# Your views on Gentrification



## Suburbanist (Dec 25, 2009)

Assuming a country provides opportunities for people of all origins (poor or rich, provided they are citizens and not illegal immigrants), and that a city doesn't hb pockets of slum or the like, why would it be of any difference if people of different incomes live or don't live in close quarters in the same streets or economically segregated in large homogenous neighborhoods?


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## Slartibartfas (Aug 15, 2006)

Suburbanist said:


> Assuming a country provides opportunities for people of all origins (poor or rich, provided they are citizens and not illegal immigrants), and that a city doesn't hb pockets of slum or the like, why would it be of any difference if people of different incomes live or don't live in close quarters in the same streets or economically segregated in large homogenous neighborhoods?


Because it makes a difference if you have extreme segregation or not. The average quality and state of maintenance across all places of a city is worse in a highly segregated city than in a mixed one, even if you have in both scenarios the same overall number of poor, middle class and rich people. Mixed neighborhoods are not merely the average of the people that live there, but are better than that average.

Poor ghettos grow crime, but in a mixed city they don't exist, which does not eliminate crime but lead to lower overall crime rates. 


Another argument is that highly segregated cities are very inefficient by leading to longer distances as the working class also has many jobs in wealthy areas but has to commute from far away places. In a mixed city also poor people can live closer to where they work even if that's in services for wealthier people. But hey, if you want to see how great an excessively segregated city is, why no visiting Johannesburg?


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## 009 (Nov 28, 2007)

To me it depends how it looks after the "gentrification" is done. If crumbling buildings/roads/sidewalks are restored, or really ugly buildings are replaced with attractive ones, of course it's a good thing to me. On the other hand, tearing down interesting or beautiful old buildings and replacing them with bland new ones takes a lot of the character and beauty away from a place.

On a side note, if adding greenery is considered gentrification too, then it's always a good thing in my view


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## svicious22 (Nov 16, 2011)

I am generally very pro-gentrification with a few qualifications. Gentrification that replaces unique neighborhood businesses with chain businesses is undesirable, and gentrification that leads to cheap, low-character housing being thrown up in the name of real estate developers making a quick buck by capitalizing on the popularity of newly trendy neighborhoods is terrible for gentrified neighborhoods in the long run.


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## alexandru.mircea (May 18, 2011)

Impressive Guardian investigation on a case of gentrification based on residential redevelopment in public-private partnership: http://www.theguardian.com/society/...tion-how-woodberry-down-became-woodberry-park


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## Mr Bricks (May 6, 2005)

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/05/peril-hipster-economics-2014527105521158885.html

"On May 16, an artist, a railway service and a government agency spent $291,978 to block poverty from the public eye.

Called psychylustro, German artist Katharina Grosse's project is a large-scale work designed to distract Amtrak train riders from the dilapidated buildings and fallen factories of north Philadelphia. The city has a 28 percent poverty rate - the highest of any major US city - with much of it concentrated in the north. In some north Philadelphia elementary schools, nearly every child is living below the poverty line.

Grosse partnered with the National Endowment of the Arts and Amtrak to mask North Philadelphia's hardship with a delightful view. The Wall Street Journal calls this "Fighting Urban Blight With Art". Liz Thomas, the curator of the project, calls it "an experience that asks people to think about this space that they hurtle through every day". 

The project is not actually fighting blight, of course - only the ability of Amtrak customers to see it.

"I need the brilliance of colour to get close to people, to stir up a sense of life experience and heighten their sense of presence," Grosse proclaims.

"People", in Grosse and Thomas's formulation, are not those who actually live in north Philadelphia and bear the brunt of its burdens. "People" are those who can afford to view poverty through the lens of aesthetics as they pass it by.

Urban decay becomes a set piece to be remodeled or romanticised. This is hipster economics.

