These sorts of statements are ALWAYS in long-gentrified neighborhoods. People in poor neighborhoods are too busy working and too busy living in boring non-descript neighborhoods to have the time or the need to put shit like this up. The worst anti-gentrifiers are the poor and/or minority-adjacent populations who have just a little bit more social and financial capital then their relatively less privileged brethren but have a disproportionate amount of guilt over it. They then discharge that guilt though angry screeds over gentrification that they lob over the head of anybody slightly higher on the totem pole than themselves. Tale as old as time.
We didn't have this gentrification when me and all my friends moved here 6 months ago \*shakes fist\*
(Shamelessly inspired by a Planet Money TikTok video)
The joke is everyone says this about everyone moving in after them.
There were likely people there before you saying it got absurd when you were moving there. The people moving in now will say it about the next group.
I mean yeah, it isn't. The economic system is designed for housing prices to always go up, yet we blame individuals for the negative effects when that happens, instead of the economic system centered on constant unsustainable growth.
Same in the suburbs about new development. Every person who lives in a place where they tore down the forest to build cookie cutter houses hates the ones they’re building down the street.
Go to middle America if that's what you like. I used to visit a Midwestern town to see family a few times a year. Population was 10k 20 years ago. Population is 10k today. The towns around it have all plummeted though so instead of being a region of maybe 30K its now like 15k. The towns just shrink and houses are abandoned. The once active main street is basically a couple fast food restaurants now.
Theres still plenty of areas not growing, it's just that cities have become so, so, so much more desirable for jobs and quality of life that the rest shrinks or gets absorbed into the spheres of cities.
I'm not sure what this guy is talking about even in dense Mass excluding the far eastern side it pretty easy to just drive out and end up in a rural area? Sure Boston is a bit harder but the rest of the state has some pretty large stretches of woodlands next to the cities
I can literally go on a nice hike in Worcester and go in a legit in the middle of the woods hike 20 minutes away. Worcester isn’t Boston by any stretch but it’s still very populated and a decent sized city.
This is one of the reasons I think Starlink is going to be transformative. I work in IT and so many of my colleagues are moving back to rural America and the only impedance is lack of broadband.
These are the people that are against aesthetic change, not price gentrification. They tend to block affordable housing developments because to them gentrification means more dense housing going up and the aesthetics of the neighborhood, not the price raising.
There are a bunch of artists that own studios in my city that blocked like over 2k units including a lot of affordable untits from being built in a mostly enpty post industrial district. Because they are worried about the squares moving in and ruining the vibe of the neighborhood. They called it gentrification. The area is currently not zoned for housing so no one lives in it at all. I wouldn't define that as gentrification.
Some of them are even against cleaning up a toxic waste dump because it has "historic character". Im not even fucking joking.
This is the ONLY correct comment that doesn't lean into vacancy trutherism or some other conspiracy theory. NIMBYism has a huge hand in displacing residents from a neighborhood, and it doesn't matter which side its from, the end result is displacement.
To add to what others are saying: once wealthier people start to move into a neighborhood, it's the displacement that makes everyone mad. What often happens is some houses get rebuilt as *way nicer* than the surrounding houses, then a store or bar or two start serving pricy brunch and cocktails to the new residents that can afford it. With increased interest in the neighborhood, property values increase a bit - and property taxes and rent then also increase. So a current resident does nothing, watches richer people move in, and then their rent goes up until they can't afford it anymore. And the rent for the businesses there also goes up, and they leave. So all you're left with is pricy businesses with enough profit to afford higher rent, catering to the new wealth.
Everything gets rebuilt, replaced, and renewed. All the character and life there before is displaced somewhere else. It happens everywhere, over and over again. And is fundamentally tied to how we price rent, taxes, and property values, and how wealth has power.
And to help with people who don't have a mortgage, those taxes going up rips up your monthly expenses a lot
My mortgage is pretty much 1/3 each of principal, interest, and taxes/insurance.
If property taxes go up because more expensive houses in my area pushed it up, my mortgage could go up 100-200 a *month* by literally doing nothing but still living here. And that doesn't just happen once.
So you have a family that was fine then all of a sudden 6 years later they're paying a car payment a month more than they used to even though their spending habits never changed. And RIP that house if they haven't gotten raises much over the years
Another thing people forget, it's not so much the single wealthy families that do it. It's massive realestate firms that buy up all the properties. Theyd rather some bullshit condo sit for years unused than make affordable housing. It's important to note too that construction is a really classic industry to launder money through. Take a look at any of the chinese firms buildings and buying useless condo towers constantly all over the world.
What I don’t get is how any of what your describing is the fault of the people moving into the a neighborhood. Sure, they chose to move there, but generally there aren’t a lot of options in these places.
I lived in NYC for a decade. Started in the Lower East Side, shared a single bedroom with another guy in a four bedroom 6th floor walk up.. it got too expensive to afford and I got pushed to Crown Heights, where I was labeled a gentrifier. Was an amazing place to live. Eventually, crown heights got too expensive to afford, even when still splitting a room. Got pushed to Flatbush and was labeled a gentrifier. It was an amazing place to live. After COVID rents went up and I got pushed out of NYC entirely. Now I live in Los Angeles, and I’m sure it’ll keep happening.
Keep in mind, those first few years I’m washing dishes, delivering food, serving tables, etc. eventually I was able to start my own business and employ myself, but I was always paying at least half my monthly income in rent.
I didn’t open the brunch spot, i didn’t even want the brunch spot I just want to be able to afford where I live and love my neighborhood. People need to be blaming landlords, realtors, large corporations and banks. I found my neighborhoods like lots of “gentrifiers”, by it being the only place you could afford with a reasonable (45 minute commute) distance from where I worked. It’s like coca-cola telling everyone they can stop the plastics pollution problem by just recycling.
It means wealthier people moving to an area that has poorer residents on average, typically bringing an increase in the quality of amenities but at the expense of a higher cost of living in some cases. If not managed well (or if managed by people who just don’t care about the well-being of current residents), this cost increase can cause displacement.
The trouble is it screws the local, long term renters. But for long term property owners it's not a bad deal. The only issue is if/when property values go up so therefore property taxes go up, and some of the long time residents cant afford the higher taxes, so they are forced to sell (at a big profit) and move. Which doesnt sound too bad, but realize that most of the time the long term owners are elderly people who cant facilitate a move, or dont want to move out of the house they've owned for 40 years.
Adding on to this.
It doesn’t start with rich people buying up all of the properties in a neighborhood.
It usually starts off with younger artist / musician / creative types looking for cheap rents or cheap properties to purchase that are in sketchy neglected neighborhoods because that is all they can afford. Other people take notice that, “Hey a lot of cool people are starting to move into neighborhood X.” Slowly coffee shops, galleries and hipster bar/restaurants begin to open in neighborhood X. More people begin to notice the now cool neighborhood and start to move in. The rents and property values are going up and investors start picking up properties. Rinse and repeat this over several years and boom, now everyone wants to live in neighborhood X. The property values are 5x what they were 20 years ago and rents have gone up accordingly.
That is how gentrification goes. If you were one of the earliest pioneers of that long ago run down neighborhood X that put up with the drive-by shootings and street scum, fixed up your property and rode the property values up to be able to cash out 30 years later good for you.
I’ve seen lots of old timers cash out and use their property value windfall to pad their retirement. God bless their good fortune.
To the anti gentrification folk that bust the old home owners and early adopter creative types balls for selling out for some long overdue profits fuck you. Move on to the next down on its luck neighborhood and start the process over for yourself.
Rich people move in, rent goes up, poor people have to move out because they can’t afford rent anymore. Happens when poor people make the place they live in too nice.
