The rich aren’t moving in and gentrifying neighborhoods. They can already live in the nicest neighborhoods. It’s the younger middle class folks. Probably their first home. Their income and their savings means that they can’t afford to buy those houses in the suburbs that Mom and Dad had. So they buy a cheaper home. Now they can pick between being way out in the far edges of suburbia, or in a condo, or they can move into a cheaper neighborhood.
Start by asking, Why did people move out of central cities in the first place?
Housing barely grew in the 1930s and 1940s because of the Depression and war. Population did. By the 1950s, every city had enormous housing shortages. That was made doubly worse by a flood of marriages and the baby boom, when the number of babies born each year rose by 50%. Suburbs had plenty of room, land was cheap there, and families could afford cars. Cities that had been growing for a hundred years emptied out, many of them losing half their population.
Blacks were deliberately barred from most suburban housing developments and from getting bank loans in the cities (see redlining). “White flight” had a huge element of racism in it. The hollowed out cities therefore had majority minority populations of people who had historically been kept to the lowest level of jobs. With fewer and poorer people paying taxes, cities and schools crumbled. Crime went up along with a major drug epidemic. Cities became bad places to live for a generation.
But cities have always had advantages, the same ones that lured people off farms. They were innovative, culturally exciting, provided public transportation, incubated interesting jobs, and tolerated differences. The suburbs were seen as sterile, isolated, and anti-individualistic. Some people trickled back into cities, at least when they were young and didn’t have to worry about school systems. They usually were not at all rich. They bought properties that were cheap and distressed and put in years of sweat labor. Over time neighborhoods revitalized. Housing improved, stores opened, jobs appeared. That brought more and more people who didn’t want to be pioneers. This has had good and bad results, depending on the individuals affected.
That’s gentrification. It started in the biggest cities, like New York, and now has worked its way across the Rust Belt. I saw the first stabs at gentrification fail miserably here in Rochester in the 1980s. Today several areas are hip as all get out. Yelp’s Hottest Hipster Markets in America puts one in Rochester fifth in the nation. (Nobody in Rochester believes this, but it feels nice.)
Where are these hipsters coming from? The suburbs. That’s it. The whole story. Instead of young families moving out, young childless people are moving in. What happens when they marry and have kids? Rochester schools are disasters and Rochester suburbs are nationally ranked. There better be some new youngsters coming along or the gentrification will vanish overnight.
The suburbs. The previous generation in the US, the white middle/upper class, fled the nasty cities that were full of poor non-white people and crime, to the nice suburbs.
Suddenly they realized the suburbs sucks, the commutes were too long, and actually cities were, rather than being distopian crime-ridden wastelands, are actually cool places to live. So they decided to move back.
Well. The crime rate is less than half what it was when the suburban flight period was in full swing. In addition, the United States as a whole is immensely richer than it was in 1960. The distribution does mean nearly all the gains go to to the 1%, but some of the wealth has gone to lower tiers. So the cities have nicer buildings and more policing than they used to have and the gentrification itself has pushed many of the poor people out of the cities.
I would say this is it. Older people I know aren’t leaving the suburbs for the city, but plenty of young people are graduating and going out there when they leave their suburban nest. At least in Cleveland and Akron. Downtown Cleveland is revitalized and it’s 100% suited for young professionals and artists.
I live in a suburb of Kansas City but am tired of mowing grass, fixing the roof, and all the general chores that make up owning a home. I wouldn’t mind living in somecondos like they have downtown Kansas City. These offer all the benefits of home ownership (property increases in value) with the benefits of an apartment plus is near many exciting places. They also have parking, security, and some their own gyms and activity areas.
The downer of that area is a lack of nice grocery stores or “Walmart” type general stores in general meaning you have to drive somewhere to get a gallon of milk.
In the Bay Area, where I live, it’s not that rich people are moving here, it’s that people move here to become rich. Gentrification is being driven by the tech boom, and there isn’t enough housing for the number of people who have come here. The result is that tech employees are moving into poorer neighborhoods and driving the prices up.
I read an Atlantic article that said from 2000-2014, the % of blacks who live in cities has dropped from 41% down to 36%, meanwhile the % who live in suburbs increased from 33% to 39%.
So I assume that is who is being displaced by gentrification. As to who replaces them, probably white people from the suburbs. I honestly don’t know who is behind gentrification but I assume college educated whites under 40.
I’ve also read a lot of millennials are picking smaller apartments due to affordability. So not all the gentrification is from the upper middle class. A lot is middle class millennials who live in micro apartments.
Yes but those people could live in nearby cities instead like Tracy or Santa Rosa and commute to San Francisco for work.
Why are they wanting to actually live in the city proper? I guess for the culture and social atmosphere.
I think that in DC, and probably other places, the first wave of gentrifiers were gay men, who were fleeing the intolerance of rural areas. They didn’t have children, so had money and time to fix up old houses, which made neighborhoods appealing to other young people, and so on…
Commuting from Santa Rosa or Tracy to San Francisco or Oakland is pretty awful. The drive can take an hour and a half or two hours each way. Most people don’t want to spend that much time in their cars.
Plus young people can get together to share some of these places, which people with families can’t do.
In San Francisco a lot of the hot new jobs are in the city as opposed to Santa Clara County, which increased the coolness of the place, and led even people who worked in Silicon Valley to want to live there. You can’t blame them, San Jose is still not really a happening place.
