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How does a community (edit: geographically defined, not the people living there at time X) receive investment while avoiding gentrification? There seems to be

How does a community (edit: geographically defined, not the people living there at time X) receive investment while avoiding gentrification? There seems to be a logical pattern of receiving investment -> community gets more resources/becomes better -> more people want to live there -> prices increase -> gentrification and the original residents being forced out. What am I missing?

deleuze 6y ago
Does the community actually receive "investment" if the investment causes the community to no longer exist? I think you're mistaking the process that happens here. Investment targets a geographic area, but that doesn't mean that it's intended to benefit the inhabitants of that area at all.
- albntomat0 6y ago
  I was using "community" as synonymous with a geographical area. Your comment matches my thought of particular geographical area receives money -> the folks in that area get pushed out some period of time later.
nickff 6y ago
Gentrification is a symptom of limited supply. The way to reduce housing prices in the face of increased demand is to flood the market with supply, by increasing high-density zoning, and loosening requirements such as parking. SF will probably respond with even more rent control, which won't work.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Well, it will work for the intended purpose, which is to drive up rents even further, it just won't work for the stated purpose.
- topher515 6y ago
  Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! The number 1, 2, 3 and 4 problems the Bay Area specifically (and CA generally) faces are an undersupply of housing. Fixing this problem will be huge steps towards addressing homelessness, gentrification, desegregating schools, and general wealth inequality. If there is a focus on high density housing near public transit, then this will also have a positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions
  - nickff 6y ago
    I would like to add that rent controls increase all types of pollution; they increase average commuting distance, because the rent controls make it expensive to move closer to work (decreasing mobility).
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      Lack of rent control ... seems to have achieved the same result. Land value tax (and relaxed/rationalised zoning & building codes) seem a more likely route.
  - umvi 6y ago
    High density housing? That sounds like it's going to devalue my own property. Not in my back yard!
    - bradlys 6y ago
      Not sure if you're being sarcastic. From what I've heard, if you own a SFH and SFH are being torn down for apartments then your SFH becomes more desirable over time because SFH are less common. (Presuming finite land and SFHs) And if a developer can make 5x the housing on your one lot then probably $$$ - right?
- CalRobert 6y ago
  It would help if they recognized homeowners as a cartel.
- i_love_limes 6y ago
  This is true that gentrification is a problem with increased demand that is not meet with an increase of supply, but untrue in it's solution. You can't infinitely scale up the supply for the same plots of land. You can't even 10x it. Also, this entirely ignores what to do with the people and properties of the area that is being gentrified. I see this opinion far too often from people who have never studied urban planning and development. It smells like of those 'I took an econ 101 class, let me tell you how the world works' kind of opinions.
  - nickff 6y ago
    You can't increase it infinitely, but you can increase it a lot. Single family homes are 4-10 units/acre, townhomes are 20-40 units, and apartments are 50-100. Here is one of my favorite illustrations: http://densityatlas.org/measuring/far.shtml http://densityatlas.org/measuring/far.shtml Another nice one: https://twitter.com/euanmills/status/969132807548260352/photo/1 https://twitter.com/euanmills/status/969132807548260352/phot...
    - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
      So... what should we do? Kick these "single families" out of their homes, because they take too much space in such a sought-after area?
      - nickff 6y ago
        When you allow higher density, the land values increase, and people 'volunteer' their homes for development.
        temp-dude-87844 6y ago
        In this scenario, existing homeowners volunteer to be bought out and move away, removing themselves from the community. Existing landlords volunteer to be bought out, and kick out their renters, leaving them to move away and remove themselves from the community. These homes are demolished and the lots become a construction site for 6-18 months, then the freshly built housing goes to rent or sale at market rate. When they're occupied, they will be filled by newcomers to the community. You look back at this neighborhood in five years. Wouldn't you consider it to have gentrified?
hedora 6y ago
