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How gentrification really changes a neighborhood
- em3rgent0rdr 11y agoChange happens. Part of living in a dynamic society. Gotta get used to it. Or else we'd all still be hunter-gatherers.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y agoI hope you have to try living in Mountain View on a minimum wage salary.
- angstrom 11y agoThe first mistake would be to think you can. Same reason I don't have a second home on Martha's Vineyard or the Hamptons.
- pc86 11y agoIf it's not a great social injustice that you can't buy a house in the Hamptons, why is it a great social injustice for a gas station clerk not to be able to buy or rent in SF proper?
- fixermark 11y agoThe injustice creeps in when that gas station clerk was successfully renting for twenty years of their life, and one day their home becomes unaffordable to them because the property values in their town have risen but the economic value of "vending gas" has not. (Hard to say what the just solution is though. As a first-pass filter, changing the rules so people don't have to rent for twenty years might be useful, if there's a practical way to succeed at that).
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoBecause 'life is hard' doesn't mean everything has to be fixed. If we're in a market economy, sometimes people who rent find their apartment to be unaffordable. So they more. That's sad. But not a reason to jigger the entire economy.
- fixermark 11y ago"Life is hard" is the clarion song of someone who doesn't yet live in the time where society has solved the problem they see. Life was hard when we had to forage for food. Life was hard when infant mortality was massive worldwide. Life was hard when we didn't have a cure for polio. Life was hard when the economically disadvantaged generally just quietly died out because no programs existed to help them over a bad chunk of time. And life is now hard when you get cancer, lose your job, or are forced to move because the economics of your town have changed and you can't afford to live there anymore. Worth noting is that sometimes, these three are inter-related. ;) The hard things are not fixed in stone; they are challenges to be solved. That's why we bother with society; if it weren't worth our time to take on the hard stuff, we'd have stuck with hunter-gatherer life style because it's a lot structurally simpler.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoAnd, again, if we're in a market economy then sometimes people have to move. Not a societal problem. In fact, very much a first-world problem.
- quinnchr 11y agoNo, actually gentrification can occur in developing countries as well. Finding ways to rationalize the negative effects of gentrification is the first world problem.
- Grishnakh 11y agoThe hunter-gatherer lifestyle is superior to everything that came after it, on average for most people. Evidence shows that hunter-gatherer people were much taller (a full foot) than their ancestors who turned to agriculture. It's only been in recent years that we've finally caught up with the heights hunter-gatherers reached: that's around 10,000 years that we've been deficient. The reason we didn't stick with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is because we humans became overpopulated and ran out of resources. Agriculture was the only way to survive, because growing crops on a farm and herding domesticized prey animals is much more efficient than hunting and gathering in the wild. But it's also a lot more work and has a lot of problems with disease and malnutrition (potatoes and rice have terrible nutritional value by themselves). Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had generally superior and happier lifestyles, but they were living in an age when they didn't have a lot of competition for resources; it was like a "garden of Eden". The natives of Hawaii (before European contact) are probably one of the closest cultures in modern times to this.
- aetherson 11y agoNobody "has" to try living in Mountain View. It's not like commuting to Mountain View from Sunnyvale or Santa Clara or, hell, San Jose is some kind of unbearable hardship. Where does this right to live exactly where you want to end? I'm a fairly wealthy software developer who lives in San Francisco, but I can't afford a home in Monterey Heights. If it's rank injustice for someone poorer than me to not be able to afford my neighborhood (Outer Mission) and they have to move to Daly City, is it also rank injustice for me not to be able to live in a swankier neighborhood? What if I really just want that house over there? Can I do that? These are serious questions -- I genuinely don't know where this line is supposed to be drawn.
- mbrock 11y agoResisting gentrification is not about the right to live "exactly where you want." Often it's about the ability to keep paying an increasing rent in an apartment where you've lived for many years. It's also about entire city cores becoming entirely reserved for wealthy people. That doesn't mean lower income people want to point at a house and say "gimme." Doesn't have anything to do with wanting to live somewhere "swanky." Often it's about neighborhoods transforming from "livable and affordable" to "swanky," which increases landlord profits and is very nice for wealthy people, but also destroys communities. Aside from that, there are the larger questions... like, how the whole gentrification process is tied up with income distribution... we software developers tend to be relatively wealthy, because of market forces, and this money becomes a powerful reason for landlords to keep increasing rents... etc etc...
