What does “gentrification” mean and what are “gentrified” neighboorhoods in modern day united states?
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Gentrification is the process where wealthy individuals start moving into relatively poorer neighborhoods. Sounds like a good thing, right? They’ll bring in more businesses and improve the neighborhood’s status. However, it also causes an increase in the cost of living in the neighborhood – rent goes up, stores become more expensive – which hurts the neighborhood’s existing population.
It means that a working class neighborhood over time becomes a middle or upper class neighborhood.
Property values increase, crime theoretically goes down, businesses move in and replace the low income friendly businesses that were there before. Basically, quality of life goes up but so do the costs, and a lot of the times the people who were living there before have to move somewhere else, usually to be replaced by wealthier and whiter residents.
It’s the process whereby a poor neighborhood is shifted into a wealthy one… however:
The main thing in particular about gentrification is that, the people aren’t becoming wealthier.
Rather the poorer people are being replaced with wealthier people, the previous residents remain poor, but are eventually forced out because they cannot afford the raised prices that the new residents have caused.
It’s when wealthy or middle class people start buying up property in low-income neighborhoods.
Pros:
– poor neighborhoods get rejuvenated with new businesses and people wanting to invest.
– crime goes down
– home values goes up
Cons:
– lower income people get pushed away from their community centers.
– local cultures get diluted
– the crime and poverty don’t “go away”. They just relocate to the next “poor” area.
The reality:
It’s typically not a voluntary or intentional process. As housing costs in most cities continue to climb and wages continue to stagnate, middle-class people are increasingly forced to buy homes in poorer neighborhoods.
New buildings are expensive. Old, decrepit buildings are cheap. Replacing old decrepit buildings with new ones makes the neighborhood more expensive to live in. Rents and property values increase, new, more affluent people move in, and poorer, less affluent people are obliged to move somewhere else. In many cases, there’s no equally or less expensive place to move to, which results in a huge drop in disposable income for the poor people being displaced.
The trouble is, you can’t just leave neighborhoods to rot, on the undertaking that slums are cheap. Because they’re *not*. Those same cheap neighborhoods with decaying buildings are rife with crime and violence, and erode the tax base of the community that they’re situated in, which will ensure that, in the long run, the community continues to be worse and worse off. Look no further than Flint, Michigan or Gary, Indiana for an example of this vicious cycle in action. There’s no longer any affluent taxpayers from which to fund programs which support less affluent residents, and eventually even basic public services like police, fire safety, sewage and water stop being within the means of the public purse.
Where I’ve seen it happen with bad outcomes is in “cottage country” in central Ontario.
Communities surviving in low population areas, jobs are scarce, housing is poor. Then the rich show up and purchase their holiday property, throw up a McMansion on said lakefront property. In 10 years, the original population can’t afford the massive rise in property taxes and 100 year old family homes go into foreclosure.
It is a certain type of urban redevelopment which includes an increase in property values, typically in rundown neighborhoods. There are lots of reasons why this happens – new businesses move in, a new kind of marketing or attractiveness to the area, it becomes more desirable to many people than it was previously. Often property developers will start by building some shops and apartments attractive to professionals to live close to the city center.
People who own property in a neighborhood see an increase in their asset value. Some people sell and take the money and leave. People who live there but rent rather than own see an increase in their rent as a result and move out. The end result is that the area and neighborhood which was often partially neglected with rundown buildings and the like is transformed into a neighborhood with more business, newer buildings and infrastructure, and a higher standard of living and quality of life for those who live there.
When people use the word gentrification they are often referring to this phenomenon from the point of view of those who wish to remain in the same neighborhood but find it more difficult to do so and face little alternative besides moving away. People will talk about this in terms of class and racial division and the desire and some will say right for people to remain in a neighborhood they have known much of their lives.
There are ideas which are a bit ethereal which some people take more seriously than others – the culture of a neighborhood, the value of a continuous community, the stake and say that non-property owners have or should have over the nature of where they choose to live.
Listening to either side for too long can give someone a headache as one side sounds like they are eager for all the previous residents to move out and the other side sounds eager to keep their neighborhood a ghetto.
Gentrification is a process by which poorer areas/neighbourhoods become middle-class areas/neighbourhoods but, crucially, *by swapping the poorer people who live there for middle-class people*. No one does it deliberately; the middle-class people are being forced from where they really want to live just as much as the poorer people are.
The process goes like this:
* Middle-class people live in “nice” neighbourhoods, poorer people live in “not-so-nice” neighbourhoods
* Property/rent prices in the “nice” areas increase faster than wages. Eventually middle-class people can’t afford to live there, and start looking to cheaper (i.e. “not-so-nice”) places
* When the middle-class people have arrived in the “not-so-nice” area in sufficient numbers, their presence starts to push up property/rent prices (due to the extra demand), as well as the price range of local businesses (due to the extra spending power of the new residents)
* As local prices increase (property / rent / local business), the poorer people who lived there originally are either forced out themselves (through rent increases) or are generationally forced out, as young people trying to get on the property ladder find that they can’t afford to live in the same area as their parents
* Eventually the poorer people have, bit by bit, left the area almost entirely. Gentrification has taken place.
* [Bonus round] Repeat.
The process is perfectly understandable in how it works, but what I find interesting is why it happens at all? For gentrification to happen there must a root cause, a huge increase in price of the most affluent areas that kicks off this chain reaction.
Other people have given a good explanation, so I wanted to share a slightly different angle-
Gay communities oftentimes are also a part of this force- a few areas around the Delaware River in New Jersey I know ended up having the gays(tm) move in and the same thing happened.
Which makes sense. Especially in previous times when society was more openly intolerant, gay communities would move together to be among like minded people, and since for obvious reasons most gay couples are childfree, they tend to have more disposable income and artsier tastes.
So they move into a run-down town, fix it up, and the area that was once payday loan outlets, pawn shops, and convenience stores is trendy boutiques, cafes, and gay bars.
Gentrification isn’t malicious. It’s usually people just acting in their own best interest.
The key issue here that is behind this process being controversial is that the poor neighborhoods being gentrified didn’t become poor by some accident of the free market, but typically through redlining and blockbusting.
Blockbusting is a corrupt practice in the United States whereby real estate agents would sell a property to a black (or otherwise non-white) person, and then use that sale to suggest (credibly) that the “neighborhood is changing”, and that other white residents should sell below market value before the values drop. They would then sell those properties to black people at the status quo ante market rates, and by the magic of the explicitly racist real estate practice — supported, at least in the past, by federal law — the neighborhood would be determined to be undesirable and marked as high risk — “redlined”, literally outlined in red on maps to indicate that federal mortgage subsidies/underwriting would not be approved for the area.
The mortgages approved for the new black homeowners would have extremely unfavorable terms, leading to high rates of default. Thus, the white families coerced to leave would lose money by selling at low prices, the black families moving in would pay too much, with too high interest rates, and lose their homes anyway, and in the end you would end up with a racial ghetto created intentionally by overtly racist housing policy,
So when white people today start buying up housing cheaply in those neighborhoods as an investment, which are then magically declared desirable on account of all the hip white people moving in, it’s just adding insult to injury.
In the absence of that racist history, it wouldn’t really be a problem, but that history exists, and so it amounts to white people, not even through any fault of their own, continuing to profit off of the exploitation of black people.
It’s as American as apple pie and cotton plantations.
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