Growing cities can avoid gentrification if the investment improves opportunities for people that already live there. For example, a city could plow money into K-12 education and the local college. Then, it could provide small businesses loans to students graduating from the local university.
- albntomat0 6y ago
  Would that not also raising housing prices due to families wanting to send their kids to those better schools, and the competition for housing raising prices? This depends on the degree of the improvement, but my hometown had significant changes in housing prices on the same street, where one side was on the side with a better school district.
macrael 6y ago
I don't have great citations on this, but my understanding is that Tokyo has done a good job at this mostly by aggressively continuing to build housing. The housing prices there have remained much more stable than those in SF for example.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Tokyo has grown by about as much as SF in last 20 years so it is a good example. Another good point of comparison is Vienna, Austria, which is larger than SF and growing faster.
- 0max 6y ago
  They also don't speculate on real estate and tie wealth to it like we in the west do. My understanding is that housing is considered a sunken asset similar to a car when you account for the frequency of seismic activity and changing building standards to account for it.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    Generally true in Japan but "Tower mansion" (high apartment) on Tokyo/Osaka is exceptional. It's considered as wealth.
vorpalhex 6y ago
When you make a place attractive to live in, people will want to move there and costs will rise. You can increase supply but that still leads to more costs, you're just shifting them from housing to transport/shared services/groceries/etc. There are some kinds of tax breaks and protections that can help reduce the harm of gentrification by helping people who own their home to avoid losing it.
- ng12 6y ago
  > You can increase supply but that still leads to more costs, you're just shifting them from housing to transport/shared services/groceries/etc. I'm not totally convinced. If you can afford rent in NYC everything else is actually pretty affordable. An unlimited metro card is much cheaper than owning a car (plus insurance, gas, maintenance). Cheap food is widely available and there's a plethora of services available that don't exist in rural areas.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/dallas-tx/new-york-ny/70000 https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/dallas-tx/new-york... Food is 17% more expensive. It's harder to get delivery trucks through, more trucks have to get to the city, fuel is more expensive, etc. Sure a metro card is cheaper in terms of direct cost but you've sacrificed commute time and time really is money. If it takes you an extra 30 minutes to commute home via metro, that's less time to be with your kids or prepare (cheap) food.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  > increase supply but that still leads to more costs More absolute costs but with a tendency to amortize to a lower cost per person or per dwelling. If you have to dig up the street to run a water pipe to a place, it costs exactly the same whether there's one house or two houses or a 4-plex at that place.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    > it costs exactly the same whether there's one house or two houses or a 4-plex at that place. In your specific example: + More cars parked on the street + More existing pipes under the asphalt to avoid or repair if you damage + More traffic on the street so you have to work more condensed hours and limit the time the street can be closed + Typically more density means less open room for moving machinery/workers/equipment Ripping out a street and running a new main is endlessly easier in the middle of a small town than it is in downtown NYC, from getting the equipment in place to doing it safely.
closeparen 6y ago
People owning their homes?
ALittleLight 6y ago
There's tension between leading a place and a people. If you lead a place, it seems only good that investment goes up, housing prices increase, wealthier people live here, more tax dollars, and so on. If you lead a people, specifically the people who lived in the city when you assumed leadership, then gentrification can clearly be a bad thing - e.g. "Now our people can't afford to live here."
- nordsieck 6y ago
  > If you lead a people, specifically the people who lived in the city when you assumed leadership, then gentrification can clearly be a bad thing - e.g. "Now our people can't afford to live here." What does it even mean to "lead a people" in the context of a city with immigration and emigration? You quickly run into the Ship of Theseus[1] problem. ___ 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    I don't have a rigorous definition, but I mean it as the difference between caring about something like median income and something like "my kids had to move away because they can't afford to live here."
- rbecker 6y ago
  That description of "leading a people" sounds a lot like nativism.
