As someone who has done a fair bit of research on the urban decline nearly all American cities experienced in the latter half of the 20th century and parts of the 21st the idea of “gentrification” has always confused me.
Gentrification seems to be a negative way of saying these areas are returning to the norm? The parts of these cities associated with being poor and blighted haven’t always been that way. Why would anyone expect or want that to continue indefinitely?
Appeals to keeping a music/food culture fall somewhat flat to my ears when you just look at pictures of these areas or crime statistics of those periods.
It’s like the city fails the poor twice: first they have to enjoy substandard living conditions, and whenever this changes, they get priced out.
Gentrification refers specifically to this displacement, and it shouldn’t be hard to understand why this is considered negative. No-one likes to have to move.
It’s also an effect of how the housing market works almost anywhere, so it’s not so easy to imagine an alternative within these market economies—a challenge the article doesn’t really touch upon.
Gentrification and displacement are distinct concepts, even if they are usually conflated in colloquial usage. Obviously nobody wants to be forced out of 'their neighborhood' if rent is raised, but this isn't an inevitable consequence of improved conditions. This Vox article does a great job explaining possible policies to mitigate this harm, like building more housing, stronger tenant protections, and upzoning wealthy segregated neighborhoods.[0] As you say, existing residents of a neighborhood should be able to enjoy the benefits of increased investment and improved conditions in their neighborhood.
Thanks for the link.
I am not sure I like the article, it seems to be doing a lot of dancing around and have the issue appear more complex than it really is.
Saying two concepts are being conflated without explaining the differences sounds a bit... pedant ?
And it is because from what I can read, gentrification is when richer people arrive in a place. No wonder why people conflate it with rising prices and displacement of the poor, this is just the "natural" consequence in a market economy where housing is a commodity. Sure, you can (should!) have a policy to mitigate that problem but if you don't, as is usual, it just happens.
> As you say, existing residents of a neighborhood should be able to enjoy the benefits of increased investment and improved conditions in their neighborhood.
Is it possible got some of the existing residents to be partly responsible for undesirable conditions? If so, then displacing them seems like a necessary component.
Note that I specified “some” residents, and “partly” responsible. A mechanism to cleanly identify and displace only them seems difficult to implement.
? Some people think it is not a good thing to give people a preference to stay in the neighborhood they are in because this entrenches racial segregation.
Something that's always confused me in contemporary American discourse is that it's "white flight" when white people move out and "gentrification" when white people move back in. Can someone help me grok this?
I'm not sure what you're asking. The terms describe inverse/opposite movements of mostly middle-class, mostly white populations. And (very generally) white flight occurred from the 60s to the 90s or 00s. And gentrification became a "big deal" in the 00s and into the 20s (very rough year ranges - varies significantly by city).
I'd just add that gentrification of cities has been pretty selective overall. There are a ton of cities that haven't really gentrified or that have gentrified very narrowly (e.g. Detroit) in the US. One of the things that has led to housing affordability problems in that the mostly young professional influx to cities has mostly been to a fairly small selection of cities and has happened over the course of just a couple of decades.
I think that they are looking at slightly different things.
As I understand it white flight criticizes that white people (at a population level, not each white person obviously) displaying behavior that suggests that they don't want to live in a multi-cultural society. Alternatively, white flight might be a criticism of defacto segregation either due to redlining or due to minorities being priced out of white neighborhoods.
Gentrification refers to the residents of areas that are low cost and low income being priced out by an influx of more wealthy residents. It's also used to refer to development designed to cause that influx. Race is only a factor to the degree that wealth tends to correlate with race in the US.
Gentrification is more about class than race - it's entirely possible for all black neighborhoods to be gentrified to cater to a wealthier black establishment at the expense of poor black base. At its core, gentrification is simply the result of capitalist government incentives to maximize tax revenues the way companies maximize profit. Poor people are driven out so that rich people can come in. In the US, the effect of a long history of white supremacist power structures is that class more often than not (although not always) maps to race.
White flight, however, is entirely just about white people just wanting to get away from black people.
> White flight, however, is entirely just about white people just wanting to get away from black people.
Redlining was one of FDR's racist policies. The resulting non-white areas were cheaper and became cheaper still than white ones for many reasons. Under LBJ, redlining was finally made illegal. Then the threat of declining property values due to "darkening" of neighborhoods could be used to clear out white neighborhoods and buy up real estate at bargain prices! That's white flight.
It's a little more complicated than "I don't want to be near that person on the bus."
White flight in 60's/70's being just about White people want to get away from black people is hard to credit.
White people were living in cities close to Black people for a long time - they suddenly decided they didn't like it?
If the answer is that they suddenly started allowing Black people to buy next to White people then how would moving to the suburbs help? I mean, we can no longer redline in the city but when can still redline in the suburb county?
I don't want to overstate it - some part of it clearly had to do with not wanting to live next to Black people. Some part was clearly not caring for the riots happening contemporaneously. I just think there was more going on.
I've talked to my Dad about house buying in that period in the past and he mentioned places in the city that they almost bought (generally he talks about one place in the city ruefully as it's price doubled after every sale) and the places in the suburbs that they ultimately did purchase. If they settled on a detached house with a yard in the suburbs because there were only white people in the neighborhood (which was largely though not entirely true when I grew up ) he (obviously I suppose) never mentioned that. The main impression I did get was that he valued detached and yard so highly that the places they did buy seemed very cheap.
I'm living in a row home in the city and I can sort of see how he must have felt. I don't really want those things that badly but the places in the city that are detached with a yard are out of my price range. A reasonable price for that - especially if the things you get from living close to city center didn't catch my fancy - would be very compelling.
The problem with this analysis is that it prioritizes physical locations and comfortable people over, well, pain?
I get that its weird, but it appears as if "society/culture" whatnot has a lot of trouble paying attention to pain unless expressed through fun art.
So what people are perhaps subconsciously lamenting is the possibility of really changing things for a lot of people because our focus is at an interesting place being bulldozed by "the rich." Again.
If you want art in a capitalist society, the options are to make it cheaper or to give it money. The cheapest places to live and work in a city are also the least desirable.
Gentrification seems to be a negative way of saying these areas are returning to the norm? The parts of these cities associated with being poor and blighted haven’t always been that way. Why would anyone expect or want that to continue indefinitely?
Appeals to keeping a music/food culture fall somewhat flat to my ears when you just look at pictures of these areas or crime statistics of those periods.