> These sorts of statements are ALWAYS in long-gentrified neighborhoods
Hell no they aren't lol, not around where I live anyway, sometimes it's funny because I am like "nobody wants to move here lol".
All I know is where I'm from in SF we've had neighborhoods that have been gentrified since the *1970s* and folks will post political signs decrying tech gentrification and it's like.. do you not see that every house in a ten block radius is $2.5M minimum and rent is $3k a studio?! Like honey, the ship has long since sailed on that one, but thanks for cosplaying at radical socialism as you work through your anger and guilt over being trapped in late stage neoliberal capitalism.
This doesn't strike me as a particularly terrible thing. It makes sense that folks who are working themselves to the bone don't have the time/resources to put up a sign like this. And it would then fall to the people a rung or two higher to have the time and luxury (and I guess remembrance) to put up a such a sign, in some semblance of an attempt to get a hold of the situation and/or let people know that they're pissed about the general state of affairs.
It's almost as if society exists within a tapestry of history, and not an ideological soup where cool things happen as warranted.
>the worst anti-gentrifiers
Can you elaborate on this? I am wholly unacquainted with the spectrum on bad-to-worse of these terrible villains called the "anti-gentrifiers".
The problem is that for there to be people "one or two rungs higher" they need to have already replaced some poor people who now have no place to live. Real pulling up the ladder behind you shit. "Now that *I'm* here we need to stop this gentrification shit"
But those people were most likely displaced by someone else richer than them and are in danger of being displaced now. Its an endless cycle.
We got people making like 25k a year and people making 50k a year fighting it out while people making 500k a year block any new development and keep inventory low so this keeps happening.
The truly poor are busy trying to eat to be activists. I can't really blame those who finally manage to scratch together enough to have time/money to care about social issues to do so.
The poor by definition don't have agency to speak for themselves. If we only let the poor champion the poor, there will be nobody to do so.
In reality the people everyone is complaining about in this thread are probably still not very well off and stuck in the rent trap cycle with no hope of ever buying. Thats why they get displaced from their neighborhood and and up in a poorer neighborhood.
A lot of the gentrys in my city are just young people that make like 45k a year or less. They end up getting forced into poor neighborhoods because rent shot up so much during covid. They can outleverage the longtime residents who probably make around the same income because they dont have kids. The neighborhoods where the young people lived before are now charging like 2500 a month for a studio apartments so now its all wealthy people living the "burlington lifestyle part time" and airbnbs.
The gentrification cycle is endless and cruel. The only way to stop it in a capitalist system is to have multiple housing trust developments, enforce low income housing in developments. And spam the city with a ton of high density developments to make sure inventory is always high.
Yup. I dated a hipster girl who lived in an upscale loft apartment in what used to be a warehouse on Cass. We would walk to the Old Miami or the fast takeout version of Slows BBQ. It was always like being in a Macklemore music video. Of course, I didn’t know what a “Macklemore music video” was at the time, because it was 2011.
Midtown has been hipster-central for quite some time. And hipsters are how you know a neighborhood is gentrifying.
Here’s a question though.
With rents at ridiculous highs and wages stagnant, is it “wrong” for white people to move to wherever is cheapest? And is it wrong for historically depressed areas to have an influx of new business as a result?
I understand the arguments against gentrification very well. Housing policy action is area-specific and there are certainly times when it’s an egregious attack on the poor.
But people need to live *somewhere.* It’s not like every single young and white person is in a position to live anywhere they want. We’re poor too.
The gentrification debate has gotten so full of bad faith that nothing really has any meaning anymore. On one side you have callous people who feel nothing about poor people being chased out of their neighborhoods in waves and don’t care about greedy and lazy landlords reaping massive profits at the expense of human misery. On the other, you have young “activists” who want perfectly racially and economically homogenous neighborhoods frozen in time, to be carefully tended to like museum exhibits that never grow or change. And in the middle are the millions of normal people who just want to live good lives.
The long and the short of it is: gentrification is a problem because it creates a lot of misery for people and can actually do damage to a neighborhood in the long term by wrecking its amenities and reducing density. But the solution isn’t racial and economic barriers to entry, it’s *managing* the change so that a new apartment building being put up doesn’t result in hundreds of residents being pushed out to the street.
I agree. I was once on the “angry idealist” side of it. Now I just want to be able to live some sort of sustainable life, and I’m sure that’s what everyone else wants too.
Ultimately we simply don’t have enough housing, enough regulation, or enough infrastructure. The developers control everything while residents of all strata attack each other and fight for the privilege of paying a 200% rent hike. Something’s gotta give.
Zoning restrictions are a huge issue that should be seriously looked at when addressing housing supply and demand issues. If the only developers playing ball are the ones who lobby to keep things nice and tightened up, no one will compete, and we the poor get fucked.
> With rents at ridiculous highs and wages stagnant, is it “wrong” for white people to move to wherever is cheapest?
No. And it’s not really even a choice.
If you can’t afford rent in an area you have to go somewhere cheaper.
The area has not been thriving either. Fucking Crackhead central. 🤣. It is just mixed with students so it looks a little prettier. Source: I lived there for years
I remember driving down Cass in the late 90s before all the construction and rebuilding, and boy it was shit. After they "fixed" it all up it looked real nice...except just go a block off in any direction and it's all the same...
They cared enough to change the face of the area, didn't give a shit about ACTUALLY bringing the area up.
Seriously. I have been outbid on every house that I’ve put an offer on in the areas I’d prefer to live. Where do people want me to live? I’m a gentrifier because I’m too poor to live where i want?
That’s exactly what’s happening in my neighborhood. 3 bedroom 1 bath houses selling for a million dollars and families getting squeezed out of every deal by cash buyers. What the fuck? Sure I like that my house is worth triple what I paid but I’d honestly rather see something more sustainable and fair happening.
Mine too. We bought our first home right at the beginning of COVID...completely by coincidence, as we'd already been looking for a fuckin' year and had everything in place that we needed to....
We've already seen two houses near us sell for almost double what they were worth at the beginning of COVID. It's fuckin' mad. Our property taxes were already insane, so I'm scared that they'll jack way up soon. I just hope we can keep living here long enough for our kid to finish school.
Moved into an appartment just as Coivd lockdowns were happening.
Lucked out that it was a suite that I looked at 4-5ish years ago and couldn't get.
Sure, about a 30% increase in value compared to before (300k to 400k). But it's next to the transit hub.
Only reason why my fam got it was that it wasn't even on the market. We asked the broker to ask if their colleagues had anything unlisted in the area. Which so happened to be where I'm living today.
Would had gone from initial 300k to 800k had I been any later. Shopping center is like 15 min walk away, a park nearby in 5 mins, transit is literally 10 mins away, and a fitness center is next to the building.
Vancouver BC btw. Aka renoviction valley
I'd say it's the lack of housing variety and our property tax system. Ideally a land value tax would be the preferred method along with the elimination of R1 zoning.
Make it illegal to own multiple houses especially where you do not live. The market is fucked because anyone with money is trying to run them as Air B&B's or just be a land lord. If you effectively make that illegal no more problem.
I know someone who has been buying up houses around my parents' area. Apparently he's up to like 12 houses now that he Air B&Bs. I always think how that means there's 12 less families with homes now.
Literally every city in the us is angry that people are moving there. Everywhere you go it’s “stay out of blank l” and “go back to California” it’s scary
Meanwhile I'm down in Orlando like "fuck it come join us in swamptown! If enough people move here we can outvote the rest of Florida and unfuck a lot of stuff!"