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    I've just googled the definition of "nativism" and I think so. I understand it as being concerned with the well-being of the "native" inhabitants, or as I put it, the people there when you assumed power. I think, in practice, there needs to be something of a balance between prioritizing place and people, probably not an equal balance though. I think people are more important. As a citizen, if I elect a leader, live by the laws, and pay taxes, I want the government to look after me and my well being and not try to optimize the local stats for GDP or median income or whatever if that comes at the expense of people who live there. Do you disagree with that?
dicomdan 6y ago
It doesn't, and why would it? Gentrification is by definition a good thing - making the area nicer, more modern and more prosperous. All these things require investment. People are confusing gentrification with displacement, which are two separate concepts. Gentrification simply means improvement.
cactus2093 6y ago
I think this is a matter of quite a lot of debate with no simple answer, but I would suggest you're misrepresenting the causality. The series of events usually looks more like: Round 1. More people want to live there -> prices increase -> original residents start being forced out -> receiving investment -> Round 2. Even more people want to live there. Gentrification is only really happening in Round 2+ of this cycle. A lot of people think if they oppose new buildings they cut off gentrification at the source, and maybe it's possible to slow down some occurrences of gentrification this way. But it ignores the factors that put this process in motion in the first place in Round 1 of my example - that new people wanted to live there before the area received any investment. Which is either the result of these people moving from nearby neighborhoods that they may have been priced out of, or the result of overall growth attracting people from far outside the region. So it's really a lose-lose situation - if you don't build new housing, newcomers need somewhere to live and will end up forcing out existing residents somewhere. If you build some new housing, that's when people take notice and start calling it gentrification, and it may even create a flywheel effect that accelerates the gentrification. (But in a place like San Francisco, I don't really even see this flywheel effect anyway. Nobody is moving here because of the pretty new condos that are going up, people decide to move to the city first and decide later whether that means living in a new condo or an old walkup with charm). The only way out of it is to build enough new housing to overcome the shortage. If the people being forced out could just move down the street into a new apartment, it wouldn't be such a big deal that they are forced out of that particular unit. As it is now, these people are often locked in and barely hanging on, maybe they've known the landlord for 30 years and are getting a break, or they have a low rent control price and wouldn't be able to afford the market rate price anymore. These things are obviously good in some ways, but it means a lot of people are in very precarious situations. In the long term, as we're seeing, this is clearly not a good situation to be in. And in the short term, we need protections for these people while the equilibrium is fixed, such as having subsidized housing available for them to move to, paying them housing stipends, or paying them out when they are evicted to help cover their costs of moving and finding a new place to live.
CalRobert 6y ago
You need to crush the nimbys and build a home for every person who moves in (or family, etc. you get the idea).
linuxftw 6y ago
The part you're missing is that affordable housing is condemned and bulldozed in favor of luxury apartments. At least, that's how it works in DC. They evict the poor, bulldoze the existing businesses and residences, and put up pretty buildings for the trust fund kids that want to party and live in the city.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  The easiest way to provide affordable housing is simply to build more housing, and let the existing stock filter down due to the newly-increased supply.
  - linuxftw 6y ago
    The easiest way to provide affordable housing is to raise wages. You can do this by having a functioning economy. Unfortunately, depressed areas are depressed due to 50 years of sending jobs overseas. Right now, it's trendy to live in cities, so they're attracting the upper middle class. Eventually, the steam is going to run out of that engine, and we're going to figure out that a city full of nothing but bars and starbucks is a net drain on society.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      A robust supply of housing is an integral part of building "a functioning economy". It's not just renters and future homeowners that lose out when housing supply dwindles; the surrounding businesses lose out too. People have less disposable income, meanwhile their costs rise due to having to support the housing costs of workers that need to live nearby.
      - linuxftw 6y ago
        There's plenty of housing in the US, it's just not all in SF or NYC. There's plenty of places outside of downtown that businesses can be located.
