Is Gentrification a Bad Thing?

Pages

I'll admit I haven't given much thought to the phenomenon of gentrification which is why I'm asking for some input from you fine folks. In a recent rant by Spike Lee he seems to vacilate between "back in my day" nostalgia and real, honest concerns about how different populations are treated by local governments. Here are some snipets of Lee's various rants from a lecture he was involved in for Black History Month and on Anderson Cooper.

"I grew up here in New York. It's changed," Lee said at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, an art, design, and architecture school. "And why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the South Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better? The garbage wasn't picked up every mother******* day when I was living in 165 Washington Park. ... The police weren't around. When you see white mothers pushing their babies in strollers, three o'clock in the morning on 125th Street, that must tell you something."

...

On Wednesday, Lee told "Anderson Cooper 360" that he's not against new people moving into areas that were once predominantly poor and predominantly African-American.

"My problem is that when you move into a neighborhood, have some respect for the history, for the culture," Lee said.

...

Then comes the mother******' Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can't discover this! We been here," he said to applause from the audience.

He gave the examples of people playing drums in Mount Morris Park, a tradition he said lasted 40 years until the new residents complained.

And then there was the one that literally hit home. Lee said his father, "a great jazz musician," bought a brownstone 46 years ago.

"And the mother******' people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He's not — he doesn't even play electric bass. It's acoustic. We bought the mother******' house in 1968, and now you call the cops? In 2013?"

And the part where I felt like he was actually on to something,

"So, why did it take this great influx of white people to get the schools better?" Lee asked. "Why's there more police protection in Bed Stuy and Harlem now? Why's the garbage getting picked up more regularly? We been here!"

So has anyone had first hand experience with this? Good, bad? Whereas Lee seems to link the city providing inadequate services solely due to the residents being black, I tend to see this like every other city, they just provide better services to the areas that have more wealth. The wealthy, whether they be residents or the businesses there, can pressure public officials and just have more clout in general because, well... money.

I also agree that the strip-malling of America has had a huge impact on local culture but that's happening world wide. Culture is homogenizing. Is this just a case of the world changing and there will always be people bemoaning the passing of the good old days or do we need to make efforts to preserve local ecentricities?

Gentrification can be bad if there isn't a way to keep prices affordable for those who were there first. There are fights going on right now in Oakland over this and Seattle has this problem too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrif...

DC has that issue as well. Baltimore perhaps handled it better, but there are still so many bad areas in the city that I'm not sure it made as much of a difference as it was hoped. (Basically, the city sold fixer-uppers for a dollar, but you had to commit to improving them.)

I don't think that apartment complexes should throw out their low income residents and then convert to higher income tenants, at least not en masse. That's backfired in Arlington, Va, if I remember correctly, where they literally allowed developers to get rid of affordable housing all across the city. Who thinks that minimum wage commuters are going to *commute* every day back into the town they used to live in, and who is going to raise their wages to allow them to do that?

The key would seem to be mixed income neighborhoods. While that's never easy, I think it will provide the best mix of rejuvenation and opportunity for residents.

Gentrification is the pejorative word for urban renewal.

Like Robear pointed out, you end up with things like this:

San Fran's Teachers Can Afford Exactly 0 of San Francisco's Homes. Most aren't elligible for below market rate, either.

http://www.modernluxury.com/san-fran...

A key problem with gentrification and even mixed-income neighborhoods is that as prices increase (not just of housing, but also of food and other necessities), the previous low-income residents are no longer able to afford to live in the area. The higher prices force them to relocate, which is an additional cost, and if they continue to work in the area it becomes a recurring cost of commuting, which may drive them out of that job market entirely.

The reason mixed-income is a potential problem is that it can lead to further gentrification as prices at local stores increase to what the local market will bear, which is more than some residents can afford. Maintaining a real mixed-income neighborhood is thus difficult, because you need stores that cater to the various income levels... but retailers will always be tempted to aim for the more affluent customers, just as landlords will be tempted to aim for the more affluent residents.

And the danger of all of this (outside the question of whether the people who are doing the gentrifying really intended to drive out the people and businesses that made the area unique and desirable to begin with) is that no city runs on yuppies alone.

Hypatian wrote:

Maintaining a real mixed-income neighborhood is thus difficult, because you need stores that cater to the various income levels... but retailers will always be tempted to aim for the more affluent customers, just as landlords will be tempted to aim for the more affluent residents.