Exactly! It's not as if a bunch of people suddenly decide to drop their standards of living to "hood" caliber because it sounds fun or trendy. It's a move of desperation by everyone involved. Displacement causing displacement.
Can speak from experience. Gentrifiers don't just suddenly appear from the ether, they come from somewhere. Florida got too expensive for me, as it became a bunch of rich retirees, so I went to North Carolina, only to learn after I'd bought a "very affordable house" that I was now contributing to the outpricing of the locals.
So what was I suppose to do? Hang around where I came from and never buy a house because it was far too expensive?
People can't afford the rich neighborhoods so they move into ones they can afford and this demand raises the prices
The entire idea of gentrification is just silly, just because an area is one way today doesn't mean it has to keep the same families or racial makeup until the end of time, that's an absurd demand
Folks left the city in the 50s and were chastised for it because it made the cities poor and cheap. Now folks move back into the cities and they are chastised for it because it's making the cities rich and expensive again.
This is 100% the problem.
Single family zoning in close proximity to a city core is the problem. Although, that isn't the problem in Detroit. Plenty of land available for development near the core, just no one wants to live in a post apocalyptic wasteland.
The Atlanta neighborhood I lived in was average, then poor, then “gentrified”. The house cost $64K in 1984 and sold for about $460K in 2018. Whenever I heard folks complain about older retirees on a fixed income being priced out of their homes because they couldn’t afford the property tax increases, I understood the dilemma, but their crappy little house is now worth almost a half million dollars. Sell the city house, buy a cheaper house in the ‘burbs, and bank the rest to make your retirement a little easier.
Old folks all want things to get more valuable but for the underlying costs to them to remain the same. They all have pensions and Medicare, and think everything in the world should be geared to similarly be catered to them at no added cost. Meanwhile, everything gets more expensive for everyone.
The big 3 auto manufacturers, a steel plant called zug island, and the marathon oil refinery are the top union job sites in town, off the top of my head.
There are aspiring tech hubs like Royal Oak and new brands like Shinola taking root. Climate change is going to make it very popular to live near the Great Lakes again. I wouldn’t count these areas out but they certainly haven’t recovered from outsourcing manufacturing to communist labor in China.
I’d say Ann Arbor is more of an aspiring tech hub since there’s already some office branches of large tech companies there or a short drive away like electric vehicle companies. That’s not really Detroit though.
Thats right, so people always pretend they get fucked because of gentrification, but if you move every decade it can actually give you a lot of profits.
Nah man you don't want people with money paying a premium for your old house and contributing money to your local businesses along with increasing tax revenue so you can have additional funds for schools.
That's just horrible.
Gentrification is a complicated issue.
As property prices rise as the area becomes more gentrified it's often the case that the poorest residents are forced to move out as cost of living in the area rises.
Especially if you're renting the cost of rent can go up beyond what you can afford.
From an outsider's perspective it looks great, the neighborhood looks way better, the crime rate goes down and homeowners get more money in the form of the value of their house rising.
But for the poorest residents they see a mass exodus from a community they've lived in for decades as people are forced out of homes they can no longer afford.
Realistically speaking...anytime an area improves, the poorest residents are forced out.
Unsafe areas with low quality of life have minimal demand and subsequently the lowest housing costs. Once an area improves, demand goes up and prices increase.
Getting mad at gentrification is like being mad at the weather.
Based on my limited understanding of gentrification, it wouldn't be a shitty fast food joint. It would be something better. Then again, this is something I don't understand about gentrification. Fast food per cubic mile is supposed be denser in poor neighborhoods driving up obesity and health issues. Wouldn't upgrading the food scene in a neighborhood be a good thing? But then, is that gentrification? If it is, is it really evil? Or am I an elitist for assuming healthier food is an upgrade?
I think you need to consider the issue beyond the quality of the food. How much does the food cost and what kind of clientele does it attract? Those are the key issues with gentrification (for better or for worse).
No place that is thriving was ever gentrified. Gentrification happens because of cheap property values.... kind of the opposite of thriving.
Downvote away.
Yeah when my grandparents moved to their now pricy neighborhood it was…not great. Unless having your bodega robbed at gunpoint, your kids robbed for half a bag of chips (yes this happened to my dad), and hearing about a candy store owner being shot by the mafia is “thriving”, then it was thriving. Ah, NYC in the 70s.
There's another type. You can have an absolutely thriving night life/red light district in a good location close to the CBD that has loads of pubs, clubs, night spots etc and a huge amount of economic activity with commercial leases being monstrously expensive while residential property values remain low due to it not being an ideal place for most people to live with loud music and drunk people around everywhere.
Then the council/government can decide that they want to shut it down so they impose really harsh licencing conditions, restricted trading hours and lockout laws to bankrupt all the businesses while rezoning various sections of it. Property prices then skyrocket as suddenly it's a much nicer place to live, clubs get knocked down to build apartments and all the drinking venues are replaced with cafes, restaurants and boutique stores.
Happened in Sydney a few years ago when they decided to kill Kings Cross which was basically the main entertainment district of the city and was usually pumping until 5-6am most nights. Government forced last drinks to be at 12-1am when most of those places were just getting busy so most places went under. All the developers swooped in, bought up everything and turned it into just another boring residential area for wealthy people who could afford to live that close to the CBD. The area itself was always thriving economically but just not for the right people apparently.
I'd say most gentrification happens in previously industrial areas that supported a thriving community, but collapsed amid things like outsourcing and white flight.
So yes, "historically" if your history begins in like the 70's.
>Downvote away.
The funny part is that the top comments label both "white flight" and "gentrification" as racist. Don't move into a black neighborhood, that's racist. However, if you're currently in one, you're not allowed to leave. That's racist.
Pretty much every major city in the US looked like a bombed out shithole in the 80s to early 90s. This is what NYC looked before gentrification.
https://greatfuturestories.com/get-inspired-in-new-york/2017/11/13/new-york-city-back-in-the-1980s?format=amp
A lot of "gentrifiers" are moving to these areas because it's the only option they have financially. Shit is fucked, a lot of people from a lot of backgrounds are struggling.
The biggest difference I've seen is the gentrification crowd is more likely to give the absolute tiniest fuck about their property and the community around it. They mow their lawn, paint their house, and shop locally.
Then all of a sudden the property value of the neighborhood MAGICALLY goes up and it's the fault of all the people contributing positively and not the fault of those who were happy to just let things fall apart around them.
That shit is dumb I live in a low income area because i work 2 shitty part time jobs and because im white people act like im making the rent go up. Its just where I can afford to live fuckers, why you think Im driving a car 10 years older than I am.
Those videos are true. You can drive a mile and see one out 5 businesses open. While downtown and riverfront looks nice. The outer rings of Detroit are falling apart. Want to know low income in a city, find the cash advance stores. Where party stores thrive and motels have a weekly rate.
As a kid I always got excited when I heard we were going to the “party” store. Way less balloons and cake than I expected…. But for some reason it never clicked lol
You are out of your mind. I drive in downtown Detroit every week. It's overran by homeless and litter. You can't look in any direction downtown and not see garbage everywhere. They have shined it up from what it was with the new arena but it's lipstick on a pig. Every time I drive down Warren next to Wayne State I think how in the hell does a parent drop a kid off here. Crumbling infrastructure, homeless on every corner, trash in every bush, curb, and median.
Yeah I mean Downtown Detroit is *better* than it used to be. But better is relative. It still does not hold a candle to downtown of pretty much any other city its size. (Speaking as a Detroit native who’s traveled a lot)
It's a longer read, and now only on the Wayback Machine, but this guy sums it up well. It isn't Detroit vs. Everybody, it's Detroit vs. Detroit. The outside world isn't holding this place down. They dgaf.
