WHAT IS GENTRIFICATION? Do you care?

[DasBlunt]

I'm not sure this audience wants to embark on this tangent, but better here than Poly asshatery for the laughs....

"Gentrification is the colonization of our neighborhoods by powerful developers and affluent consumers who claim to be building something valuable on land that was “empty” and “wasted” before they came. Colonizers invoked the notion of terra nullius–– “the racist legal fiction that declared Indigenous peoples too “primitive” to bear rights to land and sovereignty when they first encountered European powers on the continent, thus rendering their territories legally empty and thus open for colonial settlement and development...Today the land that Latinos, American Indians and Blacks are living on is deemed too valuable to be left to us. But those who celebrate gentrification ignore the violence of eviction, growing poverty and broken communities. The noise of demolition is muffled out by the same colonial mantra of “improvement” and the clanking of wine glasses."

WHAT IS GENTRIFICATION? PART I: THE RENT GAP
This article is the first in a two-part series explaining what gentrification is and how it works. This first part explains what the late urban geographer Neil Smith called the “rent gap,” an essential condition for gentrification to occur. Part 2 will discuss the multiple phases of the gentrification process from disinvestment to displacement.

Imagine a large working-class family, who’ve been renting a home for decades. Its a few rooms too small for them to live comfortably but they try to respect each other’s privacy. The parents work 40 hours a week, sometimes putting in a few hours of overtime, and still they struggle to live a respectable existence, capable of only making ends meet, trying to provide a good life for their children.

Now imagine a developer who is looking to make profit from the same community, a community that has been disinvested from and ignored for decades by landlords and the City of Dallas, as well as the majority of the affluent class–but not by its residents.

So the investor purchases the lot that this family and similar families with similar stories have been living in and decides to demolish their homes to build a luxury apartment complex that the current residents will never be able to afford. Now they have no place to stay or at least afford in the neighborhood they’ve called home, forcing them to move further away from what they know, only to deal with further economic and social obstacles.

This is Gentrification. For the wealthy gentrification may look more like wine glasses, elegant patios, boutique stores and cappuccinos, but for us it is the loss of our cultural spaces, a higher cost of living and eventually eviction by one means or another.

[digitaldeath]

U KKK?

[Harry]

I grew up with a guy named Bob Gentry.

[old goat]

Seems to me gentrification is the inevitable consequence of the increasingly huge disparities of income and wealth in this country. As long as these disparities exist nothing will stop gentrification--only dealing with the disparities will do that. A decent minimum wage, increased taxation of the well to do and wealthy--through the income tax, taxing capital gains like ordinary income, and taxing wealth as well as income (see Thomas Piketty). Which ain't going to happen as long as the wealthy control the political process. I predict armed revolution in this country within the next 50 years, probably less. (see Piketty again.)

[DasBlunt]

Should be fun to hear the fears and hopes of this audience. Poll up top.

[Timberridge]

Misread the title, thought this was about genital mutilation and I wanted to chime in.

Nvrmnd.

[concretejungle]

So you just plagiarized this and didn't give credit to the original author?

[guroo270]

TLDR, but sounds to me like places are getting nicer from it. People have moved from the ebb and flow of affluence in areas forever. It's part of life, someone just gave it a name now.

[fastfred]

DasBlunt Do you live in denver?

Take a look around your screwed, if your not a white yuppie in most nieghborhoods that no one cared about ten plus years ago.

I was able to watch the highlands neighborhood go from mainly hispanic to full on yuppie with plenty of foo foo bars and resturants, used to be able to pick up a cheap burrito or stop at a gas station with bullet proof glass around the cashier, no more..............

Now five points and river fucking dooshbag north is the even hipper places to be, minorities are being pushed over to aurora. Once the i70 project is done in ten years all of the land and houses surrounding it will become high dollar real estate full of whites. buy now

gentrification is good if you have money and are white, gentrification is bad if you are a minority and poor or working class. I just find it funny how a neighborhood or area can be ignored for 20-30 years then become the coolest place to be

[char]

Jackson Hole - gentrified

[Timberridge]

Wilson isn't far behind. I'm waiting for the gentrification of TGR.

I'm also getting a bit concerned by some of the going's on at Flowing Lake.

Btw, I haven't voted yet, as I'm still deciding if I care enough to vote.

[MontuckyFried]

It's a tough issue to fully grasp, but I can totally understand both the anger and also the justification for gentrification. I remember the local news in San Antonio doing a story about re-gentrification and interviewed a bunch of people who saw their neighborhoods go downhill decades ago and then spring back to life when the developers wanted back in. They were pissed off on both ends of it, and understandably so.

