Is Gentrification a Bad Thing?

Paleocon wrote:
absurddoctor wrote:
Edwin wrote:

This was interesting to read about. tl;dr, one of Google's employees bought an entire building and evicted all the residents.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/...

When I first read a 'Google employee', I was surprised ... it didn't sound like the action of someone in the 'tech' field. Then I saw that he was a lawyer, and understood.

Perhaps things are different in California, but in RTP, I know plenty of tech employees who would do this sort of thing if only they thought of it first.

It is my experience that "fcuk the poor" libertarian types are massively overrepresented in the tech fields. I suspect a lot of that comes from the psychological insecurity and isolation many of them experienced from being "nerds" all their lives combined with the fact that many of them lack traditional credentials associated with status or education (many are high school or college dropouts because their lack of social skills made it difficult to manage those environments). Combine that with salaries that defy expectations for those education levels and you suddenly end up with a large percentage of the tech population feeling simultaneously insecure and personally superior.

Mix in a dose of meritocracy (and possibly Asperger's or other autism spectrum conditions) and that description is probably not too far off the mark.

nel e nel wrote:
Paleocon wrote:
absurddoctor wrote:
Edwin wrote:

This was interesting to read about. tl;dr, one of Google's employees bought an entire building and evicted all the residents.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/...

When I first read a 'Google employee', I was surprised ... it didn't sound like the action of someone in the 'tech' field. Then I saw that he was a lawyer, and understood.

Perhaps things are different in California, but in RTP, I know plenty of tech employees who would do this sort of thing if only they thought of it first.

It is my experience that "fcuk the poor" libertarian types are massively overrepresented in the tech fields. I suspect a lot of that comes from the psychological insecurity and isolation many of them experienced from being "nerds" all their lives combined with the fact that many of them lack traditional credentials associated with status or education (many are high school or college dropouts because their lack of social skills made it difficult to manage those environments). Combine that with salaries that defy expectations for those education levels and you suddenly end up with a large percentage of the tech population feeling simultaneously insecure and personally superior.

Mix in a dose of meritocracy (and possibly Asperger's or other autism spectrum conditions) and that description is probably not too far off the mark.

Yup.

Take a look at folks like Edward Snowden and Michael Dunn.

Man, I knew I should've gone into the tech field. I'd have fit right in.

nel e nel wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

Perhaps things are different in California, but in RTP, I know plenty of tech employees who would do this sort of thing if only they thought of it first.

It is my experience that "fcuk the poor" libertarian types are massively overrepresented in the tech fields. I suspect a lot of that comes from the psychological insecurity and isolation many of them experienced from being "nerds" all their lives combined with the fact that many of them lack traditional credentials associated with status or education (many are high school or college dropouts because their lack of social skills made it difficult to manage those environments). Combine that with salaries that defy expectations for those education levels and you suddenly end up with a large percentage of the tech population feeling simultaneously insecure and personally superior.

Mix in a dose of meritocracy (and possibly Asperger's or other autism spectrum conditions) and that description is probably not too far off the mark.

I saw it during the dot-com boom. I felt it starting to happen to me.

I think MyLackey.com was the pinnacle of this sort of attitude.

This is what is happening just down the street from me:

http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20140...

NathanialG wrote:

This is what is happening just down the street from me:

http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20140...

Nice! Reminds me of what I was just hearing the other day about Maria's being owned by the same guy as the Co-Prosperity Sphere.

OG_slinger wrote:

Kim-Mai Culter posted a very interesting article on Techcrunch about what's happening with the Google bus protests in San Francisco and the idea that Silicon Valley techies are pushing out lower-income San Franciscans.

It's a fairly long read, but the takeaway is that this issue has been brewing literally for decades and what we're seeing now is, in large part, based on political decisions made decades ago--everything from California property tax rates to urban planning processes--amplified by healthy doses of NIMBY.

That's a good read. And timely for me, thanks. I'm not in San Francisco, but Portland rents are starting to rise at silly rates. It's starting to look like a lifetime of hop-scotching around the area or just buying a house.

And probably not buying in the CD (as much as there is one here).

EDIT: Go home, me, I am drunk.

Grumpicus wrote:

This seems relevant: http://www.austinpost.org/article/wh...

Arise thread!

In response - lack of affordability isn't killing Austin...unless you're black.

What happened in Austin seems to be consistent with the Stanford research. Austin has the highest percentage of college graduates as well as the highest median incomes in Texas. Census data also suggests that the African Americans who left Austin between 2000 and 2010 were by and large lower-waged workers (African American losses occurred in tracts that were on average poorer than those that did not see losses).

This is an obvious issue where class and race are extremely similar, so I don't think we need anyone to mention that ACTUALLY this is a class issue and not a race issue.

