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End game: the people who were renting there get priced out. But you can't have gentrification without that. It's not run down buildings and boarded-up storefronts that make an area bad, that's just a symptom; it's the people living there.
I fully agree.
Case in point is Allentown, PA's Center City (downtown) area. The majority of downtown houses the majority of the city's poorest residents.
As a result of this, murder, rape, assault, armed robbery and burglary are commonplace in the area.
Litter and abandoned cars have been a real issue.
The retailers in Center City consist of payday advance check cashing stores, hip hop oriented clothing stores, homeless shelters along with empty buildings that still stand as a testament the better days past.
Enter the new professional hockey arena currently being built along with three corporations relocating their corporate headquarters to new buildings being built as we speak.
Also planned with funding in place is a new highrise hotel and convention center.
This has not gone unnoticed by low income housing advocates along with Latino community activists.
They have already expressed deep concern and worry over this revitalization and are protesting.
I personally could care less if they are worried about it.
The majority of Allentown's residents, myself included are sick and tired of the lead weight around the city's neck.
The city's leadership is saying twenty years from now Center City Allentown will be filled with productive citizenry living, working and recreating in Center City.
End game: the people who were renting there get priced out. But you can't have gentrification without that. It's not run down buildings and boarded-up storefronts that make an area bad, that's just a symptom; it's the people living there.
The people who were renting don't own run down buildings (including their dilapidated apartments), they can't repair something they don't own even if they had money. It's mostly abandoned or absentee owned into the ground. Run down buildings are not the fault of the people living there (since of those people don't own a squat), it's the fault of the people who cut the economic support from under that particular neighborhood that trapped people without economic resources and ownership rights, the rest snowballed.
Virtually every American ghetto can be traced to the times when owning class decided to move major businesses to the greener/cheaper places, the most opulent folks followed (or simply fled elsewhere) leaving decline behind. Now you blame the poorest for staying put and failing to maintain abandoned properties and/or failing to lure in new (bottom-feeding) businesses by displaying their compliant&eager to please poverty&desperation. Never mind that businesses that prey on the most desperate workers unlikely to provide sufficient capital to maintain former glory of those neighborhoods.
Minority owning survival means of the majority (and owing nothing to that majority) that what creates ghettos and blight. How reverse social segregation a.k.a gentrification can fix that? Hint, most of the "gentry" doesn't own its survival means either, most are in the superfluous (or outright silly) lines of business that don't create much of anything of true value.
Minority owning survival means of the majority (and owing nothing to that majority) that what creates ghettos and blight. How reverse social segregation a.k.a gentrification can fix that?
The problem with your thesis is that it demonstrably DOES.
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Hint, most of the "gentry" doesn't own its survival means either, most are in the superfluous (or outright silly) lines of business that don't create much of anything of true value.
I'm in the "funny cat video" business myself. But not everyone can be in mining, manufacturing, or agriculture (your basic "value creating" business), nor transport, power production, or any of the other direct support businesses. This just means your thesis is flawed; owning the direct means of survival has nothing to do with ghettos and blight.
The people who were renting don't own run down buildings (including their dilapidated apartments), they can't repair something they don't own even if they had money. It's mostly abandoned or absentee owned into the ground. Run down buildings are not the fault of the people living there (since of those people don't own a squat), it's the fault of the people who cut the economic support from under that particular neighborhood that trapped people without economic resources and ownership rights, the rest snowballed.
Virtually every American ghetto can be traced to the times when owning class decided to move major businesses to the greener/cheaper places, the most opulent folks followed (or simply fled elsewhere) leaving decline behind. Now you blame the poorest for staying put and failing to maintain abandoned properties and/or failing to lure in new (bottom-feeding) businesses by displaying their compliant&eager to please poverty&desperation. Never mind that businesses that prey on the most desperate workers unlikely to provide sufficient capital to maintain former glory of those neighborhoods.
Minority owning survival means of the majority (and owing nothing to that majority) that what creates ghettos and blight. How reverse social segregation a.k.a gentrification can fix that? Hint, most of the "gentry" doesn't own its survival means either, most are in the superfluous (or outright silly) lines of business that don't create much of anything of true value.
I agree with most of this especially the etiology of the American ghetto and how it can be traced to owning class moving businesses away to less expensive areas. That is true.
I agree that the middle class moves out to usually outer suburbs, properties are snatched up by investors, and are maintained as rentals.
This continues until none of the private residences are owner occupied, The fisrt wave of tenants and owners may not be the worst, They usually are not. The inverters may just be middle class people themselves with some connection to the neighborhood, They lived there as children or their parents did, They may know the seller and still hold some affection for the old neighborhood.
Some of the first tenants may be OK. People who typically rent. Those who are new in town, newly weds, students, single parents, They are not usually of a distinctly different class than the first residents, They are just renters looking for some thing short term and safe.
I think that the problems set in, in a few ways, The middle class property owner is a novice not a pro. He manages the dwellings by himself and perhaps with the aid of his son or other relative. These older buildings must be meticulously maintained and maintaining one or several rentals is greatly different than maintaining one's own home. The insensive is not there.
The desire and pride may be, in the beginning, but all it really takes is one tenant to lose his job, skip out over night for greener pastures creating a vacancy and the armature landlord, who in all probability has his own house and his own mortgage, is ovewhelmed. Where as once the land lord required references, he may deal wirh the vacancy by quickly renting to just any one. These people can be pros. The may know land lord tenant law better than the armature land lord. He is in over his head.