So imagine back in the day, you have a decent neighborhood of all demographics. Then the neighborhood starts getting kind of bad, so the more affluent white folks move out and toward the burbs, further driving the neighborhood down. The hispanics in the interviews said it, not me. They said things got worse after the guettos moved out, and they saw real estate values plummet and the neighborhoods became REALLY bad over the decades. Then, once developers key in on a location (usually being after a hip, thriving arts community gets the ball rolling), they come rolling back in, bring the neighborhood back up to par, but then the tax values get driven back up, driving home owners out, or rents get jacked up where the people who had been living there for decades couldn't do it anymore. The elderly are who really feel the brunt of this whole thing the most...twice over. So I feel bad for them.

At the same time however, isn't it a good thing to be reusing existing land, resources and buildings instead of promoting urban sprawl? Lots of people got sick of their commutes, the burbs, and the lack of soul all of that entails. These hip new re-vitalized urban centers became a very appealing place to be. I've seen many of these transformations and they were clearly a good thing. What were crack house and Scooby-Doo-esque abandoned warehouse riddled neighborhoods have become some really nice and even safe places to live. Should we just let areas go into further decay or "recycle" these locations?

I can totally see both angles on the issue, so am a bit torn on how I feel about the subject. There's got to be some sort of middle ground to revitalize these areas without totally screwing over the poor that were there from the beginning, but I couldn't tell you what a realistic and fair answer to that would be.

[Vt-Freeheel]

DasBlunt Do you live in denver?take a look around your screwed, if your not a white yuppie in most nieghborhoods that no one cared about ten plus years ago.i was able to watch the highlands neighborhood go from mainly hispanic to full on yuppie with plenty of foo foo bars and resturants, used to be able to pick up a cheap burrito or stop at a gas station with bullet proof glass around the cashier, no more..............now five points and river fucking dooshbag north is the even hipper places to be, minorities are being pushed over to aurora. Once the i70 project is done in ten years all of the land and houses surrounding it will become high dollar real estate full of whites. buy now gentrification is good if you have money and are white, gentrification is bad if you are a minority and poor or working class. I just find it funny how a neighborhood or area can be ignored for 20-30 years then become the coolest place to be

fify You're slipping

[wolfelot]

It is better for a neighborhood to remain a shitty crime-ridden dump? Really? Really?

While I see some of the issue of people getting pushed out due to increased costs, I think overall it is a good thing and way better than remaining a dump.

[Timberridge]

I blame the gays.

[riser4]

strip the rich of all assets and make them live in the ghettos for a while.

[stfu&gbtw]

Capitalism is what it is... Shit goes to the highest bidder. Is it right? I don't think that's the right question... Is there a better alternative? Not that I'm aware of. The fact is that neighborhoods can't survive in the long term on section 8 housing and wic checks. Gentrification, racism, and class warfare are often conflated to one degree or another, but those relationships are correlative, not causative. No condo owner in Brooklyn is going to refuse to cash your checks because you're black, or gay, or whatever. No one cares whether you went to prep school... Go get a job, make them duckets, and the world is yours. Anyone considering hitting "reply" to whine about systemic racism, sexism, etc, needs to take a long hard look at modern successful urban populations. Claims that society keeps the black man down had their place in 1950, but not any more. Sure, there are a few people who have their wealth and success handed to them, but by and large, the people who are successful are the people who work their ass off. And the people who aren't are the ones who don't.

We're struggling with this process where I live. Fact is, living in the mountains is challenging... And when I say challenging, I mean expensive. Limited housing, limited employment, lots of maintenance expenses, and lots of people interested in giving it a go. It's just not plausible to think that an area is going to sustain itself on a tax base of transient potheads and destitute senior citizens... So the chicken/egg discussion begins... At what point does a community's economic development efforts stop serving the existing population, and start attracting a future population? Can you even legitimately question whether it's "right"? That's just the way the world works. Bottom line is, it sucks to be poor, and if you don't want to be poor, you should do something about that.

[AK47bp]

I'm cool with geriatric genocide as a gentrification tool long as their quality of life is somewhat diminished.

And no that doesn't mean Matlock reruns getting cancelled.

[MontuckyFried]

I blame the gays.

