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the quote we were talking about is from a fictional character who would've been speaking around 1914 or something like that.
According to this post, it was written in 1970, hence my description of Big Ag country in the 1970s.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nybbler
Note the quote was commentary, not prediction; it was written in 1970.
Specialized farming and manufacturing, however, was happening whether the automobile did or not. And violence never reached "a scale never seen before"; history is even more violent than you'd think. Of those two, at least, the automobile is innocent.
After gentrification comes aristocratization, when only the glitterati can afford the area. Then you get regification, when only foreign royalty can afford the place; they don't actually live there, they just hold the real estate.
It's pretty evident that this has happened in a number of places globally but the extent to which it can keep happening is in question.
If we look at the top 5% of richest households in the US then look at the bottom 80% of those households, they average $208k/yr which, if we're calling "affordable" around 1/3 of annual income then the average rents in San Francisco would be around the upper limits of what's affordable. For instance, a family of 4 with a husband/wife both pulling down $105k/yr in SF would likely find the rent for a 3 bedroom apartment pretty expensive. In any case there are 4.59 million of those households.
Assuming that all of them wanted to live in a big city it would be roughly equivalent to the 10 biggest cities in the US.
Then there are 1.48 million households in the top 1%. As a point of comparison there are around 2.1 million households in NYC.
Gentrification is a fairly mild form of urban renewal compared to the old kind that involved kicking everyone out and bulldozing entire neighborhoods all at once for office buildings and highways. It's no fun for the gentrified but it becomes a process of years or sometimes decades instead of an immediate act of ethnic urban cleansing.
Hipster neighborhoods start out cheap--the reason they start becoming hipster neighborhoods is because they are cheap and the hipster kids (who are poor compared to their middle-class parents, if not their new neighbors) move in so they can work part-time and spend the rest of the time going to school or creating art/music/etc., and get by without a car but still be able to get around. But once they arrive, people want to make money off them and that starts the gentrification cycle.
There are ways to slow, interrupt or mitigate gentrification--personally I don't think it is necessary for a neighborhood to remain poor and in disrepair, if only because cities are constantly changing. One of the most effective strategies seems to be mixed-income housing and mixture of building ages--gentrifiers seem to prefer being able to turn a whole neighborhood into single-family enclaves, but few people want to convert a row of 1960s Mansard-roofed apartment buildings into condos, except maybe in conditions of extreme economic pressure, like San Francisco or New York. A mixture of new and old buildings is good for urban vitality and maintaining income diversity. Protecting the old buildings is important to prevent speculator-driven development, or at least slow its effects, or direct it into the areas where it is most needed.
The alternative to gentrification is urban regeneration: gradual but steady neighborhood improvement that provides opportunities for people already in the neighborhood along with those moving to it. Not everyone will be able to stay, nor should they--the friendly neighborhood drug dealers and chop shops, for example. But the long-time residents will be the happiest to see them go if the neighborhood's repair and improvement means opportunities for their children, and not just for those swooping in to make a fast buck.
If all of the poor folk flew Mexican flags, Jamaican flags in their front yards, would that keep whitey out? Or would he keep coming?
Most cities would be very happy to have the gentrification problem you describe. It's only in a handful of American cities, namely NYC, Boston, Washington, San Francisco and Los Angeles that have the extreme gentrification problem - as defined as making the city so expensive that even the normal middle classes can't afford to live there anymore.
But the rest of American cities aren't experiencing this. Their gentrifying neighborhoods haven't made the city more unaffordable. If anything, in places like Baltimore and Philadelphia, gentrification have turned once dangerous, destabilized neighborhoods it more livable places. And both cities still have large swathes of unfashionable lower middle/working class neighborhoods that would greatly benefit from some gentrification investment.