- raldi 11y ago> It's also about entire city cores becoming entirely reserved for wealthy people. If that were true, rent control and Prop 13 would have means-testing, and leave seniority completely out of the equation. Because they do not, they're actually about benefitting the establishment (even if wealthy) at the expense of newcomers (even if poor).
- mbrock 11y ago
- cousin_it 11y agoThe civilized response to hardship is not individual endurance but collective action.
- jkot 11y agoHardship? She sold her condo, and moved to 2,400-square-foot home that was twice the size of our condo, solidly within our budget, and squarely in the middle of a vibrant, diverse, and walkable community
- pc86 11y agoThe author's name is Josh so I'm not sure why you are using "she"
- taneq 11y agoSome metrics say my zip code, 30317, is already too wealthy for the household income of my wife, a tenured Atlanta Public Schools teacher, and me, a freelance writer and author, to technically be gentrifying it. So what they really mean is "we moved house"?
- thex10 11y agoInteresting perspective of gentrification from somewhere I know little about (an Atlantan suburb). The neighborhood I grew up in (Lower east side of New York City) is gentrifying these days as well. It's a bit disorienting for me to think that if I moved back (these new rents are insane, but I can pay it) I'd become the gentrify-er. Personally, I'm more interested to read about the forces precipitating gentrification than about the effects of it (which I think can be quite mixed and subjective).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rdlecler1 11y agoI found it interesting that the writer would divulge information on how much Anna bought the house for, how much they sold the lot, how much they sold the house but he seemingly wanted his privacy and didn't divulge the purchase price of his own house.
- gph 11y agoWell if he's at 49 Warren rd, then it's 389k[1]. Pretty surprising they can afford that on a teacher salary and freelance writing, but what do I know of their finances. [1]http://www.zillow.com/homes/49-warren-rd-kirkwood-georgia_rb/?fromHomePage=true&shouldFireSellPageImplicitClaimGA=false&fromHomePageTab=buy http://www.zillow.com/homes/49-warren-rd-kirkwood-georgia_rb...
- pc86 11y agoJust a few numbers: - At that sale price, a 3.25% FHA mortgage (3.5% down min) will be $375,385 or just a hair over $1,600 a month. - Property taxes are $500/mo give or take [0] - PMI will be about $360/mo [1] So you are looking at roughly $2,500/mo to live in that house. They also sold a condo so maybe they had $150k in the bank and have a lower mortgage and no PMI. But looking at these numbers they're certainly not living off a teacher's salary alone. [0] http://www.city-data.com/forum/atlanta/1286033-property-taxes-kirkwood.html [1] http://www.goodmortgage.com/Calculators/PMI.html
- aetherson 11y agoIt's public information. I don't want to dox the author, but he gave the street address of his neighbor and showed which side of his neighbor's house he was on. I did a tiny bit of investigation with Google Street View, found his address, and then looked up the sale price of his house -- you can do it too if you care.
- gph 11y agoIs it really doxing if he said his neighbors address and put up a picture of his house? Doesn't seem like he's exactly trying to hide which house he's in.
- yummyfajitas 11y agoSo back in the day, "Anna" and a bunch of black people moved in and 'displaced' locals: “Due to the circumstances of the section going colored, we have sold our house. The school is surrounded.” One anonymous landlord was perhaps the most blunt: “We own about five houses in that section, and we wish to sell all of them, if even one negro moves in.” Given these attitudes, it’s not surprising that some 40,000 homes, in Kirkwood and beyond, were sold by whites to blacks—for as little as $10,000—in just a few months in 1961, as Newsweek’s Atlanta bureau reported later that decade. I wonder if people like Anna moving in also felt the same guilt that the author of this piece does? Still, it’s hard not to feel like an interloper after you’ve moved into a historically black (well, after it was historically white) neighborhood...The guilt intensifies when you realize that your [house] belonged to the family next door for longer than you’ve been alive. I'm curious if these feelings of guilt are common when moving into a demographically different neighborhood? Maybe they are just a convenient way for (culturally, if not financially) upper class whites to signal virtue to each other? Would the author feel less guilt if he instead stuck to a lily-white enclave full of "blonde wi[ves] and ...Nordic-looking cherubs"? What must a mixed race couple do to avoid feeling guilt, given that at least one of them is probably displacing a demographically different person? (Yes, I'm obviously mocking the author of this silly article a bit.)