The real point of the article is that gentrification is happening in cities that pride themselves on being liberal, whereas conservative cities are actually becoming more diverse.

I've had to think about this a lot lately. My health went sideways and my wife and I went back to our home we own in the suburbs (we were renting it out). I'm bummed to go back to longer drives and lack of "walkability", but it was the responsible financial decision until rents in the suburbs catch up with what we pay for the house. Or until we manage to sell the house and move closer in.

This has caused me to think quite a lot recently, however, about what I'd be buying into if I moved back into Portland. I love the density of the city, but I don't love the homogeneity. In the week+ I've been back out in the suburbs it clearly feels more diverse out here. The density of small business, ethnic restaurants has been kind of shocking. Nevermind seeing actual human beings of different races and apparent socio-economic backgrounds. I don't have the data to back that up. It just feels much different in a way that is kind of shocking me. Living in that bubble has been really weird, in hindsight.

Thread rez reminds me that I meant to post this back when it was running.

The Marketplace Wealth & Poverty desk [produced] a series about the economic undercurrents of gentrification. To do this, the desk rented a temporary bureau in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

YorkAndFig.com

DSGamer wrote:

This has caused me to think quite a lot recently, however, about what I'd be buying into if I moved back into Portland. I love the density of the city, but I don't love the homogeneity. In the week+ I've been back out in the suburbs it clearly feels more diverse out here. The density of small business, ethnic restaurants has been kind of shocking. Nevermind seeing actual human beings of different races and apparent socio-economic backgrounds. I don't have the data to back that up. It just feels much different in a way that is kind of shocking me. Living in that bubble has been really weird, in hindsight.

This is really interesting, as I feel like it's backwards from how most cities/suburbs work. In Portland, however, this totally makes sense to me.

I just bought a luxury townhouse in the previously "small town" area of Apex, NC and my understanding is that there is some friction between older, working class white residents and the more affluent, largely ethnically diverse technical professionals that are moving into new townhouse construction.

Am I "gentrifying" the white folks?

Paleocon wrote:

Am I "gentrifying" the white folks?

Very much like Genghis Khan "gentrified" Central Asia, I hope...

Robear wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

Am I "gentrifying" the white folks?

Very much like Genghis Khan "gentrified" Central Asia, I hope...

Europe was kind of ghetto at the time.

SixteenBlue wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

This has caused me to think quite a lot recently, however, about what I'd be buying into if I moved back into Portland. I love the density of the city, but I don't love the homogeneity. In the week+ I've been back out in the suburbs it clearly feels more diverse out here. The density of small business, ethnic restaurants has been kind of shocking. Nevermind seeing actual human beings of different races and apparent socio-economic backgrounds. I don't have the data to back that up. It just feels much different in a way that is kind of shocking me. Living in that bubble has been really weird, in hindsight.

This is really interesting, as I feel like it's backwards from how most cities/suburbs work. In Portland, however, this totally makes sense to me.

It is backwards from how most cities work. Something that bothered me even before we moved downtown and before I started to work with a bunch of millenials who "migrated" to Portland was that no one appreciated that this wasn't all organic. Gigantic tax breaks paid for turning the brewery blocks into the paradise of restaurants and small (or not small in the case of Whole Foods) grocery stores that it's become. Taxes paid for the light rail and street car that run people around the area.

Not saying that planning the city doesn't have merit. But the hipsters flocking to pay high prices to live in Portland don't appreciate just how subsidized the gentrification is.

DSGamer wrote:
SixteenBlue wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

This has caused me to think quite a lot recently, however, about what I'd be buying into if I moved back into Portland. I love the density of the city, but I don't love the homogeneity. In the week+ I've been back out in the suburbs it clearly feels more diverse out here. The density of small business, ethnic restaurants has been kind of shocking. Nevermind seeing actual human beings of different races and apparent socio-economic backgrounds. I don't have the data to back that up. It just feels much different in a way that is kind of shocking me. Living in that bubble has been really weird, in hindsight.

This is really interesting, as I feel like it's backwards from how most cities/suburbs work. In Portland, however, this totally makes sense to me.

It is backwards from how most cities work. Something that bothered me even before we moved downtown and before I started to work with a bunch of millenials who "migrated" to Portland was that no one appreciated that this wasn't all organic. Gigantic tax breaks paid for turning the brewery blocks into the paradise of restaurants and small (or not small in the case of Whole Foods) grocery stores that it's become. Taxes paid for the light rail and street car that run people around the area.

Not saying that planning the city doesn't have merit. But the hipsters flocking to pay high prices to live in Portland don't appreciate just how subsidized the gentrification is.