With that description it seems like a true mixed-income neighborhood would be almost impossible in a capitalistic society and that for this to work there would need to be strict state-mandated price-controls in effect that scale with income on everything from rent to food.

Gentrification is bad and an honest discussion on it will never take place as long as the crux of the issue continues to be ignored; race. Gentrification is a term that deals with economics and class but make no mistake about it, this is about whites and blacks. Spike Lee isn't saying anything new; black folks have been saying it for years. It's whites and the mainstream media which do not give it the appropriate attention. Kudos to Anderson Cooper for talking to Lee about it but as quickly as it was brought up it will be forgotten again.

It reminds me of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin who spoke of New Orleans being a "chocolate city" again when blacks began returning to the Big Easy after Hurricane Katrina. He was talking about precisely what Spike Lee is talking about: not New Orleans or Harlem or Bed Stuy "belonging" to black folks, but that those places are what they are precisely because of the black folks who have lived there for decades and created the local culture and gentrifying these places will destroy the very things that make them great.

So what's the danger in gentrification? Culturally, such as Lee's example of drumming in Mount Morris Park being complained about by white folks, the things that make these places so great will disappear proportional to the percentage of whites that move in. The vibrant and diverse ethnic eateries will relocate. Quaint shops will disappear. It will get whitewashed - pun intended - until it becomes Stepford-wived (with the exception of those white folks who decorate their home with items from other cultures...you know. You've seen them. White guy with Asian or African masks on his wall, or an African sculpture) and indistinguishable from any other predominantly white urban area. Starbucks on every corner, a Barnes & Noble instead of Sister's Uptown Bookstore & Cultural Center (where I was fortunate to bear witness to a reading of Small Talk at 125th and Lenox by Gil Scott-Heron), and a TGI Friday's instead of a Sylvia's Soul Food. Either that, or those places will jack up their prices so much to reflect the current environment that they will effectively price out the very people who frequented those places and made them what they are.

Economically, all we have to do is look at history to predict what will happen. Spike Lee speaks to this in relating the story of his father. All it takes is for landlords to start jacking up the rents, for Real Estate Agents to discriminate by steering blacks away from available housing, for banks to engage in redlining, and on and on. Phenomenons all of which exist and are well documented. They marginalize blacks and welcome whites with open arms. It's the modern day version of a Sundown Town. For those interested, James Loewen wrote a book called Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism which looks at the phenomenon of "Sundown Towns" which, as Wikipedia states it, "was a town, city, or neighborhood in the US that was purposely all-white. The term came from signs that were allegedly posted stating that people of color had to leave the town by sundown. They are also sometimes known as “sunset towns” or “gray towns”." He points to examples of dozens of all-white communities established between 1890 and 1968 which still exist today by using any means necessary - harassment, police, and in some cases murder - to keep blacks and other minorities out.

It's also important to note why these places were predominantly black for so long: White Flight. Why do you think it is that you can drive from one end of this country to the other without ever passing through a community that isn't predominantly white? When whites chose to flee from black folks in the inner cities but not their jobs, they still needed a way to get back and forth from their city job to their new suburban home (acquired from a low interest loan which was probably discriminatory thanks to the racist FHA/VA loans of the 1940's - 1960's) and so the government subsidized white flight by building the interstate highways. Institutional racism kept black folks in the inner cities due to decreasing opportunity the further you got from the inner city, while white folks could come and go as they please thanks to the new highway system.

And now all the backlash white people are experiencing is nothing more than the chickens coming home to roost. And make no mistake, it will take even more shady, unscrupulous, and morally bankrupt behaviors and dealings to gentrify these neighborhoods.

I have such strong conflicting feelings I am having trouble starting.

I love Chicago so much. It is where I want to live and be a family with my friends, fiance and parents. I can no longer afford to buy a home in the neighborhood I grew up in, Logan Square, because it has become even more of a place I want to live. When I was growing up there were gang problems, my bike would be stolen if I left it in the backyard overnight, and we had a car chase with people shooting at each other once. But now there is a farmers market every Sunday, there is some of the best eating in the city, there are 2 bookstores (one new, one used). So now my options are to pretty much do the same thing to someone else. I can afford to find a place in Pilsen where I would contribute to the forcing out of the Mexican community that makes the neighborhood so interesting and have such great food. Or I can do the same thing in Humboldt Park where it is already moving out of our price range.

