What does “gentrification” mean and what are “gentrified” neighboorhoods in modern day united states?
In: 5284
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.
Latest Answers