What are the problems gentrification brings? Isn’t fixing up a neighborhood a good thing? How can gentrification stop?
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I went back to visit my old city recently.
All the old vibrant lively places, where people of all types (class, age, race, gender) used to mix and mingle – with venues for rock, blues, country, punk, and a biker bar and a rich people’s classy bar, all on the same street – they are all now boarded up and shut down.
That was a place where gutterpunks, bikers, rednecks, drag queens, college kids, and also the local politicians and businessmen would all get together and meet each other and talk, shoot some pool, have some drinks together, whatever. It’s all gone now.
A few blocks away there are now much more expensive hipster venues. There’s only one type of person there, one class. Mostly one race (nowhere near as mixed as it used to be). Primarily one age group. No gay bars. All the music is the same bland pop. If I had to describe it, I’d label it “the upper-middle-class whitebread elevator music district”. It’s a totally different vibe. No sense of community or serendipity, no diversity.
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Meanwhile, there used to be one or two homeless people around, and you could have a nice discussion with them. They’d talk about philosophy or culture or whatever. You could comfortably invite them to the bar, buy them a beer, take turns picking songs on the jukebox, and shoot some pool while they told you their life stories and the adventures they’d had while serving in the navy or whatever their stories were.
Nowadays instead, there are tons of homeless people, several per block, hitting you up for money. And they’re very different, with fear and desperation in their eyes. Like both prey and predator, and they’re trying to figure out which you are. They’re beyond desperate. They don’t want to talk or hang out, they just want to survive.
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And I stopped to look at the slummy apartment building I used to live in when I first got out on my own. It was cheap then, easily affordable on a full-time minimum wage job. It looks exactly the same now, just a little older and more worn-down. But now it’s competing with the new luxury condos in the same area, and priced just under them. About 6 times what it used to cost. Nobody on minimum wage or just starting out can afford that.
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That’s what gentrification does.
It takes a vibrant mixed community, kills it, homogenizes it, and throws everyone else out on the street.
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I was excited to show off my old neighborhood, how lively and mixed and fun it was. How well everyone got along. And I was utterly embarrassed to see what it had become. And I am a straight middle class white guy, the demographic that this gentrification is supposed to be for. I was horrified by it.
One of my old friends asked me “you don’t have any reason to come back here again, do you?” and I said “No. The place I grew up is gone. The people are gone. There’s nothing here anymore.”
That is the problem with gentrification.
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