Meanwhile he may foreclose. All the while the residential properties are getting worse. A true bottom feeder slumlord may sniff out these aging properties and snap them up often at cost, The armature land lord is just glad to get out without a foreclosure. His affection for the old neighborhood is gone, He retreats into the safty of the suburbs,
There's a new guy in town.
Before we get to him what happened to the businesses that were there that are now in the outskirts of town with the raised ranches, colonels capes and ranches? There are empty store fronts and some one needs to move in.
In stead of the Mom and Pop grocery store, florist, dry cleaner, bakery, ethnic market, family owned carpet and furniture store, photographer, hair salon, barber and butcher there is a new breed of stores.
The first sign that things have gone down to a point of no return is a Dollar Store, owned by a chain from a right to work state. After comes a chek cashing place, and at it's heals, a Furniture and Appliance rental store. The dollar store is first though. A place to but milk and eggs under wear, and socks and perhaps some cheap cold cuts, hot dogs and potato chips.
Back at the rental properties the remaining decent tenants are frightened. The dwelling are getting worse and the new tenants are scarier, The streets are littered and noisy. The leave.
The new Property Management firm improves the buildings just enough to collect a government check. Section Eight or Welfare.
There is truly no one decent left in the neighborhood, Not the management company, the stores or even the tenants .
I once thought that if given the chance to own that all people would be so, I don't think so any longer. Negative attracts more of the same. The people go from poor, to lower class to dangerous. A crominal class.
They care about nothing. They and the slumlord make a good pair. They know how to destroy and to take.
At this point, the area can cleared out and leveled to the ground or the blight will just continue.
I was once against gentrification, but having tried living in an area that I was told was "up and coming" that was not, my days as an urban explorer are over.
I think gentrification is a solution and not a problem. It sure beats this.
Depends on how much they "gentrify". If the gentrification is extreme enough (similar to say DC, maybe San Francisco and parts of NYC) no one except well-off people will be able to afford to live there. Not really any diversity in incomes or lifestyles.
I'm not saying it's bad, but it's a completely different feel. You've also got all sorts of culture clash going on between old Cascades inhabitants (blue collar, light-industrial) and the new Vulcanville (glass corporate, $1500 studios, trendy restaurants). Using the arbitrarily defined 30% value the Federal Gubmint says is the magic line between burdened and unburdened this simply means that Cascades is rapidly gentrifying via bull dozer method have a $60,000 minimum income entry fee. Rents have dropped a bit since the glory bubble days below what Vulcan-type development (who owns most SLU and a fair amount of Cascades) is willing to develop at, which is why the bulk of residential development has shifted to Ballard where smaller developers building smaller projects and willing to accept lower ROIs are building.
Cascades and SLU are still very early in the gentrification process. When build-out occurs, competition for a limited number of units begins to occur that $60,000 price floor for a studio is only going to go up.
"Gentrification" (the pejorative label used to describe the process of revitalization) is decried as terrible. But it isn't. Every neighborhood that I've seen that has be "gentrified" went from being blighted and frequently dangerous places to being incredible neighborhoods that are a draw for people of all kinds. Gentrified neighborhoods frequently become the most interest, highest mixed of incomes and lifestyles, and most lively neighborhoods in the city.
Also, think about running the tape in reverse - would anyone today favor blighting a neighborhood to increase affordability? That's what they effectively did in the 70s with those horrible housing projects that ended up killing off whole sections of cities nationally.
Ripping that stuff out, replacing it with new development that brings interest and vitality back to neighborhoods is a good thing.
I agree with you in a way. My only problem with it is that it generally involves pushing the poor population out. They claim "mixed-income neighborhoods", but they get so expensive that poor people can not live there and have to leave. In essence, this doesn't solve the poor problem, but instead pushes it onto someone else. That doesn't sound altogether like a viable solution to me.
I love the idea of gentrification personally. If the current tenants are "low-income" why not make sure that they are grandfathered into the new rents? IMO, gentrification helps gets the crime out, so basically it is a good thing. Technically, the areas that are gentrified are usually high crime areas. So, its not the income of the people who stay there, its the mentality that creates all of the disadvantages of gentrification.
I love the idea of gentrification personally. If the current tenants are "low-income" why not make sure that they are grandfathered into the new rents? IMO, gentrification helps gets the crime out, so basically it is a good thing. Technically, the areas that are gentrified are usually high crime areas. So, its not the income of the people who stay there, its the mentality that creates all of the disadvantages of gentrification.
You shouldn't generalize about gentrification happening only in high-crime areas. It all depends upon the city and the current prices for housing. In very expensive cities, affordable rents were only ever found in the ghetto. In contrast, in cities where housing and/or rental prices have been historically affordable, perfectly safe but blighted/under-invested areas may gentrify.
In Pittsburgh, the vast majority of gentrification has been located in traditionally edgy, but fairly safe working-class white parts of the city. The main black neighborhoods (with the exception of East Liberty, and to an extent Garfield), have not seen significant gentrification.
Not to generalize, but to share experiences (here in the Chicago area) I know that the gentrified areas are not always high crime, but most had been in the past. If not the high crime, they are generally in areas where people would not want to travel to because of lack of activities and/or recreational things to do. The reason the main black neighborhoods which are high crime areas haven't been gentrified here is because there is so much prime real estate where the housing developments used to be in other areas, and lack of resources in those areas. Why build in an area that is not primed for substantial growth? There are also places in New Orleans like that; check out the St. Thomas area in uptown New Orleans.
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