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In my entire lifetime I have seen exactly ONE poor person buy a home. (This person was a welfare recipient who bought a home in a declining neighborhood in 1980 from her grandmother for $15,000 with nothing down and payments lower than rent.)
Poor people don't buy homes. Sheesh.
Depends on your definition of poor.
If you define it as borderline sleeping on the street, no job, and just living off government welfare; sure not too many of them can buy a house.
But my definition is a family working low-paying jobs. I have seen many of them buy houses. Yes, ugly shack in the ghetto, but they do buy.
This family of migrant farm workers scraped money together to buy a cheap beat up house in a bad hood and had to live 12 people in a 1 bedroom. Don't tell them they were not poor.
Jesus and Margarita had scrimped and saved to buy the house for about $20,000 – $153,500 in today’s dollars – with money from backbreaking labor as migrant farm workers, along with help from relatives in their native Mexico and a usurious loan from a real estate agent.
All the Mosqueda siblings have vivid memories of early mornings when their parents bundled them, barely awake, into the back of a beat-up station wagon. They would drive to Menlo Park to pick cherries, to Gilroy for onions and green beans, or to Salinas for lettuce and broccoli.
Still, to make ends meet, all 12 Mosquedas, plus a cousin, crammed into the downstairs one-bedroom apartment. They rented the upstairs unit to a family of four; another couple leased a garage apartment that Jesus built. In all, 19 people lived in the modest triplex.
Then, to avoid gentrification, poor people should work to stop crime, unless they're just too lazy to do that.
Do you even know what causes crime? And especially, why poor people are more prone to it?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dockside
I have no use for this whiny logic. In the mid-70's we moved into a run-down Brooklyn neighborhood, bought a beat-up old brownstone from an older woman desperate to leave behind the junkies hitting up under her stairs and physically threatening her for money every time she tried to leave the house. It took lots of work, money and a certain amount of courage to turn that neighborhood around and now it's spectacular.
The hell with the whiners and the losers and the junkies who turn other people's lives into hell.
1) I wasn't whining. I was merely explaining what gentrification really is.
2) You are assuming that every single person in a gentrified neighborhood is a junkie and a loser. Or that the solution to crime is to move it somewhere else.
3) Not all gentrified areas are high-crime. Some are just poor. And good people get displaced just as well as the bad ones by skyrocketing rents and property taxes.
4) As people are pushed out, whatever community had been built there, sometimes over decades or generations, is lost. And the original inhabitants are scattered to the winds.
Regardless, I hate cities. They destroy everything good about humanity, and leave only shallow, hedonistic materialism. And while the people who inhabit gentrified areas don't commit much crime(because they don't need to, and have too much to lose), and also while the government might deem them "good citizens"(because they make lots of money, and pay lots of taxes), I wouldn't consider most of them to be good people, in the ways that actually matter.
A bunch of immoral, religion-hating, wordly people, who think they're better than everyone else.
Well, gentrification does ruin communities, and displaces the people who may have lived there generations, just pushing them somewhere else.
But it does leave in its wake, expensive houses, coffee shops, fancy restaurants, etc.
So who benefits from gentrification? Mostly real-estate investors, and government tax revenues.
I spent about a week last year in Philly near Jefferson Hospital, Had to make the walk to Penn Hospital about twice day, about 8 blocks or so. It was quite a nice area and I would of had no qualms about walking those streets at 2AM. Having my pick of different restaurants for every meal was particularly nice, there was this one place with a neon pig in the window. I was drawn to it like a fly. How can you go wrong with a restaurant that has a neon pig in the window?
Do you even know what causes crime? And especially, why poor people are more prone to it?
1) I wasn't whining. I was merely explaining what gentrification really is.
2) You are assuming that every single person in a gentrified neighborhood is a junkie and a loser. Or that the solution to crime is to move it somewhere else.
3) Not all gentrified areas are high-crime. Some are just poor. And good people get displaced just as well as the bad ones by skyrocketing rents and property taxes.
4) As people are pushed out, whatever community had been built there, sometimes over decades or generations, is lost. And the original inhabitants are scattered to the winds.
Regardless, I hate cities. They destroy everything good about humanity, and leave only shallow, hedonistic materialism. And while the people who inhabit gentrified areas don't commit much crime(because they don't need to, and have too much to lose), and also while the government might deem them "good citizens"(because they make lots of money, and pay lots of taxes), I wouldn't consider most of them to be good people, in the ways that actually matter.
A bunch of immoral, religion-hating, wordly people, who think they're better than everyone else.
Just look at this thread. A bunch of snobs.
Yeah, I don't much like cities either which is why we moved out of NYC years ago.
I know you weren't whining...and I apologize for portraying you that way. I had no call to be rude to you.
The vast-majority of poor people are renters, who get absolutely nothing from higher housing prices, except higher rents.
But the point is, gentrification doesn't stop crime, it just moves it somewhere else. There is nothing magical about it. It doesn't fix anything.
Then the question isn’t whether gentrification is good or bad, but why crime and poor people go together. And why poor people and minority go together.
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