Haha. As bad as that sounds, there's actually some truth to that. True story: One my family's best life-long friends, who happens to be an artist too (yes, totally stereotypical), bought an abandoned crack house for next to nothing in a slummy part of town in SA. He and his gay friends completely renovated that old building into a pretty spectacular art studio and lofts. Bought the dump for like $50 grand and sold it for over a million. That's happened en masse in that area and now that hood's become nearly 100% re-gentrified. What was formerly one of the nastiest parts of town is now really nice, safe, and has become THE place to live in town. Shops, restaurants, super nice apartments and condos, and a thriving art community.

As sad as the economic effect on the local poor is, it seems that revitalizing a run down ghetto into a nice area is mostly a really good thing.

[Tippster]

Huge discussion going on in the public sphere here in DC about Gentrification. Not sure what the solution is, but there is something to be said about people on fixed incomes being forced out of their homes simply due to rising taxes.

[MontuckyFried]

I remember hearing this story on NPR a while back. Pretty interesting. Studies are showing that the net effect of gentrification is a good thing, even to the poor.
http://www.npr.org/2014/01/22/264528...ing-its-stigma

[GeezerSteve]

Pretty much what Austin said in his first post, but add the important factor that current circumstances in most cities resulted from racial segregation via bank redlining. Passing this off as merely the product of free markets ignores the legacy of redlining.

[Bromontana]

Pretty much what Austin said in his first post, but add the important factor that current circumstances in most cities resulted from racial segregation via bank redlining. Passing this off as merely the product of free markets ignores the legacy of redlining.

And after redlining we had Ferrari driving loan officers telling hispanics to ignore ARM resets because they could just refinance in a few yrs with equity.

[stuckathuntermtn]

I'm not sure this audience wants to embark on this tangent, but better here than Poly asshatery for the laughs....

"Gentrification is the colonization of our neighborhoods by powerful developers and affluent consumers who claim to be building something valuable on land that was “empty” and “wasted” before they came. Colonizers invoked the notion of terra nullius–– “the racist legal fiction that declared Indigenous peoples too “primitive” to bear rights to land and sovereignty when they first encountered European powers on the continent, thus rendering their territories legally empty and thus open for colonial settlement and development...Today the land that Latinos, American Indians and Blacks are living on is deemed too valuable to be left to us. But those who celebrate gentrification ignore the violence of eviction, growing poverty and broken communities. The noise of demolition is muffled out by the same colonial mantra of “improvement” and the clanking of wine glasses."

WHAT IS GENTRIFICATION? PART I: THE RENT GAP
This article is the first in a two-part series explaining what gentrification is and how it works. This first part explains what the late urban geographer Neil Smith called the “rent gap,” an essential condition for gentrification to occur. Part 2 will discuss the multiple phases of the gentrification process from disinvestment to displacement.

Imagine a large working-class family, who’ve been renting a home for decades. Its a few rooms too small for them to live comfortably but they try to respect each other’s privacy. The parents work 40 hours a week, sometimes putting in a few hours of overtime, and still they struggle to live a respectable existence, capable of only making ends meet, trying to provide a good life for their children.

Now imagine a developer who is looking to make profit from the same community, a community that has been disinvested from and ignored for decades by landlords and the City of Dallas, as well as the majority of the affluent class–but not by its residents.

So the investor purchases the lot that this family and similar families with similar stories have been living in and decides to demolish their homes to build a luxury apartment complex that the current residents will never be able to afford. Now they have no place to stay or at least afford in the neighborhood they’ve called home, forcing them to move further away from what they know, only to deal with further economic and social obstacles.

This is Gentrification. For the wealthy gentrification may look more like wine glasses, elegant patios, boutique stores and cappuccinos, but for us it is the loss of our cultural spaces, a higher cost of living and eventually eviction by one means or another.

tl;dr don't care
Shut the fuck up, Donny, you're out of your element!

[Mudfoot]

I understand the negative implications of the process on residents, but the other option appears to be letting ghettos continue to deteriorate and forever remain ghettos. You can debate how the situation arose but, irrespective of the numerous moral issues, at this point the question seems to be, "Do poor people have a right to remain living in places they cannot afford?" In the capitalist economic system we live in the answer is obviously "no." What is the solution, for some entity to step in and fix up the housing that is not financially self-supporting so that the residents can live beyond their means? Yes they are living there because in some sense they have been victimized, and will be further victimized by forced eviction. Obviously, there are no easy answers.

This is a classic case of the second Golden Rule: The man with the gold makes the rules. So unless you come up with a viable economic solution the moral issues will likely continue to be ignored.