Beautification is a general term with a general meaning, not necessarily to do with neighborhoods or houses.
But in the context of a comparison with ‘gentrification’ and in view of some of the foregoing posts, maybe ‘beautification’ in this context means a forlorn unrealistic hope that people will invest their own money significantly to improve the housing stock in a neighborhood without expecting a commensurate return in selling price or rent.
That’s not to rule out marginal changes, clean things up, put a new coat of paint here or there, if some organization, which comes down to some dedicated local people, can make that happen where it wasn’t happening before. But in general people crap on their own litter strewn, run down neighborhood in the first place for their own reasons. Not to moralize about that but just to accept reality: it’s not typically people coming from miles away who are littering, tagging, breaking stuff etc.
But again looking at places that were desolate and run down, now are thriving, with big new investment in upgrading the housing stock, but that came along with a demographic change, and say wouldn’t it be great if that had happened without the demographic change: not so realistic IMO.
What is called “gentrification” can only take place in a limited environment. I’ve never read of an example that takes place outside of an older city area that was once desirable because it was close to the center, compact, full of interesting housing and available storefronts, and accessible by public transportation. Of course people want to live there. It’s where people used to want to live and left for contemporary reasons that no longer apply. The same conditions that made these areas desirable in the past are returning and therefore they are regaining their desirability. Why should it matter that other places exist? They don’t have any of these factors and are irrelevant to this discussion.
Moreover, as others have said and you’re ignoring, people with money are not the people who gentrify. They are the people who arrive *after *gentrification takes place. People with money always move to the better neighborhoods. Always. Since the beginning of neighborhoods. The earlier arrivals use sweat equity and often endure years of crime and other problems before their investments take hold. Some, many in certain times and places, are defeated and leave without getting anything at all out of their work.
I don’t have an answer to the plight of poor people. Nobody does. Gentrification is not their problem. People striving to make city neighborhoods better, safer, more livable, more usable, and more attractive to others are not what anybody in the past ever would have thought of as the “problem.” If you think that way, you should have said something all those decades ago when the neighborhoods were abandoned and left to the poor and maybe done something about it then.
To the extent that gentrification involves their being squeezed out of an established home, community and social network, it very much is. The difficulty, though, is how to induce the gentrification of their incomes as well as of their neighbourhoods.
Beautification could only be realistically about the public space and perhaps a bit of pressure on owners and occupants to keep their yard neat and tidy as a small side effort.
This might then lead to gentrification, which means having ordinary - eg middle class - move in.
Not really the point: the point is that it is better to have somewhere secure to live rather than have no place to live. The USA has a lot of people living in cars, almost any building however run-down, if peaceful, is going to be better to vegetate in.
‘Improvement’ and pushing people out for economic reasons is pure bolshevism — as was last practiced on a large scale by Ceaușescu.
As for the richer interlopers who want to take over there is a very simple solution: instead of feeding them into decaying Detroit or wherever, simply redirect them to places they can build up with their own two hands and take pride in ownership: with financial and tax inducements they can revitalise settlements and create healthy communities of rich folk unthreatened by crime, or even decay, Like Gated Communities without the gates.
I refer of course to the fact that America has tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of once thriving GhostTowns — rather on the Chinese model ( except Americans give grief to the Chinese for it, whilst ignoring the beam in their own eye ) — which with a little work and co-operation could be made nice again. Powerful broadband could be laid on so instead of working directly at the Stock Exchanges in a major city they do their business from home, or run home businesses ( many women seem to have started successful baby and wedding sites ), or work programming, uploading to GIT or Atlassian etc. who don’t have to be in a 1000 miles of where you are.
If a richer community is made, the Starbucks etc. will follow.
When Jonathan Swift wrote *A Modest Proposal *he didn’t hate the Irish, he was mocking the British opinion of them. He provided a great number of actual proposals for ameliorating their plight. That’s what turned it into great literature rather than stupid swipes at the less fortunate. You might want to keep that model in mind in the future.
True of owners, not renters. I live in an urban area that’s called ‘gentrified’ though 30 yrs ago when we moved in people were saying ‘boy this place has gentrified compared to just a few years ago!’…and now they say the same thing. The idea that it’s one single event rather than a continuum is questionable, like a lot of other simplified media type social trend conversations.
Anyway we’re fortunate all around, and no pretense of having been ‘pioneers’ or ‘deserving’ anything because we moved in earlier than somebody else or any such nonsense. But I have friends with the kind of late working age poor employment prospects that are often scary in today’s economy, but at least their houses are worth >$1mil, even relatively run down. For others I know who didn’t bite the bullet and buy, or just couldn’t, back when (parents of my grown kids’ friends when they were little, mostly), too expensive now to rent here.
