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.
And these are all valid points. Nonetheless, they (a) are not original thoughts by Spike Lee, and (b) have been far better articulated by people other than Spike Lee.
This is true, but Spike does have a bigger audience. The question is not whether we like Spike or whether we don't, but whether what he's saying deserves to be at least talked about. There are a lot of young, relatively wealthy white people who have moved into historically diverse neighborhoods, raising rents and causing people with roots in the area to have to move. That is just a fact. The thing that gets me is how these same people who have driven up rent prices want nothing to do with their own responsibility. Even if this population is demographically quite liberal, educated, etc... What we are seeing now is that in the end they are carrying forward the reactionary tradition of absolute disavowal of responsibility they've inherited from previous (usually) white generations. It's like when people buy a bunch of expensive organic food and they justify the expense because through some magic it's going to result in lower prices for others to buy organic in the future, only with entire neighborhoods. It's trickle down economics used by the very people who would decry trickle-down economics, only masked because now it serves their interests.
Gentrification will come to naught if the schools don't improve.
That's not necessarily the case; you can have places like Tribeca (in Manhattan) and some places in Philadelphia where the current gentry are wealthy enough to afford private schools, or can get their kids into selective public schools. Or other places which remain popular with relatively well-off people without children.
Quote:
When it gets to the point that there aren't enough spaces in these schools for all the gentrifier kids, then maybe something will happen.
Yes, but don't be surprised if the "something" is the "special" schools expand, or the gentry send their kids further away.
That's not necessarily the case; you can have places like Tribeca (in Manhattan) and some places in Philadelphia where the current gentry are wealthy enough to afford private schools, or can get their kids into selective public schools. Or other places which remain popular with relatively well-off people without children.
Yes, but don't be surprised if the "something" is the "special" schools expand, or the gentry send their kids further away.
I'd like to do away with these "special" schools altogether, if it were politically possible. (It's not.) I am particularly opposed to charter schools. I'd love to be on a committee that selects students for these schools, and turn down a few "movers and shakers" kids. (The lottery in Colorado is not a "pure" lottery. Districts are allowed to use preferences, e.g. sibling in the school; parent a member of the founding board; some schools require a certain percentage of students to be receiving free and reduced lunch-this to combat the claim that they're only for elites-; in district before out of district; teacher's kids, etc. And some of the magnet schools have subjective criteria such as the submission of a portfolio to Denver School of the Arts.) Savvy people learn to game the system.
Sort of. But SF is so behind the building curve that people in older stock who might have moved know that there is nothing they can afford now. Everything available is 3x more than they are paying. So they don't move.
My neighborhood is 30-40% more now compared to when I moved in. So I don't move because I figure I might as well save up to buy. One more older unit that is not available. There needs to be more middle ground (in our whole region).
I did a cursory look at apartments near my job and that were all the same price, pretty expensive. There was absolutely no variation across the entire city.
All of this is the result of a market that is severely constricted due to regulatory policy.
And the longer bad regulatory policy is in place, the worse the problem will get and the harder it will be to reverse. SF's wounds are entirely self inflicted (as they are in most places). There are lots and lots of things that can be done, but not when the city prevents intensification of land use over the vast majority of the city.
I'd like to do away with these "special" schools altogether, if it were politically possible. (It's not.) I am particularly opposed to charter schools. I'd love to be on a committee that selects students for these schools, and turn down a few "movers and shakers" kids. (The lottery in Colorado is not a "pure" lottery. Districts are allowed to use preferences, e.g. sibling in the school; parent a member of the founding board; some schools require a certain percentage of students to be receiving free and reduced lunch-this to combat the claim that they're only for elites-; in district before out of district; teacher's kids, etc. And some of the magnet schools have subjective criteria such as the submission of a portfolio to Denver School of the Arts.) Savvy people learn to game the system.
I agree. But a basic tenet of our American school system is those that can pay opt out or move somewhere where everyone is the same class. And the ones that can't are segregated into a low opportunity school.
All of this is the result of a market that is severely constricted due to regulatory policy.
And the longer bad regulatory policy is in place, the worse the problem will get and the harder it will be to reverse. SF's wounds are entirely self inflicted (as they are in most places). There are lots and lots of things that can be done, but not when the city prevents intensification of land use over the vast majority of the city.