In our city,those subsidies come from city income tax - that is, literally, the people who live and work within the city limits are the ones paying for those upgrades. Unless Portland is vastly different (and it could be), wouldn't those hipsters be actively helping the tax base paying for those upgrades?

Seth wrote:
DSGamer wrote:
SixteenBlue wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

This has caused me to think quite a lot recently, however, about what I'd be buying into if I moved back into Portland. I love the density of the city, but I don't love the homogeneity. In the week+ I've been back out in the suburbs it clearly feels more diverse out here. The density of small business, ethnic restaurants has been kind of shocking. Nevermind seeing actual human beings of different races and apparent socio-economic backgrounds. I don't have the data to back that up. It just feels much different in a way that is kind of shocking me. Living in that bubble has been really weird, in hindsight.

This is really interesting, as I feel like it's backwards from how most cities/suburbs work. In Portland, however, this totally makes sense to me.

It is backwards from how most cities work. Something that bothered me even before we moved downtown and before I started to work with a bunch of millenials who "migrated" to Portland was that no one appreciated that this wasn't all organic. Gigantic tax breaks paid for turning the brewery blocks into the paradise of restaurants and small (or not small in the case of Whole Foods) grocery stores that it's become. Taxes paid for the light rail and street car that run people around the area.

Not saying that planning the city doesn't have merit. But the hipsters flocking to pay high prices to live in Portland don't appreciate just how subsidized the gentrification is.

In our city,those subsidies come from city income tax - that is, literally, the people who live and work within the city limits are the ones paying for those upgrades. Unless Portland is vastly different (and it could be), wouldn't those hipsters be actively helping the tax base paying for those upgrades?

Yes and no. The people who lived there who were displaced paid. The people who don't live there, but live within the city paid. You paid (as did the people who moved there from Brooklyn, etc.) in so far as federal tax dollars paid for the transportation changes. When it comes to the giant real estate development, though, those tax breaks came in the form of property tax breaks. So I suppose the people moving in who, in theory, make more money and thus pay more overall taxes indirectly pay for it. But it's not 1 to 1. It's not like buying a condo in Portland's downtown causes you to pay for the original tax breaks.

The myth of gentrification; It’s extremely rare and not as bad for the poor as you think.

The gist is that displacement for poor people is actually less in neighborhoods marked as gentrifying than it is in neighborhoods not gentrifying. Even as rents increase, inhabitants stayed where they were at a greater percentage than places where rent stayed the same.

The most plausible interpretation,” the authors concluded, “may be the simplest: As neighborhoods gentrify, they also improve in many ways that may be as appreciated by their disadvantaged residents as by their more affluent ones.”

It also helps that the studies suggest minorities in gentrifying neighborhoods earn more than in non gentrifying neighborhoods.

Black residents, particularly black youth, living in more diverse neighborhoods find significantly better jobs than peers with the same skill sets who live in less diverse neighborhoods. In short, writes Sharkey, “There is strong evidence that when neighborhood disadvantage declines, the economic fortunes of black youth improve, and improve rather substantially.”

This feels counter intuitive to me but the longer I think about it the more sense it makes. The article also goes into some depth about how the real problem is poverty, not gentrification, and how coastal cities with limited construction potential have problems so unrelated to "Rust Belt cities" that they're practically incomparable.

It definitely makes sense that gentrifying neighborhoods increase opportunities for black residents. The service industry, which employs the greatest number of lower income and less educated members of our society tends to locate itself near the people who can afford to pay for said services. So when you get an inflow of people into a region with better income and education, services tend to spring up to meet their needs. Those services tend to get their employees from the groups that are disadvantaged.

I agree with the article that poverty is the root problem.

Except how many of the poor actually own their property? I need to read that article, but where I live it's most definitely resulted in white upper class displacing minorities and the poor. And not because the minorities and the poor got rich off of it. But rather because they could no longer afford the rent or the houses were purchased to be flipped, etc.

I do think we should embrace change, but it's important to realize that gentrification specifically takes an actual human toll. People who previously rented in a neighborhood that actually functioned like a neighborhood can be forced to spread out and leave, adding time to their commute, creating actual financial hardships as prices go up, etc. But let's set that aside for a moment.

When we talk about gentrification part of what we're talking about is neighborhoods losing their character. Sometimes they gain new characters, but frequently what bugs people (I count myself as one of those people) is that these gentrified neighborhoods skew towards a more homogeneous culture. Watching Portland go from a genuinely weird, interesting city to a bunch of almost-identical neighborhoods has been kind of a bummer. Strangely, moving back out to the suburbs, while my commute sucks, has been somewhat invigorating. There's more diversity in class and race in my sleepy little suburb than most of the core city. That feels like a loss to me.

As one of the tech professionals moving into otherwise redneck Apex, NC, I guess I am doing my own part to "destroy the character" of a neighborhood known for shade tree mechanics, poorly tended lawns, and naked white kids running in the yards.

