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Mixed income communities do exist--I live in one. And an end result of mixed-income communities is more wealth for the impoverished, because having wealthier neighbors means more economic opportunities for them. They are a little more complex, and people aren't used to them after so many decades of deliberate economic segregation, but they can and do exist. Of course, there will still be variations within a city--some areas will be mixed-income, some more or less wealthy. In the same sense, some areas will have dense populations, others will be more strictly commercial with fewer residents and others more low-density residential. The point isn't having all of one type or another, whether it is housing type or economic mixture, but a variety of economic choices. A mixed-income community contributes to the wealth of all its members. I certainly wouldn't want all my neighbors to be of the same economic class--I tried that, didn't care for it.
Mixed income communities are nearly impossible to accomplish. Well off home seekers are going to seek neighborhoods in the city where they will be surrounded by people similar to themselves. They don't want to live next door to the impoverished residents of the city.
You can't make that statement without defining community. Because around here there are lots of areas where within say one square mile you have incomes ranging from say less than 25k / yr to well over several hundred thousand per year.
God forbid that anyone bring new investment and energy into a flagging community and provide a burgeoning tax base for the city at large. What a hideous thought.
It is in a way.
Let me be blunt, gentrification = whites move in, blacks go bye bye.
The neighborhood went from being a sense of community where people of lower class could socialize amongst one other and not feel inferior because theres wealthier people mixed in the hood. In a city like D.C., where theres no native whites for the most part and most of the blacks here ARE natives, the two groups have little common ground and native blacks aren't so fond of newcomers , at least not in the way its all happening. When a neighborhood doesn't get bike lanes, dog parks, new housing, new retail, more police protection, etc until it becomes whiter. and as the city gentrifies more and more, the more racial tensions come about here. Prince George's County, MD is becoming the new DC for blacks here and many are doing better. Theres some parts of D.C. that has been black since slavery................ if anything those parts should be left alone, but sadly they aren't.
You know would make things even though? Put affordable and section 8 development in wealthier areas and see how they like it it'll probably just cause another white flight and then that area will be turn into the hood or undesirable.
The argument against gentrification is often based on a subtext that economically depressed neighborhoods should stay that way, racially segregated areas should stay segregated, and that the presence of whites inevitably must displace a nonwhite population. A lot of earlier decades' experience with gentrification happened in the wake of urban renewal, which uprooted and destroyed a lot of neighborhoods and created middle-class/upper-class workplaces on their former sites. Workers in those workplaces decided they would rather move into un-demolished adjacent neighborhoods in the central city instead of commute. This did cause economic displacement because there were no policies to deal with the phenomenon--it wasn't supposed to happen. Sprawl policy was meant to move whites permanently to the suburbs, downtown was supposed to empty entirely at night, and other populations would live in whatever spaces whites cared about least. By moving into those neighborhoods, they often priced out the current inhabitants.
The modern "gentrification" model is a little different, because the era of large-scale urban renewal and highway development is largely over. There are more workplaces in the suburbs and in new "edge cities," so there is generally less need for workers to move to the central city to cut down on their commute. Instead they are coming to the city because of an interest in city life--in leaving those cocoons. Implicit in that, indirectly if not directly, is a desire for a more diverse cultural life. Another feature one finds now is that it isn't necessarily whites doing the moving--often they are immigrants or existing American nonwhite populations, moving into in-migrant neighborhoods as immigrants have done for centuries.
The term "economic integration," as defined by folks like Donovan Rypkema, is based on the idea that more investment in a community should help it, not harm it--as more money comes in, so comes more opportunity for the people already in the neighborhood. If the effort is based on preservation and restoration of existing housing stock (vs. wholesale demolition) it requires more labor, which means construction and maintenance jobs in that community. If the city has a low-income housing policy in place once the changes start, affordable housing can be maintained in the neighborhood and displacement can be avoided--in most economically deprived neighborhoods, abandoned housing and vacant lots can and should be filled before housing pressure results in displacement of current tenants. As neighborhoods get repaired, opportunities for retail, commercial and professional jobs appear, both for the current residents and new in-migrants. This means everyone in the neighborhood has a way to make more money, at least for those in the job force or able to rejoin it. The main concern will be those who won't rejoin it--the retired and the disabled. That's why maintaining (and sometimes expanding) low-income housing is so important.
In new-growth suburbs, cities that start with low-income housing policies have a head start. This can be done well or badly--typically developers balk at putting it in until the very last minute, which means low-income units tend to get bunched up into the last parts of a PUD instead of in a planned fashion. Locally, this has resulted in a suburb that was originally very desirable to the white and wealthy, then when the low-income units all went in at once, there was a loud negative reaction from people who had only preceded them by a few years. It wasn't a huge percentage (15% of the housing had to be affordable to 40% of the population) and in the long run things will probably stabilize but it drew a powerful reaction from the new neighborhood.
In the longer run, some of the former wealthier areas will see their own economic integration happen, as opportunities open up and a draw to the cities lowers rents. Some folks will not be able to get over their wishes to maintain white enclaves, but in many places white flight has reached its physical limits. You can only commute so far, and in fully built out parts of the country if you go too far you hit another city in the other direction. Most people are just going to have to come to terms with an increasingly diverse and increasingly integrated nation. Some places will still feature more of this group or the other--but, one hopes, promotion of cultural identity will be more along the lines of a community celebration than a drawing of racial boundaries.
On a positive note, I have always loved the part of Laurelton, just south of Merrick Blvd. You won't find too many neighborhoods with the same quality of English Tudor homes. IMO, the community should be applying for designation as a Historic District, which would give it a needed PR boost.
It would also jack up home prices considerably and probably drive out the very people you want to stay. I'm very familiar with the area you are talking about I lived in Hollis and graduated from Jamaica High School.
It is leading to our cities and suburbs being on an even playing field. Eventually you will see the ghetto areas of our cities revitalized and those ghetto areas will make their way to the suburbs. Not to say that there will be no more city ghettos or that all suburbs will be ghetto, but there will be more of a balance in the future. I think city life will be viewed in more of a positive way in the future by the general population, with the suburban dream not being as popular. Eventually middle-class families will move into cities again after they are made safer and more kid friendly. Of course this will be a long process that I don't expect to come to fruition in our lifetimes.
Yeah, in Chicago theres been a small influx of criminals flooding into suburbs like Mount Prospect.
Maybe the community you speak so much of should increase their income so that they can afford to remain in their traditional communities. You use the word pushed, but these people chose to move when and where they did. We have a free market system in America and people can live anywhere they can afford.
As a white recent college grad and new hire working downtown I was looking for an affordable home in an interesting neighborhood close to downtown job/culture/night life. I found one on a street with 5 foreclosures within 2 neighboring properties (including diagonal and across the street). Our neighborhood is probably 65% black and 35% white. I do consider myself a gentrifier because I am not from the neighborhood and I am considerably more well off and better educated than the vast majority of the neighborhood. We have a neighborhood organization, but it is entirely made up of white professionals. Our goal, and that of most gentrifiers is not to push the local population out but instead to make it very hard for drug dealers, prostitutes, and homeless squatters to do their business near our homes. I think these goals and the added voices in and around city hall can only make the neighborhood a better place for all.
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