I would rather move to another city than become a suburbanite.

Spike Lee wrote:

And then there was the one that literally hit home. Lee said his father, "a great jazz musician," bought a brownstone 46 years ago.

"And the mother******' people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He's not — he doesn't even play electric bass. It's acoustic. We bought the mother******' house in 1968, and now you call the cops? In 2013?"

Dude, I don't care when my neighbors moved in, if they're playing bass really late at night or stupidly early in the morning on a weekend, and its noise is carrying and keeping me awake, I'm going to call about that, but I'm going to do so after a discussion of, hey, we're neighbors, can we work something out here, as I need to be able to sleep during these hours.

Otherwise, weirdly, the same thing's been happening in Cincinnati, lately. OTR (Over-the-Rhine), which was predominately a German area, then became a predominately Black area, now it's becoming Hipsterville (thus why it's called OTR, rather than Over-the-Rhine as it has been for decades). To my mind, it's confusing as hell, as that area was always ridiculously dangerous to my mind from my childhood years on. There were very few weeks where you wouldn't hear about violent incidents (shootings, stabbings, violent muggings, etc...) on the news.

Thanks to a lot of TV/movies, living in the city is all hip and cool again, the pendulum swings the other way. Gonna be a pain in the ass for me if I do get this job at our downtown offices, as unless it comes with a significant pay increase, I don't know that I could live all that close to our headquarters downtown as new apartment blocks are going up in the hundreds of thousands range, and rents would be basically impossible if I wanted to avoid student loan default.

Reminds me of the haoles in Maui that complain about the annual sugarcane burn. Seriously? Move to another island, haole.

FSeven wrote:

Gentrification is bad and an honest discussion on it will never take place as long as the crux of the issue continues to be ignored; race. Gentrification is a term that deals with economics and class but make no mistake about it, this is about whites and blacks. Spike Lee isn't saying anything new; black folks have been saying it for years. It's whites and the mainstream media which do not give it the appropriate attention. Kudos to Anderson Cooper for talking to Lee about it but as quickly as it was brought up it will be forgotten again.

*nod* This is true, although I'll note that the same thing has happened with other marginalized groups. Along with black communities, other communities of PoC (particularly immigrant communities), immigrant communities in general, and even "gayborhood"s have experienced the same sort of gentrification.

This is an example where institutional problems with race (i.e. the fact that black people are proportionately more economically disadvantaged) turn a class problem into a race problem. If the problem of institutionalized racism against blacks were solved, gentrification would still happen to other disadvantaged groups.

That's not to say that we should ignore the fact that this has an exceptionally large impact on black communities, however. I just think that we need to note that on the one hand the heart of the problem is economic hardship, and the tragedy is that blacks experience that far more often than they should.

And we should see from this that the economic hardships and the breaking up of communities that gentrification creates then [em]contribute[/em] to future institutional problems for people of color. If a predominantly poor black community works hard to improve their neighborhood, it suddenly becomes a more attractive target for gentrification, and the people who made things better face being driven out of the home they've worked so hard to improve.

Hypatian wrote:
FSeven wrote:

Gentrification is bad and an honest discussion on it will never take place as long as the crux of the issue continues to be ignored; race. Gentrification is a term that deals with economics and class but make no mistake about it, this is about whites and blacks. Spike Lee isn't saying anything new; black folks have been saying it for years. It's whites and the mainstream media which do not give it the appropriate attention. Kudos to Anderson Cooper for talking to Lee about it but as quickly as it was brought up it will be forgotten again.

*nod* This is true, although I'll note that the same thing has happened with other marginalized groups. Along with black communities, other communities of PoC (particularly immigrant communities), immigrant communities in general, and even "gayborhood"s have experienced the same sort of gentrification.

This is an example where institutional problems with race (i.e. the fact that black people are proportionately more economically disadvantaged) turn a class problem into a race problem. If the problem of institutionalized racism against blacks were solved, gentrification would still happen to other disadvantaged groups.

That's not to say that we should ignore the fact that this has an exceptionally large impact on black communities, however. I just think that we need to note that on the one hand the heart of the problem is economic hardship, and the tragedy is that blacks experience that far more often than they should.

