This is only talking about people who own their homes. A lot of gentrification is happening in areas where historically the residents were suppressed from owning real estate. My own knowledge is mostly around the Portland, Oregon area, but there is a documented history of minorities being unable to purchase property, get loans, and lots of other institutional things that stop people from actually owning the land.
For them, gentrification is definitely a bad thing.
he also found that a lot of renters actually stay — especially if new parks, safer streets and better schools are paired with a job opportunity right down the block.
That squares with the recent study[1] by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
"We're finding that the financial health of original residents in gentrifying neighborhoods seems to be increasing, as compared to original residents in nongentrifying, low-priced neighborhoods," says Daniel Hartley, a research economist with the bank.
He looked at the credit scores of original residents and found that they went up — regardless of whether they rented or owned — compared with residents who stayed in nongentrifying neighborhoods.
If you read the above link [1], it's not survivor bias:
"Another way to cut the data is to compare movers and nonmovers across gentrifying and nongentrifying neighborhoods. Interestingly, there is a slightly larger increase in credit score (1.5 points more) associated with residents of the gentrifying neighborhoods who moved to a different neighborhood relative to those who lived in a gentrifying neighborhood but did not move. So it appears that, on average, movers are even slightly more positively affected by gentrification than nonmovers."
Fair enough. I just Ctrl-F'd 'bias' and had nothing, guess I could have been more thorough.
That paragraph still fails to specify whether this applies only to homeowners and renters, or whether that still holds when looking just at rentership. We have "original resident renters living in gentrifying neighborhood benefit", and we have "movers overall benefit", but that doesn't necessarily imply "original resident renters who (were forced to) move benefit."
'"To my surprise," Freeman says, "it seemed to suggest that people in neighborhoods classified as gentrifying were moving less frequently."'
Well, duh. With rents rising, your only chance to stay in the neighbourhood is to cling on to your existing contract. Look at a fully-gentrified neighbourhood; the only low-income residents will be those who have been living in the same home for decades, with a rental contract that protected them from rent increases.
A good possibility, but many cities don't have rent control and/or give landlords lots of leeway to raise rents. You'd have to break it down by city to see whether the effect was limited to cities with rent control.
It's always hilarious to see arguments that people fixing up a run down neighborhood is terrible. That improvement is unfair to the people who ran it down or didn't own anything there to begin with.
Let's just have things stay crappy and life will be fair to all.
Whoa there, let's not put words in people's mouths. Gentrification has benefits and drawbacks, like everything else.
First, and foremost, the neighborhoods aren't always run down. The Missions and the Williamsburgs of the world aren't the only places undergoing gentrification. Sometimes they're just neighborhoods largely populated by immigrants (Greenpoint in Brooklyn), or traditional working-class neighborhoods (Potrero Hill in SF). Being populated by immigrants or working-class folks doesn't make a neighborhood run-down.
Second, what does it mean to "fix up" a neighborhood? I'd argue it's really just replacing the historic culture with the culture of the new residents (which is usually rich, mostly white people). Sure, one nice effect is a huge reduction in crime, but you're also often replacing historic establishments with rich people tropes (e.g. Murry's -> Whole Foods). Harlem will probably be a really safe place to be in 20 years, but isn't it going to be a little bit of a shame when the Apollo gets replaced with a coffee shop?
A lot of the gentrifying neighborhoods in NYC have histories that go much too far back to be attributed to the current residents, even if they've been there 50+ years. Maintaining a late 1800s brownstone is not cheap and without proper care these historic areas will just slowly deteriorate. I think it is an absolute positive that money is returning to these areas.
IMO, current residents have no more of a right to live somewhere than any newcomer.
> A lot of the gentrifying neighborhoods in NYC have histories that go much too far back to be attributed to the current residents
That's kind of a silly argument (Harlem's 50+ year residents were most certainly in Harlem during the race riots), but regardless that wasn't really my point anyway.
The incoming community always brings their culture with them, with very little incentive to preserve the existing culture. They have no reason to keep a Murry's around - they want a Whole Foods. The Russian Orthodox cathedral looks cool, sure, but a new luxury high-rise could be built in that spot instead.
> IMO, current residents have no more of a right to live somewhere than any newcomer.
That's also not really the point. It's not about who has a right to live where. It's about making sure we collectively don't tread over artifacts without taking a step back and evaluating what we're doing as a society. By the time we decide something has historical value and should be preserved, it might be way too late.
My point: In most cases current residents do not have a tie to the original culture or history.
Do not take my comments out of context. You're making my argument but acting like current residents have more credibility - they don't. They are not the "artifacts" and living through race riots does not have any relevance whatsoever.