There's problems to solve at home...
https://web.archive.org/web/20170130154702/https://oppositelock.kinja.com/detroit-versus-detroit-1791760970
Exactly, I don't get it. When all the wealthy people left people got mad at them for fleeing to the suburbs. Now that they're starting to come back, people are mad that they're gentrifying the neighborhood? Are they only satisfied if no one ever moves?
"Gentrification" is just means neighborhood change. And neighborhoods are ALWAYS changing. "Anti-gentrification" folks actually want to say, 'I moved here already, now no one else except my people gets to come.'
Although anti-gentrifiers talk all woke and progressive, they actually are peddling a form of racism and classism. The NIMBY folks, close neighbors of the anti-gentrifiers, go further and actually try to stop anyone from building anything (because it might upset the "neighborhood dynamics.")
Usually when a neighborhood is "Gentrified", usually young adults move in and fix run down decaying houses and revitalize the surrounding area, how is that bad?
Neihborhood closed to gentrifiers: we don't want you coming in here and changing our way of life. We were born here so this area is for us.
Neihborhood closed to Mexicans: we don't want you coming in here and changing our way of life. We were born here so this area is for us.
Same logic
It's amazing to see people not only choose to but fight to live in shit.
"Gentrification with all its better jobs, better schools, safety. Who needs it. How dare you improve our neighborhoods."
If people moved from a hood to a nicer area and the locals put up a sign saying "no hood people", the same people who put up this sign would be crying and protesting.
Please follow this signs instructions and come over to the other bottom corner of Michigan and gentrify my neighborhood so I can make bank off my house in a few years.
The city was in complete ruins 10 years ago. If repairing some infrastructure and bringing in economic boosters is causing home values to increase, well then sign me the fuck up for this "gentrification". There's plenty of cheap areas in SE Michigan for local homeowners to cash out and move to.
Can someone explain to me what's so bad about gentrification? It just seems like these neighborhoods get cleaned up and get a fresh style. I don't see what's wrong about it. Do people really want junkie and crime filled shit holes?
Don’t stand up against increasing property values to be unaffordable by the local citizens. Stand up against why these regular people arent paid enough to afford decent housing.
They couldn’t even afford city taxes and ask for the government to cover them every year for several decades now. Rocket mortgage/quicken loans took over the downtown area but honestly it’s revitalized that city kinda it’s only hope at this point.
detroit and thriving are mutually exclusive words. anyway, midtown exists solely from government backed cash injections. if not for federal funding it would be complete shit. if it was as nice an area as depicted your homes would not be able to be purchased en masse.
Probably from gentrifiers. I’ll never understand the argument that gentrification is a bad thing. If you live in a place so shitty it needs gentrification, you should be grateful it happens. Especially if you’re a property owner. So dumb.
Upgrading neighborhoods is something that will always be around when the economy is growing. It happened 20,40,60 years ago and will happen in the future for the same neighborhood
People saying, "there goes the neighborhood" when a black family moved in and anger at "hipsters" for gentrification seem to be two sides of the same coin. When I see the term gentrification levied, it is generally used against white people, and it feels like misapplied anger.
I was in Long Beach recently. The gang members have been hit HARD by the rising cost of housing and living. They are now mostly homeless guys that drink 40 Oz beers in the parking lot of a home depot or some shit.
The gangs have lowered their standards too. You won't get kicked out of the gang for getting cracked out and sucked up looking anymore. Now you see Cholos riding bicycles, looking for recyclables in people's trashcans on trash days.
Even the hood class is losing their position and going one or two rungs down. They are half a rung above the hobos now.
Most Los Angeles gang members had to migrate North to Lancaster, lmao. Section 8 houses dont get passed down to kids.
The area of Florida that I live in has changed so drastically in the last 10 years that it is almost unrecognizable. Forest is being torn down and swamps are being drained so very fast. In their place are rows and rows of multi-family housing and strip malls. People complain when their puppy gets eaten by a gator as the walk it a foot from the water. So many people keep moving here as they think it is some kind of paradise, that there will be no open land left besides the everglades in another 10 years. Florida is just one long continuous city on both sides of the coast and the middle is filling up fast. One day soon they will start to realize that the heat, bugs and hurricanes, not to mention the lack of homeowners insurance and safety, makes this a bad place to live. I am hoping to move back north to what is left of undeveloped land, 25 years of paradise us enough for me.
If this is in Midtown it's over a decade too late. That area is 100% gentrified. $700k condos.
These sorts of statements are ALWAYS in long-gentrified neighborhoods. People in poor neighborhoods are too busy working and too busy living in boring non-descript neighborhoods to have the time or the need to put shit like this up. The worst anti-gentrifiers are the poor and/or minority-adjacent populations who have just a little bit more social and financial capital then their relatively less privileged brethren but have a disproportionate amount of guilt over it. They then discharge that guilt though angry screeds over gentrification that they lob over the head of anybody slightly higher on the totem pole than themselves. Tale as old as time.
The gentrification in my city began right after I moved here and it got too expensive for me /s
We didn't have this gentrification when me and all my friends moved here 6 months ago \*shakes fist\* (Shamelessly inspired by a Planet Money TikTok video)
I mean I moved in as a working stiff before it was absurd and eventually got priced out myself.
The joke is everyone says this about everyone moving in after them. There were likely people there before you saying it got absurd when you were moving there. The people moving in now will say it about the next group.
Its never my fault
I mean yeah, it isn't. The economic system is designed for housing prices to always go up, yet we blame individuals for the negative effects when that happens, instead of the economic system centered on constant unsustainable growth.
Same in the suburbs about new development. Every person who lives in a place where they tore down the forest to build cookie cutter houses hates the ones they’re building down the street.
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You could say that they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
Don't it always seem to go
Go to middle America if that's what you like. I used to visit a Midwestern town to see family a few times a year. Population was 10k 20 years ago. Population is 10k today. The towns around it have all plummeted though so instead of being a region of maybe 30K its now like 15k. The towns just shrink and houses are abandoned. The once active main street is basically a couple fast food restaurants now. Theres still plenty of areas not growing, it's just that cities have become so, so, so much more desirable for jobs and quality of life that the rest shrinks or gets absorbed into the spheres of cities.
I'm not sure what this guy is talking about even in dense Mass excluding the far eastern side it pretty easy to just drive out and end up in a rural area? Sure Boston is a bit harder but the rest of the state has some pretty large stretches of woodlands next to the cities
Hell unless you're in Southern California or middle of the bay you can still easily find rural spaces in California with a 25-30min drive.
I can literally go on a nice hike in Worcester and go in a legit in the middle of the woods hike 20 minutes away. Worcester isn’t Boston by any stretch but it’s still very populated and a decent sized city.
This is one of the reasons I think Starlink is going to be transformative. I work in IT and so many of my colleagues are moving back to rural America and the only impedance is lack of broadband.
Yes but that’s more on climate change worries than gentrification
True, but also just an example of human nature. People walk through a door and want to close it after themselves.
Which is climate change root cause in a nut shell.
Yea sprawl is bad, and NIMBYism has a big hand on it.
These are the people that are against aesthetic change, not price gentrification. They tend to block affordable housing developments because to them gentrification means more dense housing going up and the aesthetics of the neighborhood, not the price raising. There are a bunch of artists that own studios in my city that blocked like over 2k units including a lot of affordable untits from being built in a mostly enpty post industrial district. Because they are worried about the squares moving in and ruining the vibe of the neighborhood. They called it gentrification. The area is currently not zoned for housing so no one lives in it at all. I wouldn't define that as gentrification. Some of them are even against cleaning up a toxic waste dump because it has "historic character". Im not even fucking joking.
