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.
In: 0
It would be a good idea to identify the goals of “preventing gentrification.” Gentrification can be a result of free market forces with property rights in an area where someone is trying to make it “nicer” or “more desirable.” So to prevent it, you either have to infringe on property rights, market forces, or simply prevent an area from becoming more desirable.
A place like Centralia, Pennsylvania is not concerned about gentrification. (look it up)
So you can take active measures to disallow people from buying and selling property. You can also put in things like rent control which often results in underinvestment. So people aren’t forced out because of rental prices. They also don’t enjoy a higher standard of living.
One “solution” which many places have come up with is a requirement for “affordable housing” as percentage of any redevelopment. Something similar might be government assistance to help cover increased rent.
Another idea is to try to increase home ownership in a neighborhood, that way less people are forced out as rents rise.
Gentrification is going to have a set of pros and cons, or maybe a set of winners and losers. This is not unique in economics or politics or life in general. I submit that identity politics makes the issue of gentrification more of a lightning rod than it needs to be.
Peace
Gentrification is part of a process whereby over time, some neighborhoods become wealthier and other neighborhoods become poorer. When neighborhoods become wealthier, some people call it “gentrification”. There is no equivalent word for neighborhoods becoming poorer for some reason.
I’m not sure why we want to only allow neighborhoods to become poorer, but never to become wealthier, as the end result would be eventually all neighborhoods and everyone would be poor. But if we want to do so, the ultimate solution is to ensure that everyone is poor. This way, gentrification becomes impossible.
There would be many ways to ensure that the entire population is poor, such as massive taxes which starve the citizenry, governments stealing most everything from the people, and a wide variety of bad economic policies. Usually people want the opposite, but if the goal is to maximize poverty, it can easily be done.
One recurring note in a lot of the responses is to build more affordable housing. But I submit to you that the answer is simply to build more housing, affordable or not. There is research that show that when market-priced housing is built, rents in the area drop, even rents for affordable housing. This is because building market priced housing allows well-off individuals to buy the expensive housing they really want rather than being forced down into the market for what should-be affordable housing, driving the cost for that up until it’s no longer affordable. San Francisco is a great example of that. You’ve got people making $180,000 a year living in studio apartments because there is simply not enough market-priced housing for all the rich people so the “poorer” rich people pay exorbitant rates for the housing which SHOULD be the affordable stuff.
So laws and zoning that require some percentage of new apartments to be affordable housing really aren’t as effective as just letting developers build 100% market-priced housing. Because the affordability requirement discourages them from building at all. And often market-priced housing becomes affordable housing after some period of time when it’s not so new and flashy anymore.
So just build more housing. Any housing, but especially dense housing. Stop the NIMBYs trying to keep their home prices up by prohibiting development, often under the guise of a lot of bullshit (environmental concerns, etc).
Latest Answers