Change is good.

There's been something that's been bugging me about this topic for a while, and it's taken me a while to crush it into a reasonable post with my mind-grapes. There's follow on questions from the question posed in the title.

To flip the polarity of the original question is instructive:

1: "Is Urban Decay A Bad Thing?"

which leads onto

2: "Are Gentrification and/or Urban Decay An Avoidable Thing?"

Which is obviously answered with a resounding "no". Cities are not static entities. Gentrification is merely one side of the coin, the pendulum swings in the opposite direction too, which, for want of a better term, I've used "urban decay" to refer to. Feel free to suggest better terminology.

This leads me to boil down the question (probably in an overly reductive way) posed in the OP to:

3: "Should we be angry that change happens?"

Which leads me to ask, "what's the alternative?" Remaining static is likely worse. Change is almost mandated by the nature of our society and culture. Demographics shift, economies shift, and our cities should be morphing to accommodate those shifts. Gentrification is an emergent property of that process, and to suggest that it shouldn't be occurring feels too much like suggesting that we simply ignore the fact that the world changes, and refuse to adapt to those changes.

I'm certainly not suggesting that there aren't better ways we could manage change in cities and neighborhoods, in both directions, but change is inevitable. We should be flexing with it, not trying to remain in place resisting it.

DSGamer wrote:

When we talk about gentrification part of what we're talking about is neighborhoods losing their character. Sometimes they gain new characters, but frequently what bugs people (I count myself as one of those people) is that these gentrified neighborhoods skew towards a more homogeneous culture. Watching Portland go from a genuinely weird, interesting city to a bunch of almost-identical neighborhoods has been kind of a bummer. Strangely, moving back out to the suburbs, while my commute sucks, has been somewhat invigorating. There's more diversity in class and race in my sleepy little suburb than most of the core city. That feels like a loss to me.

I think that's where I feel uneasy. It's not "losing" character, it's "changing" character. Maybe that change is in the direction of more homogeneity, but that's still change, rather than loss. Or to frame it the opposite way, *any* change implies loss - you exchange the old for the new.

Something about decrying that change in character sits wrong with me. It smacks of an appeal to antiquity.

Remember that a not-insignificant part of this change is abandoned buildings being converted into retail stores, vacant factories turned into lofts, and literal drug dens turned into duplexes. This type of change is what both drives rents up and keeps existing tenants paying those rents.

Jonman wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

When we talk about gentrification part of what we're talking about is neighborhoods losing their character. Sometimes they gain new characters, but frequently what bugs people (I count myself as one of those people) is that these gentrified neighborhoods skew towards a more homogeneous culture. Watching Portland go from a genuinely weird, interesting city to a bunch of almost-identical neighborhoods has been kind of a bummer. Strangely, moving back out to the suburbs, while my commute sucks, has been somewhat invigorating. There's more diversity in class and race in my sleepy little suburb than most of the core city. That feels like a loss to me.

I think that's where I feel uneasy. It's not "losing" character, it's "changing" character. Maybe that change is in the direction of more homogeneity, but that's still change, rather than loss. Or to frame it the opposite way, *any* change implies loss - you exchange the old for the new.

Something about decrying that change in character sits wrong with me. It smacks of an appeal to antiquity.

Yup. I actually heard a local say "it's getting so bad I can't take a dump in my own back yard".

How is that for character?

Where I have a gas station in Baltimore, we just got a Chipotle. I figure that is an improvement over the boarded up row house/shooting gallery where smackheads would stumble out into traffic, but what do I know about neighborhood charm?

Jonman wrote:

I think that's where I feel uneasy. It's not "losing" character, it's "changing" character. Maybe that change is in the direction of more homogeneity, but that's still change, rather than loss. Or to frame it the opposite way, *any* change implies loss - you exchange the old for the new.

Something about decrying that change in character sits wrong with me. It smacks of an appeal to antiquity.

The irony is how so much of gentrification smacks of an appeal to antiquity.

Paleocon wrote:

Where I have a gas station in Baltimore, we just got a Chipotle. I figure that is an improvement over the boarded up row house/shooting gallery where smackheads would stumble out into traffic, but what do I know about neighborhood charm?

Ah, see, there's that kind of neighborhood charm, and then there's opening up an artisianal meatball restaurant next to a 'charming' dive bar with one remaining customer who has a bunch of unironic Sailor Jerry tattoos. Who you think is drinking Fleichmann's, but has a special bottle where the liquor has been replaced with a premium liquor, because the management is actually paying him to stick around like a honeypot for hipsters.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

The irony is how so much of gentrification smacks of an appeal to antiquity.

How so? I don't follow.