In my neighborhood "gentrifiers" are coming and preserving 1890s brownstones, on which a new facade costs upwards of 300k (yes hundreds of thousands). Maintaining our architectural history is not cheap and I think it's great that it's happening.
I think you would be hard-pressed to make your same argument in other neighborhoods:
Bed-Stuy? Crown Heights? Park Slope? Brooklyn heights? Boerum Hill? Clinton hill?
There were 1960s race riots in Bed-Stuy too.
In these places in prime Brooklyn what happened in the 1960s is divorced from the neighborhood's origins. Taking one unique case in Harlem and extrapolating it to gentrification all over NYC does not hold water. From my personal experience, it seems Harlem has seen the least amount of gentrification compared to these Brooklyn neighborhoods. If you were to take real-estate prices as a metric (you could choose others I'm sure), Brooklyn has far outpaced Harlem in the rate of change, especially in the last decade.
shaftoe, as a thought experiment consider why the neighborhood is run down. Did the people run down the neighborhood because that's what they like? How was the economic situation for these people? How were the schools, the hospitals, the law enforcement? Was there housing discrimination? How were their politicians? What was the funding like compared to other neighborhoods?
In other words, how was the neighborhood before it was crappy and how did it become so?
... And how is it helped by a £2 beer now costing £5, and a burger costing £20? Thats the problem with hipsters - they buy the property out from under some residents, then make it impossible for those that remain to afford anything. They are like locusts. Eventually (as we see in London) they even price themselves out of an area, then move onto the next to destroy. E.g. from Stoke Newington to Dalston. What about the people there already, who can't afford to shop at Wholefood Market?
Why do you target your rage at the hipsters paying £5 for a beer rather than the bartender charging £5 for that beer? Or, perhaps, his landlord, for raising is rent to the point where he needs to charge £5? I guarantee that the hipster would rather pay £2. The whole issue of gentrification seems to always come around to blaming the people who move in rather than the people who profit off of them, be they existing home owners, local businesses or real estate developers.
If the displaced want to cast this as a class war, follow through on the metaphor. Profiteering is considered criminal in times of war. Those profiting from the influx of money need to be held accountable.
Your last paragraph makes me unsure where you're actually standing on this, but I think that the issue with the hipsters is that they are financially indifferent. Since they're wealthy compared to the locals, they have the interesting condition of wanting to look like bohemian beatniks while enjoying modern luxuries. You end up with the kid who wants to live in a little loft in Harlem but also wants wifi for his laptop. And he's willing to pay for it. Also, since he's not strapped for money, he's willing to pay extra if it means that he gets the ambiance he's looking for. That's why formerly dingy dive bars start selling $5 Pabst Blue Ribbons, shitty apartments start adding amenities and increasing the prices, and everything follows from there.
Personally, I don't really blame anyone, although I chuckle at the fact that there are people who want to pretend that they're poor while demanding luxuries used by 1% of the world.
Exactly - they want a Disneyfied experience, playing at being poor in a fake attempt at "authenticity" but unwilling to forego their luxuries. It's not that the working class shouldn't have good coffee - it's that the greasy spoon charged 20p for a polystyrene cup and the artisanal roaster charges £10 for an espresso and a cupcake, so the honest folks, in practice, have nowhere to go once the hipsters take over. Coffee, beer, groceries, then rent and then the swarm has completely won. But where do the former locals go?
I don't really have a position when it comes to gentrification in general, as I believe circumstances are different in each area. But in the area where I'm from (SF bay area), I believe the majority of the fault lies with property owners and local/state government. Current homeowners in San Francisco lobby hard to limit development of new housing and have basically succeeded in limiting new development to SOMA and Mission Bay. They do this out of self interest to drive property values up under the guise of maintaining the character of their neighborhoods. They're able to do this because of Proposition 13, which prevents their property taxes from increasing along with the value of their property. Local policies like rent control and below-market-rate properties only serve to further limit the available housing and make it harder for the working poor to afford to live in San Francisco.
We're seeing regular protests against tech workers, but I believe these are naive and targeting the wrong people. Expecting to continue to rent in a desirable location as demand for housing in that area increases and new construction is blocked is just ignorant of the basic laws of supply and demand. You either need to increase the supply or demand will push the prices beyond what the poor can pay and they'll be forced to move. Blaming people for wanting to live somewhere is counterproductive and lets the profiteers (current property owners) off the hook. Ironically, the same people protesting against Ellis Act evictions (landlords evicting long-time tenants so that they can convert properties to condos/TICs) are the same ones arguing to maintain the character of their neighborhoods. It's a position that can only be explained by a denial of reality.
One comment about what you wrote:
> That's why formerly dingy dive bars start selling $5 Pabst Blue Ribbons, shitty apartments start adding amenities and increasing the prices, and everything follows from there.
