What are the problems gentrification brings? Isn’t fixing up a neighborhood a good thing? How can gentrification stop?
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The main problem of gentrification is that it pushes people out of an area. That hits renters first, but it also hits others – for example people will be unable to buy houses where they grew up.
This makes the problem difficult to see. It’s easy to see an area becoming physically nicer. It’s not too hard to see happy people who have moved into this gentrified place. It’s a lot harder to see unhappy people who have been pushed out and scattered around the place.
Even for the people who stay there are problems. Most appreciate things like cleaner streets and less crime, but they often lose places and people that are important to them, and generally see the character of their home change. Gentrification can damage the community in an area, particularly when incomers are less likely to get involved. (There can often be a racial element to this, too.)
What can be done about this? In part it’s an inevitable feature of a market based system, where prices for more desirable things will inevitably go up.
Some things can be done to limit the problem. More secure tenancies, better consultation with people living in an area about ‘redevelopment’, more mixed developments, making changes gradually rather than in big steps, more government provided housing. At a bigger scale, more income inequality helps. A focus by (local) government on the impacts on people rather than places may also help.
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