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As was with Christopher Columbus calling natives savages and then other Europeans feeling their way of life was superior to brown:black skin locals it's still happening. I understand both sides completely.
My only gripe is when the first wave of "urban pioneers" who are mostly white move into an area because the rent is currently cheap, they try to "improve" (as if the people who were living there for the past 15-40yrs weren't happy) the area and open up all these shops, cafes, stores. These improvements no longer keep the rents cheap for anyone and eventually the first wave of gentrifiers and long time residents are forced out and on to the next cycle.
Every new hood doesn't need to be like williamsburg, let that be the area where all that stuff is concentrated and just commute there from bed stuy/bushwick/Ridgewood/etc and keep some prices down on your rent.
I had more to say on this subject but goig to stop cause as with everything in life different people have different experiences and that's what determines our mindset. This board is a great example of how one situation will bring about many opinions which are "right" with one group and "wrong" in another group.
The people living there for the past 15-45 years weren't happy.
And gentrification is a lot bigger than local NYC politics.
In the 1960s Johnson had his war on poverty. The federal government provided funding for massive housing projects, welfare, etc. White fled inner cities and this was facilitated by big expansions in highways, etc. The federal government promoted the suburban ideal. Marginalized populations that the nation cared nothing about (ghetto Blacks, poor immigrants, gays concentrated in certain big cities)
Enter the Clinton and Bush administrations. Both Clinton and Bush hired Ivy League and Stanford technocrats who wanted big US cities (especially NYC) to be able to compete with European cities that were their nations centers of business and culture. Big corporations were given huge tax credits to invest in urban areas and the feds encouraged big cities to dump their ghetto populations (go down South).
So really what the marginalized people living there for the past 15-45 years want doesn't matter as far as the national government is concerned. Big urban areas are valuable to the current economy, particularly to industries like finance, tech, media, education, etc and therefore big urban areas are important to the national government.
I got here in '88. The city was GREAT then. My heart has broken over the past few years as I've seen it all slip away. All it took was twenty-years of Republican rule to ruin it all. All the fun is gone. It's about $$$ now. Whenever I walk around town, it's difficult to find a smiling face sometimes. So many people who now live here seem to exist solely for the purpose of "measuring up." I find it mind-boggling. I'd go back to the 80's in a second.
So its you to partially blame for gentrification. Maybe you shouldn't of came here to live then, just to visit and enjoy on a temp basis.
It is all one big cycle. Cities have gone through them for centuries and will continue to.
A city is a poor dump -> people move in because of cheap rents -> they clean up the area -> area gets uber cool -> rents go up -> cool, shops get priced out and move out -> chains move in -> cool people move out -> city goes back to being a poor dump -> repeat.
Years ago someone built nice homes and apartments and unfortunately the quality of the people who moved in turned to ****. Now those houses and buildings are getting attention by the productive members of society who aren't into violence or theft or gangsterism and finally the owners are making a nice chunk of change.
If you feel gentrification hurts your race then it is what it is. The ghettofication of neighborhoods hurts my race and force my people out in fear for their safety, their sons and especially daughters and their quality of life. They have to move and hopefully people in the new nice area don't make the mistake of allowing in ****.
It is all one big cycle. Cities have gone through them for centuries and will continue to.
A city is a poor dump -> people move in because of cheap rents -> they clean up the area -> area gets uber cool -> rents go up -> cool, shops get priced out and move out -> chains move in -> cool people move out -> city goes back to being a poor dump -> repeat.
In another 50 years NYC will be a dump again.
London and Paris haven't been dumps for a long time.
It's not cyclical.
NYC used to be an industrial city. That isn't coming back and consistently over decades they've concentrated in wiping out all traces of that.
European cities for quite sometime became places where the wealthy stayed, and now the biggest US cities are becoming that.
We have been having a lot of fires as landlords burn down rent stabilized buildings so they can get rid of tenants living in those buildings. Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and Queens, especially. The people living in tenement housing ARE NOT MIDDLE CLASS people. You have poor people in these buildings (some may be working to middle class) but many will be elderly people or even people on Section 8.
Gentrification does indeed displace poor people. Just leave the Bronx and find out what has happened to poor people in privately owned housing in Manhattan, much of Brooklyn, and much of Queens.
The city has a 1.3 billion dollar surplus. It did not shoot itself in the foot. You don't project your personal situation onto the city.
The building that blew up in the East Village was rent stabilized, and apartments leave the program when rents go above 2500. There's still some people in the East Village paying 1000 or less for their apartments because they've been living there for awhile, but these buildings seem to be literally going up in SMOKE. Or the real estate industry finds legal ways to demolish them.
