3 ms·

What kind of value you think is being lost during a displacement? I’m genuinely interested

lucaspiller 9y ago
Maybe not value on a material level, but there is definitely value lost in the relationships and sense of community that would disappear from forcibly relocating a large group of people like this. Maybe if they moved everyone to a new area together, but I'd guess they would just be distributed across the district.
RobertoG 9y ago
In some cases is precisely the value that make the prices go up in the first place. For instance, people want to live in city x because this city have nice features (good public transport, good public spaces, buildings size that leave to see the sky..). Those features are in some cases due to location but, in other cases, are due to what the people that have been living there for generations have done with the city. Now outsiders come and out-price the people that "created" the city and, in the process, destroy the value of the place. So, people start to move to another nice city. Rinse and repeat. This, it seems to me, is not a "fault of the market", but the effect of an optimization process run amok. And I have not even mentioned speculation.
Eridrus 9y ago
Community has value and since people are displaced to different locations, the community does not just re-appear somewhere else, hence value destroyed. It's also very easy to find negative effects of displacement. The one that springs to mind easiest is that old people who get displaced die many years earlier. These negative externalities fall on people who simply don't have the money to pay enough to cover these downsides. For a totally trivial example with real dollars: moving costs are non-zero, so when people move against their will we trivially destroy value there. I disagree with the sibling comment which claims that the existing community/neighborhood have done is what drives gentrification - a LOT of gentrification is driven by a balancing act between price, public transportation and safety. So, I would argue that for the gentrifiers, one neighborhood is often as good as any other, but for the people who have lived there a long time, that specific neighborhood is what is important. So in this sense, it is value destroying to push these people out on a 1:1 basis. Often gentrifiers aren't even moving to their first choice neighborhood and are merely priced out of the places they actually want to live.

Maybe not value on a material level, but there is definitely value lost in the relationships and sense of community that would disappear from forcibly relocating a large group of people like this. Maybe if they moved everyone to a new area together, but I'd guess they would just be distributed across the district.

RobertoG 9y ago

In some cases is precisely the value that make the prices go up in the first place. For instance, people want to live in city x because this city have nice features (good public transport, good public spaces, buildings size that leave to see the sky..). Those features are in some cases due to location but, in other cases, are due to what the people that have been living there for generations have done with the city. Now outsiders come and out-price the people that "created" the city and, in the process, destroy the value of the place. So, people start to move to another nice city. Rinse and repeat. This, it seems to me, is not a "fault of the market", but the effect of an optimization process run amok. And I have not even mentioned speculation.

Eridrus 9y ago

Community has value and since people are displaced to different locations, the community does not just re-appear somewhere else, hence value destroyed. It's also very easy to find negative effects of displacement. The one that springs to mind easiest is that old people who get displaced die many years earlier. These negative externalities fall on people who simply don't have the money to pay enough to cover these downsides. For a totally trivial example with real dollars: moving costs are non-zero, so when people move against their will we trivially destroy value there. I disagree with the sibling comment which claims that the existing community/neighborhood have done is what drives gentrification - a LOT of gentrification is driven by a balancing act between price, public transportation and safety. So, I would argue that for the gentrifiers, one neighborhood is often as good as any other, but for the people who have lived there a long time, that specific neighborhood is what is important. So in this sense, it is value destroying to push these people out on a 1:1 basis. Often gentrifiers aren't even moving to their first choice neighborhood and are merely priced out of the places they actually want to live.