7 ms·
Resisting 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
by mbrock 11y ago
Resisting 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 agoI don't deny that there are other forces at work too... and I'm not only talking about California.
- yummyfajitas 11y agoOften it's about the ability to keep paying an increasing rent in an apartment where you've lived for many years...That doesn't mean lower income people want to point at a house and say "gimme." You just contradicted yourself. Also, what's wrong with "entire city cores becoming entirely reserved for wealthy people"? The problem is N people want to live there, but there are only K < N houses. N-K people don't get what they want, by simple arithmetic. Why is allocating by willingness to pay a bad way to go? (There is an obvious solution - legalize increases in K. Good luck with that.)
- mbrock 11y agoWould you point out the exact contradiction, so I can explain the misunderstanding? Whether there's anything wrong with reserving the city core for wealthy people only, I didn't really make any normative claims about that. There are of course many reasons to consider it problematic: cultural segregation, justice, etc, but you probably don't care about those things, so I won't waste my time. Oh, and "willingness to pay" is a pretty yucky way to put it.
- yummyfajitas 11y agoThe low income person you describe, attempting to continue living "in an apartment where you've lived for many years" is a poor person pointing at a specific house and saying "gimme".
- mbrock 11y agoThat's just your ideologically motivated redescription of the situation. Not interested.
- iakh 11y agoExcept in the first scenario they actually already live and own the place? It's unfair to compare not wanting to lose [lifelong] sentimental value with just any other house outside their means.
- aetherson 11y agoObviously nobody is actually suggesting a situation where you can point at a house and say "I deserve to live exactly there" -- but my point is that it's hard to see any clear line between there and any form of "resisting gentrification." For example, you say, "entire city cores become entirely reserved for wealthy people." That's a sentence fragment replete with lineless definitions. What's a "city core"? If I can afford a house one block outside of the imaginary line that bounds a "city core," is that actually much different from my being able to afford a house one block inside that line? What constitutes a "wealthy" person? If the "city core" (however that's defined) is "affordable" (however that's defined) for someone whose income is $60,000, but not $50,000, what does that mean? I have no trouble with the sort of general intuition that it's a shame if someone can no longer afford to live in a neighborhood that is deeply meaningful to them. What I have trouble with is any way to quantify that intuition and put it into a practical set of policies that actually increase justice and do not diminish it.
- mbrock 11y agoWell, nor do I have a proposed solution by way of regulation for the problems caused by gentrification and income inequality. At this point in the discussion I'm just saying that there are deep problems with "free market" rental housing. That doesn't imply that what's needed is a quantitative system of regulation. You could also, for example, just appropriate the houses from the landlords, right?
- aetherson 11y agoWell, you could, yes, but it's hard to imagine a system of "just appropriating the houses from the landlords" that was justice-positive.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoNo it's not. Just appropriate the houses from the landlords, justice served, job well-done. Landlording is the world's second-oldest form of straight-up exploitation, right after pimping.