You say that as if it's a natural phenomenon devoid of any human involvement. But there are humans making the choice to make more money servicing the wants of the wealthier population while ignoring the wants of their previous patrons. It's an understandable choice, but it's a choice none the less and one that they need to be held accountable for. My point was that the displaced population wants to blame only the new residents and not the businesses and landlords that choose to service those new residents to the detriment of the long-time residents. That those businesses and landlords are making a choice for significant financial gain and escaping all criticism seems wrong to me. For better or for worse, they're the ones that actually changing the neighborhoods. If current property owners and businesses refused the financial temptation and maintained the status quo, there would be no gentrification. Every change is voluntary and the result of a landlord choosing to sell or rent for more money or a business owner choosing to make more money by changing their service.
I see the same misplaced rage against foreign buyers of real estate (or the perception of foreign buyers inflating real estate prices). There is a whole lot of blame to go around.
Foreign buyers are a different matter; they usually have no intent to live in the properties they buy, and often no intent to lease them to tenants either. For example, the Hyde Park neighborhood in London is basically becoming a rich ghost town (http://www.bbc.com/news/business-26980299).
It really depends on what you mean by improving. It might mean something directly quantifiable like crime rates, or it might be something intangible, like it just being cool and fashionable to live there. The hipsters see the latter and descend like vultures on it. In the process, they do improve the neighbourhood in a quantifiable way - house prices. But they destroy what brought them there in the first place.
And here's the thing: the hipsters don't need to do this. They already live somewhere. Why not stay there and live their hipster lives? That's what makes people angry - they just invade and colonize, destroying communities and driving people out of their homes for fun.
"That improvement is unfair to the people who ran it down"
Assumption 1: The residents are the people who ran down the neighborhood.
Assumption 2: Gentrification improves the neighborhood.
My previous comment addresses the first assumption. Feel free to disagree.
If a neighborhood is just real estate, assumption two is valid. If a neighborhood is a community of people, and gentrification moves a lot of the people, you have not improved the neighborhood, you displaced it.
Once we question these assumptions, perhaps we can address the root problems.
"If a neighborhood is a community of people, and gentrification moves a lot of the people, you have not improved the neighborhood, you displaced it."
Maybe; maybe not. If crime and other social and environmental ills are reduced after the previous inhabitants have been displaced, I'd contend it's an improvement.
I agree, any reduction is an improvement. I have no problem admitting that I just don't know if we fixed the problem or moved the problem.
On one hand, overall crime in the U.S. is down and crime in New York City is really down.
I just wonder, is the goal of gentrification to fix neighborhood's ills or cheap rent in a cool area that happens to be a fantastic real estate investment?
I'm having a hard time understanding how moving people from the suburbs to the inner city and back improves anything aside from a specific geographic area for a while.
The pinnacle example of this imho is the 202 year old Parisien Au Richelieu Boulangerie (bakery) that closed it's doors recently in Paris due to rent increases because of it's proximity to the ever popular Louvre Museum.
There's no link to the first study, but I'm pretty sure the results of the Cleveland Fed are a result of the batty definition of gentrification used:
"For the purpose of this analysis, I will say a neighborhood is gentrifying if it is located in the central city of a metropolitan area and it goes from being in the bottom half of the distribution of home prices in the metropolitan area to the top half between 2000 and 2007. Housing prices are a good measure of gentrification since they provide a summary of the various amenities in the neighborhood. Changes in neighborhood amenities such as increases in school quality or decreases in crime should be reflected in changes in neighborhood home prices."
Again: Entirely based on home prices (reasonable), but not on home price improvement, but instead based on passing from the lower half of the entire distribution of prices in a metropolitan area to the upper half. This could happen if housing prices declined in an area if the mean price in the metro declined slightly faster. This is not what normal people are talking about when they refer to gentrification.
Obviously this doesn't apply everywhere, but gentrification is really rough on students. Between tuition increases, rent increases, and high demand for student neighborhoods because they're "hip", students moving to certain areas are being pushed farther and farther away from the actual school (because of both price and availability).
This article conveniently sashays around the real effects of gentrification due to the "entitlement" mentality of the more recent newcomers.
For example, I heard of a neighborhood ballpark that was used for decades by Latino children to play ball. The newcomers with dogs would chuck their dog's droppings over the fence and onto the ballpark.
Latinos who used to play dominos outside at another park. Until they were continually harassed by cops to stop gathering in a public area to play dominos. Seems like the newcomers didn't like the bodega feel when they were out walking their dogs.
It's entitlement all the way down. People who live somewhere feel entitled to stay there indefinitely because they were there "first". People who don't live there feel entitled to buy their way in because that's how supply and demand work.
