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'

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.