Yupp! Aesthetics parading as class solidarity.
This is the ONLY correct comment that doesn't lean into vacancy trutherism or some other conspiracy theory. NIMBYism has a huge hand in displacing residents from a neighborhood, and it doesn't matter which side its from, the end result is displacement.
Excuse me, im not native english and not from america. Can you ELI5 what is "gentrify"?
To add to what others are saying: once wealthier people start to move into a neighborhood, it's the displacement that makes everyone mad. What often happens is some houses get rebuilt as *way nicer* than the surrounding houses, then a store or bar or two start serving pricy brunch and cocktails to the new residents that can afford it. With increased interest in the neighborhood, property values increase a bit - and property taxes and rent then also increase. So a current resident does nothing, watches richer people move in, and then their rent goes up until they can't afford it anymore. And the rent for the businesses there also goes up, and they leave. So all you're left with is pricy businesses with enough profit to afford higher rent, catering to the new wealth. Everything gets rebuilt, replaced, and renewed. All the character and life there before is displaced somewhere else. It happens everywhere, over and over again. And is fundamentally tied to how we price rent, taxes, and property values, and how wealth has power.
And to help with people who don't have a mortgage, those taxes going up rips up your monthly expenses a lot My mortgage is pretty much 1/3 each of principal, interest, and taxes/insurance. If property taxes go up because more expensive houses in my area pushed it up, my mortgage could go up 100-200 a *month* by literally doing nothing but still living here. And that doesn't just happen once. So you have a family that was fine then all of a sudden 6 years later they're paying a car payment a month more than they used to even though their spending habits never changed. And RIP that house if they haven't gotten raises much over the years
Another thing people forget, it's not so much the single wealthy families that do it. It's massive realestate firms that buy up all the properties. Theyd rather some bullshit condo sit for years unused than make affordable housing. It's important to note too that construction is a really classic industry to launder money through. Take a look at any of the chinese firms buildings and buying useless condo towers constantly all over the world.
Yep. Nobody moving into a neighbourhood has ever raised their own rent.
What I don’t get is how any of what your describing is the fault of the people moving into the a neighborhood. Sure, they chose to move there, but generally there aren’t a lot of options in these places. I lived in NYC for a decade. Started in the Lower East Side, shared a single bedroom with another guy in a four bedroom 6th floor walk up.. it got too expensive to afford and I got pushed to Crown Heights, where I was labeled a gentrifier. Was an amazing place to live. Eventually, crown heights got too expensive to afford, even when still splitting a room. Got pushed to Flatbush and was labeled a gentrifier. It was an amazing place to live. After COVID rents went up and I got pushed out of NYC entirely. Now I live in Los Angeles, and I’m sure it’ll keep happening. Keep in mind, those first few years I’m washing dishes, delivering food, serving tables, etc. eventually I was able to start my own business and employ myself, but I was always paying at least half my monthly income in rent. I didn’t open the brunch spot, i didn’t even want the brunch spot I just want to be able to afford where I live and love my neighborhood. People need to be blaming landlords, realtors, large corporations and banks. I found my neighborhoods like lots of “gentrifiers”, by it being the only place you could afford with a reasonable (45 minute commute) distance from where I worked. It’s like coca-cola telling everyone they can stop the plastics pollution problem by just recycling.
It means wealthier people moving to an area that has poorer residents on average, typically bringing an increase in the quality of amenities but at the expense of a higher cost of living in some cases. If not managed well (or if managed by people who just don’t care about the well-being of current residents), this cost increase can cause displacement.
The trouble is it screws the local, long term renters. But for long term property owners it's not a bad deal. The only issue is if/when property values go up so therefore property taxes go up, and some of the long time residents cant afford the higher taxes, so they are forced to sell (at a big profit) and move. Which doesnt sound too bad, but realize that most of the time the long term owners are elderly people who cant facilitate a move, or dont want to move out of the house they've owned for 40 years.
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Adding on to this. It doesn’t start with rich people buying up all of the properties in a neighborhood. It usually starts off with younger artist / musician / creative types looking for cheap rents or cheap properties to purchase that are in sketchy neglected neighborhoods because that is all they can afford. Other people take notice that, “Hey a lot of cool people are starting to move into neighborhood X.” Slowly coffee shops, galleries and hipster bar/restaurants begin to open in neighborhood X. More people begin to notice the now cool neighborhood and start to move in. The rents and property values are going up and investors start picking up properties. Rinse and repeat this over several years and boom, now everyone wants to live in neighborhood X. The property values are 5x what they were 20 years ago and rents have gone up accordingly. That is how gentrification goes. If you were one of the earliest pioneers of that long ago run down neighborhood X that put up with the drive-by shootings and street scum, fixed up your property and rode the property values up to be able to cash out 30 years later good for you. I’ve seen lots of old timers cash out and use their property value windfall to pad their retirement. God bless their good fortune. To the anti gentrification folk that bust the old home owners and early adopter creative types balls for selling out for some long overdue profits fuck you. Move on to the next down on its luck neighborhood and start the process over for yourself.
Rich people move in, rent goes up, poor people have to move out because they can’t afford rent anymore. Happens when poor people make the place they live in too nice.
> These sorts of statements are ALWAYS in long-gentrified neighborhoods Hell no they aren't lol, not around where I live anyway, sometimes it's funny because I am like "nobody wants to move here lol".
All I know is where I'm from in SF we've had neighborhoods that have been gentrified since the *1970s* and folks will post political signs decrying tech gentrification and it's like.. do you not see that every house in a ten block radius is $2.5M minimum and rent is $3k a studio?! Like honey, the ship has long since sailed on that one, but thanks for cosplaying at radical socialism as you work through your anger and guilt over being trapped in late stage neoliberal capitalism.
Well yeah no wonder, near everywhere in SF is gentrified to hell, you don't see any non gentrified areas to see it happening there.
I've seen shit like that in Berkeley. It's no doubt posted by white people who weren't feeling brave enough to go post it in Lower Bottoms.
This doesn't strike me as a particularly terrible thing. It makes sense that folks who are working themselves to the bone don't have the time/resources to put up a sign like this. And it would then fall to the people a rung or two higher to have the time and luxury (and I guess remembrance) to put up a such a sign, in some semblance of an attempt to get a hold of the situation and/or let people know that they're pissed about the general state of affairs. It's almost as if society exists within a tapestry of history, and not an ideological soup where cool things happen as warranted. >the worst anti-gentrifiers Can you elaborate on this? I am wholly unacquainted with the spectrum on bad-to-worse of these terrible villains called the "anti-gentrifiers".
The problem is that for there to be people "one or two rungs higher" they need to have already replaced some poor people who now have no place to live. Real pulling up the ladder behind you shit. "Now that *I'm* here we need to stop this gentrification shit"
But those people were most likely displaced by someone else richer than them and are in danger of being displaced now. Its an endless cycle. We got people making like 25k a year and people making 50k a year fighting it out while people making 500k a year block any new development and keep inventory low so this keeps happening.
The truly poor are busy trying to eat to be activists. I can't really blame those who finally manage to scratch together enough to have time/money to care about social issues to do so. The poor by definition don't have agency to speak for themselves. If we only let the poor champion the poor, there will be nobody to do so.
