Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Do you any American cities suffer from too much gentrification, too much development, perhaps too tall affecting scale, and have become too devoted to the wealthiest people?
I'm talking about cities you might identify as having lost their soul, that are no longer the truly diverse places where the creative class adds to the mix and where a sense of place may have been lost to the generic, sterility of architecture?
Is there, in you opinion, any sense that we may to a degree killed the goose that laid the golden egg by our cities dedication to the rich and the monied, corporate powers?
If you think any of this may be so, which cities fit the bill....and how, do you think, each has been affected?
DC - It's become a playground for the Upper Middle Class and up. Nothing wrong with the city but it's become pretty generic in appeal and lacks a strong creative class.
Personally I feel like Seattle, Austin, Portland, and Denver lost the most in the last 5 years. These were once cool medium sized, modest living cities that had a strong, young, and creative population during the great recession. Now that these economies have been booming, and high paying jobs followed the mass migration, most of the soul has been replaced by luxury apartments, yoga studios, and boutique store fronts.
San Francisco's rent control policies means that it's not going to become an exclusive playground for the wealthy for decades to come.
Umm isn't it already there? I don't think I can find a studio for under $1500 and probably still hard under $2000 in a safe area. Especially anything more than 400sq ft.
There French Quarter, Marigny, and Bywater are becoming like this. Not many locals can afford to live there, bunch of Airbnb's, not any tall developments but a bunch of people complaining about how it's not Disney enough for them like where they came from.
Gentrification is small potatoes. Slumification is a much bigger issue in most of the country. Run down buildings, declining schools, increased crime, and abandoned storefronts. For every neighborhood getting better, there is one somewhere else getting worse. I'll take less crime, more commercial activity, and better schools over the reverse any day of the week.
Umm isn't it already there? I don't think I can find a studio for under $1500 and probably still hard under $2000 in a safe area. Especially anything more than 400sq ft.
It's damn hard for new people of modest income to move to San Francisco, but if you're a longtime renter of a rent-controlled unit (or a homeowner who has kept property in your family for generations at a low assessed rate due to Proposition 13) it's easy enough to stay in the city indefinitely and have low housing costs. This is the primary reason why San Francisco hasn't developed into an area exclusively for the wealthy.
Roughly the same dynamic happens in NYC due to rent control and NYCHA. Lots of now-tony neighborhoods like Chelsea still have big blocks of public housing, which means that gentrification will essentially never be complete.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