- H0n3sty 11y agoLike most gentrification fluff pieces this one is as you note, just a convenient way for the author to signal his virtue. If he had any real concern about improving relations in his community he would have made an effort to do just that. I never took the initiative to walk next door and chat There is also no great tragedy in two parties coming to terms on a transaction when both of them agree - by definition, they're both better off because of the transaction. $70K for a the weeded lot next door it not a bad deal.
- jseliger 11y agoThere is also no great tragedy in two parties coming to terms on a transaction when both of them agree - by definition, they're both better off because of the transaction. $70K for a the weeded lot next door it not a bad deal. The real tragedy here is land-use restrictions that most municipalities instituted in the '70s and '80s, which prevent the supply of housing to meet demand (http://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-the-1970s/ http://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-t...). Many "gentrifiers" in many Atlanta neighborhoods would probably prefer to live in NYC, LA, SF, or Seattle, but those municipalities have strict rules that prevent the building of sufficient housing to meet demand. So people move elsewhere. Matt Yglesias discusses this in more detail in The Rent is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/TheRent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957 http://www.amazon.com/TheRent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp...).
- sosuke 11y agoToo bad the author didn't take the time to learn about Anna when she was alive. I'm sure it would have been priceless to Anna to have a friendly neighbor. Instead the author felt guilty from the gentrification after the new house went up and used that emotion to write a story for their career. That was unfair to the author. I can sympathize with the author and with Anna having watched my own family be priced out of their neighborhoods and the homes their parents built demolished. These homes weren't even derelict; just not large enough for the much richer buyers. Now I'm trying to get a home of my own and can't afford a house at 1/5th the lands value. This is a constant motion, one generation moves into a new area for cheap and spends a lifetime cultivating it. The generation after the next then moves into that same neighborhood at very high cost as demand increases when the current home owners die. I'm not going anywhere with this. Gentrification is bad and good, progress is bad and good.
- jcizzle 11y agoEvery place has a story, and every place changes. It's good to hear a story, it's good to see how things change and it's good to respect and understand the past. I could have really enjoyed this story, specifically because I've spent a lot of time in Kirkwood. However, this signaling, righteous superiority masquerading as guilt ruined the whole story for me. It is as though the author feels he is a conqueror, having compassion for the community he so savagely destroyed with his amazing strength. But really, he just bought a house in a pretty normal neighborhood because that's what he and his wife can afford. The jobs Anna and Tommie had decades ago are analogous to the jobs the author and his wife have today. He is in no way better than them. The author fits right into that neighborhood, he isn't changing it at all.
- embarcadero 11y agoI've been both gentrifier and gentrified. As a white man from a relatively privileged background, I lived in Harlem long before it was deemed "safe". I remember apartment hunting north of Central Park around 2003 and getting a lot of dirty looks from the black Americans who had been there for generations. Who could blame them? To them I was another invader from Columbia U. And while I was there as a "pioneer" and not a "settler", as one paying about as much as they did, and while I resented the charm-bracelet girls as much as they did, I was changing the tone of the place, like it or not. New York is now in the midst of a battle over absentee landlords. You might call it ground zero in the battle over the future of the US. You walk through Central Park and the Plaza Hotel, now mostly condos, sits dark. No one home. And behind there's a string of supertowers twice as high as the average skyscraper. The New York Times last year had an expose [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-foreign-wealth-flows-to-time-warner-condos.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-foreign...] about the buyers: many foreign, many dirty, most masking their identities with shell companies. Since the owners often do not reside in New York, they're contribution to the city's coffers is mixed. More importantly, it seems pretty clear that a majority of New Yorkers resent the shadows being cast over their parks. We may have "air rights", but unlike San Francisco, we have no law guaranteeing sun rights. No wonder many of us are deficient in D. Meanwhile, the mayor, Bill de Blasio, is happy to let the builders have their way, so long as they support his "affordable housing" agenda, ie, contribute. Until recently he refused to acknowledge what has been plain: that the homeless population has ballooned -- to 60,000, almost half of them children. Many of these people got priced out. We can debate the fairness of all this as well as the wisdom of price controls, etc. What we should acknowledge, though, is the fact that policies have consequences, that sometimes change outpaces people's ability to adapt, and that we as a city / society will pay the costs, directly or indirectly. For a very moving but also nonjudgmental look at these dynamics, check out the documentary Homme Less: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=homme+less https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=homme+less
- jff 11y agoHey, and if he moves away again, it'll be white flight and he can feel guilty yet again!