"White Flight" vs Gentrification (dollars, school, education, states)

[Cyanosphere]

So a couple of months ago, there was a protest against the construction of a new high-rise residential development. Demonstrators and protesting that the introduction of a high-class apartment building would raise the surrounding property values and make rent too expensive for the residents.

With the home/apartment industry in shambles, I don't think we have to worry about new developments for a while, but it seems like this is a frequently common issue in many cities, and it confuses me.

For decades, people were complaining about "white flight;" that the wealthy people were leaving the cities for the suburbs (and thusly, taking their tax dollars with them).

But now that wealthy people are growing bored in the suburbs and want back in, people are complaining they'll make the cities too expensive to live in for the poor.

Where's the middle ground? Can't people make up their mind?

[Oerdin]

The middle ground is mixed development (sometimes called balanced development or smart growth). All to often developers will only build those items which are most profitable for them after all their job is to maximize returns for their shareholders. The problem with this is that you end up with highly segregated communities (all upper class or all lower class or even all commercial with no housing nearby). Places like Japan and western Europe try to push balanced development where any given area should have a mixture of units some upscale and desirable to the rich but others more modest covering both the middle class and even lower class people. The idea is you make room in an area so that everyone in society can find a place plus ideally you want have retail space, office space, and public spaces like parks all mixed in so that people don't have to commute long distances and you have a more community feel.

Smart development avoids the typical pitfalls seen in post war American suburbanism where housing is segregated by class, the housing areas have only housing so if you want to shop you have to get in your car and drive some where, and all the industrial/business areas are in a third area far from the other two so that workers have to commute and fight traffic every day to get to work and come home. Smart growth balances all that so people at least have an option of moving closer to their work so they could walk, ride their bike, or at least spend less time commuting plus they can walk to the corner store instead of driving to some big box store for every purchase. It's really just the happy medium.

Try reading the book "The Geography of no where" by James Howard Kunstler.

[TylerJAX]

^Mixed development would only work with a charter school system/school choice. I'm not sending my (future/hypothetical) children to school with kids whose parents don't have any interest in their children's education and I know a lot of people feel this way.

[southernnaturelover]

Mixed development won't work period. It's like putting section 8 people in a middle class neighborhood, we all know what happens in the end.

[Katarina Witt]

We area never going to go back to the days of the idealized New England/midwestern farm town construct where everyone walked to work, school, church, you name it. That wasn't reality then and it isn't now.

[Oerdin]

Europe and Japan seems to manage it very successfully.

[Katarina Witt]

I've never been to Japan. What I've seen of Europe isn't what we have, but it isn't what the New Urbanists want, either. People live very tightly together in mid-rise apt buildings. There is very little landscaping; the buildings are built right up to the sidewalk. People bike a lot in Belgium and the Netherlands, b/c it is flat. I saw less biking in Germany, where it's hillier. Lots of walking in the cities; but I think most people take buses from their mid-rises to the downtown areas (called something different there, I can't remember what). It's very dense there in the Benelux area and also NW Germany, though a little less in Germany. Just my observations.

[Randomstudent]

Originally Posted by Oerdin

Europe and Japan seems to manage it very successfully.

Europe and Japan both have well developed mass transit systems that are non-existent in the majority United States cities. In order for US to get even to European levels would require a drastic replaning of most American cities that were built to facilitate a car culture. European and Japanese cities were built mostly prior to the development of the automobile and have much friendlier designs for mass-transit and walking.