And we should see from this that the economic hardships and the breaking up of communities that gentrification creates then [em]contribute[/em] to future institutional problems for people of color. If a predominantly poor black community works hard to improve their neighborhood, it suddenly becomes a more attractive target for gentrification, and the people who made things better face being driven out of the home they've worked so hard to improve.

Pretty much. I know of one example in my own experience that was gentrification of a white neighborhood (again it's a class thing) but generally speaking you're both dead on.

gayborhood

...I love that word. I didn't know that was a thing, but it's awesome.

EDIT: Ok, wait, the implied maybe ghettoness of the word of all the LGBT people in a city whatever kind of having to band together due to discrimination or othering by other residents of a city is awful. I just like the word for being clever.

Totally agree Hypatian. I didn't want to suggest that black communities were the only one that experiences this. Only that Spike Lee was speaking specifically of black communities and so that's what I was addressing.

Yeah, I'm just inclined to point out intersectional issues and institutional prejudice whenever I see them, in the hopes that the idea will click with more people.

This makes a great example of how a problem like this will tend to effect people of color more than whites, which feeds into the cycle of institutional racism that maintains inequality. That's a very important idea.

It also makes it clearer why the problem is often dismissed as being unimportant--there's a factor of privilege at work in making it easy for people to believe "Oh, that's not such a big deal", because the burden is lighter if you assume that everywhere is "for you". (Whereas marginalized people are frequently leaving behind a more cohesive community, and new places that would welcome a privileged person may not welcome them.)

I'm excited to see the inevitable climax when the crusaders for black justice and the crusaders for LGBT justice - as defined by the parameters of gentrification - draw blood on the arena of who lives where.

Because there are no greater enemies than Crusaders of Black Justice and Crusaders of LGBT Justice.

So says the onlooker of urban renewal.

San Fran's Teachers Can Afford Exactly 0 of San Francisco's Homes.

San Francisco's problem is actually quite simple: demand for housing greatly exceeds supply, so only the wealthiest people can afford to make their homes there. Historically, what made SF such a great city was that it had neighborhoods for basically everyone on the income scale, with the incredible diversity and richness that resulted. It had a good public life, where you could travel a couple blocks from home, and be surrounded by folks that lived quite differently than you did, but shared the same city.

Folks are wanting to "preserve" San Francisco, but in this case, it's preservation like a historical monument. While demand for living space goes up and up, because the population in the Bay Area keeps increasing, San Francisco remains stuck in amber in terms of the buildings it has. So, naturally, wealthier and wealthier people buy everything, and the spiraling prices themselves cause prices to spiral even further, because you get speculation in the market as well.

San Francisco has a choice. It can look the same, or it can be the same, by allowing new skyscrapers to be built. If they increase in-city housing a great deal, prices will fall (or at least stop going up), and they'll be able to maintain more of the amazing diversity that once made it so wonderful.

Either the buildings get taller, or the citizens get richer. There's really no other way around the problem.

FSeven wrote:

Gentrification is bad and an honest discussion on it will never take place as long as the crux of the issue continues to be ignored; race. Gentrification is a term that deals with economics and class but make no mistake about it, this is about whites and blacks.

I disagree. Redevelopment is purely about economics. You can't make more land in a city and that means that what land there is is going to become increasingly valuable over time.

I'll agree with you that it largely impacts minorities, but it does so because 1) they're typically living in the more affordable areas of town (or areas that have suddenly become geographically desirable because of other redevelopment) and, 2) they don't have enough money to stay in that same area when it becomes more expensive.

I'll even agree with you that redevelopment destroys what attracted new people to the neighborhood in the first place. But that's also kinda the point. City neighborhoods are living things. They constantly change based on who's living there.

I'm sure a Jew living in turn of the century Harlem bemoaned the fact that Saul's Kosher Eats was closing and that Jewish temples were being repurposed as Baptist churches to serve the rapid influx of blacks as much as you're bemoaning the fate of Sylvia's Soul Food and Sister's Uptown Bookstore and Cultural Center in the face of rich whites.

OG_slinger wrote:

I'm sure a Jew living in turn of the century Harlem bemoaned the fact that Saul's Kosher Eats was closing and that Jewish temples were being repurposed as Baptist churches to serve the rapid influx of blacks as much as you're bemoaning the fate of Sylvia's Soul Food and Sister's Uptown Bookstore and Cultural Center in the face of rich whites.

