Discussion for article #231675
Gentrification is bad. Except when I do it. Then itâs really good.
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This is why I donât understand why so many people go out of their way to tear down Tyler Perry and his movies. Even if you donât like his films, heaven forbid a black child be able to see depictions of educated upper middle class professional black adults and believe itâs an entirely expected state of normal, the way white children get to every day on TV or film screen.
So much of the anti-gentrification rants come across as bourgeoisie white kids complaining that theyâve had their self constructed and contrived âauthentic experiencesâ taken away from them (and the value they put into them for their own carefully crafted self image and identity as worldly and hip) at the expense of projecting and defining a very limited existence and narrow scope of possibilities for minorities.
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Something about this article rubs me the wrong way. The âI-Got-Mineâ type of narcissism perhaps. I donât find fault with her wanting an upwardly mobile lifeâŚWe all want that. And frankly, I donât give a shit what type of shoes she wears. Why she mentions that âtwiceâ is beyond me. Maybe this is why:
http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/manolo-blahnik
Caviar Dreams Baby!!!
Sorry lady, I canât relate.
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The stats back this up, the three biggest drivers in reducing crime are education, immigration and gentrification. Look it up. White people might not like educating non-whites, but it works. White people might not like brown folks coming here, but immigration works too. And lots of folks donât like gentrification, but it works as well.
Yep this article strikes me as one long humble-brag. Minus the humble.
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I was kind of struck by her suggestion that her professional dress meant that people should assume she was a transplant and not originally from the area. It seems to imply that she expects people to assume that no-one native to the neighborhood could make it good and become a professional, that being a professional and a native to the neighborhood are somehow incompatible.
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Yeah, but I canât show off how cool and bohemian I am to all my friends if the people living in my neighborhood are living comfortable middle class lives.
Sorry minorities, Iâll need you and your children to stay in poverty because it helps my image and show off to everyone how Iâve broken free from the chains of bourgeois suburbia. Priorities.
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From what I understand part of the problem with gentrification is suppose to be that those people living the comfortable middle class lives in the neighborhood arenât the same people that were living in the neighborhood when the bohemians show up. You start with a poor neighborhood that the bohemian types move into for whatever reason, which makes the neighborhood âtrendyâ or âcool.â This attracts more middle class people to the neighborhood, which in turn provides provides an influx of cash into the neighborhood which attracts even more middle class people. This causes housing prices to rise, which displaces the poor people, until you end up with a neighborhood which was once poor but is now primarily middle class, however the poor folk who had been living their previously, for the most part, arenât the ones getting to enjoy the neighborhoods new found success as they have, again for the most part, been priced out and forced to move somewhere cheaper. So you end up with a situation where poor people canât have nice neighborhoods, because if they make the neighborhood nice you start getting wealthier people moving into the neighborhood driving up prices and pricing them out of their homes. A sort of real-estate catch twenty-two.
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This broad defines âhigh maintenanceâ.
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That was my feeling too. I donât have any real objections to gentrification per se. While it is sad that people are priced out of their own homes, the community benefits enormously from being cleaned up. As mentioned above, most of the complaints against gentrification seem to come from hipsters who didnât grow up in the projects, but rather moved there voluntarily. There is a reason that hipsters are considered the first stage of gentrification despite the fact that they rail against it.
Mostly the article just felt like bragging to me. âLook how awesome I am! Of course I am different from those people. The oneâs who grew up here.â You never know, maybe the cabby was hoping to see a native daughter made good.
And FYI, turning on your phone when some one is just trying to be nice and make small talk⌠super-bitchy. I actually like talking to my cab drivers. Meet some interesting people that way.
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I wonder a little what this complaint says about stereotypes of people born and raised in the east village. Is it beyond conception that a black or hispanic kid born and raised there would go to college and law school and still want to live where they grew up?
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But if the people that make up the community are priced out of their homes and forced to move somewhere just as poor as their old community in order to be replaced by people from other already well-off communities moving into the new gentrified âcommunityâ are you actually improving the community? Is the community the physical location or the people that live there? If the community is âimprovedâ by forcing out the less well-off residents to make room for new more well-off residents what is the actual benefit to anyone? Everyone is pretty much in the same situation they were before with the well-off living in well-off neighborhoods and the less well-off living in less well-off neighborhoods, except that the less well-off find their housing options even further restricted as once affordable housing becomes ever more expensive.
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I think you nailed it for me. Humble-brag minus the humble.
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No, you are absolutely 100% correct about everything you said. A small minority, those who own their own homes do benefit from gentrification. Even as tax rates move up to rates that are unaffordable, their house value also increases so they are able to move into a nicer neighborhood than the one they settled in originally (even if it isnât as nice as what the neighborhood has become) if that makes any sense. The reality is, most of the people we are talking about in these gentrified neighborhoods donât own, they rent, meaning they get nothing out of it. And they are forced into an equally bad area. I understand that, and am empathetic.
But I donât know the solution to that problem (aside from solving poverty of course). Anytime a formerly rundown/dangerous neighborhood is cleaned up, by nature, housing values go up. Which brings in hipsters. Which brings in the yuppies, which brings in the lawyers/hedge fund managers/doctors. Do you pass a city ordinance banning suspenders and bow ties? or Pipes? So the hipsters never move in?
