5 of the 41 gentrifying areas were in SF. The rest are all of East Bay or in South Bay. It's incredibly misleading to call that SF. SF had completed it's gentrification process much earlier.
How does a community (edit: geographically defined, not the people living there at time X) receive investment while avoiding gentrification?
There seems to be a logical pattern of receiving investment -> community gets more resources/becomes better -> more people want to live there -> prices increase -> gentrification and the original residents being forced out.
Gentrification is a symptom of limited supply. The way to reduce housing prices in the face of increased demand is to flood the market with supply, by increasing high-density zoning, and loosening requirements such as parking. SF will probably respond with even more rent control, which won't work.
This is true that gentrification is a problem with increased demand that is not meet with an increase of supply, but untrue in it's solution. You can't infinitely scale up the supply for the same plots of land. You can't even 10x it. Also, this entirely ignores what to do with the people and properties of the area that is being gentrified.
I see this opinion far too often from people who have never studied urban planning and development. It smells like of those 'I took an econ 101 class, let me tell you how the world works' kind of opinions.
You can't increase it infinitely, but you can increase it a lot. Single family homes are 4-10 units/acre, townhomes are 20-40 units, and apartments are 50-100.
In this scenario, existing homeowners volunteer to be bought out and move away, removing themselves from the community. Existing landlords volunteer to be bought out, and kick out their renters, leaving them to move away and remove themselves from the community. These homes are demolished and the lots become a construction site for 6-18 months, then the freshly built housing goes to rent or sale at market rate. When they're occupied, they will be filled by newcomers to the community.
You look back at this neighborhood in five years. Wouldn't you consider it to have gentrified?
I would consider the housing stock to be modernized. Whether the neighborhood has been gentrified is more a question of how affordable and appealing it remains to the 'original' residents.
If you razed a SFH in a SFH neighborhood and put in its place a 10 unit complex the surrounding home values would absolutely go down. Values would only eventually go up in the long run as the whole area is turned into dense housing and there are holdout SFH in the area.
I thought we were past framing the discussion in terms of increase/decrease in value. NIMBYs (generally) aren’t against it because it’ll lower value and bringing high density housing doesn’t increase value (except in the extreme long run).
Of course I agree that high density housing is a great for cities. But I think you have conveniently forgot that this thread is about gentrification of existing communities, and not about Greenfield developments.
Relatively few apartment buildings are built as greenfield developments; they are usually built on the former sites of townhomes or single-family houses. This still represents a huge increase in supply.
This is one of the things I love about the area I moved to.
There's a train station nearby, but there was a lot of open area as well. We are also in an opportunity zone. Within the last couple years, construction has started for over 1000 housing units on all greenfield sites (except one of the 200+ unit complexes which was on a single family lot).
I'm not sure if the term gentrification applies here, but I'm really hoping it turns into a nice little transit oriented development. Construction is still ongoing, so we'll see.
This is all within 4 miles of downtown Denver.
Edit: I'm aware this will likely create more demand for the area, and might cause some displacement, but seeing that development is taking place around a transit station, on green/brownfield sites, and nearby an urban core gives me some hope regarding city planning.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic. From what I've heard, if you own a SFH and SFH are being torn down for apartments then your SFH becomes more desirable over time because SFH are less common. (Presuming finite land and SFHs) And if a developer can make 5x the housing on your one lot then probably $$$ - right?
I would like to add that rent controls increase all types of pollution; they increase average commuting distance, because the rent controls make it expensive to move closer to work (decreasing mobility).
The missing thing here is property ownership. If the existing residents owned their properties, then the investment in those communities would accrue to them. Even if property taxes got too high and the existing residents left, they would be cashing out a big chunk of equity.