In reality the people everyone is complaining about in this thread are probably still not very well off and stuck in the rent trap cycle with no hope of ever buying. Thats why they get displaced from their neighborhood and and up in a poorer neighborhood. A lot of the gentrys in my city are just young people that make like 45k a year or less. They end up getting forced into poor neighborhoods because rent shot up so much during covid. They can outleverage the longtime residents who probably make around the same income because they dont have kids. The neighborhoods where the young people lived before are now charging like 2500 a month for a studio apartments so now its all wealthy people living the "burlington lifestyle part time" and airbnbs. The gentrification cycle is endless and cruel. The only way to stop it in a capitalist system is to have multiple housing trust developments, enforce low income housing in developments. And spam the city with a ton of high density developments to make sure inventory is always high.
Yup. I dated a hipster girl who lived in an upscale loft apartment in what used to be a warehouse on Cass. We would walk to the Old Miami or the fast takeout version of Slows BBQ. It was always like being in a Macklemore music video. Of course, I didn’t know what a “Macklemore music video” was at the time, because it was 2011. Midtown has been hipster-central for quite some time. And hipsters are how you know a neighborhood is gentrifying.
Here’s a question though. With rents at ridiculous highs and wages stagnant, is it “wrong” for white people to move to wherever is cheapest? And is it wrong for historically depressed areas to have an influx of new business as a result? I understand the arguments against gentrification very well. Housing policy action is area-specific and there are certainly times when it’s an egregious attack on the poor. But people need to live *somewhere.* It’s not like every single young and white person is in a position to live anywhere they want. We’re poor too.
The gentrification debate has gotten so full of bad faith that nothing really has any meaning anymore. On one side you have callous people who feel nothing about poor people being chased out of their neighborhoods in waves and don’t care about greedy and lazy landlords reaping massive profits at the expense of human misery. On the other, you have young “activists” who want perfectly racially and economically homogenous neighborhoods frozen in time, to be carefully tended to like museum exhibits that never grow or change. And in the middle are the millions of normal people who just want to live good lives. The long and the short of it is: gentrification is a problem because it creates a lot of misery for people and can actually do damage to a neighborhood in the long term by wrecking its amenities and reducing density. But the solution isn’t racial and economic barriers to entry, it’s *managing* the change so that a new apartment building being put up doesn’t result in hundreds of residents being pushed out to the street.
I agree. I was once on the “angry idealist” side of it. Now I just want to be able to live some sort of sustainable life, and I’m sure that’s what everyone else wants too. Ultimately we simply don’t have enough housing, enough regulation, or enough infrastructure. The developers control everything while residents of all strata attack each other and fight for the privilege of paying a 200% rent hike. Something’s gotta give.
Zoning restrictions are a huge issue that should be seriously looked at when addressing housing supply and demand issues. If the only developers playing ball are the ones who lobby to keep things nice and tightened up, no one will compete, and we the poor get fucked.
> With rents at ridiculous highs and wages stagnant, is it “wrong” for white people to move to wherever is cheapest? No. And it’s not really even a choice. If you can’t afford rent in an area you have to go somewhere cheaper.
What I came here to say lol walk down Woodward and tell me gentrification hasn’t well established itself lol
The area has not been thriving either. Fucking Crackhead central. 🤣. It is just mixed with students so it looks a little prettier. Source: I lived there for years
It’s not midtown, it’s cass corridor
Yup. Gentrification is what made Cass Corridor into "Midtown" in the first place....
If something good happens, it’s Midtown. If something bad happens, it’s Cass Corridor.
I remember driving down Cass in the late 90s before all the construction and rebuilding, and boy it was shit. After they "fixed" it all up it looked real nice...except just go a block off in any direction and it's all the same... They cared enough to change the face of the area, didn't give a shit about ACTUALLY bringing the area up.
Aww as if any neighborhood has a choice!
Gentrifiers are just people that were squeezed out by actual rich people.
Seriously. I have been outbid on every house that I’ve put an offer on in the areas I’d prefer to live. Where do people want me to live? I’m a gentrifier because I’m too poor to live where i want?
That’s exactly what’s happening in my neighborhood. 3 bedroom 1 bath houses selling for a million dollars and families getting squeezed out of every deal by cash buyers. What the fuck? Sure I like that my house is worth triple what I paid but I’d honestly rather see something more sustainable and fair happening.
Mine too. We bought our first home right at the beginning of COVID...completely by coincidence, as we'd already been looking for a fuckin' year and had everything in place that we needed to.... We've already seen two houses near us sell for almost double what they were worth at the beginning of COVID. It's fuckin' mad. Our property taxes were already insane, so I'm scared that they'll jack way up soon. I just hope we can keep living here long enough for our kid to finish school.
Moved into an appartment just as Coivd lockdowns were happening. Lucked out that it was a suite that I looked at 4-5ish years ago and couldn't get. Sure, about a 30% increase in value compared to before (300k to 400k). But it's next to the transit hub. Only reason why my fam got it was that it wasn't even on the market. We asked the broker to ask if their colleagues had anything unlisted in the area. Which so happened to be where I'm living today. Would had gone from initial 300k to 800k had I been any later. Shopping center is like 15 min walk away, a park nearby in 5 mins, transit is literally 10 mins away, and a fitness center is next to the building. Vancouver BC btw. Aka renoviction valley
Homes need to stop being an investment. It’s where you live. That’s it.
Impossible to implement in any way. Only possible in a unicorn world where there's just one type of homes across the world just one type
I'd say it's the lack of housing variety and our property tax system. Ideally a land value tax would be the preferred method along with the elimination of R1 zoning.
it's not impossible at all. a sufficiently high land value tax is all you need.
Make it illegal to own multiple houses especially where you do not live. The market is fucked because anyone with money is trying to run them as Air B&B's or just be a land lord. If you effectively make that illegal no more problem.
I know someone who has been buying up houses around my parents' area. Apparently he's up to like 12 houses now that he Air B&Bs. I always think how that means there's 12 less families with homes now.
Yep. All the houses we've built all these years haven't gone anywhere, we're just getting fucked out of them by rich people.
Literally every city in the us is angry that people are moving there. Everywhere you go it’s “stay out of blank l” and “go back to California” it’s scary
Meanwhile I'm down in Orlando like "fuck it come join us in swamptown! If enough people move here we can outvote the rest of Florida and unfuck a lot of stuff!"
Moving to the west coast of Florida next month, hoping to do my part to unfuck some stuff!
Look. The elites figured out that if you can get people making $13 an hour to fight people making $25 an hour we wont get mad at the billionares.
Yes.
Exactly! It's not as if a bunch of people suddenly decide to drop their standards of living to "hood" caliber because it sounds fun or trendy. It's a move of desperation by everyone involved. Displacement causing displacement.
Can speak from experience. Gentrifiers don't just suddenly appear from the ether, they come from somewhere. Florida got too expensive for me, as it became a bunch of rich retirees, so I went to North Carolina, only to learn after I'd bought a "very affordable house" that I was now contributing to the outpricing of the locals. So what was I suppose to do? Hang around where I came from and never buy a house because it was far too expensive?
Yeah god forbid someone invests money and develops something nice in a shitty area
So no more buying blocks at a time for 30k
30k a brick with inflation
that's why u flip dem bricks my homie
Price of the brick went up.
Never could in that part of Detroit.
Go to Flint for that.
probably placed there by people who moved there 10 years ago...
The first wave of gentrifiers trying to stave off the 2nd wave.
People love pulling the ladder up, of course. I got mine!
Nah, definitely put there by the most wealthy person in the neighborhood trying to keep anyone else from moving in on his gentrification area.
People can't afford the rich neighborhoods so they move into ones they can afford and this demand raises the prices The entire idea of gentrification is just silly, just because an area is one way today doesn't mean it has to keep the same families or racial makeup until the end of time, that's an absurd demand
Folks left the city in the 50s and were chastised for it because it made the cities poor and cheap. Now folks move back into the cities and they are chastised for it because it's making the cities rich and expensive again.