If the downtown area of a major city is entirely gentrified (impossible, I know), where do the poor people go? To the suburbs? Are local businesses forced to pay their employees more so they can live there? Or are they forced into the streets, which drives up crime and stumps further gentrification? Does this follow with increased police actions to protect the rich people from the poor people?
There are simply so many difficult questions that I will admit I am not nearly knowledgeable enough about to deal with the consequences of gentrification for the poor people. The only thing I do know is that I will never advocate keeping a community poor and crime-ridden just for some misguided hipster ideal of keeping a âcommunityâ Because living in fear that you will be mugged on the way to work isnât a community. And it isnât living.
Not being snarky at all; if you have any knowledge about those questions, please do share. I really do feel woefully under-informed on the topic of dealing with gentrification. However, it is such a hot button topic, it is very hard to get good information or good discussion going on it. Race gets drug into it so fast (because urban poverty and race are very difficult to talk about separately) that talking about the problem openly and honestly gets difficult.
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Agree, it is a complicated issue, and I donât expect that people would sympathize with the author. I worked in Miami Beach just as the movement to protect local Art Deco-era buildings gathered steam. The southern part of Miami Beach was never upscale but largely the haunt of lower-middle class and working class retirees and tourism service workers. When the area took off, a lot of the artists and intellectuals who early on advocated for protection and recognition of the area â and who were met with fierce opposition from city leaders and the business community who initially opposed historic preservation and protection of these buildings â were priced out by skyrocketing rents. So were some of the small businesses, when landlords realized they could get double or triple the rents they were paying.
The Art Deco movement leaders did express concern over the potential displacement of low income seniors in the event of gentrification.
Southern Miami Beach is now South Beach, a very successful retail/entertainment/nightlife district with some very upscale modern housing that undoubtedly was lured to the area by the demographics. In recent years there has been a push from city planners to require a certain percentage of affordable housing from developers to ensure that service workers are able to live in the communities they work in.
I believe public policy at its best can mitigate the inevitable effects of displacement caused by gentrification. Affordable housing should be a component of any community, as it makes for a diverse mix of housing options, and helps prevent the creation of ghettos.
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Wanted to say I agree with pretty much everything you said, but this paragraph in particular is right on. Iâm afraid Iâm in the same boat as you I have enough of a grasp to recognize the problem, but not enough to see anyway out of it. Like I said earlier it is sort of a catch twenty-two, poor people deserve to be able to live in a nice safe neighborhood, but if you make the neighborhood nice and safe suddenly people with more money start to want to live in the area. Which isnât necessarily bad because they can bring money and businesses to the neighborhood, but if too many well to do people come housing prices go up. It is almost like you need a perfect mix of incomes, enough people with money to inject some funds into the neighborhood, but not so many that they price out lower income residents. The problem is how to strike that balance.
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When I lived in England there was a law to do something like this (I donât know if it was national or local). Every community was supposed to have I think around 1% of their housing be âcouncil flatsâ which is basically housing owned by the local government and rented out at super low rents to people considered to be âeconomically disadvantagedâ. The problem was two fold. Communities would build these shoddy buildings (or sell the existing crap buildings) on the absolute outskirts of the community and the poor people would still be outside, but now with no real access to public transport. In areas where communities were bunched right up against each other (think British equivalent of suburbs, kinda the same but not quite) the communities would put all of the council homes along their borders and create an effective ghetto, but just split among several different councils.
There was the additional problem that to live in the houses you had to have a certain number of âpointsâ that were determined by factors like income, number of dependents etc. And if your income went above a certain level you were kicked out. But the discrepancy in rent between a council house and the houses in the community can be enormous. I was in a well off area, and I think the discrepancy was around double. So people would actively avoid getting a marginally better paying job because their rent would double. It really inhibited upward mobility.
The government since the Thatcher days has tried to encourage the people who live in council houses to buy them at severely reduced rates, partially to have an excuse to scrap any social program, and partially under the idea that if someone owns, or hopes to own, their property they will take care of it and try to improve their community. I donât know the numbers, but anecdotally, based on what I saw, it doesnât work. It is one of those things that seems to be a good idea in theory but in practice doesnât work.
If you think we have class issues here, you ainât seen nothing. The UK has a very serious problem with economic and social classes, but they try really hard to not talk about it. But at least their cops arenât killing people (except when they do, in which case mass rioting leads to the burning of major cities, ie. the London riots of 2011). And the racists, while present in the form of the English Defense League (British KKK/Tea Party), are pretty much hated by everyone, and casual racism is much less tolerated there. So that is a good thing.
So I guess left where we started. Still donât know any answers.
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âŚtook off my Manolos so theyâd stop crushing my feetâŚ
Yup! The writer brags about wearing $700 shoes that hurts. She really lives the âcaviar dreams.â The writers at Slate also reference products (specially books) from Amazon.
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That solution in the UK seems very problematic, to say the least.
Some of what Iâve seen here involves setting aside a certain number of units in a multi-unit complex for affordable housing, so the contrast doesnât seem as stark.
Also, between my home and Miami Beach, an expensive high-rise community initiated affordable housing legislation several years ago â before the 2008 crash â in the so-called hospital district to enable workers to live near their work. Itâs working in the sense that market forces inhibit the impulse of some developers to go too cheap ânâ shabby on the affordable component.
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