scythe 6y ago
One simple change is to upzone areas that aren't poor too. That will lower the price of housing everywhere, which is good. In most US cities, rich neighborhoods buy their way out of upzoning. For example the area around Dewey Blvd and the Forest Hill MUNI station has excellent transit access (subway in walking distance!) and there are a few km of street frontage without too much pitch for walkability but it's all SFH on relatively large lots by SF standards with commercial confined to a tiny strip mall. Why? Owners are rich! See also: Peskin ratfucking the North Beach central subway station. However, this isn't a complete solution because it's not just a side-effect to have mid-to-high income people moving in to a lower-income area; it's intended. Concentrated poverty leads to weaker education and healthcare systems and other social disorders that perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Making those areas mixed-income is something social planners dreamed up as a way to increase access to jobs and improve schools etc. Mixed-income environments have a good track record where they occur naturally, so we've tried to replicate that success. You've got to deal with the business sector. Analyses that look at housing prices and incomes alone inevitably find that housing price increases don't exceed the benefits of new job availability. But what also happens is that everything else in the community becomes more expensive. Cheap restaurants close, expensive ones open, survivors raise their prices; the same thing happens to grocers, bars, theatres, hairdressers etc. This is the big unsolved problem in "investing in poor communities": even in places with rent control (like SF), this kind of gentrification can price people out. But do note, however, that the problem described in the first paragraph exacerbates the one in the third paragraph by increasing the mean income of people who move into poor communities and thus increasing the disparity in the price point of services in demand in those areas.
rayiner 6y ago
The missing thing here is property ownership. If the existing residents owned their properties, then the investment in those communities would accrue to them. Even if property taxes got too high and the existing residents left, they would be cashing out a big chunk of equity. The problem is that, due to historical and ongoing discrimination, most of the existing residents in neighborhoods being gentrified are renters with no equity: https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history.... Indeed, black and brown residents face the problem that their very presence depresses property values, and property values skyrocket when they leave. In DC, the area east of the Capitol has been gentrifying over the last 15 years. If you look at homes districted first Maury elementary school, their prices have skyrocketed (doubling in many cases) in the last 5-7 years. That’s far faster than the city as a whole. Why? Because in that time frame Maury flipped from majority black to majority white. Everything is in DCPS. The district has a highly equitable funding formula. It’s the same teachers, etc. Many of the fancy new school buildings are in fact majority black schools. But upper middle class parents are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars more to send their kids to majority white schools. So the very fact of black residents leaving causes property values to go up—gains which obviously those former residents cannot capture.
temp-dude-87844 6y ago
From its definition, it follows that gentrification will have resulted in existing resident landowners getting outbid and/or renters outbid or otherwise being forced from their homes. To avoid gentrification, you need to devise a market distortion (e.g. incentive, regulation, etc) to keep people in their homes, or provide them with comparable replacement homes that are still within the community. But, then you must also discourage or disincentivize the relocated residents from immediately losing and/or selling these homes to newcomers who are willing to pay more. Owner-occupied homes allow each owner to evaluate whether or not they wish to sell, whereas renters rarely get a say. If all owners willingly sell to richer newcomers, would you look back and consider the community to have gentrified? Rent control is one such market distortion. Prop 13 is another. These tools serve to keep certain houses off the market, while largely allowing their residents to stay in place. These mechanisms are irrespective of supply, because the supply is always finite. The mechanisms act on the demand-side.
corny 6y ago
I think the best way to avoid gentrification is to reduce income inequality. Gentrification often does not make the community better. The original residents' favourite businesses close, unaffordable options take their place, and the culture changes. I doubt most new people who move to these neighbourhoods want to change the neighbourhood culture or displace the original residents but it happens regardless. If there was less difference in wealth between the rich and the poor, that displacement wouldn't be so extreme.

