13 ms·

Letting Go of Nostalgia Urbanism

118 points by oftenwrong 6y ago

jdkee 6y ago
I lived on the west side of Chicago in the late 80s and in Pilsen in the early 90s. They were a blend of ethnic neighborhoods, Italian in the former and artists colonies supported by open spaces rented cheaply by the Pomodjarskeys (sp?) in the 90s. They were interstitial spaces true to the Gibsonian form, small ethnic enclaves, industrial wastelands bereft of industry from the 70s onward, that afforded a isolated née desolated place to live. The areas attracted artistic types, ravers, communes and the sense of existing, living in luminal states where structures of power, churches, local government, economic development were strangely absent from the population of oddballs and irregular who could rent a 4,000 square foot loft in a former printing plant for $1,000 a month. No social services, grocery stores, schools or other symbolic anchors of traditional communities were present. The artists were a community but bereft and ignored by social services, forcing them to create their own. A kind of anti-commune abandoned by late-stage capitalism where individual expression, art and music could take root and fester. A Bohemia in a sense of those young and old, who fell outside most normative rules of life in order to pursue their own ideal for living. It existed than and as I drive the Chicago streets of those areas today I sadly realize that happenstance of time and place is gone. Replaced mostly by money. The eviction of the first wave of, let’s not call them gentrifiers, by the commercial gentrifiers seeking to exploit underpriced buildings by boutiques and the final corporate invasion of the Starbucks and potbelly sandwich shop who out performed the local indigenous businesses. It was money and class, not race or anti-bohemian forces which decimated those areas. The neighborhood micro cultures could not compete with $300,000 condo lofts and so it was no more. Places like this have been eradicated nationwide by the flow of money in lieu of culture and money wins.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Bohemians must be peripatetic. Just when you have a nest all set up in the wainscoting, it's time to scurry along to the next: “We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment...”
jariel 6y ago
Great post - but they are 'not the good old days' today in terms of affordability in most places. Gentrification is not so bad, but hypergentrification is. There is a new form of 'Globalist/Consumerist' gentrification and suburban building that is straight up 'bad' - there is no local anything, just miles of materially 'ok' people working for large corps, driving the same cars. There are no accents, cuisine, no weird characters, no un-PC opinions, and there's nowhere to walk. There is a huge missing ingredient in 'urban planning' that we have not put our finger on, and it's related to commodification of culture, particularly in North America. The Europeans (and others) haven't so much 'figured it out' so much as 'already had it' and are careful to adapt new-tech, even tossing it in retrospect (dumping cars downtown). Finally: Montreal. It's fairly affordable (super cheap in USD), authentic, cool, there is more going on here in the summer than any American city except NY (even LA) and that's saying a lot. Quebec speaks French and is protected from a lot of the US culture wars as there's no hyper-scrutiny of some things here. There are many interesting places in the US as well, but probably not so many big ones.
tfehring 6y ago
Great article, thanks for sharing. But I think this misses the mark a bit. I agree with the general point that the folks who think they want to live in 1960s New York wouldn't be caught dead in the most similar places that exist today, but obviously that's not really what they're asking for. They're wondering why every safe, walkable urban neighborhood seems to be gentrified to the point of being unaffordable to all but the top decile or so. Even if neighborhoods like that have never existed in the past (aren't cities today safer than they've ever been?), it doesn't seem like that should be an unattainable goal, but they seem to be rare if not nonexistent. As an aside, there are probably classist elements to what they're asking for but it's not just a class thing. Since taking a fully remote job I've seriously considered moving back to my hometown, where I could get a 3BR detached house for <$150k within a couple blocks of an intact downtown, but I keep remembering that this [0] (recorded 3 miles away) is representative of the people who would be my neighbors there. "Classist" is adjacent to the right term for my attitude here but it's not quite right. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Zdx97A63s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Zdx97A63s
- KirillPanov 6y ago
  > safe, walkable urban "Walkable" is an incredibly loaded term. It has evolved to mean "convenient" rather than "has sidewalks". Struggling creatives don't usually live in neighborhoods that are safe or "walkable", though they may be urban and have sidewalks.
  - naravara 6y ago
    “Walkable” has never meant “has sidewalks.” It means the neighborhood’s denizens can reasonably walk to meet their day-to-day necessities. It has always meant that.
    - KirillPanov 6y ago
