are you obligated to live in the most expensive part of a city you can afford so that you're not gentrifying somewhere else?

are you obligated to live in the most expensive part of a city you can afford so that you're not gentrifying somewhere else?

at what point are you being an evil dick if you just want to save some money? is moving out to the suburbs the only moral thing to do?

i guess i mean this mostly for Americans with the added element of race.

are you obligated to live in the most expensive part of a city you can afford so that you're not gentrifying somewhere else?

no

at what point are you being an evil dick if you just want to save some money?

at no point

I'm a moral anti-realist so no of course not

nah gentrification is good

also your question is presuming that gentrification is a uniformly bad thing for neighborhoods

or maybe that it's more good than bad, depending i guess on what kind of price ceilings the city institutes on renters who had already been living somewhere for a long time.

more bad than good*

frogbs, surprisingly, otm

i'm surprised at the unity of these replies tbh. maybe i'm reading the wrong parts of ilx.

can somebody break down the reasoning behind yr standard "gentrification is good" argument please??

people wanting to move to cities is a good trend that we should encourage for countless reasons, limited supply of urban housing is an artificial problem

artificial in that the constraints are legal not physical

Feeling that gentrifcation is overall an evil stems from a conservative notion that denies change or evolution, which is errant folly, and from a kind of entitlement which is as tedious to hear defended as racial or class or money entitlement. I don't mind individual acts of resistence to neighborhood change but when ppl espouse a sanctimonious position that nothing should ever change and no-one new or different should ever move into a neighborhood, it's just nimbyist intolerance really. Since stasis is unlikely for any lengthy period of time, should one really hope for deterioration instead?

gentrification is only an issue IMO when it expresses itself as homogenization; see for example the differences between the gentrification of Harvard Square, which is now for all intents and purposes a giant mall, and the gentrification of Central Square, which still supports several neighborhood clubs, bars, and other businesses, as well as new independent ventures as opposed to Qdoba/Panera franchises

people wanting to move to cities is a good trend

^^all boils down to this for me.

sure sure, it's omg america and you are certainly free to move out to your own little fiefdom, but you should pay for it. no more subsidizing whitey's flight to the suburbs imo.

is there some word for this kind of moral handwringing, where youre minutely weighing every single thing and attempting to find the righteous path, i ask because i was recently trying figure the best way to describe this style of thinking

like the difference between is gentrification good/bad whatre its qualities and do you have a moral responsibility to live in x/y neighborhood and buy local products but only this type of local etc etc

'responsible capitalism'

i mean like whats a name for this overheated psychological activity, its sort of approaching the legendary theologians arguing abt how many angels can fit on the head of a pin

I call it "moneyed liberalism"

it's a game I like to play I just get frustrated cause people are really bad at it

'being alive'

the first part of the term i think is moral and then something that means minute differentiation lacking a sense of totality or something, w/also maybe and aspect of having no trust in oneself

moral perfectionism, minutely parsed moral perfectionism

It's obsessive and probably never takes a break or relaxes

yeah thats a key aspect for sure

the first part of the term i think is moral and then something that means minute differentiation lacking a sense of totality or something, w/also maybe and aspect of having no trust in oneself

do you really think this is a terrible mindset? or even problematic, i guess?

I think the way people do it can be problematic cause it's easy to prioritize the wrong things

i think its problematic tho not terrible, mostly i think its v now and i want to name it something vaguely pejorative

theres a sense of the play of experience and concept being out of balance

Yes, 'cause it's a miserable way to live.

like i think a grinding vigilance over the relative 'correctness' of ones own behavior is tiresome and depressing but im not sure its really bad at low points feels like a decent compromise w/ the unyielding terribleness of modern life over which its hard to exert much control why not worry about living in the place you are doing the least ~damage~ even if you cant really fully account ~damage~ as a concept

idk

yeah again I sorta 'do this' my problem just comes w/ the fact that so many people who do it aren't very rigorous about it ie 'I am doing a good thing by buying a prius' and not 'I am doing a less bad thing than I might otherwise be doing'

and this thread is a good example of that

I do this sometimes too but I do think we have almost a moral duty to take a day off every once in a while and not be a miserable obssessive downer to oneslef and ones fellow creatures - if only for social environmental reasons.

i think its really good to think abt how yr behavior effects others, theres just a sense having a lack of balance or perspective w/this stuff that seems v prevalent, i got to thinking abt how particularly in activist do gooder situations of people who are trying to change the world they often get bogged down in these modes of thought that end up so fine as to be comic, and its sort of self defeating, there seems to be an aspect where people dont trust themselves at all, theyre constantly on guard against themselves and its quite insidious

Is it ok if you live in a real mess so you couldn't be accused of gentrifying anywhere anyway?
& would everybody automatically be gentrifying a place anyway?

xp It's like religion in that way? The self-policing and the scrupulousness and the mistrust of own impulses and stuff.

yeah it is p religious i think

iatee did you read the david owen book "the conundrum?"
it's pretty basic level criticism of the prius buying impulse, etc.

I'm with iatee here

a little repetitive but a good primer that I kinda want to give to my prius-driving-all-over-the-state-of-california-sierra-club-member parents

xpost

no but reading the summary online it sounds like something I'd like!

I own a Prius btw, bring it haters

I often find the do-gooder impulse isn't as simple or as pure as it seems. In my neighborhood, it was often miserable depressives who liked to morally bludgeon others for not suffering sufficiently from the world's fucked-up-edness who acted as if the only morally defensive attitude was one of never-ending surliness. I do not think this is how to change the world for the better.

Also showing off your moral superiority is nagl

well a lot of why people want to do heroic things is to help themselves, you often hear abt doing something meaningful, which i think is fine, it could be quite symbiotic, but really only if youre honest abt it

people getting competitive about being environmentally friendly or whatever is actually a pretty good way for it to spread, the problem is more in the 'are they actually doing environmentally friendly things'.

i do think just on a side note that the rise in responsible consumption has to do a lot w/how completely people have come to identify themselves as consumers, and how powerless and alienated they feel from other aspects of life and the world

lag00n how about 'data-driven paralysis'

it's usually not data-driven enough!

ha well how about huffpo factoid driven

thats def part of it but doesnt really touch the emotional/irrational aspect of the whole thing

like w/ gentrification for example, people really don't think about the data they think about 'the gentrification narrative'

#konythemia

I've had people cite gentrification to me as the reason why parklets and bike lanes were bad.

its funny because the underlying problem is not gentrification its that poor people get shit services, i mean people should be able to move where they feel like, but schools etc should also be good everywhere

^^^

^^^ otm

the problem is more in the 'are they actually doing environmentally friendly things'.

Double-edged sword to me. To so essentially lack humility leads to other behaviors which aren't good either. The solipsism or at least aggressive anthropocentrism that lead to irresponsible resource depletion and to carefree pollution stem from just such moral blindspots. Developers, slavers, exploiters have all used high-minded arguments (and may even have genuinely believed them) to not only defend their enterprises but to praise them.

yeah i feel extroversion is in the mix here, the problems are all outside oneself and can be solved via manipulating the world

Oddly this leads me to defend a certain kind of selfishness. I wish ppl could do their good deeds for their own gratification instead of seeking my approval or using them as means of exerting power over others. Then they might do them a bit more quietly.

be the gentrification you wish to see

Oddly this leads me to defend a certain kind of selfishness. I wish ppl could do their good deeds for their own gratification instead of seeking my approval or using them as means of exerting power over others. Then they might do them a bit more quietly.

eh these are kinda just aspects of being human

be the gentrification you wish to see

Genuine lol

just spitballin here but part of the problem w/this phenomenon is its fastidiousness doesnt allow enough room for people to be human, its unsympathetic

lotta people aren't really thought of as human anyway ime

idk, I think a lot of what a lot of people think is 'being human' are very cultural, like when we have what feel like natural desires for a high resource consumption lifestyle some might come from certain 'being human' things but they're often also due to the time and place and history we find ourselves in and those things do change

Competition is very human

naw everyone desires a high resource consumption lifestyle, not that thats what i was talking abt xp

I was walking down the street in the afternoon w/ a friend yesterday and this really really like incredibly gorgeous young white girl in an expensive short dress walked by and my friend, who has lived in the neighborhood for like 15 years, was like, man I've been seeing at least one woman like that a day just walking around here, things sure have changed

yeah I don't think that's true but I guess 'that's another thread' xp

its just people who dont have refrigerators want refrigerators, why because theyre useful

fire was some p sweet tech at one point too

yeah but 'everyone lives in their own house and has their own refrigerator' is not more natural than 'people live w/ a huge extended family and share a refrigerator'

thats all relative

I just want to live near the best deli in a house that can fit my stuff.

Can I just say?

(straightens posture, clears throat, raises his right hand with index finger pointing at ceiling)

Be the change you want to see in the world.

(a shower of thrown garbage erupts from the audience, runs away dodging and ducking)

Kant's categorical imperative not as snappy

theory: michael rappaport in do the right thing made people ashamed of gentrifying for fear of resembling michael rappaport. (not the character in do the right thing, but michael rappaport)

I call it "moneyed liberalism"

― an independent online phenomenon (DJP), Tuesday, April 17, 2012 11:49 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was trying to formulate a term something like this over the weekend (especially in response to seeing Damsels in Distress)! "Noblesse oblige" might apply, were it not that America simultaneously defines "noblesse" in terms of income and scorns that definition.

noblesse

It's true that it must suck to live in a place a long time and slowly have it become strange to you. To have shops that you can afford disappear, replaced by shops you can't afford. To have your property taxes or rent become increasingly onerous, perhaps unaffordable, to the point where you are forced to move away.