deleuze 6y ago

Does the community actually receive "investment" if the investment causes the community to no longer exist? I think you're mistaking the process that happens here. Investment targets a geographic area, but that doesn't mean that it's intended to benefit the inhabitants of that area at all.

albntomat0 6y ago
I was using "community" as synonymous with a geographical area. Your comment matches my thought of particular geographical area receives money -> the folks in that area get pushed out some period of time later.

nickff 6y ago

Gentrification is a symptom of limited supply. The way to reduce housing prices in the face of increased demand is to flood the market with supply, by increasing high-density zoning, and loosening requirements such as parking. SF will probably respond with even more rent control, which won't work.

jjoonathan 6y ago
Well, it will work for the intended purpose, which is to drive up rents even further, it just won't work for the stated purpose.
topher515 6y ago
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! The number 1, 2, 3 and 4 problems the Bay Area specifically (and CA generally) faces are an undersupply of housing. Fixing this problem will be huge steps towards addressing homelessness, gentrification, desegregating schools, and general wealth inequality. If there is a focus on high density housing near public transit, then this will also have a positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions
- nickff 6y ago
  I would like to add that rent controls increase all types of pollution; they increase average commuting distance, because the rent controls make it expensive to move closer to work (decreasing mobility).
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Lack of rent control ... seems to have achieved the same result. Land value tax (and relaxed/rationalised zoning & building codes) seem a more likely route.
- umvi 6y ago
  High density housing? That sounds like it's going to devalue my own property. Not in my back yard!
  - bradlys 6y ago
    Not sure if you're being sarcastic. From what I've heard, if you own a SFH and SFH are being torn down for apartments then your SFH becomes more desirable over time because SFH are less common. (Presuming finite land and SFHs) And if a developer can make 5x the housing on your one lot then probably $$$ - right?
CalRobert 6y ago
It would help if they recognized homeowners as a cartel.
i_love_limes 6y ago
This is true that gentrification is a problem with increased demand that is not meet with an increase of supply, but untrue in it's solution. You can't infinitely scale up the supply for the same plots of land. You can't even 10x it. Also, this entirely ignores what to do with the people and properties of the area that is being gentrified. I see this opinion far too often from people who have never studied urban planning and development. It smells like of those 'I took an econ 101 class, let me tell you how the world works' kind of opinions.
- nickff 6y ago
  You can't increase it infinitely, but you can increase it a lot. Single family homes are 4-10 units/acre, townhomes are 20-40 units, and apartments are 50-100. Here is one of my favorite illustrations: http://densityatlas.org/measuring/far.shtml http://densityatlas.org/measuring/far.shtml Another nice one: https://twitter.com/euanmills/status/969132807548260352/photo/1 https://twitter.com/euanmills/status/969132807548260352/phot...
  - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
    So... what should we do? Kick these "single families" out of their homes, because they take too much space in such a sought-after area?
    - nickff 6y ago
      When you allow higher density, the land values increase, and people 'volunteer' their homes for development.
      - temp-dude-87844 6y ago
        In this scenario, existing homeowners volunteer to be bought out and move away, removing themselves from the community. Existing landlords volunteer to be bought out, and kick out their renters, leaving them to move away and remove themselves from the community. These homes are demolished and the lots become a construction site for 6-18 months, then the freshly built housing goes to rent or sale at market rate. When they're occupied, they will be filled by newcomers to the community. You look back at this neighborhood in five years. Wouldn't you consider it to have gentrified?

hedora 6y ago

Growing cities can avoid gentrification if the investment improves opportunities for people that already live there. For example, a city could plow money into K-12 education and the local college. Then, it could provide small businesses loans to students graduating from the local university.

albntomat0 6y ago
Would that not also raising housing prices due to families wanting to send their kids to those better schools, and the competition for housing raising prices? This depends on the degree of the improvement, but my hometown had significant changes in housing prices on the same street, where one side was on the side with a better school district.

macrael 6y ago

I don't have great citations on this, but my understanding is that Tokyo has done a good job at this mostly by aggressively continuing to build housing. The housing prices there have remained much more stable than those in SF for example.

jeffbee 6y ago
Tokyo has grown by about as much as SF in last 20 years so it is a good example. Another good point of comparison is Vienna, Austria, which is larger than SF and growing faster.
0max 6y ago
They also don't speculate on real estate and tie wealth to it like we in the west do. My understanding is that housing is considered a sunken asset similar to a car when you account for the frequency of seismic activity and changing building standards to account for it.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Generally true in Japan but "Tower mansion" (high apartment) on Tokyo/Osaka is exceptional. It's considered as wealth.

vorpalhex 6y ago

When you make a place attractive to live in, people will want to move there and costs will rise. You can increase supply but that still leads to more costs, you're just shifting them from housing to transport/shared services/groceries/etc. There are some kinds of tax breaks and protections that can help reduce the harm of gentrification by helping people who own their home to avoid losing it.

ng12 6y ago
> You can increase supply but that still leads to more costs, you're just shifting them from housing to transport/shared services/groceries/etc. I'm not totally convinced. If you can afford rent in NYC everything else is actually pretty affordable. An unlimited metro card is much cheaper than owning a car (plus insurance, gas, maintenance). Cheap food is widely available and there's a plethora of services available that don't exist in rural areas.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/dallas-tx/new-york-ny/70000 https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/dallas-tx/new-york... Food is 17% more expensive. It's harder to get delivery trucks through, more trucks have to get to the city, fuel is more expensive, etc. Sure a metro card is cheaper in terms of direct cost but you've sacrificed commute time and time really is money. If it takes you an extra 30 minutes to commute home via metro, that's less time to be with your kids or prepare (cheap) food.
jeffbee 6y ago
> increase supply but that still leads to more costs More absolute costs but with a tendency to amortize to a lower cost per person or per dwelling. If you have to dig up the street to run a water pipe to a place, it costs exactly the same whether there's one house or two houses or a 4-plex at that place.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  > it costs exactly the same whether there's one house or two houses or a 4-plex at that place. In your specific example: + More cars parked on the street + More existing pipes under the asphalt to avoid or repair if you damage + More traffic on the street so you have to work more condensed hours and limit the time the street can be closed + Typically more density means less open room for moving machinery/workers/equipment Ripping out a street and running a new main is endlessly easier in the middle of a small town than it is in downtown NYC, from getting the equipment in place to doing it safely.

closeparen 6y ago

People owning their homes?