BTW, this isn’t limited to the US. Before my daughter went to Mongolia on vacation, I read an article in the Times about the boom in Ulan Bator, and how many of those moving there from the countryside couldn’t afford it.
Not that much of a question about what motivates these folks, though.
Here in Austin, the area just East of downtown Austin used to be overwhelmingly Mexican. Now? Yuppies as far as the eye can see. Blacks and Mexicans are priced out of downtown and are getting more suburban.
I was taken aback that you use the term “yuppies.” I think of that as a relic from the 1980s. In fact, The New Republic just ran an article on how different the modern version are from the older one.
Here in Dallas, the gentrification seems to be happening mostly by young couples with two professional-type incomes. Typically they have no kids or one kid and are on the younger side and very interested in a certain hip urban lifestyle. So they move into the areas like Ross Avenue, the Cedars, or N. Oak Cliff, displacing the primarily Hispanic residents who used to live there. For whatever reason, gentrification isn’t getting anywhere near the predominantly black areas around here.
Most younger people with similar or even higher incomes that either have more children or less interest in the urban lifestyle tend to live either in the far outer suburbs (think McKinney/Frisco/Keller/Wylie) or they live in closer, older suburbs like Lake Highlands or the cheaper parts of Lakewood and Preston Hollow.
Actual gentrification is the action of moderately well-off not rich people. They move to the margins of acceptable living, which were run down and now recently renovated buildings, because the poor location made the accommodations much cheaper than where the rich people live. Then as the area becomes more a middle class neighbourhood and less of a poor one, richer and richer people move in.
This is what happened to Greenwich Village and then SoHo, and then each other Manhattan neighbourhood and now encroaching on Harlem. Greenwich was where the artists and other poor people went - because it was cheap. They turned it from poor into interesting. Then more and more bigger money moved in because it was the trendy place to be, until now hoses are in the millions and movie stars have houses there.
So the answer typically is - it’s new people moving out or changing cities as much as anything.
Gentrification takes several forms. In big old cities like London, money moves around over time as the housing need of the population changes. In the past decade or so, some very poor parts of London have changed quite dramatically due to changes in the UK economy. This has gone from one based on industry to being dominated by services. That requires a workforce that has all of those soft skills and the government encouraged univeristies to expand dramatically and there has been a huge boom in the numbers of youngsters studying for university degrees. Those institutions are concentrated in the centre of the city and this has led to some very poor inner city areas suddenly becoming very popular with young middle class students.
It is quite remarkable to see some of poorest areas being invaded by all these bright young things, the sons and daughters of middle classes, settling in some of the grimmest parts of the city. The locals, who are often poor and many second or third generation immigrants, look on with an odd sort of bemusement. These kids are all very young and they seem to have money to spend and the certainly bring life to an otherwise depressed area. The cafes and restaurants are certainly pleased to take their money and anyone who has property and is a landlord sees great demand, even for the most neglected dump. Middle class kids love living in a slum for a few years, putting some distance between themselves and the cosy suburban tastes of their parents. The downside is that the rabid partying is also an opportunity for drug dealers and thieves keen to sell party drugs or steal laptops. The locals have little in common with these kids, but they prefer having them around spending their money rather than social venues dominated by local gansters and lowlives.
For the students, they are between 18 and their early twenties and they are having fun. For them the downside is that the degree they get may not qualify them for any sort of technical or professional job and they may well face several years after university doing low paid work in call centres or as unpaid interns, much to the consternation of their parents. Often they just go back to university and do another degree. Some spend their twenties and into their thirties becoming academically more qualified but only marginally more employable. When they do get a decent job they find it hard to raise the money to buy an apartment and have come to be known morosely as ‘generation rent’ and have to deal with neglectful landlords and share apartments in a rough area of town for far too many years. They carry a great burden of student loan debt at levels that have never been see before in the UK. Student debt is a fairly recent phenomenon in the UK, it is no where near US levels, but people are becoming quite concerned that it is impoverishing the younger generation quite unfairly. Their parents, well a popular investment is in buying property to rent to students!
This is just one type of gentrification. Thirty-something couples with professional jobs looking for an affordable apartment to begin a family is another. They too are victims of poor housing and they get themselves into huge debt to buy their first home. The often settle in innercity areas, but choose those that have a stock of old, big houses with gardens from previous times when a now run down area may have been wealthy in the past. The buildings get renovated and the area gets a new, articulate middle class. Some of the locals may feel marginalised by the culture and tastes they bring, but they are happy to sell their property to them for a tidy sum.
This sort of ‘population churn’ happens every generation or so and it depends on long term economic factors and how they affect different areas. Some people speculate on the next ‘up and coming’ area of London live and buy property there in the hope that it will rise in value and provide them with a valuable nest egg. On a larger scale city planners and big property developers try to sell their over priced apartments in aspirational terms that appeal to young professionals. Only a few actually invest in improving the public realm, most simply want to make a fast buck.
The property market in London is pretty dysfunctional and has been neglected by government for many decades and it blights the life of the city. Gentrification is very localised symptom of this malaise.
I concede that “yuppie” is a dated term, but I think you grasp my meaning anyway. What used to be Mexican neighborhoods filled with big families are now filled with young, well off childless white couples.
Call them something other than yuppies, if you like, but the show seems to fit.
You say show, I say shoe, let’s call the whole thing off. 