Indeed, black and brown residents face the problem that their very presence depresses property values, and property values skyrocket when they leave. In DC, the area east of the Capitol has been gentrifying over the last 15 years. If you look at homes districted first Maury elementary school, their prices have skyrocketed (doubling in many cases) in the last 5-7 years. That’s far faster than the city as a whole. Why? Because in that time frame Maury flipped from majority black to majority white. Everything is in DCPS. The district has a highly equitable funding formula. It’s the same teachers, etc. Many of the fancy new school buildings are in fact majority black schools. But upper middle class parents are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars more to send their kids to majority white schools. So the very fact of black residents leaving causes property values to go up—gains which obviously those former residents cannot capture.
I don't have great citations on this, but my understanding is that Tokyo has done a good job at this mostly by aggressively continuing to build housing. The housing prices there have remained much more stable than those in SF for example.
Tokyo has grown by about as much as SF in last 20 years so it is a good example. Another good point of comparison is Vienna, Austria, which is larger than SF and growing faster.
They also don't speculate on real estate and tie wealth to it like we in the west do. My understanding is that housing is considered a sunken asset similar to a car when you account for the frequency of seismic activity and changing building standards to account for it.
Does the community actually receive "investment" if the investment causes the community to no longer exist? I think you're mistaking the process that happens here. Investment targets a geographic area, but that doesn't mean that it's intended to benefit the inhabitants of that area at all.
I was using "community" as synonymous with a geographical area. Your comment matches my thought of particular geographical area receives money -> the folks in that area get pushed out some period of time later.
There's tension between leading a place and a people. If you lead a place, it seems only good that investment goes up, housing prices increase, wealthier people live here, more tax dollars, and so on. If you lead a people, specifically the people who lived in the city when you assumed leadership, then gentrification can clearly be a bad thing - e.g. "Now our people can't afford to live here."
> If you lead a people, specifically the people who lived in the city when you assumed leadership, then gentrification can clearly be a bad thing - e.g. "Now our people can't afford to live here."
What does it even mean to "lead a people" in the context of a city with immigration and emigration? You quickly run into the Ship of Theseus[1] problem.
I don't have a rigorous definition, but I mean it as the difference between caring about something like median income and something like "my kids had to move away because they can't afford to live here."
I've just googled the definition of "nativism" and I think so. I understand it as being concerned with the well-being of the "native" inhabitants, or as I put it, the people there when you assumed power.
I think, in practice, there needs to be something of a balance between prioritizing place and people, probably not an equal balance though. I think people are more important.
As a citizen, if I elect a leader, live by the laws, and pay taxes, I want the government to look after me and my well being and not try to optimize the local stats for GDP or median income or whatever if that comes at the expense of people who live there.
From its definition, it follows that gentrification will have resulted in existing resident landowners getting outbid and/or renters outbid or otherwise being forced from their homes. To avoid gentrification, you need to devise a market distortion (e.g. incentive, regulation, etc) to keep people in their homes, or provide them with comparable replacement homes that are still within the community.
But, then you must also discourage or disincentivize the relocated residents from immediately losing and/or selling these homes to newcomers who are willing to pay more. Owner-occupied homes allow each owner to evaluate whether or not they wish to sell, whereas renters rarely get a say. If all owners willingly sell to richer newcomers, would you look back and consider the community to have gentrified?
Rent control is one such market distortion. Prop 13 is another. These tools serve to keep certain houses off the market, while largely allowing their residents to stay in place.
These mechanisms are irrespective of supply, because the supply is always finite. The mechanisms act on the demand-side.
One simple change is to upzone areas that aren't poor too. That will lower the price of housing everywhere, which is good. In most US cities, rich neighborhoods buy their way out of upzoning. For example the area around Dewey Blvd and the Forest Hill MUNI station has excellent transit access (subway in walking distance!) and there are a few km of street frontage without too much pitch for walkability but it's all SFH on relatively large lots by SF standards with commercial confined to a tiny strip mall. Why? Owners are rich! See also: Peskin ratfucking the North Beach central subway station.