But every place everywhere changes. Even Nebraska. The more humans who live in a place, the faster it changes. If you can't deal with that, you should learn to.

What's important is that society make the effort to ensure everyone has some kind of place they are allowed to exist, and that it meets some kind of minimum standards of livability.

i think its problematic tho not terrible, mostly i think its v now and i want to name it something vaguely pejorative

"concern porn"?

concern proling

i love that word "noblesse". oblige too. yeah i think desire is totally ... elemental but also endlessly various and it makes EVERYTHING like it's basically the aether. you can be a flow director to some degree and get really good at explaining that to people, like iatee (but i mean let's face it, not everyone is gonna be on the same level). i think it's good to try to be more flexible with our own desire and to understand what it is for us and for everything else. (this is the fun part and the part a lot of people, myself included, are scared shitless of).

and djp and lagoon otm above about what 'gentrification' ends up meaning in our world that's still racist

or, why it means what it means before a white person feels guilty about it

after too.

concern proling

― diafiyhm (darraghmac), Tuesday, April 17, 2012 1:27 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haaaa

yeah again I sorta 'do this' my problem just comes w/ the fact that so many people who do it aren't very rigorous about it ie 'I am doing a good thing by buying a prius' and not 'I am doing a less bad thing than I might otherwise be doing'

― iatee, Tuesday, 17 April 2012 16:01 (3 hours ago) Permalink

and this thread is a good example of that

― iatee, Tuesday, 17 April 2012 16:02 (3 hours ago) Permalink

what part of this thread makes it seem like i'm congratulating myself at all (i'm not)?? i was asking earnestly. i've never lived in a city before and i want to understand the debate about this--all i've ever really heard is the "narrative."

lol honestly i feel like i'm getting strawmanned so hard throughout this thread

I don't know if you've ever seen iatee post on this subject but writing is moving out to the suburbs the only moral thing to do? is pretty much the equivalent of waving a red cape in front of a bull

haha

when the city where i currently lived began to gentrify during the early 1980s, there literally was blood. not a nice feeling to know that poors died for our sins.

nb: i didn't know about the movie or this part of Hoboken's history until long after i'd moved here. truthfully, even i had i still would've moved here.

red cape made from egyptian cotton by a trustafarian in brooklyn

i would totally love living in brooklyn. have fun in your new city and just try to not be a dick iirc!

In my city (Vancouver), gentrification pretty much means making poor people move to the suburbs. So it's not a question of living in the suburbs or not, it's a question of *who* gets to live in the city versus who has to live in the 'burbs.

nah 'the question' is why poor people aren't being given an option to live in denser parts of the greater vancouver region if they'd prefer it and there is no natural or economic constraint

Demand is high enough to price them out?

A lot of U.S. cities seem to be developing far suburbs of, like ... poverty sprawl. The idea used to be that concentrated poverty in cities was a recipe for all sorts of disastrous stuff, but pushing it out into more diffuse places does not exactly seem better, since it adds all sorts of isolation, distance from services, more difficulty maintaining communities, etc....

The thing is that any time you spend money, you're using economic power to make the world slightly more like what you want than what somebody else might want, whether that means increased production of size 33/30 wool trousers or affordable store-brand diet soda. I mean, gentrification messes with people because over the past few decades, it's been this huge opportunity for certain young people, newly exercising their own economic power, to see this writ really large, and see how it might screw others over -- through absolutely no ill will of their own, the simple fact that they have more purchasing power than others will visibly convert the space around them into something different, something more organized around their needs. They don't even ask for it (that'd be so gauche!); it just happens. But at least with gentrification you can see this, and maybe try to consciously manage your place in it, which is really far from true for most every other way we, you know, use our economic power to get things, right?

i'm poor and i'll forgive all of you if you make it easier for me to move where you just moved too (i'm open). xp

right, which is an economic constraint.

"the question is why people don't all use personal jetpacks and flying railroads to commute to jobs at spacely sprockets if they'd prefer it and there is no natural or economic constraint."

"the question is why people don't all live in underwater hydroponic bubble cities if they'd prefer it and there is no natural or economic constraint."

Yeah, the thing with Vancouver is that there are *both* natural and economic constraints: it's a very physically restricted area and there is a ridiculously high amount of demand for real estate that, as yet, supply has not been able to meet. There are attempts to build affordable housing in the city and create better support services, but they can't keep up with the rate of gentrification (though maybe they could if various levels of government cared more about it, but that's another story). So in the current-day reality of the city, I would say, there are issues if you buy one of the new fancy condos going up in the middle of poorest part of the city (the downtown east side).

The thing is that any time you spend money, you're using economic power to make the world slightly more like what you want than what somebody else might want, whether that means increased production of size 33/30 wool trousers or affordable store-brand diet soda.

right, and this is true today w/r/t 'living in a city', and that expressed demand is vastly more important than anything else in the big picture

supply has not been able to meet

supply isn't allowed to meet

http://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2011/11/vancouver-update-apartment-house-cometh.html

it's funny how much of this thread consists of concerned people critiquing how other people express their concern. which is just basic human behavior, i suppose (hell, i'm doing it right now), but still lol.

anyway, i don't see gentrification as an intrinsically good or bad thing, rather as something that just happens, part of the ongoing life cycle of the city. the users of a given area will change over time, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, usually both in different ways. what is gentrified today will likely fall back into decay at some point in the future. it's good to be aware of the costs of gentrification, though, of what's lost or displaced in the process (bert streb's post on vancouver being a good example of this).

as far as "responsible capitalism" or whatever goes, i think it's great that people are aware of and concerned about the impact of their lives on our shared environment. even if they're poorly informed or selfish, the impulse is a good one, and the more it spreads, the better off we all are. assholes and idiots will always be assholes and idiots, but that's a different issue.

What I take out of nabisco's post, though, is that if you don't allow places to gentrify, they're not going to magically get better for poor ppl. They won't be cool. No-one will want to move there. The services will remain inferior and time does have a tendancy to erode even the qualities that the initial gentrifiers liked; buildings burn, store-owners retire...

whether that means increased production of size 33/30 wool trousers

bklyn alts demand 30/33 surely

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2802068/#R1

Using the 1990 and 2000 Census Long Form Data, we create a mapping of time-consistent census tracts between 1990 and 2000, identify a set of gentrifying tracts, and compare these neighborhoods to non-gentrifying tracts in the same metropolitan area that were similarly poor in 1990. We highlight two key benefits of using non-public data that allow us to provide a much more detailed analysis of gentrifying neighborhoods than previous studies. First, we have the refined geographic detail, geographic coverage, and sample size to better define the set of gentrifying neighborhoods and a set of comparison neighborhoods. Second, because we have individual data that identify census tract of residence, we can separately identify residents who are recent in-migrants and those who are long-time residents of the neighborhoods.

Our findings do suggest that neighborhood gentrification is associated with disproportionate in-migration of college graduates, particularly white college graduates under 40 without children. However, in the full sample, synthetic cohort analysis of out-migration finds no evidence of disproportionate exit of low-education or minority householders. A decomposition of the total income gains in a gentrifying neighborhoods attributes a substantial 33% of income gains to black high school graduates. This sizeable contribution results from the fact that black high school graduates make up a full 30% of the population of gentrifying neighborhoods in 2000 and that the average income of this demographic group in gentrifying neighborhoods increases substantially during the 1990’s.

Our results indicate that, on average, the demographic flows associated with the gentrification of urban neighborhoods during the 1990’s are not consistent with displacement and harm to minority households. In fact, taken as a whole, our results suggest that gentrification of predominantly black neighborhoods creates neighborhoods that are attractive to middle-class black households. While this does not rule out the possibility of negative effects in individual neighborhoods or other time periods, it does suggest that policy makers can approach discussions of gentrification with the knowledge that recent gentrification has not solely benefited high-income white households at the expense of lower-income or minority households.

xp are you calling nabisco fat?

short

The thing is that any time you spend money, you're using economic power to make the world slightly more like what you want than what somebody else might want

is that so

well in an every-purchase-is-an-act-of-judgment kind of way

i'd say yes, nabisco's right about that, but it's not a bad thing in itself

there are issues if you buy one of the new fancy condos going up in the middle of poorest part of the city

This has been expressed in SF since I first moved here and earlier still undoubtedly. However, the reality is that the market is unlikely to have much enthusiasm for that area unless the developers can make more money selling condos than building rental units (whether rent controlled or not) and even if they do bring in rental units, they'll rent for more than existing units for a variety of fully rational reasons. The money all the gentrifiers don't bring in further depresses growth potential. To some extent I just don't believe all that much in 'responsible capitalism' - the price of capitalism's efficiency should be some kind of *gasp* socialism that helps the poor to live at a minimum standard. I have no problem arguing endlessly about abuses and what the standards should be as long as we don't go back to 70's/80's style racist codewords but I don't think we've really seen anything to make me believe the market can be gamed for better results past a certain point.

