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For my comment, it is about how they raise the property values (taxes) and change laws and eventually lifestyle. I'm in an area that used to be quite rural, and one could be kind of 'country'. Then the yuppies started overflowing from the city and buying the working farms for hobby farms/McMansions. Now they have ideas of how a farm 'should' be. Now you can't have hay stacked more than about 10 ft and can no longer use blue tarps to protect it from the weather (might have an unsightly view or block a sliver of mountain/ocean view). Limited to the number of animals that can be on a farm...they don't like hearing cows moo or horses whinny...or chickens crow (but want those organic eggs). Filled up the marina with sailboats and day cruisers so all the fishing boats had to move on....once the fishing boats left the bait and tackle part of the marina is now a highend restuarant/bar and yacht club. They like mountain biking, hiking and trail running; but complained to no end about the ATVs and dirtbikes and hunting in the areas to get a lot of those hobbies shut down. Right now they are busy trying to get horses banned from those areas--because they might get horse poop on their $300 REI hiking sneakers. So once those hobbies are gone the sporting goods stores go under. The original hardware stores and mills were too backwoods so they had to use Home Depot/Lowes contractors to build the McMansions on the hobby farm. Those are just a few of the ways (at least where I'm at where the yuppies have moved in) that it appears they have changed ('ruined'-for me at least) the area.
People complain today that cities are being ruined by yuppies, but if white people hadn't been so racist in the 1950s and 1960s and fled en masse when black folks showed up, you might have had a stable middle class left in inner cities. As it was though, a lot of the wealth fled to the suburbs along with manufacturing and along with assimilated white people moving out down the interstate.
The economic gap was so large and state of disinvestment loomed so large over most American inner cities, that city governments had to re-invent the cores to appeal to the yuppies with their disposable income. What else are you going to do--it's not convenient to put a big electronics company like Apple in a urban center--they want space out in the burbs. All you can do is market urban living and just copy the Soho or Lower Eastside blueprint.
I think this has been answered in many ways but I can give a more familiar example. If you remember the TV show Northern Exposure, this is kind of one.
While the show was filming in Roslyn Washington, my friends and I used to drive up from Portland to watch. After the filming had shut down we wandered the town which was really very quaint and interesting. Sometimes we would bump into the actors all who were great except for one who shall remain namless because that's another story.
There was a little museum run by two elderly ladies in their 80's who had memorabilia from the pioneer days. They were happy to show and explain everything to us tourists. And maybe sell a trinket or two.
They told us how the townspeople were always very happy to see new ventures from the mining days to the present with the TV companies because it brought revenue and jobs. Townspeople had a happy existence with the NE people. They got jobs as extras on the show as well as crew and what-not. Not to mention the tourist trade who brought in revenue to the local stores that sold souvenirs, food and their own museum.
But guess who objected to all of this? The newly placed residents on the outskirts of the town. The yuppies who bought what was former farm land to build their large homes with gates and tennis courts who felt their privacy was being invaded. They made noises about how the TV people were low class network media. I suppose if they were from PBS it would have made a difference. They complained about the noise, the tourists, the traffic; just about everything. They said the TV show was just destroying the pristiness of the area. All this was just snobbiness and not really true.
But as the museum ladies pointed out, it was just another boom for the small town and the townies welcomed everyone with open arms while the yuppies sulked in their million dollar homes. They didn't give a damn about the Indian population or the others who had lived there for generations surviving feast and famine. And for them this was definitely a brief period of feast. But the yuppies begrudged them even that. I guess it was ruining their view or something.
As the elder ladies said though, the town had survived a lot and they would survive the yuppies. I don't know what the town is like today. I haven't been back since the show went off the air in the 90's and I don't want to because I am afraid it might be yuppieville. I prefer to think of Roslyn as it was back in the day.
I think yuppies do good and bad things. The good is that they get buildings fixed up--Philadelphia for one has a lot of terrible buildings and vacant lots. They support stores. They often get city services to their neighborhoods improved--the city listens to them. It should do this for everyone, but I've repeatedly seen the pattern of improvements going into gentrifying neighborhoods.
On the bad side, their presence leads to rising rents and home prices, and displacement. Presumably the yuppies aren't increasing inequality at a metropolitan area scale (they were already there) but they certainly can cause that a neighborhood scale. Presumably that makes it harder for people in the neighborhood to get along and work together.
I think there's a sweet spot in the life of gentrifying neighborhoods. That's when the neighborhood has improved enough to have more life--new stores, restaurants. Buildings aren't crumbling, there are people on the street. But the pre-existing population is there alongside the new. One place that feels this way to me is Downtown Los Angeles, you can definitely see different populations there. It might be easier there because the population is going up, converting non-residential buildings where people weren't getting displaced. I'd be interested if other people think there are sweet spot neighborhoods around. The problem is that the dynamics of the American housing market usually don't let those places stabilize--they either further gentrify or start to deteriorate again. American cities have limited powers in this situation--imagine in that bad story above if the city could have helped the previous tenant find another place.
IMO Hollywood is a lot like DTLA and both are about in the same place with their "gentrification". My building is starting to get a little too hipster (the worst kind, the yuppy fake-indie/artist type - IMO not all hipsters are bad) but still probably about 60 percent long-time residents and 40 percent newcomers. It's a five floor building - floors 1-3 are mostly 5+ years residents, the 4th floor (our floor) is the units they rented out during the renovation (building looked pretty terrifying, no floor surface - just concrete, destroyed hardwood hallways, no paint-job), and the 5th floor is the post-renovation units (mostly empty during the renovation) - and it is plainly obvious when you get in the elevator and ask the person next to you "what floor" what floor they will say.
You can spot the posters who grew up in nice neighborhoods--they're the ones complaining about the lack of flavor and character in formerly dumpy areas. Had they grown up in one of them, perhaps they'd sing a different tune.
I grew up in a rough neighborhood during a particularly rough era (Highland Park, early 90's) and let me just say--I love the way it has cleaned up over the years. It's still majority Hispanic, still has tons of character, but is far less dangerous and sketchy than it once was. It has drawn attention from hipsters and the artistic class over the years, they've only been a positive, so far.
Yeah but that is because the place hasn't been overwhelmed by gentrification. I think Carlite is right that there is a "sweet spot" - Highland Park is firmly in that sweet spot. I mentioned this on the LA board but it does seem like LA has managed to avoid gentrifying in a terribly sterile way. I think maybe Santa Monica and (to an extent) Sunset Junction are the only two gentrified neighborhoods that approach "sterile" and even they have their appropriate grittiness.
I'm mystified too. Pretty much everything gets cleaned up, new businesses open bringing jobs, real estate values go up, crime goes down and schools improve. Sounds like a real bummer.
When I think of yuppies I think of young, upper middle class white people driving Subarus and wearing North Face vests.
HA! You just described the typical yuppie Portlander.
But don't forget the Thule pod on top of the Subaru and the Golden Retriever in the back!
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cities ruined by yuppies