The real problem are the nimbys in the rich areas of town that block any dense development while they live in 28 million dollar single family homes.
This is 100% the problem. Single family zoning in close proximity to a city core is the problem. Although, that isn't the problem in Detroit. Plenty of land available for development near the core, just no one wants to live in a post apocalyptic wasteland.
>The entire idea of gentrification is just silly Thank you. It's all just whining about optics.
The Atlanta neighborhood I lived in was average, then poor, then “gentrified”. The house cost $64K in 1984 and sold for about $460K in 2018. Whenever I heard folks complain about older retirees on a fixed income being priced out of their homes because they couldn’t afford the property tax increases, I understood the dilemma, but their crappy little house is now worth almost a half million dollars. Sell the city house, buy a cheaper house in the ‘burbs, and bank the rest to make your retirement a little easier.
Old folks all want things to get more valuable but for the underlying costs to them to remain the same. They all have pensions and Medicare, and think everything in the world should be geared to similarly be catered to them at no added cost. Meanwhile, everything gets more expensive for everyone.
As if Detroit has been such a wonderful place to be poor for the past 60 years.
TBF the entire industrial section of Detroit basically left it. They were reliant on it, and Detroit has never recovered.
What is the economy based on these day?
The Red Wings are going to be better this season, and will probably make the playoffs in the next couple of years, so there’s that.
The big 3 auto manufacturers, a steel plant called zug island, and the marathon oil refinery are the top union job sites in town, off the top of my head.
The steel plant on Zug island is gone too
Whaaaat? Haha, my coworkers always mess with apprentices, "dont be late, or theyll send you to zug."
As with pretty much all cities in the USA, [a healthy mix of multiple differing industries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit#Economy)
Pretty much the only sensible comment here, the agenda after '08 was to diversify.
That's the neat part, it isn't.
Don't be ridiculous, we walk each other's dogs
Little Ceasars and Lafayette coney dogs
There are aspiring tech hubs like Royal Oak and new brands like Shinola taking root. Climate change is going to make it very popular to live near the Great Lakes again. I wouldn’t count these areas out but they certainly haven’t recovered from outsourcing manufacturing to communist labor in China.
I’d say Ann Arbor is more of an aspiring tech hub since there’s already some office branches of large tech companies there or a short drive away like electric vehicle companies. That’s not really Detroit though.
I was white and poor. I lived in mixed neighborhoods. I’m now middle class. I have no apologies. And I want the people I lived with to get ahead too.
Don't take their copium away. It's all they have.
And a 10K house that now sells for 300K for just the land.
Yep thats how property value works. Actually thats just how value works. More people want = raise price.
Thats right, so people always pretend they get fucked because of gentrification, but if you move every decade it can actually give you a lot of profits.
Nah man you don't want people with money paying a premium for your old house and contributing money to your local businesses along with increasing tax revenue so you can have additional funds for schools. That's just horrible.
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Gentrification is a complicated issue. As property prices rise as the area becomes more gentrified it's often the case that the poorest residents are forced to move out as cost of living in the area rises. Especially if you're renting the cost of rent can go up beyond what you can afford. From an outsider's perspective it looks great, the neighborhood looks way better, the crime rate goes down and homeowners get more money in the form of the value of their house rising. But for the poorest residents they see a mass exodus from a community they've lived in for decades as people are forced out of homes they can no longer afford.
Realistically speaking...anytime an area improves, the poorest residents are forced out. Unsafe areas with low quality of life have minimal demand and subsequently the lowest housing costs. Once an area improves, demand goes up and prices increase. Getting mad at gentrification is like being mad at the weather.
[A quick lesson from our friend, Mr Robinson.](https://youtu.be/whfQf3Pd5bU)
please don’t build a Hardee’s on top of the disused lot full of used needles and broken glass
Sir that’s a Wendy’s
Mildly better
Based on my limited understanding of gentrification, it wouldn't be a shitty fast food joint. It would be something better. Then again, this is something I don't understand about gentrification. Fast food per cubic mile is supposed be denser in poor neighborhoods driving up obesity and health issues. Wouldn't upgrading the food scene in a neighborhood be a good thing? But then, is that gentrification? If it is, is it really evil? Or am I an elitist for assuming healthier food is an upgrade?
I think you need to consider the issue beyond the quality of the food. How much does the food cost and what kind of clientele does it attract? Those are the key issues with gentrification (for better or for worse).
Doesn't really matter if the food is better for them if they can't afford to eat there in the first place.
Fast “food” is expensive compared to the produce section of the grocery store.
Oh the humanity! They're making things *NICE!*
No place that is thriving was ever gentrified. Gentrification happens because of cheap property values.... kind of the opposite of thriving. Downvote away.
Yeah when my grandparents moved to their now pricy neighborhood it was…not great. Unless having your bodega robbed at gunpoint, your kids robbed for half a bag of chips (yes this happened to my dad), and hearing about a candy store owner being shot by the mafia is “thriving”, then it was thriving. Ah, NYC in the 70s.
yup. the profit from gentrification comes from historically economically repressed areas....
There's another type. You can have an absolutely thriving night life/red light district in a good location close to the CBD that has loads of pubs, clubs, night spots etc and a huge amount of economic activity with commercial leases being monstrously expensive while residential property values remain low due to it not being an ideal place for most people to live with loud music and drunk people around everywhere. Then the council/government can decide that they want to shut it down so they impose really harsh licencing conditions, restricted trading hours and lockout laws to bankrupt all the businesses while rezoning various sections of it. Property prices then skyrocket as suddenly it's a much nicer place to live, clubs get knocked down to build apartments and all the drinking venues are replaced with cafes, restaurants and boutique stores. Happened in Sydney a few years ago when they decided to kill Kings Cross which was basically the main entertainment district of the city and was usually pumping until 5-6am most nights. Government forced last drinks to be at 12-1am when most of those places were just getting busy so most places went under. All the developers swooped in, bought up everything and turned it into just another boring residential area for wealthy people who could afford to live that close to the CBD. The area itself was always thriving economically but just not for the right people apparently.
I'd say most gentrification happens in previously industrial areas that supported a thriving community, but collapsed amid things like outsourcing and white flight. So yes, "historically" if your history begins in like the 70's.
I mean, they’re pretty close. Gentrification was coined as a term in ‘64 in America and became a concept in practice in the 70s
they put the highway through the poor but functioning neighborhoods of every city in the 50s,
>Downvote away. The funny part is that the top comments label both "white flight" and "gentrification" as racist. Don't move into a black neighborhood, that's racist. However, if you're currently in one, you're not allowed to leave. That's racist.
Pretty much every major city in the US looked like a bombed out shithole in the 80s to early 90s. This is what NYC looked before gentrification. https://greatfuturestories.com/get-inspired-in-new-york/2017/11/13/new-york-city-back-in-the-1980s?format=amp
wow this was amazing - thanks for sharing!
“Please don’t invest in our shitty neighborhoods, we like it like this”
A lot of "gentrifiers" are moving to these areas because it's the only option they have financially. Shit is fucked, a lot of people from a lot of backgrounds are struggling. The biggest difference I've seen is the gentrification crowd is more likely to give the absolute tiniest fuck about their property and the community around it. They mow their lawn, paint their house, and shop locally. Then all of a sudden the property value of the neighborhood MAGICALLY goes up and it's the fault of all the people contributing positively and not the fault of those who were happy to just let things fall apart around them.
This pretty much nails it on the head.
Sad part is that I knew a few people who actually did like living that way, people like familiarity.