However, this isn't a complete solution because it's not just a side-effect to have mid-to-high income people moving in to a lower-income area; it's intended. Concentrated poverty leads to weaker education and healthcare systems and other social disorders that perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Making those areas mixed-income is something social planners dreamed up as a way to increase access to jobs and improve schools etc. Mixed-income environments have a good track record where they occur naturally, so we've tried to replicate that success.
You've got to deal with the business sector. Analyses that look at housing prices and incomes alone inevitably find that housing price increases don't exceed the benefits of new job availability. But what also happens is that everything else in the community becomes more expensive. Cheap restaurants close, expensive ones open, survivors raise their prices; the same thing happens to grocers, bars, theatres, hairdressers etc. This is the big unsolved problem in "investing in poor communities": even in places with rent control (like SF), this kind of gentrification can price people out.
But do note, however, that the problem described in the first paragraph exacerbates the one in the third paragraph by increasing the mean income of people who move into poor communities and thus increasing the disparity in the price point of services in demand in those areas.
It doesn't, and why would it? Gentrification is by definition a good thing - making the area nicer, more modern and more prosperous. All these things require investment.
People are confusing gentrification with displacement, which are two separate concepts. Gentrification simply means improvement.
I think the best way to avoid gentrification is to reduce income inequality. Gentrification often does not make the community better. The original residents' favourite businesses close, unaffordable options take their place, and the culture changes. I doubt most new people who move to these neighbourhoods want to change the neighbourhood culture or displace the original residents but it happens regardless. If there was less difference in wealth between the rich and the poor, that displacement wouldn't be so extreme.
When you make a place attractive to live in, people will want to move there and costs will rise. You can increase supply but that still leads to more costs, you're just shifting them from housing to transport/shared services/groceries/etc.
There are some kinds of tax breaks and protections that can help reduce the harm of gentrification by helping people who own their home to avoid losing it.
> You can increase supply but that still leads to more costs, you're just shifting them from housing to transport/shared services/groceries/etc.
I'm not totally convinced. If you can afford rent in NYC everything else is actually pretty affordable. An unlimited metro card is much cheaper than owning a car (plus insurance, gas, maintenance). Cheap food is widely available and there's a plethora of services available that don't exist in rural areas.
Food is 17% more expensive. It's harder to get delivery trucks through, more trucks have to get to the city, fuel is more expensive, etc.
Sure a metro card is cheaper in terms of direct cost but you've sacrificed commute time and time really is money. If it takes you an extra 30 minutes to commute home via metro, that's less time to be with your kids or prepare (cheap) food.
> increase supply but that still leads to more costs
More absolute costs but with a tendency to amortize to a lower cost per person or per dwelling. If you have to dig up the street to run a water pipe to a place, it costs exactly the same whether there's one house or two houses or a 4-plex at that place.
> it costs exactly the same whether there's one house or two houses or a 4-plex at that place.
In your specific example:
+ More cars parked on the street
+ More existing pipes under the asphalt to avoid or repair if you damage
+ More traffic on the street so you have to work more condensed hours and limit the time the street can be closed
+ Typically more density means less open room for moving machinery/workers/equipment
Ripping out a street and running a new main is endlessly easier in the middle of a small town than it is in downtown NYC, from getting the equipment in place to doing it safely.
The part you're missing is that affordable housing is condemned and bulldozed in favor of luxury apartments. At least, that's how it works in DC. They evict the poor, bulldoze the existing businesses and residences, and put up pretty buildings for the trust fund kids that want to party and live in the city.
The easiest way to provide affordable housing is simply to build more housing, and let the existing stock filter down due to the newly-increased supply.
The easiest way to provide affordable housing is to raise wages. You can do this by having a functioning economy. Unfortunately, depressed areas are depressed due to 50 years of sending jobs overseas. Right now, it's trendy to live in cities, so they're attracting the upper middle class. Eventually, the steam is going to run out of that engine, and we're going to figure out that a city full of nothing but bars and starbucks is a net drain on society.
