppies gentrifying a small town in Wyoming with bring along broadband and increase the job opportunities. Yes, the guy who was living in town and could walk to his burger King job will be worse off when he’s pushed out of town but that town and most of their residents will benefit from the influx in capital and associated infrastructure that the new wealth brings.
I also think there are cultural benefits in a country that is so insanely polarized between coastal people and “flyover” people, to have more mixing of different folk. I think it’s generally a good thing that Californians are moving to Texas and Montana, it is likely beneficial for Californians to interact with Texans directly and vice versa.
Yep, there are a ton of advantages to getting people out of their cultural bubble for more than a weekend or long vacation.
I skipped to the end, but I disagree. People can fuck up California, but don’t bring that stuff here.
I mean, I get that this is a free country and you can come here and buy land. It does suck that land used to be pretty cheap, but you are welcome here and we treat you nice. But you came here for a reason.
You hated the high taxes and the overbearing regulations, but you want to come here and vote for the same damn people that caused you to leave the other state. And I don’t think we need to leave a “bubble.” We are like we are because we like how we live. We don’t need others to tell us how to live anymore than others need us to tell them how to live. Different cultures are just fine.
This is a common, and false, refrain. Most people leaving California are leaving because home prices are too high, which isn’t really a product of excessive taxes and regulation but basically a function of California being so rich that it’s getting harder and harder to live there if you aren’t. Also, if I recall correctly you live in West Virginia, a state I’m quite familiar with–that has some of the highest business taxes and highest regulatory difficulty in establishing a new business of any state in the country. I think it’s one of the few states that still assess B&O taxes on local businesses for example. I also don’t think aside from the area around Morgantown and the eastern panhandle your State is exactly attracting very many refugees from high cost of living areas.
Well…touche. You are right. But there are a lot of people buying up rural land for hunting and camping purposes. Land used to be very cheap here, but is ridiculous now.
People often say it doesn’t harm you if someone else gets richer, that the existence of millionaires doesn’t make you any poorer; yet this seems to show that in some cases it can. Land is a finite resource; housing isn’t in the long term, but in the short term it can be, and housing in convenient or otherwise attractive locations is. If other people get richer and you don’t, they can afford to buy a larger share of it, and there is less available for you.
I’ve heard before that if you are poor then you are better off living in a poor state than a rich one, since the lower cost of living outweighs things like better benefits and higher minimum wage, so I don’t think it should be assumed that more money coming in to the state in the form of new richer residents will necessarily benefit the people already living there. And then there are the less tangible things that are lost: communities, support systems, and connection to and care for a particular environment, as @thorny_locust mentioned.
Hard to see what can be done about it, though.
Urban dwellers have been moving into farm territory since the beginning of the country. The northern part of Manhattan was once farms. Queens was a distant suburb. Factories were sited along rivers at waterfalls to power waterwheels. The famed factory culture of Boston stretched out miles into the countryside as far as New Hampshire. The railroads allowed the well-to-do to commute in, and created the New York and Philadelphia metro areas. Freeways did the same after WWII. People have been studying the shifts and disruptions for a hundred years.
Gentrification wasn’t coined until 1973. It was defined as an urban phenomenon. Virtually all the research done on it has remained urban. I’ve found a bare few references to rural gentrification from recent years and nothing that indicates any result except class stratification and displacement without a concomitant rise in prosperity. And there is no indication that these use a new definition of rural that overlays the well-known metro growth patterns.
Yuppie was from 1982. Nobody says yuppie anymore. Seriously, yuppies are the bad guys?
If you’re going to make an argument using words like “rural” and “gentrification” and “yuppies” in ways other than their common meaning, you’re building a bubble of cherrypicking. I keep asking for cites because I’d like to study for myself what you’re talking about. How about some?
I don’t know that “rural” is really the right word for what the article focuses on. Bozeman is no metropolis, but it’s an actual city, albeit of regional importance rather than national importance. It has a commercial airport with service from all of the major airlines, the state’s largest university, etc. It’s not some rural outpost that has never seen a traffic light.
Edit: And it was already growing rapidly, long before “gentrification” was even a word. There has only been one decade since its founding where its population didn’t grow by more than 10%.
Exactly. No one has been talking about towns of less than 1,000 people because data collection there is horrendous. We could talk about rural counties and Gellatin County certainly counts as rural. Of course, we could also look at places that used to be rural but no longer are due to this effect.
Outside of that I’m afraid that @Exapno_Mapcase is correct this phenomenon has never occurred and probably never will occur and therefore is neither good nor bad.