The thing is that any time you spend money, you're using economic power to make the world slightly more like what you want than what somebody else might want

Its portability is kind of the essential reason why we use money instead of gold ingots or cattle or whatever

iatee we already argued about how that article doesn't say anything useful on the other thread.

also: thanks for linking/posting that UC study, iatee. interesting rebuttal to common criticisms of the negative consequences of gentrification.

many xp I actually agree with you iatee that Vancouver's restrictive suburban-style zoning laws are extremely dumb and definitely part of the problem. However the reality is that there's no way that's gonna change any time soon thanks to large-scale NIMBYism.

So even if it's in some sense "artificial" gentrification that's happening in the city, it's still happening and will continue to happen for the foreseeable future--and it's gentrification that's displacing the poor into even crappier neighborhoods farther from their jobs and support network.

iatee we already argued about how that article doesn't say anything useful on the other thread.

yeah, but for those of us who haven't been following "that other thread"...

also, declaring something to be "artificial" doesn't make it go away

my post from the other thread:

"Low income is defined in this paper to be avg. income in the lowest quintile of u.s. families.

So the problem then is that this definition theoretically won't beg the question with regards to up-skilling or displacement, but by construction it *does* select for an increase in income. So the results cited, even in the best possible interpretation, say that for neighborhoods were that poor and got less poor, the people in those neighborhoods got less poor."

Which is a pretty empty result...

Sure "responsible capitalism" is largely bs; however I still think gentrification can be quite damaging even though I realize that I as a consumer have very little power to stop it.

Gentrification is problematic precisely because it reduces the ability of a social welfare system to bring up the quality of living for the residents of a poorer neighborhood.

Another way of putting it:

The paper just says that in poor neighborhoods that got less poor, on average, according to some very vague "synthetic cohort" interpolation, minorities didn't get pushed out. And a few other things, but equally, eh...

It's also talking about really poor neighborhoods becoming modestly less poor, for the most part.

again, there is no way to measure the term that doesn't do that, which is partly why it's a pretty empty term and lazy narrative to begin w/

(I only mentioned the obvious truism about money because I think the crux, here, is how a lot of people idly wish they could purchase things they desire without affecting other people's ability to do so. Which the whole notion of a market makes rather difficult.)

xpost

yes there is a way to measure the term that doesn't do that -- pick some criteria for gentrification other than "got less poor". At least if the question you're asking is "did the people get less poor". Or use real cohorts instead of synthetic ones -- but that takes work and resources. Or a million other things.

In any case, if it's an essentially useless study, even if (and I dispute this) it is no more useless than any other possible study, then it is still worse than useless to continue to cite said useless study as though it were anything other than useless.

The paper just says that in poor neighborhoods that got less poor, on average, according to some very vague "synthetic cohort" interpolation, minorities didn't get pushed out. And a few other things, but equally, eh...

essentially yes, but i don't see this as an insignificant finding. basic result seems to have been that rather than be pushed out, income among minorities increased. as they say, this doesn't mean that anything is or isn't true in any particular case, but it does lend at least some support to the idea that gentrification isn't as intrinsically hostile to pre-existing low-income communities as is sometimes supposed.

...I don't think we've really seen anything to make me believe the market can be gamed for better results past a certain point.

SF's Department of Housing mandates that a percentage of all new housing developments be sold at below market rates. It worked for me - otherwise I would never have been able to buy a condo (much less a brand new condo, much less a house) in the neighborhood I've lived in for 15+ years. I have a buddy/bandmate on the City Planning Commission and I was talking to him a couple days ago about his job - basically all he does is try to steer developers and their projects to areas of the city that need the money/economic activity.

many xposts

I have to go, when I get back I hope sterling has come up with some criteria to measure 'the process' that a. doesn't beg the question b. doesn't involve poverty

The one issue is that gentrification isn't about causality, it's about a synthetic process of accretion. So you can't just go and have one factor in one column as cause and correlate it to the effect factor in the other column. But it doesn't mean the discussion is stupid, or that the process doesn't exist. That's just sort of how gentrification works, like lots of other processes in the world, with a bunch of things tangled together and growing over and into one another.

So certain types of silly studies can't deal with those sorts of things. That's the problem with these studies, and with people who lean on these studies too heavily.

Sure "responsible capitalism" is largely bs

disagree strongly with this. any action can be responsible or irresponsible (or both or w/e), and that includes participation in a capitalist economy.

if you can't strictly define it, it's not a process, it's a story

Shakey I know about that (a friend bought a place that way) but there's still a profit motive involved.

basic result seems to have been that rather than be pushed out, income among minorities increased

well yes and no. they're just measuring neighborhoods where income increased. but are those all 'gentrifying neighborhoods'? incomes increased for minorities (and everybody) in certain areas. so if somebody said 'whenever people start to make more money (including minorities) then that's bad for minorities)' then this study would prove them wrong. but that's an insane thing to say and nobody said that!

again, all the study shows is that that in poor neighborhoods which got less poor, this can be attributed to people in these neighborhoods getting less poor.

any narrative of gentrification needs to partly be a story about in-migration and demographic and social transformation, not a story about people in some neighborhood making more money than before.

i mean like whats a name for this overheated psychological activity, its sort of approaching the legendary theologians arguing abt how many angels can fit on the head of a pin

lols in retrospect

if you can't strictly define it, it's not a process, it's a story

define 'strictly define' plz. strictly, if possible.

and that includes participation in a capitalist economy.

What? How do I drop out?

Part of the genius of capitalism is its 'creative destruction'. I'm not saying that capitalism cannot be regulated in an ameliorative way but its further excesses should be under the purview of the state (and hence, politics) and not the logic of the market

yep, and wrangling the developers' profit motive is the most difficult aspect of it, I'm sure.

Still, our new condos are a damn sight nicer than public housing. And we're integrated into the building (and community) without the stigma of living in the PJs

xxp

any narrative of gentrification needs to partly be a story about in-migration and demographic and social transformation

And it invariably is... "All the artists have left," and, "that place used to be a black owned bar," and "do we really need another tchotchke shop?"

i agree that capitalism's excesses shouldn't be left to the market to solve, but this part "(and hence, politics)" makes me think it shouldn't be left to the state either.

xp Well, not always. Sometimes it's "Why isn't there a grocery store?" and then there's a grocery store.

Or a bike shop that fixes bikes for kids and where you can put air in your tires, or a hardware store, or restaurants to have dinner at, or laundromats where you won't find human shit on the floor in a corner.

again, all the study shows is that that in poor neighborhoods which got less poor, this can be attributed to people in these neighborhoods getting less poor.

not quite. it shows that when poor neighborhoods got less poor, poor minorities weren't usually displaced and excluded from the increase in wealth. that's an interesting and important point, imo, if the study's findings hold water.

questions about their definition of gentrification seem reasonable, but i think their bottom-line focused approach makes a certain amount of sense. gentrification is fundamentally about changes in the income level of inhabitants and users of an area.

My neighborhhod was pretty rough when I first visited it in the late 80's; poor, largely black, lots of drugs and most of the white ppl were 'alternative' in some way, opening tattoo parlors and boutique record shops and whatnot and it was precisely those ppl who bithced the most when the first fancy restaurant showed up and when the bar owner decided to cash out on his place and sell it "to some yuppies," by which they meant, as much as anything else, white ppl who didn't share their taste in music or their drinking habits, even after their music was no longer bringing ppl into the bar and their drinking habits kept as many ppl out, too. Shit changes w/time. Get used to it or get used to lots of disappointment. Choosing your battles is good advice, too.

makes me think it shouldn't be left to the state either.

Pls name alternatives.

What? How do I drop out?

Part of the genius of capitalism is its 'creative destruction'. I'm not saying that capitalism cannot be regulated in an ameliorative way but its further excesses should be under the purview of the state (and hence, politics) and not the logic of the market

― L'ennui, cette maladie de tous les (Michael White), Tuesday, April 17, 2012 2:17 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my point is that "responsible capitalism" is not bullshit because one can participate in a capitalist economy in ways that are, generally speaking, "responsible" and in ways that are "irresponsible". i.e., i'm not saying that capitalism can be "responsible" in and of itself (it can't), but rather that our approach to our own behaviors in a capitalist system can be more or less responsible. thus "responsible capitalism".

xxpost

actually due to "synthetic cohorts" it doesn't even tell you if poor minorities were or weren't displaced, just that the overall proportion of minorities was relatively stable.

When I lived in Jersey City the neighborhood I was in still had pretty significant remnants of a strong Dominican community. I lived above a Dominican bakery, and my landlord was the owner of the bakeshop and the two apartments above it. He had bought his building and business very cheap, and had done well enough to move out to a nice middle class suburb and rent his apartments out to the new college grad type of tenant that was moving in and paying probably way more than his mortgage. When gentrification works like that it seems like a win-win. But people need to be in a position to take some kind of ownership stake before the neighborhood gentrifies for that to happen, which I'm guessing happens more in working class immigrant neighborhoods than bottom poor neighborhoods.

I mean I don't think you can "fight" gentrification in any meaningful sense. I just don't think that therefore one should blindly say that it is all therefore for the good since market forces blah blah bullshit.

gentrification battles are largely about aesthetics imho - M White otm about taste in music/drinking habits/etc. Everyone's cool with having more money flowing. Everyone is not cool with the aesthetic transformation that ensues.

xxxp

actually due to "synthetic cohorts" it doesn't even tell you if poor minorities were or weren't displaced, just that the overall proportion of minorities was relatively stable.

yeah, that's true, but it seems a reasonable indication nonetheless. not proof, but an interesting point from which to investigate further. certainly not something we should dismiss out of hand.