ALittleLight 6y ago

There's tension between leading a place and a people. If you lead a place, it seems only good that investment goes up, housing prices increase, wealthier people live here, more tax dollars, and so on. If you lead a people, specifically the people who lived in the city when you assumed leadership, then gentrification can clearly be a bad thing - e.g. "Now our people can't afford to live here."

nordsieck 6y ago
> If you lead a people, specifically the people who lived in the city when you assumed leadership, then gentrification can clearly be a bad thing - e.g. "Now our people can't afford to live here." What does it even mean to "lead a people" in the context of a city with immigration and emigration? You quickly run into the Ship of Theseus[1] problem. ___ 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  I don't have a rigorous definition, but I mean it as the difference between caring about something like median income and something like "my kids had to move away because they can't afford to live here."
rbecker 6y ago
That description of "leading a people" sounds a lot like nativism.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  I've just googled the definition of "nativism" and I think so. I understand it as being concerned with the well-being of the "native" inhabitants, or as I put it, the people there when you assumed power. I think, in practice, there needs to be something of a balance between prioritizing place and people, probably not an equal balance though. I think people are more important. As a citizen, if I elect a leader, live by the laws, and pay taxes, I want the government to look after me and my well being and not try to optimize the local stats for GDP or median income or whatever if that comes at the expense of people who live there. Do you disagree with that?

dicomdan 6y ago

It doesn't, and why would it? Gentrification is by definition a good thing - making the area nicer, more modern and more prosperous. All these things require investment. People are confusing gentrification with displacement, which are two separate concepts. Gentrification simply means improvement.

cactus2093 6y ago

I think this is a matter of quite a lot of debate with no simple answer, but I would suggest you're misrepresenting the causality. The series of events usually looks more like: Round 1. More people want to live there -> prices increase -> original residents start being forced out -> receiving investment -> Round 2. Even more people want to live there. Gentrification is only really happening in Round 2+ of this cycle. A lot of people think if they oppose new buildings they cut off gentrification at the source, and maybe it's possible to slow down some occurrences of gentrification this way. But it ignores the factors that put this process in motion in the first place in Round 1 of my example - that new people wanted to live there before the area received any investment. Which is either the result of these people moving from nearby neighborhoods that they may have been priced out of, or the result of overall growth attracting people from far outside the region. So it's really a lose-lose situation - if you don't build new housing, newcomers need somewhere to live and will end up forcing out existing residents somewhere. If you build some new housing, that's when people take notice and start calling it gentrification, and it may even create a flywheel effect that accelerates the gentrification. (But in a place like San Francisco, I don't really even see this flywheel effect anyway. Nobody is moving here because of the pretty new condos that are going up, people decide to move to the city first and decide later whether that means living in a new condo or an old walkup with charm). The only way out of it is to build enough new housing to overcome the shortage. If the people being forced out could just move down the street into a new apartment, it wouldn't be such a big deal that they are forced out of that particular unit. As it is now, these people are often locked in and barely hanging on, maybe they've known the landlord for 30 years and are getting a break, or they have a low rent control price and wouldn't be able to afford the market rate price anymore. These things are obviously good in some ways, but it means a lot of people are in very precarious situations. In the long term, as we're seeing, this is clearly not a good situation to be in. And in the short term, we need protections for these people while the equilibrium is fixed, such as having subsidized housing available for them to move to, paying them housing stipends, or paying them out when they are evicted to help cover their costs of moving and finding a new place to live.

CalRobert 6y ago

You need to crush the nimbys and build a home for every person who moves in (or family, etc. you get the idea).

linuxftw 6y ago

The part you're missing is that affordable housing is condemned and bulldozed in favor of luxury apartments. At least, that's how it works in DC. They evict the poor, bulldoze the existing businesses and residences, and put up pretty buildings for the trust fund kids that want to party and live in the city.