A robust supply of housing is an integral part of building "a functioning economy". It's not just renters and future homeowners that lose out when housing supply dwindles; the surrounding businesses lose out too. People have less disposable income, meanwhile their costs rise due to having to support the housing costs of workers that need to live nearby.
I think this is a matter of quite a lot of debate with no simple answer, but I would suggest you're misrepresenting the causality. The series of events usually looks more like:
Round 1. More people want to live there -> prices increase -> original residents start being forced out -> receiving investment -> Round 2. Even more people want to live there.
Gentrification is only really happening in Round 2+ of this cycle. A lot of people think if they oppose new buildings they cut off gentrification at the source, and maybe it's possible to slow down some occurrences of gentrification this way. But it ignores the factors that put this process in motion in the first place in Round 1 of my example - that new people wanted to live there before the area received any investment. Which is either the result of these people moving from nearby neighborhoods that they may have been priced out of, or the result of overall growth attracting people from far outside the region.
So it's really a lose-lose situation - if you don't build new housing, newcomers need somewhere to live and will end up forcing out existing residents somewhere. If you build some new housing, that's when people take notice and start calling it gentrification, and it may even create a flywheel effect that accelerates the gentrification. (But in a place like San Francisco, I don't really even see this flywheel effect anyway. Nobody is moving here because of the pretty new condos that are going up, people decide to move to the city first and decide later whether that means living in a new condo or an old walkup with charm).
The only way out of it is to build enough new housing to overcome the shortage. If the people being forced out could just move down the street into a new apartment, it wouldn't be such a big deal that they are forced out of that particular unit. As it is now, these people are often locked in and barely hanging on, maybe they've known the landlord for 30 years and are getting a break, or they have a low rent control price and wouldn't be able to afford the market rate price anymore. These things are obviously good in some ways, but it means a lot of people are in very precarious situations. In the long term, as we're seeing, this is clearly not a good situation to be in. And in the short term, we need protections for these people while the equilibrium is fixed, such as having subsidized housing available for them to move to, paying them housing stipends, or paying them out when they are evicted to help cover their costs of moving and finding a new place to live.
Would that not also raising housing prices due to families wanting to send their kids to those better schools, and the competition for housing raising prices?
This depends on the degree of the improvement, but my hometown had significant changes in housing prices on the same street, where one side was on the side with a better school district.
Read another way: white people are moving into neighborhoods that black people had previously been redlined into, and are reaping all the benefits of that investment and safety instead of the former residents.
My grandpa used to be an engineer at Xerox decades ago. My family helped settle San Francisco. Most of us left because of gentrification in the other direction.
Whites are to blame if they gentrify a place but also to blame if they leave (white flight). No winning. 100% accountability.
BUT! Your original assumption is wrong anyway. it’s not mostly whites moving in this time. SV is a major world hub for tech. Lots of immigrants from India, Pakistan, China, Europe, South America.
From the report: "Consequently, we did not analyze displacement by race and ethnicity, a task that requires precise counts of the residents in a neighborhood. Instead, the present study focused on socioeconomic data related to income, home value and education level to assess neighborhood-level gentrification."
DC is a tragic story. During Reconstruction, DC was home to a thriving black elite: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/books/review/original-bla.... Dunbar High School (where today, 100% of students are classified as “economically disadvantaged”) was an elite secondary school for black people where at the turn of the 20th century, the majority of students went to college, including many to Ivy League universities. The Shaw neighborhood had hundreds of black-owned businesses.
The end of Reconstruction and the return of southern white people to political power ended that. Woodrow Wilson, a progressive southern Democrat and vicious racist, kicked things off by segregating the federal workforce, which up to that point had employed many black professionals. Segregation eventually took over the whole city, decimating the formerly thriving black elite. During the latter half of the century, Shaw was a typical disadvantaged black neighborhood. It remained that way until the 21st century, when the neighborhood was gentrified by progressive white millennials: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/black-branding--how-a-d...