I don't think people who live in bad neighborhoods feel entitled.
The choice is often moving from one bad neighborhood to another. Moving is expensive and a hassle for everyone, it's no wonder people don't want to move without a strong incentive.
Define bad? Do you mean bad as in poor or bad as in dangerous and unsafe. I mostly hear gentrification in the context of poor neighborhoods rather than unsafe.
I don't think gentrification is happening in dangerous and unsafe neighborhoods. It's my opinion that is where many displaced residents move. Note: opinion, not fact.
I actually agree with your overall point - unless you own, you shouldn't feel entitled to stay. You should, however, be entitled to a safe neighborhood and legitimate opportunity.
"entitled to a safe neighborhood and legitimate opportunity"
That's kind of a meaningless statement. What does it even mean? Let's say you're correct and people are entitled to living in a safe neighborhood. Now let's say they live in an unsafe one. Now what? They're entitled to a safe neighborhood! It's their right! Who is required to give it to them exactly? Me? You? The states? The feds?
You can call something an entitlement or a right all you want. Go ahead. But in cases like this it's an incredible hollow gesture.
Of course it’s a meaningless statement. If they were entitled to or had the right to safety and opportunity, it wouldn’t be a bad neighborhood, they wouldn’t have to move, and there wouldn’t be gentrification.
So many logical fallacies in a single post. Well done sir.
If you substitute 'newcomers' with 'foreigners', and 'Latino' with 'white', your post reads as exactly the same xenophobic screed I've heard over and over for years.
This reads like an attempt to counter data saying that gentrification reduces churn from the pre-gentrified population with anecdotes about dog feces and dominos.
Wait...Did you just argue that gathering in a park (a public gathering place) and playing a board game can be illegal? Where do you live that has laws like that?
I believe it's relatively common to gamble on dominoes, and gambling is often illegal. Even so, it's an innocuous crime and probably not the real reason they were hassled.
Today I learned that people gamble on dominoes. Not that I agree with gambling, or with it being illegal, but I suppose that is more justified than just playing dominoes.
Nature has endowed mankind with diverse faculties, fallible reason and variable fortune, and so in a free society there will by necessity be "winners" and "losers".
Those of you who reflexively oppose gentrification ought to consider what type of society you want to live in. Do you believe that individuals have the right to make decisions that could affect their own lives beneficially or adversely? One such decision is to rent or buy property.
There are clearly potential benefits and drawbacks to either choice. I may value stability of residence and the chance my chosen property will appreciate, and therefore choose to buy, and so put capital down and strain my credit. Alternatively, I may want to bootstrap a small business or startup using the same capital and credit, and therefore choose to rent.
When, in the name of stopping the "evil" of gentrification, you propose to severely restrict what a property owner can do, such as through rent control, you are also proposing to restrict the original choice to rent or buy. You are thus limiting the opportunity of the less fortunate to buy when and where the price is low and sell if and when the price gets high.
In the name of protecting the vulnerable, you prevent them from advancing to a better station in life. It's very easy to consider the benefits of laws and regulation while ignoring the costs.
Gentrification is happenning in Toronto outside of the downtown core, albeit very slowly.
The main effect is you have families cashing out and moving further and further away from the city to put the real estate price differentials to good use (bigger house, or cash in bank). In the current environment, it actually makes zero sense to buy residential property for the sake of renting it out, so the only ones who are long time owners. Over time, they too will cash out and it will be harder to find rentals until the neighbourhood either increases in status to command higher rates (like what happened in Kensington Market or in the Bellwood neighbourhood), or the property prices start falling to a low enough level that it makes sense to buy rental property again.
The neighbourhood I live in in my city was once crappy, got gentrified when living in the gay district got popular, and thanks to the power of inflation, is now just a nice, modest, middle class neighbourhood again.
Anyone who has met long-time residents of Washington DC knows that yeah, if you are white and rich it is working great for you. If you are black, it is not. I could write a thesis, and maybe DC is exceptional, but this is wishful thinking.
I lived in a very gentrified area of Washington for period. It was very weird. You are pushing out the poor people and you both want to pretend you do not notice. I believe saying the opposite is disingenuous.
Can someone help me understand the problems with gentrification? Do renters feel entitled to stay in their neighborhoods even when their leases end? When owners need to perform remodels on [unoccupied] aging homes?
The only real issue that comes to mind is the owner of a home on a fixed income having to pay higher property taxes because the area around them is improving. I can think of lots of ways to mitigate this problem ... but I'm asking about other problems of which I know nothing.
For them, gentrification is definitely a bad thing.
Edit: Reference here on page 25: http://aaablogs.uoregon.edu/visualculturesymposium/files/201...