"Pls name alternatives."

at this point, a roving band of economic supervigilantes secretly headed by Christina Romer and Robert Reich wearing cowboy masks and brass knuckles might be our best bet.

but rather that our approach to our own behaviors in a capitalist system can be more or less responsible. thus "responsible capitalism".

Okay. That sounds fair. I've always been very suspect of the 'value-free' aspect of the invisible hand and the bourgeoisie's facile poo-poohing of noblesse oblige and religious duties.

my biggest problem with the first-wave of dotcom bubble gentrification in my neighborhood was that all these nouveau-riche assholes had terrible taste and absolutely zero consideration for the communal environment. ("You know what this neighborhood needs? An OXYGEN BAR!" *drives off in new Beamer*)

xp

I read something about the best predictor of a neighborhood's gentrification in NYC and SF was the first arrival of a fancy restaurant.

Yeah, I hated them too, but I knew so many ppl taking their money, I couldn't really do anything about it but avoid their oxygen bars

contenderizer: right, the study doesn't actually say nothing. i gave it a bit more credit in the suburbs thread. it just says effectively nothing about *gentrification*.

cut to Shakey Mo on his stoop, porkpie hat blown off, brandishing the chronicle in mid-air with hurt in his eyes. xxp

I am ambivalent about policing a neighborhood for aesthetics 'cause that can quickly turn intolerant and racist if not just snippy and petty. When it's done right, though, it actually does the opposite and I've seen that happen. I haven't seen many ppl who weren't on crack say overtly hostile racist shit in my neighborhood (most racists are sufficiently clever enough not to get caught doing this now, maybe) but I have seen ppl told that homophobia (10 minute walk from the Castro) was not a cool thing and if you're gonna keep it up, I'm going to have to ask you to leave more than I care to remember.

I totally sympathize, though Matt. There was an infestation of super-entitled asshole kids here in the late 90's which really fucked up the vibe of this town in a lot of places.

contenderizer: right, the study doesn't actually say nothing. i gave it a bit more credit in the suburbs thread. it just says effectively nothing about *gentrification*.

depends on how we define gentrification, though, right? i agree that their study would have been much more useful if they A) hadn't relied on the synthetic cohort and B) had restricted it to poor areas that not only experienced increases in average income, but also experienced significant influxes of higher income residents and users.

It basically says that in places where people started to make more money, that rise in income was across the board. So it's not a located story, and it's not surprising. It's a real result, but just not what it's spun as.

vis a vis that sort of thing, the much more important question is what happens when people start to make *less* money -- because that's when things tend to shake out differently...

I live where I can have an easy commute to work.

It basically says that in places where people started to make more money, that rise in income was across the board.

and that there was no significant reduction in minority population. agree that the conclusion iatee posted upthread doesn't seem well-supported by the findings.

The one issue is that gentrification isn't about causality, it's about a synthetic process of accretion. So you can't just go and have one factor in one column as cause and correlate it to the effect factor in the other column. But it doesn't mean the discussion is stupid, or that the process doesn't exist. That's just sort of how gentrification works, like lots of other processes in the world, with a bunch of things tangled together and growing over and into.

yeah again, if we want to actually have a conversation about 'gentrification' and have a shared definition and talk about its effects on people and figure out 'how much' has happened etc. etc. we can't just say "oh well no it's complicated....it's a synthetic process of accretion."

if you want to talk about the changing racial demographics in some area can you talk about that? sure. change in rent prices? sure. constraints to the urban houing market? sure. those are concrete things, and you can see where they occur and try and measure their effects and have a judgment about them. but if gentrification is a "a bunch of things tangled together"' it doesn't tell you anything about anything, it's not 'a process', it's just a word used to describe a particular story that you'd like to tell. when you look at 'a bunch of things tangled together' and pretend that its a concrete process, you miss things that you could see by looking at the individual processes.

I mean is a nice grocery store opening up in bed stuy "gentrification" or is it...a nice grocery store opening up in bed stuy?. is a new store that brings a bunch of jobs to the neighborhood 'gentrification' if it's going to increase property values? is someone getting priced out of their upper west side apartment 'gentrification' or is it just lol upper class white people? a word that can be used to describe all those situations is a word that really doesn't reveal anything about the world.

the point is that one can't talk about a nicer stores as a "cause" and increased property values as an "effect" or rather that one can, but also has to recognize that increased property values are simultaneously a "cause" and nicer stores simultaneously an "effect" and so on for all the things we associate with gentrification. So you can of course measure these things and measure them in their mutual development but you can't run a regression test on one vs. the other with a t-coefficient and an r-squared and what-have-you as though this were an epidemiological analysis and expect anything sensible or meaningful. tools from, e.g., ecology are much more appropriate.

gentrification means, if anything, a demographic transformation of a neighborhood. and you can measure that in all its complexity, and describe it in concrete instances. but you can't distill it down to some "g" factor that waves up and down on a chart. But that doesn't make gentrification unique. That makes it like most sorts of things we talk about in the world.

One thing I sometimes think about in terms of better and worse gentrification -- I think it's kind of sad the way the form gentrification takes is that newcomers kind of form their entirely separate universe of businesses and eateries and the old residents don't go to the new places and the new residents don't go to the old places. I'm not expecting some kind of rainbow singalong between hipsters, Italian working class families and hispanic working class families, but I hate the feeling of a complete bubble, which also does less to let the old residents benefit from the new influx of money (other than I guess property owners).

why not just give old residents coupons to eat at the new places? is that the only thing stopping them from eating there?

s.sclover otm, mostly. i think we can, however, talk fairly accurately about gentrification as the interaction of only a few variables and conditions. these would have to do with the ways in which previously low-income areas change when they begin to be used and occupied by higher-income people. i.e., most definitions of gentrification depend on not just change in overall income level, but on influx, a change in demographics (as iatee says). not all changes in demographics lead to or constitute gentrification though. the crucial element is income disparity, that the new users and occupiers are considerably more wealthy than those with a longer history in the area.

gentrification may be accompanied by other symptoms, but this demographic shift is the most crucial single factor, and it's by no means impossible to isolate and measure.

why not just give old residents coupons to eat at the new places? is that the only thing stopping them from eating there?

there are often very deep social differences between older and newer residents that make this kind of thing difficult. if a restaurant shop or bar is too crowded with very low income people, it will likely repel patronage from many higher income people, and vice-versa. these sorts of social barriers can be very difficult to overcome.

the point is that one can't talk about a nicer stores as a "cause" and increased property values as an "effect" or rather that one can, but also has to recognize that increased property values are simultaneously a "cause" and nicer stores simultaneously an "effect" and so on for all the things we associate with gentrification. So you can of course measure these things and measure them in their mutual development but you can't run a regression test on one vs. the other with a t-coefficient and an r-squared and what-have-you as though this were an epidemiological analysis and expect anything sensible or meaningful. tools from, e.g., ecology are much more appropriate.

gentrification means, if anything, a demographic transformation of a neighborhood. and you can measure that in all its complexity, and describe it in concrete instances. but you can't distill it down to some "g" factor that waves up and down on a chart. But that doesn't make gentrification unique. That makes it like most sorts of things we talk about in the world.

― s.clover, Tuesday, April 17, 2012 5:57 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well I'm glad I got you to "if anything" - but again 'a demographic transformation of a neighborhood' can mean countless things, and almost all of those things wouldn't fall under the common use of the word 'gentrification'. if you 'can't describe its concrete instances' then you can't have an opinion on whether it's good or bad or whether it helps poor people in a neighborhood or hurts them. I agree that you can't "distill it down to anything", I just take that to the logical conclusion, which is that its 'just a word' and one that's used pretty carelessly and to mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean.

I mean:
'it is a thing, but we can't define it, or measure it, or really measure its effect on anybody or how much of it exists, and it's really a lot of things, and nobody agrees what it is, but no, it definitely, quite certainly, is a thing'

okay great, where does this get us? sure yeah, it's a thing, it's a word used to tell stories and it's generally used in the pejorative and it covers a lot of ground. that's 'a thing' I guess.

Ok, I'm bored of explaining this now when you clearly can't be bothered to read things carefully.

no I think I got it 'it's a word', I agree dude, it def is a word

"these sorts of social barriers can be very difficult to overcome."
my suspicion is that these barriers are intentionally encouraged by proprietors, hence the lack of coupons for poor residents.

maybe so, but there may be good reason for that. until recently i lived in an area that's been undergoing gentrification for more than a decade now. the businesses frequented by the very low income residents are often conspicuously avoided by the swells. some of them aren't terribly welcoming of interlopers, which makes sense given that they're the last safe places for older residents to hang out. and if the newly installed chi-chi restaurants, cafes and bars that the rich folk patronize were more welcoming of the very poor, i doubt they'd be anywhere so attractive to their current clientele.

see this is where vigilantism would solve the problem.

