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By the time the "GENT-rification" reaches Chattanooga and Pittsburgh though, it's become something more akin to "SQUIRE-ification". The people moving in are not

By the time the "GENT-rification" reaches Chattanooga and Pittsburgh though, it's become something more akin to "SQUIRE-ification". The people moving in are not nearly as wealthy, so people are not really being pushed out in the numbers that they are pushed out in places like Manhattan or San Fran. It's the difference between a few thousand hundred-thousandaires moving in, as opposed to a few thousand millionaires and billionaires moving in. There really is a material and nontrivial difference in the housing market ripples resultant from these two hypothetical immigrant waves. Far fewer people, if any, wind up displaced in the third and fourth tier cities that the hundred-thousandaires move into. Developers operating in these cities simply can't afford to remake the markets the way you can in the larger cities. The numbers typically don't allow for it. Whereas in the first tier cities, the market in entire swaths of these cities can be remade and become astronomically unaffordable in a matter or 5 or 10 years. And the numbers in that large market make it very profitable for a developer to do so.

closeparen 9y ago
>"The people moving in are not nearly as wealthy, so people are not really being pushed out in the numbers that they are pushed out in places like Manhattan or San Fran." Backwards! Third-tier cities have contracted from their 20th-century peaks, so easily commutable lots and even homes are simply vacant. They're affordable to mere hundred-thousandaires because they're drowning in supply (though it might need some work). Displacement doesn't happen as much because abundance means you can get your own spot without taking someone else's. The crappiest apartments in the San Francisco neighborhoods that time forgot are still insanely expensive next to national norms. No development is necessary for sufficiently high migration (against sufficiently low housing stock) to create a capacity crunch, and you're just as evicted when you're outbid by $500 vs. $5000.

closeparen 9y ago

>"The people moving in are not nearly as wealthy, so people are not really being pushed out in the numbers that they are pushed out in places like Manhattan or San Fran." Backwards! Third-tier cities have contracted from their 20th-century peaks, so easily commutable lots and even homes are simply vacant. They're affordable to mere hundred-thousandaires because they're drowning in supply (though it might need some work). Displacement doesn't happen as much because abundance means you can get your own spot without taking someone else's. The crappiest apartments in the San Francisco neighborhoods that time forgot are still insanely expensive next to national norms. No development is necessary for sufficiently high migration (against sufficiently low housing stock) to create a capacity crunch, and you're just as evicted when you're outbid by $500 vs. $5000.