Part of the reason for the 2008 financial crash was loans made to people who would have traditionally been "redlined" (denied credit for legitimate reasons) after a federal push for more inclusive loaning. IIRC this was a big chunk of overrated securities and at the very least contributed to instability by increasing the nationwide average probability of default.
While this is not untrue on its face, the bulk of the blame should go to initiating banks, who became more willing to make untenable loans because they could package and securitize the loans and sell them off to investors, avoiding the consequences of their own actions.
You've never been to SF, I take it. The neighborhoods are in fact not getting any investment because all that's happening is the very oldest homeowners are getting massive payouts after decades of falling-in-real-dollars taxation. Furthermore the new people who move in, whose tax bills are absolutely astronomical because they paid five million dollars for their houses, are so burdened by the cost of their housing that they have little left to invest in their neighborhood, in terms of both money and time, since they are so busy working to pay off that house that they bought from Grampa Flowerchild for, again, five million dollars.
Random example, 120-year-old wooden house, price quadrupled in only 6 years. Was assessed for only $63k in 2014/2015!
I think the parent was asking: why do we think that people who H1B immigrants who move in will make a worse neighborhood than current "native" residents?
Ah, I think I understand but the logic still seems a little twisted. Gentrification is an economic process, so the passport of the gentrifier doesn't really matter here.
Part of the reason I was confused is because -- at least where I live -- communities with a high number of foreign born residents are actually the ones most at risk of gentrification.
In that case this report is figure out. From the report, "Do Opportunity Zones benefit or gentrify low-income neighborhoods?" If one is looking just at socioeconomic indicators, and after an investment they go up, and that's defined as bad ... I have trouble following the logic from the report. Don't we want investment to improve the numbers?
I no longer live in SF, but I found it funny seeing the dissonance of people new to the Bay Area who moved there for a high paying tech startup and then talk about how bad gentrification was while being blind to the fact they were doing exactly what they were saying was wrong.
Not an exact conversation, but along the lines of what I've run into:
Rob: "It's terrible what's happening to these communities. The Mission used to be a haven for artists. Now those people are moving out and it's losing its history"
Mayk: "dude, didn't you just move here 2 years ago and have a $2,500 studio in the Mission?"
Rob: "Yeah, but it's not like any of those people could have afforded it anyway, so I'm not taking it away from somebody else or anything".
SF is a boiling melting pot of many different communities and cultures, and it's interesting to see which cultures people ascribe to while also being part of others that run counter to what ideals they say they believe.
The programmers have as much of a right to be there as anyone else does. People who owned their condos and houses weren't pushed out, they usually sold to buy something bigger. That would be practically everyone my parents knew. (Edit: Of course, people who rented apartments for 20 years and then had their rent jacked sky high by a new landlord, that's a different story...)
The fun part for me is I was born in SF. My family relocated to a suburb when I was little to get a bigger house. They never could afford to move back. Now that I'm a programmer, I can afford to take us back there! Would I feel guilty about it? Abso-fucking-lutely not.
That said, if I were to do that, I'd be buying an old beat up house in outer sunset. The only thing I'd be displacing in that case, are the people who decided to sell it after owning it for 20+ years because they wanted a bigger house in Fairfield or something. (Let's be real though, I can't afford to buy a house in SF at all haha. Maybe a few more years of saving.)
I don't know, there's a large gap between "I've got mine, fuck you" and "You must be apologetic for having a good career and being able to afford the rent."
Of course, I feel that displacing all the old hole-in-the-wall restaurants for shit like starbucks and panera bread is a disgrace. Especially because I don't eat shit like starbucks or panera bread lol. I'm all about the $5 lunch special at the chinese place. (Although now it's a $20 special!)
Buying a house at SF prices is always contributing to displacement, for in your absence there would be less demand for houses and the prices would be lower.
Disagree, I think the opposite interpretation is very conservative. If a tech bro moves in to a house that was just vacated voluntarily by someone who had lived in the city for twenty years, have they not displaced anyone, since that house would be vacant anyway? What if they moved to a nicer place in the same city, and the tech bro is taking their old residence? What if the last tenant passed away instead?