(i don't mean like vigilantism like tagging froufrourufu storefronts with anarchy logos, i mean like dudes dressed like batman escorting poor residents to buy artesanal cupcakes or something)

no I think I got it 'it's a word', I agree dude, it def is a word

But you see, I never wrote 'it's a word' in this thread! You did. I mean I get you do this thing where you think that what anyone writes is what you wish they wrote because it makes things easier for you, but it makes it very irritating to attempt to have a discussion.

alright, well, what you said

"gentrification means, if anything, a demographic transformation of a neighborhood. and you can measure that in all its complexity, and describe it in concrete instances. but you can't distill it down to some "g" factor that waves up and down on a chart. But that doesn't make gentrification unique. That makes it like most sorts of things we talk about in the world."

what "demographic transformation"? which ones count? which ones don't? when immigrants move somewhere poor and raise the demand for housing and lower the crime rate, is that gentrification or is it a demographic transformation that's not gentrification?

cause, again, that's the major story of nyc over the last 10 years:
http://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/plurality/

from above link:

block by block shifts w/r/t ethnic majorities in nyc (# of blocks, % of total blocks)

White to Asian 987 3.3
White to Latino 775 2.6
Black to Latino 486 1.6
Latino to White 377 1.3
Latino to Asian 263 .9
Latino to Black 218 .7
Black to White 189 .6
White to Black 172 .6
Asian to White 141 .5
Black to Asian 112 .4
Asian to Latino 106 .4

can you find 'a gentrification story' in those numbers? sure. but does 'white people take over black neighborhoods' jump out as the most important story? or even, a particularly important one? why aren't we talking about the black neighborhoods that turned into latino neighborhoods, something that happened to 3x as many blocks in the city. why is the white population gain in brooklyn - 38k (a large % of that hasidic jews, not gonna look it up but I'd guess at least a third) more important than the asian population gain in brooklyn...75k? do only hipsters affect the housing market? are the 100k latinos who moved to the bronx, often to black neighborhoods capable of pricing people out?

overall blacks and whites lost population and asians and latinos gained population. about half of the blacks who left went to the south, part of a pretty important national trend. did some of them feel priced out? I don't doubt it. did some feel priced out of neighborhoods where white people moved? absolutely.

can you tell a story about someone who felt like their neighborhood was too expensive, didn't like the demographic changes, and decided to leave the city completely? sure. it's just, most of the time you tell that story, the demographic changes weren't 'white people showed up'. sometimes it was. there are a lot of stories.

i hate both the yuppies (lol self-hate!) and the original residents (or, as they're called, the "born-and-raiseds" [or "bnrs"]) of my gentrified town. i hate the yuppies b/c they are, like, mostly lol obtuse greedy yuppie douchebags. and i hate the bnrs b/c they're mostly greedy Archie Bunker-type assholes who routinely do nothing but bitch about the yuppie newcomers when they aren't trying to bleed them dry of every cent they can (b/c the bnrs still control the municipal political infrastructure here). the yuppies and bnrs are both repugnant, though in different ways.

to put it another way: every time i hear one of the bnrs bitching about new condos (which are, TBH, usually ugly overpriced monstrosities that look like tarted-up college dorms) or new sushi bars that cater exclusively to yuppies, i think to myself "the only reason you bozos have that oversized SUV double-parked a block from here or yer Jersey Shore-lookalike brats tool about town in tricked-out Beemers is b/c those yuppies you're talking shit about were willing to plunk down obscene amounts of money on the real estate that you assholes own so STFU."

can you find 'a gentrification story' in those numbers? sure. but does 'white people take over black neighborhoods' jump out as the most important story? or even, a particularly important one? why aren't we talking about the black neighborhoods that turned into latino neighborhoods, something that happened to 3x as many blocks in the city. why is the white population gain in brooklyn - 38k (a large % of that hasidic jews, not gonna look it up but I'd guess at least a third) more important than the asian population gain in brooklyn...75k? do only hipsters affect the housing market? are the 100k latinos who moved to the bronx, often to black neighborhoods capable of pricing people out?

i suspect that one of the reasons the story of wealthy white gentrification is given so much mainstream attention, relative to the city's other demographic changes, is that it concerns and is directly visible to white people. gentrification is in part the legacy of the city-dwelling, culture-generating "creative classes" that are so instrumental in telling america the story of itself, and these people are often (though certainly not exclusively) white. white america is implicated in this particular aspect of the city's story, since its youthful desire for cool/cheap living spaces and hip new distractions helps fuel the processes involved. it should therefore come as no big surprise that the gentrification narrative is of special interest to this group.

there's nothing necessarily wrong with this reflexive looping of attention. some might call it narcissistic navel-gazing, but self-awareness is generally thought to be a good thing, right? the more attention wealthy whites pay to the negative consequences of the gentrification they cause, the more effectively they can work to ameliorate those consequences. "responsible capitalism" and blah blah blah.

http://www.pottersgifts.com/prodimages/BOZO-BAGBOPPERS_medium.jpg

i suspect that one of the reasons the story of wealthy white gentrification is given so much mainstream attention, relative to the city's other demographic changes, is that it concerns and is directly visible to white people

voila

whoa this is already such a long thread it's tough to jump in. a few things to note --

people wanting to move to cities is a good trend that we should encourage for countless reasons, limited supply of urban housing is an artificial problem... artificial in that the constraints are legal not physical

def not true??? proximity to reliable public transportation & to places of work = a very physical constraint. not only does displacing the less affluent out of the city force them to rely on more expensive & less ensured methods of movement (you can rely on a subway to get you where you're going, and if it's shut down, you don't need to pay to fix it -- if your car breaks you might not be able to afford to fix it). And add to that the fact that municipal taxes have dug themselves into a hole so deep/cost of infrastructure has risen so much that there will basically never be any new development of mass transit in NA cities (maybe there are exceptions but honestly when's the last time you saw a real meaningful rail line built in YOUR city?) so it cannot get better.

This isn't to say that moving into the city with money shouldn't be done, because gentrification is almost more of a symptom of a greater problem (the ballooning number of households in spite of a lack of actual population growth, thanks to social changes (people moving out of mom's house & wanting an apartment all their own & bringing spatial ideals based on suburban living to the city & expecting to have a shitload of space for their shitloads of stuff). the 'gentrification' problem isn't as symptomatic in cities where people are actually committing to roommate-esque living situations (iirc Copenhagen has a high rate of "co-habitation" where two couples eg. will buy a house together).

i don't see gentrification as an intrinsically good or bad thing, rather as something that just happens, part of the ongoing life cycle of the city

i think this is a sort of dangerous way to think because gentrification is a pretty new trend in the grand scheme. the fact that more people are moving to cities isn't cyclical, it's a trend that is going up & up possibly forever, and the aforementioned growth of new households isn't changing either. housing prices are rising everywhere & employment is becoming more & more precarious (temporary, part-time, seasonal, shift etc) -- this isn't a mark of a cycle, it's a mark of a trend that is making living conditions more dangerous for everyone. even inter-city gentrification is kind of a myth (for every person who moves from NYC to minneapolis-st-paul another ten or so people move from somewhere else to nyc) so there isn't even really an argument for that. not that anyone is making that argument here.

it's tough for me to talk abt the racial angle because most of my studies on gentrification in school have been canadian, and the gentrification "story" isn't as racial here (altho to an extent there's a french-english angle to it in my city of montreal). gentrification is an insanely tough issue to talk about (especially because there are a lot of things to consider -- multiple stages of gentrification, residential vs. commercial gentrification, etc) but there are some things that we know to make it a bit less bad -- if you move to the city fuck yr car; have roommates; know that highrises != density; blah blah blah. I should stop for now because I am probably not making a lot of sense & going off topic.

Waay back in the 80s, in the "Lawyers in Love" period in our culture, "gentrification" seemed to mean yuppies moving into old industrial spaces. Which was probably a good thing. Over time it meant "white invaders" in neighborhoods of color, possibly disrupting the cultural and historical continuity.

I am rather PC but I think gentrification is "bad" depending on how much it disrupts the culture and history of a place. Some blighted areas welcome new blood!

(maybe there are exceptions but honestly when's the last time you saw a real meaningful rail line built in YOUR city?)

there's one being built in my city right now! and there was another one just completed a couple years ago. also we are getting a new bridge.

def not true??? proximity to reliable public transportation & to places of work = a very physical constraint. not only does displacing the less affluent out of the city force them to rely on more expensive & less ensured methods of movement (you can rely on a subway to get you where you're going, and if it's shut down, you don't need to pay to fix it -- if your car breaks you might not be able to afford to fix it). And add to that the fact that municipal taxes have dug themselves into a hole so deep/cost of infrastructure has risen so much that there will basically never be any new development of mass transit in NA cities (maybe there are exceptions but honestly when's the last time you saw a real meaningful rail line built in YOUR city?) so it cannot get better.

'meaningful rail lines' are built all the time, they're currently being built in both the largest and second largest cities in america right now. DC built a massive subway system from nothing - in the 1970s.

they're not being built 'enough' because of political reasons not because of physical or economic constraints. there is nothing inevitable about the way we allocate almost all of our transit spending to roads. where we do build it, public transit is often not anywhere close to being competitive w/ automobiles because personal auto use is still massively underpriced.

massive, largely provincial/local-politics-driven in-fighting over California's huge lightrail project is going on right now.