      > “Walkable” has never meant “has sidewalks.” Nonsense. Interstate Highway 90 is quite unwalkable due to its lack of sidewalks.
keiferski 6y ago
A lot of this results from an underlying consumerism, I think. The notion that you can buy anything, whether that be coolness, meaning, social standing, or artistic skill. You can be anything you want, and you only need to buy something to get there. Hence the hipster concept, which is fundamentally about representation and not being. The life that Kerouac lived, for example, would make most contemporary upper-middle-class hipsters shudder in horror. I recommend an old anthology for similar stories to this one called On Bohemia: The Code of the Self-Exiled.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I think it’s more an inevitable consequence of technology and efficiency gains. As more information is easily available, there are fewer arbitrage opportunities. For example, the reader that asked the article’s author: >A reader reached out to me with a query. He and his wife and three daughters are in search of “a slower, more nature and community bound life, but without leaving behind people who read books, et cetera. I'm forever looking for where Henry Miller's Big Sur is today, or Provincetown, or even the Upper West Side of 1960, or the San Francisco of the early 90s. We have some money, but we don't want to be around people who are money driven.” Everyone else is looking for that too. And since it’s easier to find those places (or was) they get bid up as all things do with lots of demand and relatively low supply.
  - keiferski 6y ago
    I don’t think that’s the case at all. None of those places were actually difficult or expensive to make and could easily be replicated today. The difference is that today, there is an army of hipsters with disposable income ready to buy their way into the ‘cool’ subculture. The rich kids of 1980 weren’t eager to live in an abandoned warehouse, whereas today they’ll gladly do so - provided that it’s remodeled into a comfortable condo.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      It's theme park Bohemianism. Real Bohemianism means hanging out with drug dealers, prostitutes, pimps, alcoholics and junkies, people with mental health issues, gallery owners, critics, and other undesirables. Some of them may happen to make art. But if you want "safe" - a bit of culture but not too much - Bohemia is not for you.
marcus_holmes 6y ago
Berlin is going through this at the moment. From being "poor but sexy" to having everything safe, clean and nice and the rents doubled. Artists (of any kind) don't make any money, and don't want to waste time making money when they could be making art. So they need cheap places to live. Cheap places are cheap for a reason: there's no heating, or the roof leaks, or the kitchen isn't really a kitchen, or it's miles from anywhere you'd want to go. That doesn't matter if what you really want to do is spend every waking moment creatively and around likeminded people. Apparently Leipzig is where the artists from Berlin are moving now, because it's cheap. But who wants to live in Leipzig? It's a nothing place. Until 20 years from now, when it'll be a cultural centre because of all the artists there... and they'll have to move on because the rents will be rising.
- imtringued 6y ago
  I honestly don't understand this. If this is really such an easy way to make a city grow economically why aren't the artists making money off of this to fund their next move? > don't want to waste time making money when they could be making art. You would be making money precisely because you are spending your time making art.
  - KozmoNau7 6y ago
    Most artists make very little money, they do art for art's sake, not because they want to make big money. Money devalues art.
  - philippoi 6y ago
    > If this is really such an easy way to make a city grow economically why aren't the artists making money off of this to fund their next move? How would they do that?
  - timwaagh 6y ago
    Its not by itself a way to grow anything. Artists prefer cheap places, preferably in big cities. Those are the kind of places with most potential for growth because most places in big cities are expensive and the whole mean reversal thing.
jaspax 6y ago
I could not agree with the author's main point more. Do you know where genuine bohemian living is to be found today? Certainly not in NYC or any other major urban centre. Instead, you need to run off to a dying rust-best town in Ohio and buy out an empty storefront where your neighbours will be a liquor store and a Pentecostal church. There are places where you can pay $200/month in rent, or buy a house for under $50k. Go to one of those and build yourself an artistic utopia. Of course my interests are not neutral here. I'm from a place like this, and after a decade of urban living I decided to move back. It's not trendy or sexy, but I encourage people to give it a try.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  > Instead, you need to run off to a dying rust-best town in Ohio Not Ohio, but most of my serious bo-ho hipster friends went to Pittsburg or Detroit. Aging and rust-belty, but with enough actual city to also satisfy.
  - randomopining 6y ago
    Problem is, isn't the rent in Detroit and Pittsburg actually pretty high? Esp given the downsides.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      Is it? I thought there were opportunities in Detroit to buy a (terrible) house for almost nothing: https://patch.com/michigan/detroit/5-houses-you-can-pick-little-1 https://patch.com/michigan/detroit/5-houses-you-can-pick-lit...
