I’ve decided to try my hand at writing my first article for Cracked!.
Being fascinated by the topic of Gentrification, I’d like to research an article entitled “ High-Rent Districts That Used to Be Slums.” This is where I need the Dope’s help! I’ll do the research, you just give me the starting points. Here’s what I’ve got so far:
New Orleans, French Quarter. Then: A seedy, run-down district of strip clubs, porn shops, drug dealers, and other businesses of ill repute. Now: Well, basically the same thing, but with considerable gentrification.
Paris, Latin Quarter. Then: Site of crushing poverty that was so terrible it led to a failed revolution that inspired a Broadway musical. Now: Not unlike the rest of Paris-- sky-high rent, long waiting lists for apartments, etc.
New York: Upper West Side. Then: Tenements warehousing immigrants. Now: It’s the Upper West Side. 'Nuff said.
The Cabrini Green area in Chicago, which one of the most notorious projects in the country, is in the process of gentrifying. The last building of the projects was closed in the last year or so and new high-end condos are going in.
Hoboken, NJ, a ten-minute subway ride from Manhattan (and where I would live if it were cheaper now). Started as a nice residential and commercial town in the early 19th century; became a solidly middle class blue-collar town by mid-20th century, then a crime-ridden slum by the 1960s, when the shipping industry left.
Gentrification started in the 1980s, and now it is “the West West Village,” an artsy, lovely brownstone town way too pricey for Yours Truly.
Historically, Old Town (often said to be the very first neighborhood in Chicago that gentrified), Lincoln Park and Lake View
More recently, Wicker Park, Logan Square and the South Loop, Edgewater and now Uptown.
What I particularly love is the name game. There’s a small part of Uptown which has been called “Buena Park” for decades. Now that gentrification is under way, a startling number of listings in all of Uptown are now saying they’re in Buena Park…even if they aren’t in Buena Park.
Uptown’s kind of an interesting one, I think. It had a huge hey day as entertainment district to the rich. It was Al Capone’s stomping ground, full of ritz and glamor and awesome jazz clubs. Then it gradually changed and became one of the “worst” neighborhoods on the North Side. Now gentrification is attempting to get a foothold again. It’s not gentrified yet, but it’s on its way…except it has an alderman who is really dedicated to serving the homeless HIV mentally ill and/or drug addict population. So you’ve got crazy sick people on the street where high end developers are trying to bring in the yuppies to look at (and buy) luxury condos. The developers, of course, want the riff-raff out, but the alderman keeps funding to the free and low cost clinics and nursing homes flowing, so they’re not going anywhere. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
The slummiest of the slums (Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside) is well on the way.
Furnished rooms that used to rent for welfare-scaled rates (because after all, they’re in the worst slum in Canada) are being reno’d and presented as condos or “posh” rental apartments.
The Dutch Maastricht Stokstraatkwartier used to be, untill the fifties, the worst inner city slum in Maastricht. The houses they inhabited were in essence, still medieval. In the fifties, all the people living there were evicted and offered housing in a social housing project in a suburb in Maastricht, Wittevrouwenveld. Two generations later, even though the housing there was fine, luxurious even for that time, that part of town is still the worst, and is even in the list of 25 worst slums in the Netherlands, the Vogelaarwijken.
Back to the Stokstraatkwartier. In an enormous renovation, the medieval houses in the neighbourhood were lovingly and expensively renovated into the third chiqest shopping area of the Netherlands.
Harlem is definitely the first place that came to mind.
It wasn’t really a slum, but in Orlando, the 2,600 acres that formerly constituted the Naval Training Center just east of downtown have been redeveloped as a ritzy pastiche village called Baldwin Park.
Washington, DC has a number of neighborhoods that would seem to fit the bill. Columbia Heights ten or fifteen years ago was fairly grim; it’s not difficult, now, to drop $1800/month on a studio apartment. Ditto for U Street, though it’s been a major nightlife corridor for decades.
The H Street corridor (in Northeast) is an interesting case. It used to be an exceedingly depressed area, with an adjacent neighborhood (Trinidad) earning brief notoriety in 2008 when vehicular traffic was blocked off following a rash of drive-by shootings. The housing sector is still fairly depressed (though some high-end apartments and condos are coming in near the Union Station end), but a lot of somewhat-eccentric bars and restaurants have opened over the past five or six years, and H Street has become a thriving night-spot. (It’d be a stretch to call it DC’s Williamsburg, but there’s some of the same vibe). When the streetcar service opens up in a year or two, I expect housing will take off drastically.
Yeah, and don’t forget Chinatown in DC (although I hate what it has become). I’m live in DC and grew up in the area, I’m constantly in upscale neighborhoods in DC now and saying to my wife “I used to buy pot on the corners here.”
With the rebirth of America’s cities that has been underway, lots and lots of neighborhoods are candidates for the article.
How exactly do you define “slum”? And how high should the rent be now to meet your classification?
San Francisco is a city with a lot of gentrification, I think because it has limited area for expansion, and a lot of highly-paid people want to live close to the business center. The Lower Haight, for example, though I don’t know if I would’ve called it a 'slum" before, and I don’t know how high the rents are now.
San Diego virtually fabricated its “historic” and Gas Lamp district for tourism (mostly a business area, with restaurants, etc.) Before, it was the flop-house/prostitution/drug center of the city. They threw out all the bums and whores, and overnight it became the “quaint” part of San Diego, where tourists can spend their money at over-rated restaurants.
I’ve always been a believer that its the people who make slums, not the slums that make people.
I’ve seen squalid S**t holes become gentrified and the most sought after place to live in town.
I’ve also seen custom built housing developments, landscaped and decorated in bright colours with every amenity going, in a short time become nasty little human cesspits.