I really hope it gets built, whole project is awesome imho

I'm moving to NYC in August. the morality of what neighborhood I'm moving into will not be on my mind. Where can I afford to live that isn't the boonies is what will be on my mind.

we have a ton of friends who live in NYC & we're checking out stuff we're finding on craigslist and on some listservs (mostly to get an idea of what's popping up in which neighborhoods). The plan is to put our stuff into storage & couch surf for a few weeks while we scour the city for apts. (not optimistic abt securing a decent apt from afar.)

wish me luck. good chance I'll be a part of the gentrification narrative somehow.

anyone who's made the move into NYC: advice or recommendations are welcome

"gentrification" seemed to mean yuppies moving into old industrial spaces. Which was probably a good thing.
yes & no. massive loft spaces owned by one lawyer = poor use of space; new-build condos = overpriced & underdense = poor use of space; commercial displacement = homogenizes neighbourhood = loses "capital = "third-wave gentrification" = why even do it in the first place. I'm not for letting these places rot or go unused, far from it, I just think there'd be a better way to go about it eg. building more, smaller households & charging less & increased mixed-use zoning to encourage foot-powered shopping.

Over time it meant "white invaders" in neighborhoods of color, possibly disrupting the cultural and historical continuity.
It pretty much has always been a middle-class invaders thing -- the "gentry" displacing the working class -- the race thing just added when it became an American phenomenon b/c, I guess, that's who the gentry & working class are.

there's one being built in my city right now!
;_; which city if you dont mind my asking? so jealous :(

'meaningful rail lines' are built all the time, they're currently being built in both the largest and second largest cities in america right now. DC built a massive subway system from nothing - in the 1970s.
can you send me some more info on these meaningful rail lines? i know that not EVERY city is victim to this but certainly the places where i've studied/spent time (toronto, ottawa, montreal) are kinda disasterous to varying degrees

they're not being built 'enough' because of political reasons not because of physical or economic constraints.
one of the big political problems is that no mayor is gonna put money into something that'll hurt now to help later b/c they won't be in charge later & the 'bottom-line' people will see him/her as a failure -- might be a bit too precocious of me to call that a "physical" constraint but yeah. Besides even in cases where this stuff gets built is it really outpacing displacement? Are the lines that are going further & cost more to run, maintain, build -- are they increasingly costing more to the end user and/or becoming less likely to occur b/c of the decreased spending power of these exurban locations? in toronto it's already silly -- the people who can afford to live near a subway have a LOT of money & the light rail that connects the rest of the city (ie. places where a sqft doesn't cost a million bux) is more expensive & yet the minimum wage downtown is still nowhere near enough to cover the 25-33% that living & moving is supposed to cost (not to mention the fact that every damn body has to work as an intern there for a year, which I COMPLETELY don't get how people survive)

Another thing in re the thread title -- it's pretty much inevitable that most people will live not necessarily in the MOST expensive part of the city they can afford, but at least in a party of the city that comes pretty close to or exceeds the percent of income one is "supposed" to spend on housing. I mean most people want to maximize their quality of life, and most, say, stock brokers are not going to want to be the odd white yuppie in a working class colombian neighborhood or whatever at 15% of their income when they could spend 25% of their income and live in a yuppie neighborhood.

'displacement' is not something you can measure, because people move and don't move for countless reasons

http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2012/01/02/opening-and-construction-starts-planned-for-2012/

I live in San Francisco fwiw

oh I forgot to include the ongoing expansion of BART in the Bay Area as well - they just built the extension to the airport and are in the process of extending the entire system to close the loop and include the south bay

DC's rail is a perfect example of something built not for intra-city transit but basically commuter purposes.

Similarly BART.

the fact that more people are moving to cities isn't cyclical, it's a trend that is going up & up possibly forever, and the aforementioned growth of new households isn't changing either. housing prices are rising everywhere & employment is becoming more & more precarious (temporary, part-time, seasonal, shift etc) -- this isn't a mark of a cycle, it's a mark of a trend that is making living conditions more dangerous for everyone. even inter-city gentrification is kind of a myth (for every person who moves from NYC to minneapolis-st-paul another ten or so people move from somewhere else to nyc) so there isn't even really an argument for that. not that anyone is making that argument here.

my point was that within the life of a city, the same neighborhood can experience cycles of economic prosperity and decay, even as the city in general continues to grow.

not for intra-city transit but basically commuter purposes.

For many ppl working in the downtown and financial district of SF, the commute from the westernmost parts of the city are often longer than for ppl who live in the East Bay and take BART in.

In re the trend going up "possibly forever" I just don't see any basis for that. There's no reason that the same things that drove middle and upper middle class people out of the cities -- economic downturn, crime, racial tension, and/or changes in lifestyle preferences -- can't happen again.

one of the major reasons people were moving out of the city vs into it from WWII until the end of the cold war was because there was a pretty massive campaign encouraging people to live in the suburbs & grow their own garden vegetables & live the "country life" w/i reach of the economic centre b/c it meant that if the soviets nuked a city they'd have to spend more nuke to kill people (or so was the wisdom at the time), I highly doubt that that (very large) factor is going to come into play again & encourage people to leave cities.

you left out the part about their being a newly constructed, federally funded highway system connecting those suburbs.

built by a Republican btw

Urbanization has been a pretty steady trend in much of the world at least 400 years

yep. suburbanization thanks to the automobile is the anomaly. historically speaking.

Urbanization has been a pretty steady trend in much of the world at least 400 years

― L'ennui, cette maladie de tous les (Michael White), Wednesday, April 18, 2012 6:07 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Rural poor moving in droves to cities like Rio and Beijing is pretty much irrelevant to this thread imo.

one of the major reasons people were moving out of the city vs into it from WWII until the end of the cold war was because there was a pretty massive campaign encouraging people to live in the suburbs & grow their own garden vegetables & live the "country life" w/i reach of the economic centre b/c it meant that if the soviets nuked a city they'd have to spend more nuke to kill people

that's odd. i've never heard it suggested that suburban expansion was in large part based on the explicit marketing of nuclear anxiety. places like levittown were marketed as superior to the city in other ways: more luxurious and private, relatively crime free, reassuringly homogeneous, modern, affording greater freedom, etc. a reflection of then-current conceptions of comfort, ideal family life and basic american identity (land of one's own, road and range, etc).

Incomplete response to the scope of that post, yes. But this thread is not about mass urbanization, it's about young, upwardly mobile mostly white people moving to cities mostly in the US.

Also this:

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/04/05/article-2125507-127AE6EC000005DC-137_634x326.jpg

which has only in the last few years begun to reverse. Hardly an "unstoppable trend" of urbanisation in the US.

(note: header for that graph is confusing -- article is about the more recent trend, graph shows the trend through 2000)

My point, though, is that suburbanization in the US was weak for most of the 20th century until the Cold War, was inflamed by racism and strife following the Great Migration, especially after WWII and then more so during the Civil Rights struggles of the 50's and 60's. Over the long term, I think urbanization will more the norm, even in the US.

What is that graph showing? A city? All cities in America? The world?

The US has weak pop density and we did a LOT of expanding during the era of the automobile (which was heavily championned by the govmt) so it stands to reason that we're more suburban than most places.

Rural poor moving in droves to cities like Rio and Beijing is pretty much irrelevant to this thread imo.

I agree. More like far-off barons buying townhouses in the nation's capital.

For much of the middle and upper middle class, their jobs or prospects are downtown and city living appears to be more fun/less dangerous than it was 30 years ago.

Right. The point I am making is that there is no necessary reason that cities will remain or continue to become more attractive to middle and upper middle class people for the indefinite future, contrary to iatee's claim.

No necessary one but I'm inclined to agree with him. I think a lot of suburban flight was lower middle class and tinged with racism. If you're wealthier, you can afford security, private schools, country escapes and city living is just so much more stimulating.

i remember people moving/buying into poor/working class neighborhoods in philly years ago cuz the houses were so cheap and the houses were empty! the old people were dying and the younger people had moved on cuzza lack of jobs (or, uh, they had died too). blocks and blocks of houses. it could only be a good thing that people bought them and fixed them up, no? man, when i hear about the fishtown boom in philly! fishtown! who would have guessed?? NOBODY went to fishtown ever for anything. unless their grandmother lived there. and kensington! *shudder* sorry, no offense to anyone from kensington. could be a very ominous place. anything that could make it less ominous is okay with me!

i mean you had all these massive sections of philly that used to be filled with people who had real working class jobs. union jobs. shipyard jobs. it all went away. sometimes you gotta make something new or just abandon it all together.

that's the funny thing about the gentrification debate -- it's a blanket term for "this neighbourhood was unhealthy and now it isn't" -- sometimes it's like what you said (which sounds pretty decent -- not a lot of new-build, underused & underdense neighbourhood, some semblance of civic responsibility) and sometimes it's pricing out the businesses & people who make a neighbourhood "interesting," buying out the land barons & plopping a poorly-built flashy condo unit on top w/ a whole foods down the street & charging so much money for people to live in a space that is basically a hot mess

viz. Detroit

xpost

sometimes it's pricing out the businesses & people who make a neighbourhood "interesting," buying out the land barons & plopping a poorly-built flashy condo unit on top w/ a whole foods down the street & charging so much money for people to live in a space that is basically a hot mess

gentrification often takes place in areas that are very little used, for instance in warehouse or industrial parts of town long after business has moved on. in such cases, artists and other young bohos are the shock troops of gentrification. they move in because rents are cheap and they can make the place their own. they take the disused/decayed area and make it "interesting". they create loft and warehouse parties, art spaces, secret artisanal businesses, etc. their semi-secret hive of interestingness attracts other hip young people until an economic critical mass is reached and things like record shops, funky coffee houses and makeshift art galleries begin to appear. this less-secret interestingness in turn attracts richer and less bohemian urban types, and you start to get condos, fancy restaurants and all the rest. at this point, the "original" art-squatter gentrifiers begin to squawk, because their version of local interestingness is being squished out in favor of someone else's. but they were only ever the first wave.

there are other models and versions of gentrification, obviously, but this one is pretty common, and not a bad thing by any means.