    - anemoiac 6y ago
      Not particularly, especially for the Hacker News set - Pittsburgh has one of the lowest cost of living to earnings ratios in the US for tech workers. Detroit doesn’t have as big of a tech scene, but the cost of living is lower than the national average.
- danaris 6y ago
timwaagh 6y ago
For those wannabe Bohemians i recommend to simply buy a ticket to the czech republic.
ezekiel68 6y ago
I like the finish to this article -- a call to action (rather than to discovery). Reminds me of an old quote, attributed to Henry Ford: "Most people don't recognize opportunity because it's dressed up in overalls and looks like work."
praptak 6y ago
The article makes it sound like there's nothing except: - gentrified and unaffordable - derelict post industrial with leaky roofs - middle of nowhere That may be the case but it makes me curious why this is so.
- endori97 6y ago
  >>curious why this is so. I think because real estate investors have enough capital to take over cool areas. A stark counterexample is Japan where you can own a freestanding house in a dense urban environment near public transit for $300k -- what would that cost you in London, NYC, Berlin? It seems like Japan is one of the few major cities where you could have a large family (or large studio) and live an urban life -- everywhere else you are stuck with a 2BR or 3BR apt (if your rich). How an Average Family in Tokyo Can Buy a New Home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w
dfgdghdf 6y ago
What an excellent piece. I think the discussion is missing something though. It is hard to form an artistic community in the middle of nowhere, since many artists work best in a community of collaborators. Is it realistic to move somewhere and expect others to follow? I still think what is required is a cheap urban center. Unfortunately, these are getting increasingly hard to find in the developed world.
konjin 6y ago
>Her bedroom was exactly the size of her mattress since the partition walls had been installed for maximum efficiency. The bedroom door opened outward toward the corridor and she would just fall in on the bed and hang her possessions on hooks like a boat. This was the version of urban loft living that never made it to the pages of Architectural Digest. My own experience living in a pre-renovation light industrial warehouse: damp, mildew with a side of asbestos roofing, constantly leaking and flooding when there was a storm, illegal heavy metal dumping and illegally wired off the three phase substation, water someone had forgotten to turn off and an electric boiler that would heat water faster than you could use it. The most interesting night was scaring off some skinheads with a crow bar that had a rag set on fire on the end, and a lot of screaming. It was Victorian brick that sold for $1.3m 15 years later.
jadell 6y ago
It's the gentrification cycle, and it's been going on for decades (perhaps centuries.) It's just now getting to smaller mid-sized cities in the US. - Some part of $City is a dirty, smelly, claustrophobic place, no one wants to live there so rents are low. -> Low wage service workers, underserved/oppressed communities, and other "undesirables" move there because they have no where else to go, and form their own community. -> Artists, actors, students, and others with no money move there because of low rents, and the area become "quirky" and "authentic" (ignoring, of course, the community culture that already lives there.) -> Patrons of artists and actors like to live among artists and actors so also move to the area (or adjacent surroundings.) -> Some of those patrons start up businesses to serve the low-rent community (the ubiquitous "coffee shop", bookstore, or gallery.) -> The area becomes a center for art and creativity, and new amenities draw more people. -> Middle income people start to move in, bringing demand for services and more amenities, but specifically the ones they are used to from elsewhere, not the unique "quirky" ones that made the area interesting to begin with. (Right around here is the part of the cycle where the city council and police start receiving more complaints than in the past, and usually complaints directed at the community which was there first.) -> Developers start to take notice, buying land and increasing property values, building cheaply constructed luxury "slums" but charging sky high prices due to desirable location and access to amenities. -> As property values go up, so does rent, forcing out first the low wage service workers, underserved/oppressed communities, and other "undesirables", and then the artists/actors/students/etc. -> The area starts to lose what made it "quirky" and "authentic" to begin with, as the coffee shops are replaced with Starbucks, ethnic restaurants are replaced with chain restaurants, and little theaters and galleries can't afford rent anymore. It become sterile and Disney-fied. And while all this is happening, newcomer residents are demanding that the city & police do something about all the growing homeless and addiction problems brought on by the people who can no longer afford to live there being forced out of their homes.
- jeegsy 6y ago
  This about covers it. There really isnt any more to add