At the risk of sounding ignorant, and while fully acknowledging the broader institutional issues, could it be that part of the problem is quite often the "wealthy whites" that come into an area don't really bring any unique culture with them? Sure, they may bring Starbucks and Target with them but it's just part of that blanket non-culture culture so they're seen as diluting a neighborhood and stripping it of it's life. It also doesn't help that truly wealthy people aren't confined to a block or two of where they live. They don't HAVE to shop at the local store and the entire extended family doesn't need to live with them. Basically they're far more mobile due to their assets and they aren't tied to a single location.

Of course the examples of Portland and Austin show that having a bunch of white people move into downtown won't necessarily destroy a city's identity and can bring with it it's own unique culture.

I don't know, I've heard a lot of complaints about what's happening to Austin.

OG_slinger wrote:
FSeven wrote:

Gentrification is bad and an honest discussion on it will never take place as long as the crux of the issue continues to be ignored; race. Gentrification is a term that deals with economics and class but make no mistake about it, this is about whites and blacks.

I disagree. Redevelopment is purely about economics. You can't make more land in a city and that means that what land there is is going to become increasingly valuable over time.

The reasons need to be understood why this issue is even being talked about; white folks fled these places, minorities moved in, and now whites who want to live in the city again have targeted minority communities to displace due to limited land.

OG_slinger wrote:

I'll agree with you that it largely impacts minorities, but it does so because 1) they're typically living in the more affordable areas of town (or areas that have suddenly become geographically desirable because of other redevelopment) and, 2) they don't have enough money to stay in that same area when it becomes more expensive.

That's the gist of Spike Lee's argument and what's at the core of this issue. Black folks are being displaced because white folks want their neighborhood. So we're all in agreement.

OG_slinger wrote:

I'll even agree with you that redevelopment destroys what attracted new people to the neighborhood in the first place. But that's also kinda the point. City neighborhoods are living things. They constantly change based on who's living there.

The people in these neighborhoods now aren't abandoning them like white people did. They're slowly being priced out of the neighborhoods by opportunistic, largely white, landlords. They want to stay there but due to gentrification they are slowly becoming unable to live in the very place they've called home for decades.

OG_slinger wrote:

I'm sure a Jew living in turn of the century Harlem bemoaned the fact that Saul's Kosher Eats was closing and that Jewish temples were being repurposed as Baptist churches to serve the rapid influx of blacks as much as you're bemoaning the fate of Sylvia's Soul Food and Sister's Uptown Bookstore and Cultural Center in the face of rich whites.

I'd agree if Jews didn't voluntarily abandon Harlem like white folks did. Unless of course you're suggesting that it was blacks who moved into the neighborhood and priced everything out of reach of the Jews, thus forcing them out Harlem? A brief look into the history of Harlem will show that there was a mass exodus of Jews from Harlem from the mid 1920's to early 1930's (due to housing defecits and increased rents) and they took their services (synagogues and other Jewish organizations) with them to areas like the Bronx, West Side, and Manhattan), and as they moved out blacks moved in.

I think you're being a bit disingenuous by suggesting Jews bemoaned the loss of anything in Harlem when it was they who chose to leave.

This is the difference between White Flight, leaving of your own accord, and gentrification or being forced out.

SixteenBlue wrote:

I don't know, I've heard a lot of complaints about what's happening to Austin.

Even from people that moved to Austin.
It's like the f*cking dustbowl in reverse with all the Californiassholes that move here.
Tell people from Austin you're from Oklahoma, nbd.
Tell people from Cali you're from Oklahoma, I'm pretty much Ernest in the big city.

boogle wrote:
SixteenBlue wrote:

I don't know, I've heard a lot of complaints about what's happening to Austin.

Even from people that moved to Austin.
It's like the f*cking dustbowl in reverse with all the Californiassholes that move here.
Tell people from Austin you're from Oklahoma, nbd.
Tell people from Cali you're from Oklahoma, I'm pretty much Ernest in the big city.

In fairness, you did start off most work conversations with "Hey, Vern".

Bonus_Eruptus wrote:
boogle wrote:
SixteenBlue wrote:

I don't know, I've heard a lot of complaints about what's happening to Austin.

Even from people that moved to Austin.
It's like the f*cking dustbowl in reverse with all the Californiassholes that move here.
Tell people from Austin you're from Oklahoma, nbd.
Tell people from Cali you're from Oklahoma, I'm pretty much Ernest in the big city.