"secret artisanal businesses"

pssst...hey, buddy, need a candle? got hemp tote bags...i got what you need.

how many places does that actually happen to? where secret boho shops/industrial warehouse areas turn into condos and fancy restaurants? just wondering. maybe the economy isn't as bad as everyone thinks. outside of nyc that is. every inch of nyc is fair game.

is city island hip yet? such a cool spot. haven't been there since the 80's though.

it's totally happening in SF right now and has been for as long as I've been here. in my neighborhood even

xp

how many places does that actually happen to? where secret boho shops/industrial warehouse areas turn into condos and fancy restaurants? just wondering.

Hoboken, New Jersey. we still have a few old abandoned factories that now have secret boho shops (and recording studios/places where musicians and artists can hang) that have survived the onslaught of politically-connected developers.

i mean, no joke one such place is a block from my favorite coffee spot and every so often i bump into Yo La Tengo, Lee Renaldo, Thurston Moore and (rumor has it) a Feelie or two who use the place to record music or store their archives and instruments.

yeah should have included san fran with nyc. my bad. probably portland now too cuzza wild flag energy. although portland has been hip for years. kinda.

has happened to a number of neighborhoods in seattle over the last few decades.

in parallel to this, there's another kind of local gentrification that involves young, middle-class married people buying starter homes in the "safer" parts of low-income residential neighborhoods. this kind of gentrification bypasses the art-boho stage and quickly moves into the fancy boutiques and whole foods phase. since it takes place in active residential neighborhoods, this kind of gentrification seems more likely to displace low-income & minority residents.

...but i can't really say for sure

i bump into thurston sometimes. but he only lives up the road a piece. i like living in thurston country. even if he is from bethel and as a brookfield kid i am sworn to hate all bethel kids until i die. (cuz bethel sucks and bobcats rule fyi.)

okay, seattle, san fran, nyc. those i understand. but this is such a big country! people need to spread out more. plenty of funky places to go around. i want everyone to move up here. sweet houses for under a hundred grand. decent schools. you can jam with thurston or kim on the weekends. groovy people. lots of trees. local color. funky old shops. funky new shops. train station being built here you know. in a year or two direct trains to nyc. i'll show you around. all of you.

DC's rail is a perfect example of something built not for intra-city transit but basically commuter purposes.

― s.clover, Wednesday, April 18, 2012 4:35 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Similarly BART.

― s.clover, Wednesday, April 18, 2012 4:35 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the DC subway wasn't an example of an ideal system just an example of 'massive urban rail systems can be built, even today, even in america'

but I mean, most of the nyc subway system was originally built for commuter purposes too.

Right. The point I am making is that there is no necessary reason that cities will remain or continue to become more attractive to middle and upper middle class people for the indefinite future, contrary to iatee's claim.

― i don't believe in zimmerman (Hurting 2), Wednesday, April 18, 2012 5:31 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

resource constraints

how many places does that actually happen to? where secret boho shops/industrial warehouse areas turn into condos and fancy restaurants?

I can only really tlak to canada, but...

in toronto, in the past 20 years... queen west, ossington, yonge/eg (maybe? not sure abt the history of this area), st. clair west soon, king west (soon), liberty village, the junction & the junction triangle, possibly a couple others i am forgetting. basically a LOT of toronto = this richard florida-style PUT ALL THE CONDOS CREATIVE CLASS etc stuff.

in montreal, less so b/c the regie protects renters to a degree but even so, the plateau (ongoing), little burgundy, griffintown (big one -- in a couple years it's basically going to be a expensive yuppie bumderland), mile end (massive price up -- I moved here 6y ago and rent has probably doubled on my old apt), to a lesser extent some of NDG (monkland), and st. henri.

vancouver I know it's happened in a few places but I really don't have a lay of the land.

ottawa all I know of really is centretown, mechanicsville (the "adjacent" rule kinda turned this place into "west westboro" & pooped all over the greatness of it), but there's not much in OTT because it is such an insanely weird town (richest in canada per capita for a long time maybe still!).

I know it seems like I am maybe overstating this but LITERALLY ALL OF THESE NEIGHBOURHOODS (and yes they're all fairly big neighbourhoods) were once kinda neat and have all seen new-build condos that go for 300, 400, 500 grand that look like shit, and they all had interesting (and MORE IMPORTANTLY THAN "cool" or "secret"), AFFORDABLE shops that have since shuttered in favour of stuff that plays to that "hip" shop but charge far too much to continue living there even if you had a cheap lease.

I honestly dunno what's going to happen w/ some of these cities. I think MTL has long enough b/c of the regie resistance that it'll stay affordable but I know Vancouver & toronto are already at the point where even if I found a GREAT job that paid me like 20 or 30% more than what I'm worth I'd still be veeeeeeeeery wary of moving there, b/c prices of housing AND goods are so miserable. And there's nowhere that's like where I live in MTL -- cheap, and still very "mixed" (not a race thing, but more like... you have families, and you have young people, and you have old people -- not only students or only yuppies, but there are a couple of those too).

tbf thats 100% false so

false creek you mean?

very interesting! thanks. plus, i like reading all those canadian neighborhood names.

sounds pretty widespread. just seems crazy that arty/hip/funky/whatever can so easily turn into massive development. but people like following the coolsters. and then ruin everything cool. ah, people, what can you do about them?

enh lots of stuff that isnt rent is cheaper in toronto than it is in mtl, some stuff isnt. most of the nabes you list are still p mixed demographically, again more than 'relevant' mtl or vancouver nabes

the problem at least w/ west toronto is less gentrification than developers who buy up lots of single family homes and turn them into overpriced rental units and sorta help gut nabes and keep property prices deeply unrealistic as well as the high % of foreign-born purchasers both of which are really f(n)s of historically low interest rates

always thought it was funny that for years i could barely get people to VISIT me in philadelphia and then right after we moved that nyt article about hipsters from new york moving to philly/philly as the new borough/etc. and then on and on. people paying real serious money for houses in neighborhoods that were avoided like the plague. had to happen i guess. so much undervalued real estate for decades. and obviously proximity to nyc. for artists its always been a great place. cheap rents and huge spaces. i always had like 10 feet high ceilings in even my crappiest apartments.

i just had to move. then philly could be cool. i mean, its still not "cool" but jeezus like i said when i hear about all the clubs and bars and music happening in fishtown! fishtown! not even the fish wanted to live there!

I know it seems like I am maybe overstating this but LITERALLY ALL OF THESE NEIGHBOURHOODS (and yes they're all fairly big neighbourhoods) were once kinda neat and have all seen new-build condos that go for 300, 400, 500 grand that look like shit, and they all had interesting (and MORE IMPORTANTLY THAN "cool" or "secret"), AFFORDABLE shops that have since shuttered in favour of stuff that plays to that "hip" shop but charge far too much to continue living there even if you had a cheap lease.

this is just like objectively untrue fwiw unless korean marts that charged $15 for a bottle of advil or homeless bars that cashed ppls disability cheques for a cut are the sort of 'interesting' and 'affordable' places that yr lamenting

xxpost @ lamp, toronto has the unique problem of basically being built like a MASSIVE suburb already due to the weird way it grew but you can't deny the crazy condo development from like parkdale all the way across to the beaches!

& re: the last one why were you buying your advil from a korean mart? obv you'll overpay for things anywhere when you buy them @ the wrong place?