118 points by oftenwrong 6y ago

I lived on the west side of Chicago in the late 80s and in Pilsen in the early 90s. They were a blend of ethnic neighborhoods, Italian in the former and artists colonies supported by open spaces rented cheaply by the Pomodjarskeys (sp?) in the 90s. They were interstitial spaces true to the Gibsonian form, small ethnic enclaves, industrial wastelands bereft of industry from the 70s onward, that afforded a isolated née desolated place to live. The areas attracted artistic types, ravers, communes and the sense of existing, living in luminal states where structures of power, churches, local government, economic development were strangely absent from the population of oddballs and irregular who could rent a 4,000 square foot loft in a former printing plant for $1,000 a month. No social services, grocery stores, schools or other symbolic anchors of traditional communities were present. The artists were a community but bereft and ignored by social services, forcing them to create their own. A kind of anti-commune abandoned by late-stage capitalism where individual expression, art and music could take root and fester. A Bohemia in a sense of those young and old, who fell outside most normative rules of life in order to pursue their own ideal for living. It existed than and as I drive the Chicago streets of those areas today I sadly realize that happenstance of time and place is gone. Replaced mostly by money. The eviction of the first wave of, let’s not call them gentrifiers, by the commercial gentrifiers seeking to exploit underpriced buildings by boutiques and the final corporate invasion of the Starbucks and potbelly sandwich shop who out performed the local indigenous businesses. It was money and class, not race or anti-bohemian forces which decimated those areas. The neighborhood micro cultures could not compete with $300,000 condo lofts and so it was no more. Places like this have been eradicated nationwide by the flow of money in lieu of culture and money wins.

082349872349872 6y ago
Bohemians must be peripatetic. Just when you have a nest all set up in the wainscoting, it's time to scurry along to the next: “We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment...”

jariel 6y ago

Great post - but they are 'not the good old days' today in terms of affordability in most places. Gentrification is not so bad, but hypergentrification is. There is a new form of 'Globalist/Consumerist' gentrification and suburban building that is straight up 'bad' - there is no local anything, just miles of materially 'ok' people working for large corps, driving the same cars. There are no accents, cuisine, no weird characters, no un-PC opinions, and there's nowhere to walk. There is a huge missing ingredient in 'urban planning' that we have not put our finger on, and it's related to commodification of culture, particularly in North America. The Europeans (and others) haven't so much 'figured it out' so much as 'already had it' and are careful to adapt new-tech, even tossing it in retrospect (dumping cars downtown). Finally: Montreal. It's fairly affordable (super cheap in USD), authentic, cool, there is more going on here in the summer than any American city except NY (even LA) and that's saying a lot. Quebec speaks French and is protected from a lot of the US culture wars as there's no hyper-scrutiny of some things here. There are many interesting places in the US as well, but probably not so many big ones.

tfehring 6y ago

Great article, thanks for sharing. But I think this misses the mark a bit. I agree with the general point that the folks who think they want to live in 1960s New York wouldn't be caught dead in the most similar places that exist today, but obviously that's not really what they're asking for. They're wondering why every safe, walkable urban neighborhood seems to be gentrified to the point of being unaffordable to all but the top decile or so. Even if neighborhoods like that have never existed in the past (aren't cities today safer than they've ever been?), it doesn't seem like that should be an unattainable goal, but they seem to be rare if not nonexistent. As an aside, there are probably classist elements to what they're asking for but it's not just a class thing. Since taking a fully remote job I've seriously considered moving back to my hometown, where I could get a 3BR detached house for <$150k within a couple blocks of an intact downtown, but I keep remembering that this [0] (recorded 3 miles away) is representative of the people who would be my neighbors there. "Classist" is adjacent to the right term for my attitude here but it's not quite right. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Zdx97A63s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Zdx97A63s

KirillPanov 6y ago
> safe, walkable urban "Walkable" is an incredibly loaded term. It has evolved to mean "convenient" rather than "has sidewalks". Struggling creatives don't usually live in neighborhoods that are safe or "walkable", though they may be urban and have sidewalks.
- naravara 6y ago
  “Walkable” has never meant “has sidewalks.” It means the neighborhood’s denizens can reasonably walk to meet their day-to-day necessities. It has always meant that.
  - KirillPanov 6y ago
    > “Walkable” has never meant “has sidewalks.” Nonsense. Interstate Highway 90 is quite unwalkable due to its lack of sidewalks.