zozbot234 6y ago
The easiest way to provide affordable housing is simply to build more housing, and let the existing stock filter down due to the newly-increased supply.
- linuxftw 6y ago
  The easiest way to provide affordable housing is to raise wages. You can do this by having a functioning economy. Unfortunately, depressed areas are depressed due to 50 years of sending jobs overseas. Right now, it's trendy to live in cities, so they're attracting the upper middle class. Eventually, the steam is going to run out of that engine, and we're going to figure out that a city full of nothing but bars and starbucks is a net drain on society.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    A robust supply of housing is an integral part of building "a functioning economy". It's not just renters and future homeowners that lose out when housing supply dwindles; the surrounding businesses lose out too. People have less disposable income, meanwhile their costs rise due to having to support the housing costs of workers that need to live nearby.
    - linuxftw 6y ago
      There's plenty of housing in the US, it's just not all in SF or NYC. There's plenty of places outside of downtown that businesses can be located.

scythe 6y ago

One simple change is to upzone areas that aren't poor too. That will lower the price of housing everywhere, which is good. In most US cities, rich neighborhoods buy their way out of upzoning. For example the area around Dewey Blvd and the Forest Hill MUNI station has excellent transit access (subway in walking distance!) and there are a few km of street frontage without too much pitch for walkability but it's all SFH on relatively large lots by SF standards with commercial confined to a tiny strip mall. Why? Owners are rich! See also: Peskin ratfucking the North Beach central subway station. However, this isn't a complete solution because it's not just a side-effect to have mid-to-high income people moving in to a lower-income area; it's intended. Concentrated poverty leads to weaker education and healthcare systems and other social disorders that perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Making those areas mixed-income is something social planners dreamed up as a way to increase access to jobs and improve schools etc. Mixed-income environments have a good track record where they occur naturally, so we've tried to replicate that success. You've got to deal with the business sector. Analyses that look at housing prices and incomes alone inevitably find that housing price increases don't exceed the benefits of new job availability. But what also happens is that everything else in the community becomes more expensive. Cheap restaurants close, expensive ones open, survivors raise their prices; the same thing happens to grocers, bars, theatres, hairdressers etc. This is the big unsolved problem in "investing in poor communities": even in places with rent control (like SF), this kind of gentrification can price people out. But do note, however, that the problem described in the first paragraph exacerbates the one in the third paragraph by increasing the mean income of people who move into poor communities and thus increasing the disparity in the price point of services in demand in those areas.

rayiner 6y ago

The missing thing here is property ownership. If the existing residents owned their properties, then the investment in those communities would accrue to them. Even if property taxes got too high and the existing residents left, they would be cashing out a big chunk of equity. The problem is that, due to historical and ongoing discrimination, most of the existing residents in neighborhoods being gentrified are renters with no equity: https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history.... Indeed, black and brown residents face the problem that their very presence depresses property values, and property values skyrocket when they leave. In DC, the area east of the Capitol has been gentrifying over the last 15 years. If you look at homes districted first Maury elementary school, their prices have skyrocketed (doubling in many cases) in the last 5-7 years. That’s far faster than the city as a whole. Why? Because in that time frame Maury flipped from majority black to majority white. Everything is in DCPS. The district has a highly equitable funding formula. It’s the same teachers, etc. Many of the fancy new school buildings are in fact majority black schools. But upper middle class parents are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars more to send their kids to majority white schools. So the very fact of black residents leaving causes property values to go up—gains which obviously those former residents cannot capture.

temp-dude-87844 6y ago

From its definition, it follows that gentrification will have resulted in existing resident landowners getting outbid and/or renters outbid or otherwise being forced from their homes. To avoid gentrification, you need to devise a market distortion (e.g. incentive, regulation, etc) to keep people in their homes, or provide them with comparable replacement homes that are still within the community. But, then you must also discourage or disincentivize the relocated residents from immediately losing and/or selling these homes to newcomers who are willing to pay more. Owner-occupied homes allow each owner to evaluate whether or not they wish to sell, whereas renters rarely get a say. If all owners willingly sell to richer newcomers, would you look back and consider the community to have gentrified? Rent control is one such market distortion. Prop 13 is another. These tools serve to keep certain houses off the market, while largely allowing their residents to stay in place. These mechanisms are irrespective of supply, because the supply is always finite. The mechanisms act on the demand-side.

corny 6y ago

I think the best way to avoid gentrification is to reduce income inequality. Gentrification often does not make the community better. The original residents' favourite businesses close, unaffordable options take their place, and the culture changes. I doubt most new people who move to these neighbourhoods want to change the neighbourhood culture or displace the original residents but it happens regardless. If there was less difference in wealth between the rich and the poor, that displacement wouldn't be so extreme.