Influx of hipsters

In February, director Spike Lee delivered an impassioned critique - derisively characterised as a "rant" by US media outlets - on the gentrification of New York city. Arguing that an influx of "... hipsters" had driven up rent in most neighbourhoods - and in turn driven out the African-American communities that once called them home - he noted how long-dormant city services suddenly reappeared:

"Why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better? The garbage wasn't picked up every ... day when I was living in 165 Washington Park... So, why did it take this great influx of white people to get the schools better? Why's there more police protection in Bed Stuy and Harlem now? Why's the garbage getting picked up more regularly? We been here!"

Lee was criticised by many for "hipster-bashing", including African-American professor John McWhorter, who claimed that "hipster" was "a sneaky way of saying '******'" and compared Lee to television character George Jefferson.

These dismissals, which focus on gentrification as culture, ignore that Lee's was a critique of the racist allocation of resources. Black communities whose complaints about poor schools and city services go unheeded find these complaints are readily addressed when wealthier, whiter people move in. Meanwhile, long-time locals are treated as contagions on the landscape, targeted by police for annoying the new arrivals.

Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.

Proponents of gentrification will vouch for its benevolence by noting it "cleaned up the neighbourhood". This is often code for a literal white-washing. The problems that existed in the neighbourhood - poverty, lack of opportunity, struggling populations denied city services - did not go away. They were simply priced out to a new location.

That new location is often an impoverished suburb, which lacks the glamour to make it the object of future renewal efforts. There is no history to attract preservationists because there is nothing in poor suburbs viewed as worth preserving, including the futures of the people forced to live in them. This is blight without beauty, ruin without romance: payday loan stores, dollar stores, unassuming homes and unpaid bills. In the suburbs, poverty looks banal and is overlooked.

In cities, gentrifiers have the political clout - and accompanying racial privilege - to reallocate resources and repair infrastructure. The neighbourhood is "cleaned up" through the removal of its residents. Gentrifiers can then bask in "urban life" - the storied history, the selective nostalgia, the carefully sprinkled grit - while avoiding responsibility to those they displaced.

Hipsters want rubble with guarantee of renewal. They want to move into a memory they have already made.

Impoverished suburbs

In a sweeping analysis of displacement in San Francisco and its increasingly impoverished suburbs, journalist Adam Hudson notes that "gentrification is trickle-down economics applied to urban development: the idea being that as long as a neighbourhood is made suitable for rich and predominantly white people, the benefits will trickle down to everyone else". Like trickle-down economics itself, this theory does not play out in practice.

Rich cities such as New York and San Francisco have become what journalist Simon Kuper calls gated citadels: "Vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself."

Struggling US cities of the rust belt and heartland lack the investment of coastal contemporaries, but have in turn been spared the rapid displacement of hipster economics. Buffered by their eternal uncoolness, these slow-changing cities have a chance to make better choices - choices that value the lives of people over the aesthetics of place.

In an April blog post, Umar Lee, a St Louis writer and full-time taxi driver, bemoaned the economic model of rideshare services, which are trying to establish themselves in the city. Noting that they hurt not only taxi drivers but poor residents who have neither cars nor public transport and thus depend on taxis willing to serve dangerous neighbourhoods, he dismisses Uber and Lyft as hipster elitists masquerading as innovators:

"I've heard several young hipsters tell me they're socially-liberal and economic-conservative, a popular trend in American politics," he writes. "Well, I hate to break it to you buddy, but it's economics and the role of the state that defines politics. If you're an economic conservative, despite how ironic and sarcastic you may be or how tight your jeans are, you, my friend, are a conservative …"

Lee tells me he has his own plan to try to mitigate the negative effects of gentrification, which he calls "50-50-20-15". All employers who launch businesses in gentrifying neighbourhoods should have a workforce that is at least 50 percent minorities, 50 percent people from the local neighbourhood, and 20 percent ex-offenders. The employees should be paid at least $15 per hour.

Gentrification spreads the myth of native incompetence: That people need to be imported to be important, that a sign of a neighbourhood's "success" is the removal of its poorest residents. True success lies in giving those residents the services and opportunities they have long been denied.