keiferski 6y ago

A lot of this results from an underlying consumerism, I think. The notion that you can buy anything, whether that be coolness, meaning, social standing, or artistic skill. You can be anything you want, and you only need to buy something to get there. Hence the hipster concept, which is fundamentally about representation and not being. The life that Kerouac lived, for example, would make most contemporary upper-middle-class hipsters shudder in horror. I recommend an old anthology for similar stories to this one called On Bohemia: The Code of the Self-Exiled.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
I think it’s more an inevitable consequence of technology and efficiency gains. As more information is easily available, there are fewer arbitrage opportunities. For example, the reader that asked the article’s author: >A reader reached out to me with a query. He and his wife and three daughters are in search of “a slower, more nature and community bound life, but without leaving behind people who read books, et cetera. I'm forever looking for where Henry Miller's Big Sur is today, or Provincetown, or even the Upper West Side of 1960, or the San Francisco of the early 90s. We have some money, but we don't want to be around people who are money driven.” Everyone else is looking for that too. And since it’s easier to find those places (or was) they get bid up as all things do with lots of demand and relatively low supply.
- keiferski 6y ago
  I don’t think that’s the case at all. None of those places were actually difficult or expensive to make and could easily be replicated today. The difference is that today, there is an army of hipsters with disposable income ready to buy their way into the ‘cool’ subculture. The rich kids of 1980 weren’t eager to live in an abandoned warehouse, whereas today they’ll gladly do so - provided that it’s remodeled into a comfortable condo.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    It's theme park Bohemianism. Real Bohemianism means hanging out with drug dealers, prostitutes, pimps, alcoholics and junkies, people with mental health issues, gallery owners, critics, and other undesirables. Some of them may happen to make art. But if you want "safe" - a bit of culture but not too much - Bohemia is not for you.

marcus_holmes 6y ago

Berlin is going through this at the moment. From being "poor but sexy" to having everything safe, clean and nice and the rents doubled. Artists (of any kind) don't make any money, and don't want to waste time making money when they could be making art. So they need cheap places to live. Cheap places are cheap for a reason: there's no heating, or the roof leaks, or the kitchen isn't really a kitchen, or it's miles from anywhere you'd want to go. That doesn't matter if what you really want to do is spend every waking moment creatively and around likeminded people. Apparently Leipzig is where the artists from Berlin are moving now, because it's cheap. But who wants to live in Leipzig? It's a nothing place. Until 20 years from now, when it'll be a cultural centre because of all the artists there... and they'll have to move on because the rents will be rising.

imtringued 6y ago
I honestly don't understand this. If this is really such an easy way to make a city grow economically why aren't the artists making money off of this to fund their next move? > don't want to waste time making money when they could be making art. You would be making money precisely because you are spending your time making art.
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  Most artists make very little money, they do art for art's sake, not because they want to make big money. Money devalues art.
- philippoi 6y ago
  > If this is really such an easy way to make a city grow economically why aren't the artists making money off of this to fund their next move? How would they do that?
- timwaagh 6y ago
  Its not by itself a way to grow anything. Artists prefer cheap places, preferably in big cities. Those are the kind of places with most potential for growth because most places in big cities are expensive and the whole mean reversal thing.

jaspax 6y ago

I could not agree with the author's main point more. Do you know where genuine bohemian living is to be found today? Certainly not in NYC or any other major urban centre. Instead, you need to run off to a dying rust-best town in Ohio and buy out an empty storefront where your neighbours will be a liquor store and a Pentecostal church. There are places where you can pay $200/month in rent, or buy a house for under $50k. Go to one of those and build yourself an artistic utopia. Of course my interests are not neutral here. I'm from a place like this, and after a decade of urban living I decided to move back. It's not trendy or sexy, but I encourage people to give it a try.