Regardless of what you think about gentrification I'd like to point out two things:
1. Gentrification has turned certain cities - especially New York and Washington - from dangerous, decaying hell-holes into highly attractive, stable and desirable places. Would you rather have gentrified New York or ungentrified New York? In case you don't remember, ungentrified New York in the 1970s and 1990s was a dangerous, decaying and filthy place with a shockingly high crime rate that was trapping so many poor respectable families into circumstances they couldn't get out of. It wasn't that long ago, indeed, in the mid-1990s I remember a coworker shaking his head at his cousin's son buying a brownstone in Harlem! An entire brownstone! For 250,000! And we all thought he was stupid. Because, as we all knew, Harlem was one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America and to be white in Harlem and not looking for drugs was as close to having a death warrant on your head as you could get in the US.
2. Cities are not, and have never been, static places. Many of the gentrified areas were once fashionable neighborhoods that declined over the years due to various factors, and are now rebounding, reverting to their old statuses, perhaps.
As with any changes, there are winners and losers. But if the overall effect of gentrification is to bring more money and more people into once deprived or suffering areas, I'm all for it.
It is NOT just the handful that you mention. You left out Portland, Houston, Dallas, Austin, Seattle. Those are only the ones that I'm aware of. Only a decade ago, it was very affordable to live near Houston's downtown, not anymore. Hipsters and ultra-rich people are displacing all the historically poor people that had lived there for decades.
What happens to an area 10 years after gentrification? Do they come around again and regentrify?
It's a nasty subject. It is akin to running the poor out of a neighborhood and setting it all afire while they are gone. Nothing is ever really gained but the money the developer raked in. The neighborhood will become urban again soon enough; later gentrifiers.
No offense, but I have no idea what the hell you are talking about here. Neighborhoods which gentrify don't become undesirable again ten years later. The earliest gentrified neighborhoods in the modern era in the U.S. (say Greenwich Village or Soho in NYC, or Haight Ashbury or the Castro in San Francisco) remain desirable middle-class areas today.
Of course, it may be the case that eventually cities will fall out of favor and some of the neighborhoods will decline again. I'm not sure why this is a big deal. Neighborhoods go from rich to poor and back again throughout history. Is there something more moral about having a neighborhood just stay poor from its creation to the end of time?
Also, it's really wrong to say nothing is gained but profits for developers. Homeowners in gentrified neighborhoods gain a lot of equity. Old-timers can "cash out" if they desire, while those who came in later can stay in their homes for decades if the area still suits them. And as others have noted, many historic buildings may be restored (although other ones which are considered "too far gone" may be demolished). And the neighborhood will almost certainly remain urban - it's not like brownstones are knocked down to make detached single-family houses.
As I said elsewhere, gentrification is pretty much a logical outcome of a capitalist market economy. If you want to actually address the issues with gentrification (e.g., that it shuffles around the poor without doing much to reduce poverty) you need to address the fundamental inequality of the economy, or look into how to create more good-paying working-class jobs in general. Everything else is just a band-aid on a bullet hole.
Suburban neighborhoods have absolutely not remained uniform or static. They've changed quite a bit demographically over the last 40 years especially when it comes to the share of regional poverty.
We're using different metrics for describing uniformity. I'm not using demographics.
I'm only wondering where the people that made urban neighborhoods "hip" and "quirky" and "cool" by way of their style and their businesses have gone when those neighborhoods have gentrified. The physical appearance of suburban neighborhoods have not, in my view, changed to be more like the urban environment, speaking broadly, even as former urbanites have moved to those neighborhoods as a function of gentrification.
We're using different metrics for describing uniformity. I'm not using demographics.
I'm only wondering where the people that made urban neighborhoods "hip" and "quirky" and "cool" by way of their style and their businesses have gone when those neighborhoods have gentrified.
I see.
Neighborhood change isn't overnight. It takes 2-3 decades so these artists and bohemians usually just move to the next neighborhood and their shops and bars stay right where they are for quite awhile.
You can see this phenomenon at work in Philly where, over the last 40 years, the artist hub has moved from South St, to Old City, to Northern Liberties, to Kensington and it seems to be shifting ever northward. You can still see evidence of its existence in its various stages all along the way.
So many people wanna dance around it and talk in all this coded, pseudo-academic language. Just say it.
Won't work, though; your "hip" gentrifiers tend to be politically liberal and would find an ethnically diverse neighborhood appealing. So if you REALLY want to keep them out, you should fly the Confederate battle flag.
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