"what everyone hates about urban change and gentrification – first come the creatives and their coffee shops, then the young professionals, then the luxury high-rises and corporate chains that push out original residents"
I personally have no problem with it. And if we're talking about crappy and dangerous neighborhoods that are becoming upscale - I love it.
If anything I think it's the sort of process that benefits majority of population while extracting a cost on a minority. If we look at total effect, it's certainly net positive.
I can't help interpreting your opinion as, "it's ok to kick the poor people out, as long as the upper classes, government and businesses prosper." People aren't numbers to throw into a mean function. That "net positive" argument is what has been used to excuse globalization's "there have to be some losers" philosophy, which disproportionately affects those already in poverty.
A sense of community is one of the few things poor neighborhoods can offer their inhabitants. When those impoverished people are elbowed out and away from each other to make way for another coffee shop, it becomes hard to sympathize with the moneyed class's desire for late-night gourmet poke.
Edit: Taking a look at TulliusCicero's WaPo link is making me reconsider my position.
I don't know a whole lot about the general outcomes of those slowly and progressively displaced by gentrification but in sufficiently small catastrophies (i.e. not Syria) the displaced lower classes often do better economically. For example, Katrina refugees who stayed away are reported to have more income and live in safer and less impoverished areas with better schools (e.g. [1]). The city is more diverse and affluent as well (look for Citylab article on this, I can't look up atm) so it might not be a selection bias thing.
However complaints all around are that social networks and cultures were destroyed. It seems that when it's time to move, people move towards economic opportunity rather than for culture, etc. Hopefully with time those social networks can develop into the next rich permutation.
Not really. The relocated people generally arrived in Houston with nothing because they were evacuated to Houston and had nothing to return to in NOLA. Houston took in some of the poorest of the poor. I lived in Houston during Katrina (and actually was a catastrophe insurance adjuster,) so I saw it first hand. Many of those people got healthy FEMA money and were able to restart in Houston. However to be fair, the crime rate in Houston did spike due to some of the influx and the problems it brought (such as NOLA gang members getting into disputes with local gang members.) Overall though, it seemed to be a positive for most involved. (It did result in a much elevated Cajun/Creole cuisine due to the NOLA cooks that relocated!)
Confirm. Born and raised in Houston but now in Austin.
Texas is not "the deep south", we opened our arms and our hearts to everyone who was displaced by the hurricane. Nearly every major city in Texas participated. Moreover, we've experienced enough hurricanes to know the depth and severity of damage that can occur – and will continue to occur.
Neighbors help each other in times of crisis. Who knows, in the future maybe Louisiana will have to return the favor.
The problem with the opposite position, that even the greatest net positive is invalidated if even a single person is inconvenienced[1] (which, reductio ad absurdum is what you seem to suggest), will obviously lead to practically no change ever. Indeed, it will most likely lead to decline, as any active attempt to change things will probably inconvenience at least a few people, while you can't pin such a charge against passive apathy, even if it long term inconveniences a much greater number of people.
Even the creatives with their coffee shops (generally considered the acceptable level of gentrification, a fact that is obviously totally unrelated to the fact that a substantial subset of people fretting over gentrification are creatives in coffee shops) probably displaces some local activity, perhaps a "brown cafe" loses some customers to the new coffee shop etc.
I recently went on a street-art themed walking tour of Shoreditch in east London, and the guide started the tour by explaining how in the late 80s the area was a total write-off with poverty, violence and prostitution left, right and center, and how entire houses changed hands for as little as £1 -- and ended it by railing against the building of new apartments. The irony of he, himself, being a recent transplant to the area (he alluded to his small-town upbringing, and he was much too young to have moved there pre-1990) did not seem to trouble him much.
Bottom line: clearly there is SOME level of positive development that justifies SOME level of inconveniences. Perhaps we should be a little better at articulating the positive benefits instead of knee-jerk defending those inconvenienced by progress and idealising the gritty urban semi-slums being displaced.
PS: I'm very happy the WaPo link is making you reconsider your position.
1: This article describes the plight of "the poor" being pestered with offer to buy their flats for cash, offers they are perfectly in their right to decline. That's being inconvenienced, not kicked out. http://www.wnyc.org/story/de-blasios-affordable-housing-figh...
>I can't help interpreting your opinion as, "it's ok to kick the poor people out, as long as the upper classes, government and businesses prosper.
I can't help interpreting the original argument as "we're fine with our people here (the artists), but we don't want those other people in our community".
I basically trust the process of globalization. "You don't go to war with your trading partners." The main fault I pointed out has to do with a lack of protectionary measures for the sections of society most at risk.
I think this also has relevance to the gentrification debate, though looking into the data it seems like governments continue failing on that front. I wasn't smart enough to come up with an alternative to capitalism when I was 15, I'm not smart enough to come up with an alternative to globalization now.
To drill into a point of my quoted assertion: "You don't go to war without support from your trading partners." A world war is an exceptional case. I meant to point at national conflicts, specifically between equals. I think having to defend your ally is a separate problem.
I'd have thought, at least historically, wars were more likely with trading partners - they're going to be close and, by definition, they have stuff that you want.
So what's the solution here? How else would you improve those kinds of neighborhoods? Do you expect the poor people are going to suddenly all get better jobs and simultaneously decide to make their neighborhood nicer?
Define the problem first, then we can talk about a solution.
The problem (as I see it) is artificial scarcity of housing which creates artificially inflated and unaffordable housing costs. Depending on what sources you look at, there are around 4-6 empty houses in the US for every homeless person.