In fairness, you did start off most work conversations with "Hey, Vern".

There was also that time he accidentally caused a town to get overrun with evil trolls.

FSeven wrote:

This is the difference between White Flight, leaving of your own accord, and gentrification or being forced out.

I think that's the big part I never really considered. Since I have spent 75% of my life in the suburbs I've never really had to deal with being priced out of an entire area because of a landlord's whim. In the article I linked in the OP another person had responded to Spike basically saying that blacks were actually benefiting from gentrification because they were making tons of money by selling the places they had lived in for so long at such a huge markup. So yeah, if you own the place you live then you can, to some extent, make a choice about leaving but if you're a renter, as tons of people in cities are, then it's not really up to you. If Bob the landlord is charging you 1k a month in rent but he has a guy standing on the sidelines saying he'll pay them 5k to live there... then yeah, the 1k rent guy's in trouble come next renewal.

FSeven wrote:

The reasons need to be understood why this issue is even being talked about; white folks fled these places, minorities moved in, and now whites who want to live in the city again have targeted minority communities to displace due to limited land.

They've targeted minority communities because it's the last hunk of cheap real estate on an island. And this is after a decade of massive redevelopment throughout Brooklyn and the other boroughs as people who worked in the city couldn't afford anything in Manhattan looked for a place to live that was close.

Because of all that Harlem has become geographically desirable. It's cheap and you don't have to commute your ass off.

Again, the impact is on minority communities, but it's purely an economic thing. There's dollars chasing relatively cheap housing that's not a long commute away from the city. Most anyone can get that housing as long as they have the green. (And, yes, I fully acknowledge that there's racial bias still exists when it comes to renting and buying.)

FSeven wrote:

That's the gist of Spike Lee's argument and what's at the core of this issue. Black folks are being displaced because white folks want their neighborhood. So we're all in agreement.

No, the gist of Spike Lee's argument is that Harlem is a black cultural icon that should never change. That, of course, is a stupid position to take. You can't drop a neighborhood into carbonite.

Spike is also ignoring that there are black home and business owners in Harlem who will greatly benefit from an increase in real estate prices.

As for the non-home owners, well, the brutal reality is that they were just renting. There's no law that says that renters are guaranteed their place for the rest of their lives.

FSeven wrote:

The people in these neighborhoods now aren't abandoning them like white people did. They're slowly being priced out of the neighborhoods by opportunistic, largely white, landlords. They want to stay there but due to gentrification they are slowly becoming unable to live in the very place they've called home for decades.

Real estate in Harlem is becoming more valuable. This isn't something that happened last week. It's been happening over the past 10, 15, or more years. That's hardly opportunistic.

You seem to be arguing that property owners should willingly charge less than their property is currently worth because, well, some people have lived there for years. That's not a compelling position, especially in a nation where about 15% of the population moves each and every year (60% of which moves more than 50 miles).

Again, neighborhoods are not static. People come and people go. Sometimes willingly, sometimes not.

FSeven wrote:

I'd agree if Jews didn't voluntarily abandon Harlem like white folks did. Unless of course you're suggesting that it was blacks who moved into the neighborhood and priced everything out of reach of the Jews, thus forcing them out Harlem? A brief look into the history of Harlem will show that there was a mass exodus of Jews from Harlem from the mid 1920's to early 1930's (due to housing defecits and increased rents) and they took their services (synagogues and other Jewish organizations) with them to areas like the Bronx, West Side, and Manhattan), and as they moved out blacks moved in.

I think you're being a bit disingenuous by suggesting Jews bemoaned the loss of anything in Harlem when it was they who chose to leave.

So you're saying that there wasn't a single Jew who considered Harlem "their" neighborhood and resented the influx of blacks? That they'd didn't feel their neighborhood was being ruined by the newcomers?

I get it. I really do. We're dealing with people's homes, where they grew up. But the fact is that Harlem was someone else's neighborhood before it was a black neighborhood and now it's going to be someone else's neighborhood. And in 50 or 100 years it's going to be someone else's neighborhood. That's how cities work. Nothing's static. Nothing remains the same for long.

But the question Spike Lee should be asking isn't what can be done to prevent things from changing, but where the next Harlem is going to be.