You can split hairs all you want, but anything that causes even a perceived (by the landlord) increase in demand contributes to keeping that price from going any lower. In an extreme case, that could be data from the housing data broker saying that the average apartment in their zip code goes for $X. In an even more extreme case, maybe their proxy for a data broker is the weekly number of Craigslist views for an ad they put up. Sometimes landlords keep vacancies open for multiple months or even years on end, hoping to get someone who will pay their asking price.
Either way, the perceived demand is the thing keeping it up, and someone buying a house as opposed to them not being able to sell the house is also what stops them from renting it out to Joe Schmoe who can only pay $900/mo in the meantime.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Is it that buying a house from an owner occupier at high market rates displaces the person who couldn't bid market rate for the property?
Exactly; buying the house contributes to the displacement in the sense that if they weren't buying the house, someone of less means could buy it instead.
Displacement is constantly occurring because people can't find an apartment they can afford, so they leave the City. Why can't they find an apartment they can afford? Because the apartments they would have been able to get have been taken by people richer than they are, some of whom could buy a house. Why can't those people just buy a house and stop taking up the rental units? Because almost all the houses are spoken for by people who not only can pay market price but do so comfortably, including you.
So, it is displacement, it's just so after a lot more levels of indirection than most people think about the problem with.
I described a situation where an owner occupier was selling their home. You are describing being priced out. The concepts overlap, but what I described is certainly not displacement.
If someone says you are contributing to the mistreatment of animals by buying fur coats, they are not implying that you personally skinned a beaver/fox/what-have-you. Although your purchase of a house does not necessarily directly cause someone else to get ousted, it is still contributing to the problem of displacement, because through a sequence of events it does cause someone to get displaced when their landlord says, "I can rent this place out for 4 times the amount you're paying, so get out."
No doubt anyone has a right to be wherever. The issue was not so much who has a right to live where. It was around the attitude of saying one thing while living another.
It just doesn’t feel the same when you don’t have to throw grandma and her wheelchair down the steps yourself. All those artists living in Ghost Ship, just what were they thinking?! Nothing to do with me...
The difference between an artist and a techie is that the artist does not feel they’re entitled.
My feeling based on getting older and watching friend slip into old age. Moving old people is generally bad.
What bothers me most about the current state of the city is there have always been waves of people coming in, sometimes staying often eventually leaving. Most of them though came for the city at least partially. And because of that they were willing to accept what it was. But the Web 2.0 Tech Bro's are here for the money and do not accept the city and it's long term residents for that it is. What they want it for all those people to get kicked so more people like them can come here to become rich.
You can accept the Hispanics coming into the mission and changing it. The gays coming to Polk St and then moving to the Castro. Even the Dot Bomb kids coming, because back then they could have gone to the south bay or elsewhere. But just for money and a lack of acceptance of the city and it's past? Yeah no.
The key that people who call it “liberal bullshit” never seem to understand is that you can believe there is a problem while being part of the problem. The fact that your existence is evil does not mean you cannot, or should not, advocate for reduction of evil while still existing.
The thing is, the fault of all of that rests with the people and the system, but mostly the system. Any individual is not responsible for gentrification, least of all one who just moved to the area. It’s the same principle as that citizens can rightfully criticize the overuse of fossil fuels, even though shutting off their AC would lead to a possible heat stroke.
To the risk of being naive, I'd imagine that gentrification can be at least somewhat mitigated by adding housing as the location becomes more desirable. This can take various shapes and forms depending on where. In the Bay, open space is mostly inexistant in desirable areas, so (one of) the main solution would be increasing density.
I’ve always wondered why we have two pejorative words for opposite effects: when rich people move in, it’s gentrification. When the rich leave it’s “white flight”.
Is there some kind of equilibrium term here where a neighborhood is staying exactly the same, getting neither richer nor poorer?