Making this into a morality play though IMO is silly. As other post said, it’s market for land (where it’s located), so asking why people don’t build nice neighborhoods in the middle of nowhere is missing a basic point. The stranger thing in hindsight for my area, almost literally in the shadow of the NY skyline, is why it was worth so much less a few decades ago and especially a notably smaller fraction of Manhattan and Brooklyn land prices than now. Now it’s rationalized somewhat, and it’s far more expensive. Then if people are going to build or nicely renovate on that land, a separate step, they aren’t going to do it for the prospect of lower rents or sale prices.
All the non-commercial minded people who don’t get this, think of whether you’d contribute to your 401k or the equivalent at the university or the govt office etc where you work to have it given away. I don’t think you do. You probably give some to charity, but a separate delineated and fairly small % I’d guess. If it’s that’s mainly what you do with the money you don’t need for immediate consumption, you’re unusual. Investing in a 401 in stocks expecting a return is not fundamentally different then building/renovating real estate expecting a return. The idea of blaming people for seeking a return on capital is ridiculous, and one would have thought everybody would realize it by now.
Don’t expect people to make sense. The property values in my area have been rising since about 2009 and I constantly hear people complain about it, even homeowners, because the “kids can’t afford to buy a house in the neighborhood”. When they are asked if they will sell their home for $250K when they could get $500K ( so someone else’s kid can afford a house in the neighborhood), they are dumbfounded.
I think you might be misremembering. I’ve been running in city planning/urban geography circles for 40 years now, and I’ve never heard “beautification” for any process by which the inhabitants of a neighborhood change. We’ve called the turnover of poor neighborhoods to wealthier newcomers “gentrification” since at least the early 1970s.
It seems the same people gentrification attracts to the neighborhoods are the types that have a negative opinion of gentrification as well… its puzzling.
That is often the cause of NIMBYism in Britain, young professionals and comfortable retirees settle in old quaint villages, then pull up the drawbridge and demand no further expansion.
And they cover the quaint old houses with plasticized paint, plastic gew-gaws from the garden-centre, and well-mown lawns so the cottage looks no part of historic regional context.
I think my critics here maybe have little practical knowledge of life in the real world.
I can’t shed any tears over gentrification. The opposite happened to my neighborhood in Brooklyn in the late 60’s. A newer group of renters arrived and unlike the tenants who were already there, did not take care of their apartments or the area. Also, they also didn’t seem to grasp some basic economics, in that if you have a low income, (like almost everyone else who was already living there) you don’t have numerous children whom you cannot seem to parent. The area decayed in a very short span of time. The original tenants left to be replaced by more of the newer type tenants. The area became a horror. No one shed a tear for those of us forced to leave. Yes, forced. With neighbors leaving garbage in the halls you either fight them (that happened), complain to the landlords who did nothing, or get out of Dodge.
40+ years later, that same neighborhood has been turned around and even improved from when he lived there. I could barely afford to live there and I’m upper middle class. I say more power to the hipsters and the like who took a chance, held off having kids , and put money into improvements, buying some of the more dilapidated properties, opening those shops others have mentioned.
As other people have hinted at, there are no “original” residents of a city neighborhood, as they have been going through cycles since they were built. To give a Chicago example, Latinos are facing gentrification in the Pilsen and Humboldt Park neighborhoods, but the very names of the neighborhoods indicate they weren’t originally Latino. :smack:
Many of the Chicago neighborhoods now gentrifying were originally middle class – look at the size and quality of the surviving Victorian houses facing the boulevards and large parks – and are merely returning to being middle class. As someone else noted, they were built as houses, were subdivided into apartments, and are now beihg restored to single-family or less-crowded housing.
I respectfully disagree with the poster who said developers would build new condos in gentrifying areas if they legally could. Chicago has plenty of high-rises and condos, and plenty being built, and there’s still a demand for older houses in gentrifying neighborhoods. There’s a market that wants to live in old houses in the city and is willing to pay for them.
It seems to me the current wave of gentrification is the reversal of white flight to the suburbs. During the white flight, much of the middle class couldn’t tolerate racially diverse neighborhoods. Now the middle class not only can, but diversity makes a neighborhood more desirable for many. So those neighborhoods whose property values were suppressed because of diversity no longer are.
Sure, we wouldn’t want people with steady incomes and families moving into the neighborhood.
I’ve seen this phenomenon first hand in the various towns lining the Hudson River from Jersey City through Hoboken, Weehawken, Edgewater up to Fort Lee. Relators call it the “Gold Coast” because of the rising property values.
On the plus side, many of these towns are no longer crime-infested crap holes. There was a time in Hoboken where you didn’t venture very far from Washington Street. Now the entire town is more or less pretty nice. Especially as old factories and firetrap apartments are replaced or converted.
The down side is that some of these towns are losing their character. All along the Hudson they are building what I call “yuppie ghettos” - overpriced Toll Brother’s 12 story condos and 20+ story residential towers. These are largely self-contained buildings that remind me of the J. G. Ballard book High Rise. Although there are still neighborhoods like Grove Street in JC and most of Hoboken that still have that walkable “neighborhood” feel, with lots of cafes and restaurants and bars.