The solution to that would be to cease the state-sponsoring of fraudulent and dishonest sub-prime mortgage shell games like the one which climaxed in 2008 and let simply the market normalize.
Very good question, considering how abstract of a term "the market" is.
I suppose in a "normal market" if a surplus of supply exists affordability should increase as prices should decrease. That's Economics 101.
But in a market controlled by a monopoly/oligarchy, the price system is dictated by the recidivist whims of the super admins, rather than by the needs and desires of the user base or the physical reality of the resource(s) in question.
So in the current state of housing surplus, affordability has decreased as prices have increased.
I vote for Inter Planetary Commerce. Let's give Musk a $3T budget for a couple of years and see where we get. Plenty of jobs will be created if he can terraform Mars.
You think Musk is the right guy? He might be but his ability to build rockets and be a 'visionary' is directly proportional to the amount of funding he has received. It would seem like there could be others that could be even more effective than Musk if given the same resources.
"...the California Legislative Analyst’s Office recently released some positive data backing up this point: Particularly in the Bay Area since 2000, the researchers found, low-income neighborhoods with a lot of new construction have witnessed about half the displacement of similar neighborhoods that haven’t added much new housing."
My uneducated guess might be that the new developments add more density and thus lower land/rent prices overall. I am not sure about that though.
In my city as well, new development often come with affordability requirements for the exact reason of not displacing the existing community.
Adelaide, Australia has a really cool process for careful urban development. The city makes sure many existing buildings stay put and that new developments accommodate them in various ways. It specifically limits high rises, with the term mid-rise mixed use zoning being able to describe most of the dense areas.
The quip about coffee shops, creatives then professionals still rings true. But it stops short of high rises, and intentionally tries to mix all residents and wealth brackets.
> "what everyone hates about urban change and gentrification..."
I don't mean to be inflammatory, but I've never understood exactly what "everybody" sees as the desired state.
When white people move out of urban centers, it is "white flight"... a negative phenomenon. When white people move into urban centers, it is "gentrification"... also a negative phenomenon.
Are white people just considered inherently evil, and their existence a negative phenomenon? Short of total income redistribution, and mandatory relocation (as ethnic groups tend to coalesce even without gaps in income)... what exactly is the inequality and diversity solution that "everyone" wants?
I don't think the people who are upset about both white flight and gentrification think of things in 'white people' terms.
Rather they focus on blacks (or whichever minority the whites happen to be fleeing or displacing). It's a natural liberal tendency to focus on the 'underprivileged'. I believe it stems from the (unconscious) belief that the whites will look out for themselves - but blacks et al need to be helped. White man's burden 2.0, if you will.
For example in today's NYT there is a long article about lack of black pitchers in the US baseball league (they don't count spanish speaking blacks as aa). And there is a regular recurring piece about lack of black players in certain NFL positions (while they're actually 70% of all players).
Meanwhile I've never seen a similar article about dearth of white players in the NBA or the NFL. To an outside observer this might appear racist - but the journalist writing these pieces probably think that looking out for minorities is just what good people do. And whites will manage to take care of themselves.
I see your point, but it's not just moving in/out. It's the subtext of why. I don't think anyone can be faulted for fleeing a neighborhood in the name of safety. The same can likely be said for moving into more impoverish areas that have the potential to grow into prosperous neighborhood. This holds true regardless of race.
If someone is just throwing those terms around just because people move in or out of neighborhoods, then they're missing the overall context of what those terms mean.
> what exactly is the inequality and diversity solution that "everyone" wants?
I don't think this can be easily addressed. Most people want their neighborhoods safe with drivable streets and walkable paths. Some see culture in the history of their neighborhoods. Others want modern architecture and amenities. It really depends on who you ask.
> If anything I think it's the sort of process that benefits majority of population while extracting a cost on a minority. If we look at total effect, it's certainly net positive.
Absolutely. Otherwise we'd all be still living in wooden shacks tilling the fields. Change inevitably effects some people negatively, but without it things can't, on average, get better.
> "what everyone hates about urban change and gentrification – first come the creatives and their coffee shops, then the young professionals, then the luxury high-rises and corporate chains that push out original residents"
> I personally have no problem with it. And if we're talking about crappy and dangerous neighborhoods that are becoming upscale - I love it.
"everyone" in this context meaning "everyone who holds the views of the author"
Here in PGH, "everyone" would mean student activists who are busy decrying the tearing down of several high rise projects in a part of town that had been on a downward slope since the late 70's. Neighborhoods that only a few years ago "closed at dark" (literally) due to pervasive criminality are now economic hubs.
At least in this case, most people seem to be quite happy with economic development in what used to be no-go areas. Nonetheless, there's a vocal minority of affluent art students who are busy putting up graffiti about "preserving culture". You can't ever make everyone happy, but the author's "everyone" isn't in fact everyone.
I'm still confused, because in one sentence, you talk about affluence bringing luxury high-rises, while in a later sentence, you talk about activist art students who want to preserve graffiti.
Are the high-rises whose removal the students decry not the luxury ones, or is it a different group of activist students from those who like graffiti who are the ones who want to keep the luxury high-rises?
Or are the activist art students supporters of both luxury high-rises and graffiti? I'm confused :)
I personally have no problem with it. And if we're talking about crappy and dangerous neighborhoods that are becoming upscale - I love it.
If anything I think it's the sort of process that benefits majority of population while extracting a cost on a minority. If we look at total effect, it's certainly net positive.