"for artists its always been a great place. cheap rents and huge spaces"

great place to LIVE. and do work. i should say. still have to go to new york if you want to get $$$ for art. always thought philly had weird art scenes. VERY insular. and parochial. and not the greatest self-promoting town in the world. great self-defeating town though. one of the best.

what kind of $$$ for art are you talking? like 1% money?

re: toronto btw I am NOT an expert as most of my knowledge of it is second hand (reading for school & shit + anecdotal stuff from people i know) until the past year or two where i've been visiting it more often & as an adult -- most of the hoods I go to seem to be like $$$$$$$ to live and $$$$$$$ to buy anything even though they wear the sheen of "this place is cool/local/arty/hip/whatever"

maybe its because there isn't very much housing in toronto proper

is there a way that could be fixed

outside of fort york and liberty village none of the nabes you listed were 'gentrified' by condos tho and atp condos are one of the few affordable ways someone could buy into like litte italy or liberty village. and even the prices of single-family homes in like crawford-in-the-park or south koreatown have only gone crazy in the last three or so years. there are still demographically diverse and more economically diverse than they were like 10 years ago. hell how many pho places or portugese bbqs have made bank off of new/younger ppl moving into nabes...

i mean im not even sure what divides simple having the 'sheen' of being a nice nabe and actually being one for you except whether or not you can afford to live there so the argument seems moot but i think the real 'problem' is interest rates coupled with deregulation of the rental market. its not like this can be completely divorced from issues of gentrification bcuz increased demand is helping create a market for speculators but ::shrug::

like its obv meaningless but i can afford to live and shop in one of the yuppiest nabes in west toronto on my shitty income than it can hardly be that unaffordable

not an expert on this obv but from my personal observations in toronto, the areas w/ massive condos under construction and the areas w/ walkable neighborhoods didn't seem to overlap so much

Haven't read the full thread yet but just wanted to chime in and say the graph upthread (with cities in decline since 1900) is super misleading whatever the hell it's tracking, because its first 30-odd years are the heyday of STREETCAR suburbs, which are by today's standards urban places - the inner ring (roughly the zone between a two-mile radius from center to a six-mile radius) of all major American cities that were growing between 1890 and 1930 is all this quite densely gridded stuff. It's all single family housing, except the streets that were the trolley lines (where the shops were) but it is, internally, functional for pedestrians and only needs the now-lost trolleys to get you in and out of town. All that bungalow belt stuff, where the people with the good union jobs staked their dreams before they skipped off on white flight, cheap gas, a basically free interstate highway system (and yes, the construction of that was partly inspired by a desire to evacuate in case of atomic attack - program started the year after the Russkies detonated an H-bomb IIRC- tho I doubt most of the ppl who moved to Levittowns did so for that reason), and exTREMELY biased and discriminatory FHA loan-guaranteeing criteria that made it easy to build in the boonies but next to impossible to fix up an old building......anyway I lost my track of mind but i think the point is that a) suburbanization is not necessarily a universal human desire colliding with a free market, but in fact a situated phenomenon owing to VERY specific circumstances unlikely to be repeated in the same combination, and b) people moving back to those inner-ring streetcar places are, effectively, reurbanizing. If you want to make sure there is enough affordable housing stock for people getting squeezed out of the downtowns, reestablish the trolley lines so that commuting from the streetcar suburbs is a viable option again. IMO!

Omg that is so tldr, sorry, typing on a cellphone screen i have no idea how long my paras get

iatee I think you just found a new friend

so I heard on Bill Maher that something like over 30% of people 35-65 in the US live alone (he had the author of a book who did a study...). Now consider that in the building boom it wasn't apartments being built it was condos and homes. So the single dwelling places will largely be in the city where they were built a long time ago. I think it's all this that must be considered when you talk about the middle class moving to the cities. When you live alone you kind need to be close to community. You don't need a whole house either.

I've always lived in the nicest place I could afford. I only rent from private owner as they don't tend to raise the rents year over year. I tend to only rent from places that only advertise with a sign in the yard rather than on the internet - again sign of a private owner looking for locals. I spend so little time at home, I just want it quiet when I get there so I never have lived in a unit more than 20 and usually fewer than 6 units. I'm single, never married, very late 30s, middle class, and I live in the center of my little village in Carlsbad, CA. I have a below market place for this area -rent more than $500 less than the average for 2bds apartments here. My rent has only be raised $50 in 5 years. Carlsbad is pretty ridiculously white so but no, I have no guilt I have this place that could maybe rented by someone who needed this discount more. It is what I can afford, close to work, close to shops and entertainment, and it's a duplex so QUIET. I do want to move back to the city (San Diego) at somepoint but the economics have to be right - where i save about $400 in rent so I can afford the gas on the 40mile commute to work. That will mean once again having to find that needle in a haystack and will likely be in neighborhood that is mostly non-white.

sorry long winded. let's think about how our society is changing, how more and more people are choosing to be single and no kids and well, yep, we'll likely be in apartments that will mostly be in the city :)

otms to the left of me otms to the right of me

Jen echo

?

it's the ilx one-man welcoming committee.

thanks for your post!

it was a pretty great post

iatee-bait, this is a local issue and this guy's the only smart commenter http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/another-one-bites-the-dust/Content?oid=13385766 yaya tl;dr but he sums up some genuinely interesting things and does it in a way none of us have so far on this thread:

So many comments, so little understanding. Like @5, who says "Perhaps setting a limit on the percentage of the area of a block, say 15%, that any new building can occupy would help." No, that wouldn't help -- that would utterly destroy the neighborhood, by filling it with waste ground (and then waste, and crime). This is one of the classic mistakes of the 60s and 70s.

Now we're making new mistakes. We're filling the blocks, which is good, and rising upward, which is also good. But we're destroying the thing that makes the block usable in the first place: THE STREET.

The street is a room, with furniture and places of interest on both sides: SHOPS. This is what makes interesting urban spaces.

I only wish I was smart enough to describe what happens on streets like this in mathematics -- I know the formula is out there, I just lack the ability to describe it. You want more separate uses per block, but you also want short blocks. There is an exponential multiplier -- a block with four shopfronts has more than twice the interest, and the foot traffic, of a block with only two. But a block that's 2,000 feet long is not as interesting as a block that's 500 feet long, because the cross street is an opening to another side -- more ways for traffic to move in and out increases interest. Maybe count cross streets double or something.

I'm glad to see Dominic identifying another huge factor, elaborated by d.p. @30: shallow retail spaces. I've been harping on this subject here for years. Shallow retail spaces, caused by giving over most of the ground floor to the parking garage, almost by definition cannot be filled by interesting uses. The best you can hope for is a yoghurt shop or a nail salon or a check cashing joint or tax office or something -- something that doesn't require a stockroom, something that just serves customers one at a time at a counter. Restaurants and shoe stores and the like have problems in these spaces.

Another thing, though, that is not addressed in this article, is the natural cycle of neighborhoods. We THINK we know what this cycle looks like, but the history or gentrification is not long or deep; it's possible that the classic gentrification cycle has played out, or changed in some way, in response to immigration in particular. If I had to describe what I think goes on in 2012, as opposed to 1978 or 1992, I'd say that neighborhoods need to become laboratories for immigrant economies in order to be successful. That's what lends some vitality to seemingly banal uses like nail shops or cruddy teriyaki joints -- these are gateways into the American economy for poor immigrants.

Neighborhoods are never static; a neighborhood achieves iconic status by means of a process in flux -- that's why there's a Bauhaus in this building in the first place (I remember when there wasn't, when the idea of a coffeehouse there would have been laughed at even by the hipsters of the day). This isn't about Bauhaus. If you "preserve" Bauhaus you preserve nothing -- Bauhaus would probably disappear eventually anyways. EVERYTHING disappears eventually. The trick is to make sure that it is replaced by urban vitality. Not 24 Hour Fitness.

That vitality comes from immigrants, for the most part. There is a hipster vitality, which has floated Pike/Pine to its current state, but can that last forever? I doubt it. And, honestly, the thing that hipsters need more than anything right now is to ally with immigrants, because immigrants need similar spaces to themselves -- namely, cheaper spaces. Which means older spaces, even ramshackle spaces.

The crappy nail salon is an immigrant response to modern building -- it fits the terrible spaces that modern builders build. If builders are forced to build better spaces, better uses will come. But our track record in forcing better building is poor, because the people who do the forcing don't know what "better" means.

I'm not sure I do, either. I can describe it, and recognize it when I see it, but how to describe it in a building code?

Where I'm at right now on this is this: all newly built retail spaces must be AT LEAST twice as deep as they are wide, and retail space must occupy 85% of all street frontages (leaving room only for things like building entrances, utilities, etc. A maximum street frontage would be nice; giant entire-block buildings are soul-destroying. Another feature I'd like to see is to extend this retail requirement to the alleyways, too -- and REQUIRE alleys. Maybe relaxing the 2X depth requirement there.

And every potential member of the planning commission must be able to document, I don't know, 100 miles of street walking in shopping precincts of cities outside the US.

a geez, thanks!

that stranger post is likewise great, toandos, thanks for posting it. dunno about all the stuff at the end about hipsters and immigrants, but everything leadind up to that otm, especially the importance of street-as-room

that is a bummer. the bauhaus building is really pretty handsome. and seattle increasingly lacks handsome buildings.

yeah that comment is good

xp otm

didn't know it was under threat :(

what kind of $$$ for art are you talking? like 1% money?

― smash sbros (Will M.), Thursday, 19 April 2012 01:15 (Yesterday) Permalink

If you want to make a living as a capital A Artist (as opposed to doing graphic stuff for t-shirts and the like, or painting generic living-room landscapes and made-to-order potraits), this is pretty much the only kind of money there is.

if you live and show in philly you just aren't gonna get your name out there as easily. i mean, it happens, but rarely. philly has always been bad at creating buzz. i mean its a fine place to work if you show/sell elsewhere, but the galleries have never really excited too many people and when i lived there you would see the same artists showing in the same places forever. i think judith schaechter is brilliant and she should be world famous but she likes being in philly so she kinda isn't world famous.

http://www.claireoliver.com/catalogimages/battle-complete.jpg

i mean she is repped by a new york gallery but she's not THERE. if you know what i mean.

^ otm. saw a big show of schaecter's stuff at the tacoma art museum a number of years back. impressive as hell.

http://www.guernicamag.com/features/south-l-a-twenty-years-later

when massive racial displacement doesn't fit the gentrification narrative

Of course not all (or even most) demographic shifts are due to gentrification. Nobody ever said otherwise.