Or, better yet, what the city is doing to ensure that neighborhoods can be mixed income, with subsidized housing existing alongside market-priced housing. That's a discussion that would benefit everyone who doesn't work on Wall Street.

So you're saying that there wasn't a single Jew who considered Harlem "their" neighborhood and resented the influx of blacks? That they'd didn't feel their neighborhood was being ruined by the newcomers?

Huge difference in leaving by choice and being "forced out"

I've seen this in Philly sometimes work wonders and other times have the downside of force poorer Black people out of their neighborhoods.

I grew up in West Philly at the time my parents arrived in the mid 60's it was a fairly diverse neighborhood..but predominately Jewish (lots of awesome deli's lol). No idea if housing was affordable but I know my parents paid $15,000 for their 5 bedroom row home at the time. By the mid 70's all the Jewish people had left on their own accord and the neighborhood suffered in terms of overall income levels and housing values started a long downward spiral that would last until the early 2000's. As the neighborhoods became poorer the drugs and their dealers moved in.. by 1990 we had full on turf wars between the new Jamaican drug dealers and the entrenched drug dealers who didn't appreciate the intrusion (lol). By 1995 my parents had retired and moved to Greece leaving me the house.. tired of late night gunfire and an potentially deadly confrontation with some high as a kite Jamaicans that almost ran me down with their car (I was saved when two of my old neighborhood cronies happened to walk up to the encounter) I had enough.. sold the house for $50K and left for the Suburbs.

By 2002 The University of Penn faced with land shortages started buying up buildings to turn into Student Housing.. 2 blocks from my house an enormous old school apartment building (amazing architecture) which had become a crack den was completely taken over by the university and they did a marvelous job restoring and revitalizing it.. All of a sudden grad students appears.. security appeared, police appeared, and stores and services appeared.. Penn bought some much around the neighberhood that its affect was spreading like wildfire I drove down Baltimore Ave and I couldnt believed all the coffee shops, craft beer pubs. It was crazy. My house was now worth >$300K (In 2007 at the height). They are still buying buildings..I saw they just bought an old apt building that was in an awful part of W. Philly.. apparently it will be gated and heavy security with Shuttle service back and forth.. but I would wager in 3 years they wont need it.

Downside is.. that a good portion of the hard working blue collar black families were getting squeezed... rent went up everywhere and now that whole neighborhood is priced out. Good news Less Crime bad news it was never as bad as North Philly and its close proximity to the UPenn and Drexel Campus made it a perfect expansion target.

In a neighborhood called Northern Liberties these same efforts were marvelous. The neighborhood in this case was so bad that no one lived there.. I mean no one. Most of the blocks were filled with Shell/Husk homes if they were standing or rubble. Old warehouses were abandoned and crumbling to decay. People only went there to bury bodies because they knew no one would go looking. But it had a great location to downtown Philly and the expressways AND enough people with money actually owned the shells. In 10 years that area was completely transformed.. its now a hipster paradise.. they never have to leave it except to go to work. That was a win win for everyone because it was so bad.

I see some urban renewal projects that are positive.. better low income housing and apartments are getting built in parts of W. Philly that are near enough to UPenn and Drexel but wouldn't be ideal for students.. but you pass through them in your cars driving and I think thats enough to motivate the city and Penn to attempt to renew those areas.

Really good post, OG. You helped me clarify my position on the matter after having thought about this for a few days.

That's a good summary, TGG. The only thing I don't see mentioned which also forces the original inhabitants out of an area: property taxes. Even those who don't rent can be squeezed to the point where they must either sell, or face being evicted and having their property go up for auction. When you have equity but can't afford a loan to bring your property up to surrounding standards (let alone pay the taxes), you're probably going to be leaving one way or another.

I've seen some city center rejuvenation projects set aside funds or provide tax breaks to help original owners adapt to the change where possible. They get the opportunity to remodel, rent out some/all of their property, open a business, etc. The city of Durham NC has been good to some of the original owners in that way. However, in some of the higher density areas with single family homes I've also seen whole neighborhoods of folks who had to sell and move away or face eviction due to tax bills they couldn't pay.

I think I may have misunderstood what gentrification actually is. I thought it was a repurposing of buildings for new uses, like turning Victorian homes into quaint shops and lawyer's offices or warehouses into loft apartments.

Am I wrong? Is there a greater subtext to it?

Pages