I understand what it is and why it happens, but often when its explained it seems like no one ever gets into how it can be resisted, fought, or even outright prevented.
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Gentrification can come from deliberate government action, and that is combatted in the same way any government action is combatted. Specifics change in different jurisdictions. [EDIT: grammar]
Gentrification can also come from enough individuals freely moving into an area and driving up housing costs while at the same time making an area more desirable — creating a sort of feedback loop. You can’t really combat that without an authoritarian government. [EDIT: typo. Dunno where my mind was when I originally typed this out]
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There’s very little that can be effectively done to combat it.
The existing soon-to-be displaced residents don’t own the property, in the US often going back to the monumentally racist Redlining era that made it very hard for residents to buy their homes, making it easy for slum lords to buy up everything. So the residents have little to no control over rising prices
Once gentrification starts law enforcement tends to be much more responsive to the newcomers, which means any attempt to keep the neighborhood down is gonna get a police response. Though most folks don’t want to try that anyway, as while they’re living there they want it to be nice.
You can maybe slow it a little with price controls, but these need a regulatory body with teeth who can bring the hammer down on landlords trying to force tenants out, which is hard to get set up.
There are several steps suggested by the Healthy Community Design Initiative to combat the negative effects of gentrification.
1: Create affordable housing for all incomes.
When gentrification occurs the lower income people find it harder to secure housing at a price within their budget. You could for example create a government housing project which fixes rents at a low rate for those of low income. Of course this also has the effect of reducing property values for surrounding area since living or operating a business near a housing project is less desirable. Gentrification is countered. Of course the increased crime and reduced business growth is undesirable.
Less overtly negative methods aim to simply scatter the lower income people throughout the community via zoning laws and incentives. Instead of being all single-family homes the policies would aim to have small apartment complexes distributed amongst them. By avoiding concentrating lower income communities the businesses would need to simply accept the combination of incomes as a package deal.
2: Approve policies to ensure continued affordability of housing units and the ability of residents to remain in their homes.
Similar to above, the strategy would aim to prevent property owners from capitalizing on the increase in property value and desirability by capping rental prices, and allowing lower income people to remain on their property by stopping their property tax from increasing. Also programs to aid homeowners with property improvements would help them to improve the quality of the community without burdening them financially.
Obvious problems with this include everyone involved basically hemorrhaging money. Property owners can’t charge as much as they could be getting, the local government is missing out on a bunch of property taxes, and is paying for private owners to make their own property better. Of course this is to be expected when opposing gentrification in the first place.
3: Increase individuals’ assets to reduce dependence on subsidized housing.
Maybe we could try making the poor people less poor with better jobs and helping them buy homes.
4: Ensure that new housing-related investments benefit current residents.
Think about if what we are about to do will make gentrification worse before we do it.
5: Involve the community
Listen to the community and consider what they find acceptable. Only the gentrification the community has a problem with is something to be worried about.
You can’t combat gentrification, as it is simply a natural market condition. You can, however, work to mitigate its effects, by advocating for more affordable housing to be built, for higher density & public transit options. That helps people remain in the cities they wish to live in.
The best way to combat gentrification is to not let your community degrade into a place that needs to be gentrified. If the community cares for its spaces and maintains it, it just becomes a nice neighborhood in and of itself. But if the community doesn’t give a crap about their neighborhood, it falls into disrepair and squalor. So if you want to combat gentrification you need to promote a community that cares about themselves and their neighbors.
Increasing pay for the working class, so they can still afford to live in the area as it is improved.
At its base, gentrification is an expression of *the* fundamental idea of market capitalism: a scarce good goes to the person who is willing to pay the most for it. This often has the effect that the scarce good goes to whoever needs or values it the most, but it can also result in it going to whoever has the most money saved up.
A neighborhood begins to gentrify when prospective residents are willing/able to pay more to live there than current residents. The process of giving the scarce good (residency in the neighborhood) to these new prospective residents necessarily involves the displacement of current residents. You can use subsidies, low-income housing policies, and even outright bans on certain gentrifying activities to fight that flow, but it will always be an uphill battle because everyone involved (including the people making the policies) typically has more to gain from working with the market rather than against it. Gentrification also tends to work like a ratchet; it goes forward and never backwards. Low-income people forced out of the neighborhood tend to stay out for good, and there is a finite supply of housing, so the process will eventually complete, even if it goes slowly.
There’s also something to be said for picking one’s battles. Some gentrifying neighborhoods (especially in the US) would never have become low-income communities if not for decades of racist housing policies and practices that drove segregation and the concentration of poverty. These neighborhoods often sit on prime real estate: near the city center, close to public transit, great parks and amenities, etc. That land has been *under*valued for decades, and the price pressures on it now are absolutely enormous. Efforts to hold onto these downtown apartments are doomed to fail and could be better spent making less expensive areas more suitable for low-income populations, and perhaps even encouraging home-ownership.
Nobody wants to stop it 100%. Ultimately, keeping more well off residents around, seeing neighborhoods cleaned up, homes renovated, etc. are good vs. just letting areas continue to be crappy. But there are ways to slow gentrification, mitigate the effects.
For example, I live in an area that has undergone heavy gentrification over the past 10-20 years. Some of the initiatives that have been done to help mitigate its effects include:
– Requirements for affordable housing units included in larger developments. So a 100-unit “luxury” apartment needs to rent 10 units for below market rates to residents who make income below some threshold.
– Doing away with parking requirements for buildings within proximity to public transit, reducing construction costs, increasing space that can be devoted to housing, etc. to help keep costs down
– Demolition surcharge for tearing down an old house within a certain boundary area, to dissuade tear-downs. For a time, there were tons of 100-yr old cottages sold for $400-500k to be torn down and replaced with $1.2m 3-story homes.
– Loosening of rules to allow ADU’s, making housing more affordable by letting home owners subsidize mortgage with coach house above garage or garden-level rental unit while creating more affordable rental units in the area.
– Grants/subsidies for lower income home owners to help them maintain their properties, eg. roof replacement, window replacement and such. Many of the older homes getting sold and torn down were done so because owners couldn’t afford to make the major repairs needed.
While these make some impact, there are still issues like skyrocket property taxes, shifts in types of businesses around, cost of patronizing those businesses, etc. that still make it hard for longer term residents to stick around.
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