I think sf's problem is nimbyism and that it is way too easy for an individual or small group to block an entitled project late in the process.
This is true, but Spike does have a bigger audience. The question is not whether we like Spike or whether we don't, but whether what he's saying deserves to be at least talked about. There are a lot of young, relatively wealthy white people who have moved into historically diverse neighborhoods, raising rents and causing people with roots in the area to have to move. That is just a fact.
It's often repeated but is it a fact? It's why I linked to the videos and posted the graphs in the OP.
Are these neighborhoods actually "historically" diverse or did they just go from having one supermajority to another and now they're actually diverse (whether they stay that way is a different story)
Are people being pushed out or are they selling out? Are they moving out because other people are moving in or have they actually been moving out for decades?
I completely agree, btw, about your characterization of the kind of people who buy into neighborhoods who want everything old swept away . . . but in my experience these are usually the 3rd wave. The actual gentry. At that point the neighborhood has already changed.
Yeah, they can afford to send their kids to fancy private schools, or get their kids into the magnet/charter schools b/c they know how to work the system. But, the city schools will always be an impediment to people who need to use the public schools, including middle class people.
Rich, urban families can send their kids to private schools and will in all but a few unique circumstances. But the whole country isn't Brooklyn or San Francisco where demographic change is being driven by the top 3 or 4% of households.
This is mostly what annoys me about the gentrification debate (not calling you out, just using your post as a jumping off point) -
People want to point at the 24 year old renting, white girl in the coffee shop (who will move in 2 years anyway) working on her laptop and talk about gentrification and how "none of these people care about this neighborhood or the people who were here before them".
So we put together other trite catch phrases to dismiss the people who want to do good things so we can carry on talking about "white people" in the pigeonholes that are convenient for us.
As I said in a different thread, "gentrification" can be code for a lot of things. It can get really difficult to have an honest conversation about it because it's an emotional argument and hard for people to get out of the rhetorical boxes they paint themselves into.
The people in that link "architects, stay-at-home moms, a lawyer, even two women who don't yet have children" are incredibly naive: "All they've got to do, they figure, is reshape curriculum and teaching, lower class size, and sell Jackson to a neighborhood highly skeptical of city public schools." (emphasis mine). Not only that, they expect to do this tiny little amount of work in two years or less: ""You can't gamble with your kids' education," acknowledged Jackie Gusic, a cochair of the committee. But by the time her 3-year-old son enters Jackson, Gusic figures, it won't be a gamble."
Two years? Try more like two decades!
More: "The moms have already gotten results. With Burnley's blessing, the moms and Jackson eighth graders planted a garden last weekend. They painted a map of the United States on the playground blacktop. They're overseeing the opening of the long-shuttered library, and Burnley said their opinions will carry weight as a committee picks Jackson's next principal.
The moms want to tackle the science lab next. They will hold a teachers' appreciation luncheon. They plan to put a mosaic on the front of the school. They want a language program for the school's Latino parents, and an antiracism program in social studies classes."
Planting gardens, painting mosaics and the like will not raise academic achievement. I do think it's good they got the library back open, and the science lab project may be beneficial, though this is an elementary school (maybe K-8?). It's good they're interested in the schools, something I've long advocated for on this board. They could use a little guidance, though. They are going to see just how hard it is to improve schools. Hopefully, they won't run out of energy before they actually accomplish something like higher academic accomplishments.
Last edited by Katarina Witt; 03-02-2014 at 07:15 AM..
"We" -- white people -- didn't simply decide to divest. "We" were chased out. Literally burned out, in many cases (as in Lee's "Do The Right Thing").
This didn't really happen.
Almost all of the neighborhoods that suffered riots in the 1960s - if they had much of a white population at all it had been in rapid decline for 20-25 years before any riots happened. In a lot of cases the only white presence left in a lot of those neighborhoods were a few holdover businesses and they were the targets of a lot of animosity during the riots (and this sort of thing was seen again in LA in 1992).
In some cases riots did hasten the demise but the white exodus was going to happen one way or the other.
White people were moving out of these neighborhoods because they were living in generally crowded conditions in housing that was obsolete and that, in most cases, they couldn't afford to modernize. The federal government was offering them a (nearly) free ticket to greener pastures and brand new houses in Staten Island, Northeast Philly, New Jersey, wherever.
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.