When neighbourhoods experience business development, priority in hiring should go to locals who have long struggled to find nearby jobs that pay a decent wage. Let us learn from the mistakes of New York and San Francisco, and build cities that reflect more than surface values."



From the comments section:

"Hipster economics are standard economics because hipsters are everything the US economy has ever wished for in one convenient package. It's a group consisting largely of young, upper-middle class people with very little conviction, who will spend large amounts of money to maintain their own comfort and the appearance of diversity and rebellion. They are activists as long as it's easy, poor as long as it doesn't involve dirt or hunger, and selfless as long as they don't stand to lose anything. They represent the sanitizing of national issues so that they can be discussed without being addressed. And all you have to do to control them is use some reverse psychology. They're not rebels, they're not even malicious, because they're not anything except a bunch of kids playing pretend. They'll eventually grow up and become bankers, lawyers and politicians, just like their parents"


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## Eric Offereins (Jan 1, 2004)

hiding a problem from public view is not a solution.

In my city we have had years of accumulation of social housing and urban areas with 50%plus unemployment.

Last 2 decades we are in the process of compensation for all the middle and upper class lost to the suburbs.
We do this by building for middle class in these urban areas, constructing residential skyscrapers and also by distributing the poor and and the newcomers (refugees) over the suburbs and set maxmum numbers for these people in each urban neigborhood.


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## alexandru.mircea (May 18, 2011)

> "I’ve been photographing the streets and subways of New York for the past 30 years. When young people today look at my shots from the 1980’s, they are aghast. To them, New York of the 1980’s is almost unrecognizable. And they are right.
> 
> Some older people are nostalgic for “the good old days.” For example, they remember the Times Square of the 80’s… And what they remember is not so much the danger but the grittiness and (for lack of a better word) the authenticity. Yes, there was sleaze, but there were also video arcades, cheap movies, restaurants, and weird places. These same people resent the “Disney-ification” of Times Square and the gentrification of virtually all of Manhattan and many areas of the boroughs, and the loss of cheap housing and local stores everywhere.
> 
> ...


https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevensiegel/sets/72157626376913418/#


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## Chicagoago (Dec 2, 2005)

I love it personally. Everything is a cycle and everything is dynamic at the end of the day. At least here in Chicago most of the areas undergoing strong gentrification were upscale or nice middle class areas originally and into the 1950's, then sunk down and became low income and falling apart, and now are oncee again being rebuilt into more upscale areas. Evolving as the market dictates.

nothing is "original". If you look back over the years almost all neighborhoods older than 50 years have evolved at least once or twice.


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## Mr Bricks (May 6, 2005)

It's not about that. It's about turning city centres into sterile, corporate places dominated by chain stores and gucci ghettos. It'a about excluding people, displacing them and chasing them to the city edges.


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## billfranklin (Jan 28, 2007)

No one has the right to equal housing. This concept did not even work in the Soviet Union where the "privileged" had rights to "better government housing."

Environments evolve, and, money moves where there is opportunity to make more money. 

I, however, do believe that in many US urban cores, that an almost Latin America style juxtaposition of the wealth and poverty is occurring, with rich, well policed, enclaves sitting next to underclass areas.

This is what gentrification does.

The keys, IMO, are to encourage and educate the underclass into how to leverage their assets well while providing property tax relief to those same underclass home owners over a 5 to 10 year period. This will provide both the opportunity for properties to increase in value, and, the time for residents to move at a profit.


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## alexandru.mircea (May 18, 2011)

billfranklin said:


> No one has the right to equal housing.


This isn't about rights, it's about economics and pragmatism. For the economy to keep growing, especially in our age when economy is not one of heavy industry anymore, you need vibrant & creative cities. When regenerating a city, you need to make sure that students, young entreprenours, artists, teachers, etc. can still live in. Secondly, if you split the haves from the have nots, the poor will find themselves grouped together (just further away), and poverty only exacerbates itself when concentrated, therefore creating a needless economical problem because it increases your social spending and creates the need for regenerating that place in the future, after it has been run down by poverty. 

So, regeneration: yes, but gentrification: no.


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