blaser-waffle 6y ago
> Instead, you need to run off to a dying rust-best town in Ohio Not Ohio, but most of my serious bo-ho hipster friends went to Pittsburg or Detroit. Aging and rust-belty, but with enough actual city to also satisfy.
- randomopining 6y ago
  Problem is, isn't the rent in Detroit and Pittsburg actually pretty high? Esp given the downsides.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Is it? I thought there were opportunities in Detroit to buy a (terrible) house for almost nothing: https://patch.com/michigan/detroit/5-houses-you-can-pick-little-1 https://patch.com/michigan/detroit/5-houses-you-can-pick-lit...
  - anemoiac 6y ago
    Not particularly, especially for the Hacker News set - Pittsburgh has one of the lowest cost of living to earnings ratios in the US for tech workers. Detroit doesn’t have as big of a tech scene, but the cost of living is lower than the national average.
danaris 6y ago

timwaagh 6y ago

For those wannabe Bohemians i recommend to simply buy a ticket to the czech republic.

ezekiel68 6y ago

I like the finish to this article -- a call to action (rather than to discovery). Reminds me of an old quote, attributed to Henry Ford: "Most people don't recognize opportunity because it's dressed up in overalls and looks like work."

praptak 6y ago

The article makes it sound like there's nothing except: - gentrified and unaffordable - derelict post industrial with leaky roofs - middle of nowhere That may be the case but it makes me curious why this is so.

endori97 6y ago
>>curious why this is so. I think because real estate investors have enough capital to take over cool areas. A stark counterexample is Japan where you can own a freestanding house in a dense urban environment near public transit for $300k -- what would that cost you in London, NYC, Berlin? It seems like Japan is one of the few major cities where you could have a large family (or large studio) and live an urban life -- everywhere else you are stuck with a 2BR or 3BR apt (if your rich). How an Average Family in Tokyo Can Buy a New Home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w

dfgdghdf 6y ago

What an excellent piece. I think the discussion is missing something though. It is hard to form an artistic community in the middle of nowhere, since many artists work best in a community of collaborators. Is it realistic to move somewhere and expect others to follow? I still think what is required is a cheap urban center. Unfortunately, these are getting increasingly hard to find in the developed world.

konjin 6y ago

>Her bedroom was exactly the size of her mattress since the partition walls had been installed for maximum efficiency. The bedroom door opened outward toward the corridor and she would just fall in on the bed and hang her possessions on hooks like a boat. This was the version of urban loft living that never made it to the pages of Architectural Digest. My own experience living in a pre-renovation light industrial warehouse: damp, mildew with a side of asbestos roofing, constantly leaking and flooding when there was a storm, illegal heavy metal dumping and illegally wired off the three phase substation, water someone had forgotten to turn off and an electric boiler that would heat water faster than you could use it. The most interesting night was scaring off some skinheads with a crow bar that had a rag set on fire on the end, and a lot of screaming. It was Victorian brick that sold for $1.3m 15 years later.

jadell 6y ago

It's the gentrification cycle, and it's been going on for decades (perhaps centuries.) It's just now getting to smaller mid-sized cities in the US. - Some part of $City is a dirty, smelly, claustrophobic place, no one wants to live there so rents are low. -> Low wage service workers, underserved/oppressed communities, and other "undesirables" move there because they have no where else to go, and form their own community. -> Artists, actors, students, and others with no money move there because of low rents, and the area become "quirky" and "authentic" (ignoring, of course, the community culture that already lives there.) -> Patrons of artists and actors like to live among artists and actors so also move to the area (or adjacent surroundings.) -> Some of those patrons start up businesses to serve the low-rent community (the ubiquitous "coffee shop", bookstore, or gallery.) -> The area becomes a center for art and creativity, and new amenities draw more people. -> Middle income people start to move in, bringing demand for services and more amenities, but specifically the ones they are used to from elsewhere, not the unique "quirky" ones that made the area interesting to begin with. (Right around here is the part of the cycle where the city council and police start receiving more complaints than in the past, and usually complaints directed at the community which was there first.) -> Developers start to take notice, buying land and increasing property values, building cheaply constructed luxury "slums" but charging sky high prices due to desirable location and access to amenities. -> As property values go up, so does rent, forcing out first the low wage service workers, underserved/oppressed communities, and other "undesirables", and then the artists/actors/students/etc. -> The area starts to lose what made it "quirky" and "authentic" to begin with, as the coffee shops are replaced with Starbucks, ethnic restaurants are replaced with chain restaurants, and little theaters and galleries can't afford rent anymore. It become sterile and Disney-fied. And while all this is happening, newcomer residents are demanding that the city & police do something about all the growing homeless and addiction problems brought on by the people who can no longer afford to live there being forced out of their homes.

jeegsy 6y ago
This about covers it. There really isnt any more to add