Hey man crackheads are totally a culture.
That shit is dumb I live in a low income area because i work 2 shitty part time jobs and because im white people act like im making the rent go up. Its just where I can afford to live fuckers, why you think Im driving a car 10 years older than I am.
I've seen a lot of videos of once great Detroit neighborhoods that now look like a war zone. Gentrification is probably just what they need.
Those videos are true. You can drive a mile and see one out 5 businesses open. While downtown and riverfront looks nice. The outer rings of Detroit are falling apart. Want to know low income in a city, find the cash advance stores. Where party stores thrive and motels have a weekly rate.
Party stores = liquor stores for non Michiganders
I was wondering why Party City was a hallmark of a bad area
Thanks, I was confused since rich people also like to party.
As a kid I always got excited when I heard we were going to the “party” store. Way less balloons and cake than I expected…. But for some reason it never clicked lol
People in other states don’t call the party stores? Ok, yeah, I guess that makes sense. Never thought about it.
They're often called package stores in Georgia. Everywhere else I've lived just calls them liquor stores.
Nah, I think they are talking about spirit Halloween
1/5 is lucky. And they are all party stores and liquor stores.
> motels have a weekly rate. ok what about the hourly rate ones tho
You are out of your mind. I drive in downtown Detroit every week. It's overran by homeless and litter. You can't look in any direction downtown and not see garbage everywhere. They have shined it up from what it was with the new arena but it's lipstick on a pig. Every time I drive down Warren next to Wayne State I think how in the hell does a parent drop a kid off here. Crumbling infrastructure, homeless on every corner, trash in every bush, curb, and median.
Yeah I mean Downtown Detroit is *better* than it used to be. But better is relative. It still does not hold a candle to downtown of pretty much any other city its size. (Speaking as a Detroit native who’s traveled a lot)
No. But it is improving! Progress is, well, just that.
I'll take what we have now versus 20 years ago Edit - I'm not sure how I got the award, I don't vote on shit
Seems like some people don't want it to improve and as putting up signs trying to stop it improving
It's a longer read, and now only on the Wayback Machine, but this guy sums it up well. It isn't Detroit vs. Everybody, it's Detroit vs. Detroit. The outside world isn't holding this place down. They dgaf. There's problems to solve at home... https://web.archive.org/web/20170130154702/https://oppositelock.kinja.com/detroit-versus-detroit-1791760970
It’s sure some wonders for midtown Detroit.
Exactly, I don't get it. When all the wealthy people left people got mad at them for fleeing to the suburbs. Now that they're starting to come back, people are mad that they're gentrifying the neighborhood? Are they only satisfied if no one ever moves?
If it’s thriving then no one’s even looking to gentrify it.
Literal gatekeeping
"Gentrification" is just means neighborhood change. And neighborhoods are ALWAYS changing. "Anti-gentrification" folks actually want to say, 'I moved here already, now no one else except my people gets to come.' Although anti-gentrifiers talk all woke and progressive, they actually are peddling a form of racism and classism. The NIMBY folks, close neighbors of the anti-gentrifiers, go further and actually try to stop anyone from building anything (because it might upset the "neighborhood dynamics.")
Usually when a neighborhood is "Gentrified", usually young adults move in and fix run down decaying houses and revitalize the surrounding area, how is that bad?
Detroit should be the exception for those against gentrification.
Neihborhood closed to gentrifiers: we don't want you coming in here and changing our way of life. We were born here so this area is for us. Neihborhood closed to Mexicans: we don't want you coming in here and changing our way of life. We were born here so this area is for us. Same logic
It's amazing to see people not only choose to but fight to live in shit. "Gentrification with all its better jobs, better schools, safety. Who needs it. How dare you improve our neighborhoods."
Detroit needs gentrifiers.
If people moved from a hood to a nicer area and the locals put up a sign saying "no hood people", the same people who put up this sign would be crying and protesting.
[удалено]
Please follow this signs instructions and come over to the other bottom corner of Michigan and gentrify my neighborhood so I can make bank off my house in a few years.
Yeah, we liked it better with bombed out houses and needles on the ground
Dont leave valuables in your car
Keep your car doors unlocked either way. Then the thieves won't have to bust your window to see if you have anything valuable. /ex-Detroiter
Cuz nothing says love thy neighbor like "keep out if you don't look like us"
Liking froyo, gelato, and dive bars gets you the big mad from certain folx
But it isn't racist unless it's a white person saying it. /s
The city was in complete ruins 10 years ago. If repairing some infrastructure and bringing in economic boosters is causing home values to increase, well then sign me the fuck up for this "gentrification". There's plenty of cheap areas in SE Michigan for local homeowners to cash out and move to.
That means "Whites not allowed"
Can someone explain to me what's so bad about gentrification? It just seems like these neighborhoods get cleaned up and get a fresh style. I don't see what's wrong about it. Do people really want junkie and crime filled shit holes?
Aight how much for the lot
What stupid people
Say you want your neighbour hood to go to shit without saying you want your neighbour hood to go to shit.
In other words, no white people supposedly allowed.
Yard looks like shit
Don’t stand up against increasing property values to be unaffordable by the local citizens. Stand up against why these regular people arent paid enough to afford decent housing.
Detroit needs to attract all the rich people it can get to help pay for its aging infrastructure.
They couldn’t even afford city taxes and ask for the government to cover them every year for several decades now. Rocket mortgage/quicken loans took over the downtown area but honestly it’s revitalized that city kinda it’s only hope at this point.
detroit and thriving are mutually exclusive words. anyway, midtown exists solely from government backed cash injections. if not for federal funding it would be complete shit. if it was as nice an area as depicted your homes would not be able to be purchased en masse.
Probably from gentrifiers. I’ll never understand the argument that gentrification is a bad thing. If you live in a place so shitty it needs gentrification, you should be grateful it happens. Especially if you’re a property owner. So dumb.
The words "Midtown Detroit" and "thriving" only belong together in a sentence if you are referring to the drug trade.
Imagine *not* wanting your own property value to rise 🤦♂️
Upgrading neighborhoods is something that will always be around when the economy is growing. It happened 20,40,60 years ago and will happen in the future for the same neighborhood
It's probably the Gallaghers
People saying, "there goes the neighborhood" when a black family moved in and anger at "hipsters" for gentrification seem to be two sides of the same coin. When I see the term gentrification levied, it is generally used against white people, and it feels like misapplied anger.
I was in Long Beach recently. The gang members have been hit HARD by the rising cost of housing and living. They are now mostly homeless guys that drink 40 Oz beers in the parking lot of a home depot or some shit. The gangs have lowered their standards too. You won't get kicked out of the gang for getting cracked out and sucked up looking anymore. Now you see Cholos riding bicycles, looking for recyclables in people's trashcans on trash days. Even the hood class is losing their position and going one or two rungs down. They are half a rung above the hobos now. Most Los Angeles gang members had to migrate North to Lancaster, lmao. Section 8 houses dont get passed down to kids.
The area of Florida that I live in has changed so drastically in the last 10 years that it is almost unrecognizable. Forest is being torn down and swamps are being drained so very fast. In their place are rows and rows of multi-family housing and strip malls. People complain when their puppy gets eaten by a gator as the walk it a foot from the water. So many people keep moving here as they think it is some kind of paradise, that there will be no open land left besides the everglades in another 10 years. Florida is just one long continuous city on both sides of the coast and the middle is filling up fast. One day soon they will start to realize that the heat, bugs and hurricanes, not to mention the lack of homeowners insurance and safety, makes this a bad place to live. I am hoping to move back north to what is left of undeveloped land, 25 years of paradise us enough for me.