I think you and some others are ignoring the destruction of lies of poor people out of jealous. In your mind they're living are fantastic because they are getting free money from the government and it is only working poor people who are struggling. I gets to the point where I think you'd even ignore factual evidence, because this jealousy of these people is so strong.
What happens to a section 8 tenant or an elderly person who gets thrown out of their building by a landlord in a place like the LES? There haven't been landlords in that area who would take new cases, but there are older people who moved in these buildings in the 80s or 90s when these areas were still ghetto. And yes these poor people have been rapidly displaced and pushed out of Manhattan. Similar things are happening in Brooklyn and Queens. Ditto Harlem.
You yourself said landlords in Washington Heights stopped taking Section 8 and many Dominicans got displaced to the Bronx. So that's an example coming from YOUR MOUTH of poor people getting displaced due to gentrification.
Begging anyone with a working mind not to respond the craziness. It just derails the threads and they become really uninteresting.
NYC has lost all it's flavor and soul by this and its making the city not only expensive and unaffordable, but also dull, boring, and lame. I was born in the Bronx in the late 1980s and as a kid growing up in the 1990s, I remember how vibrant and exciting this city was back but not anymore. I'm Latino, born in the Bronx but raised in Washington Heights and still living in the Heights, my parents are both immigrants from Dominican Republic.
Not one person commented on this, which is actually the most valid point here.
The city is less interesting because it is increasingly populated by people who have the cash. That is the single criterion and it replaced something around whether a given person could "make it" - talented enough, hard-working enough, the list could go on. Interesting and creative people came here in the '60, '70s, '80s, perhaps even in the 1990s still, and I realize how fortunate I was to be around them as a child. When I encountered them they were already wealthy and established artists, writers, what-have-you. Without them, there would have been little to sell the transplants who would arrive clutching parental monies.
Fewer of these people come to New York now. It is an fundamentally accepted fact about downtown, for example - or perhaps most meaningfully - that the majority of the residents are very very rich with nothing, absolutely nothing at all, going on. We can live wherever we want and will probably never live there again. There is not enough in the offing. It is currently a dead zone of corporate brands, middle-American money - and far worse, middle-American culture, and euro-trash. In fact, it is more likely that we would move to London or Berlin.
In academia we would point out that New York has become a signifier for itself. We all know how that ends eventually.
For the mentally challenged out there, AGAIN, very low income people are still coming to New York. More every day. What did one such person call them ? Oh, yes. The "scum." It is not the "scum" who are necessarily being priced out, and not in the highest numbers in any case. FYI - working class people are not "scum," or at least few that I have encountered would be classified that way and definitely not necessarily.
Last edited by Harlem resident; 03-28-2015 at 04:14 PM..
4 shelters in recent years got closed in Hells Kitchen due to the real estate market. Poor people do indeed get displaced in NYC and there's actual proof of it.
You and BronxGuyanese like to ignore actual evidence but it is there and cannot be escaped. Manhattan and much of Brooklyn and Queens are undergoing slum clearance.
Not one person commented on this, which is actually the most valid point here.
The city is less interesting because it is increasingly populated by people who have the cash. That is the single criterion and it replaced something around whether a given person could "make it" - talented enough, hard-working enough, the list could go on. Interesting and creative people came here in the '60, '70s, '80s, perhaps even in the 1990s still, and I realize how fortunate I was to be around them as a child. When I encountered them they were already wealthy and established artists, writers, what-have-you. Without them, there would have been little to sell the transplants who would arrive clutching parental monies.
Fewer of these people come to New York now. It is an fundamentally accepted fact about downtown, for example - or perhaps most meaningfully - that the majority of the residents are very very rich with nothing, absolutely nothing at all, going on. We can live wherever we want and will probably never live there again. There is not enough in the offing. It is currently a dead zone of corporate brands, middle-American money - and far worse, middle-American culture, and euro-trash. In fact, it is more likely that we would move to London or Berlin.
In academia we would point out that New York has become a signifier for itself. We all know how that ends eventually.
For the mentally challenged out there, AGAIN, very low income people are still coming to New York. More every day. What did one such person call them ? Oh, yes. The "scum." It is not the "scum" who are necessarily being priced out, and not in the highest numbers in any case. FYI - working class people are not "scum," or at least few that I have encountered would be classified that way and definitely not necessarily.
I gave reps. It will be a damn shame if no one responds to this post. Matter of fact, if nobody responds to this post, that should sum up most of you peoples' attitudes.
__________________
"The man who sleeps on the floor, can never fall out of bed." -Martin Lawrence
I gave reps. It will be a damn shame if no one responds to this post. Matter of fact, if nobody responds to this post, that should sum up most of you peoples' attitudes.
I appreciate it.
I am quite angry about how people are discussed at times.
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