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> No, the neighborhood gentrified because you got here. > Most neighborhoods in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York City have been highly gentrified without

by Lammy 5y ago

> No, the neighborhood gentrified because you got here. > Most neighborhoods in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York City have been highly gentrified without any major changes to their built environment. It's interesting how the language has gotten reversed on this over the years. As originally defined by Ruth Glass in "London: Aspects of Change" (1964) the word "gentrification" referred to property owners making changes to the built environment to attract middle-class renters, but the new renters themselves weren't the "gentrifiers": https://hakka3.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/glass-aspects-of-change.pdf#page=4 https://hakka3.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/glass-aspects-of-...

aspenmayer 5y ago
> but the new renters themselves weren't the "gentrifiers" I think this is an interesting historical point, though the distinction is somewhat without a difference. Compare gentrifiers to carpetbaggers; carpetbaggers were a specific subset of Northern gentrifiers of the South during post Civil War Reconstruction. We don’t really have carpetbaggers per se anymore, but gentrification is still with us, unfortunately. It just morphed into redlining and urban renewal. As a value neutral process, we can examine its effects, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it doesn’t occur naturally; those gentrifying do themselves have values, and their actions or lack thereof reflect those values. Gentrification is a consequence of housing being treated as an investment vehicle, instead of being acknowledged as a basic human right.
- AvocadoPanic 5y ago
  Former Californians bringing their California money to flyover states and buying stuff? They don't have literal carpetbags. Southpark City People
  - aspenmayer 5y ago
    Speaking of South Park, this season has to be the best yet. They have really outdone themselves in the satire department.
- DiggyJohnson 5y ago
  I thought redlining was solved solved. Can you share an example of implicit or explicit redlining (which I interpret to mean realtors, banks, and other institutions enacting policies that restrict black people from purchasing homes in certain areas or neighborhoods. Sorry to ask this sort of question, it’s frankly a pet peeve of mine in internet discourse. In this case though I truly am looking for whatever answer(s) you have handy, cheers
  - acdha 5y ago
    Redlining doesn't have a simple solution — after 1980 or so it was probably not the case that someone would outright be turned down for a mortgage but that bakes in a lot of inherited inequality (your ability to qualify for a mortgage in a pricey part of town, or feel welcome in that neighborhood, will vary depending on your race and your parents' economic status) and there were a lot of dubious practices which followed boundaries based on those historic redlining practices. For example, during the previous mortgage bubble the people targeted by predatory lenders and foreclosed on rather than negotiated with were disproportionately non-white. Just recently there was a lawsuit against Wells Fargo alleging unfair lending practices and given how many examples there have been over the years of different credit scores or loan terms for people who appear quite similar financially, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a fair amount of truth to it: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-19/wells-fargo-sued-by-black-borrower-for-refinance-redlining https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-19/wells-far... The interesting question is whether this is intentional human discrimination or more subtle things like algorithms laundering old historical data. For example, if someone was training a model on borrowers' applications and credit histories versus loan default rates it would not surprise me at all to learn that it picked up on details like traditionally Black neighborhoods, colleges, societies, etc. and used that to “objectively” give a higher risk score because the algorithm doesn't have a way to recognize that many old outcomes were due to things like discrimination at work (“last hired, first fired”), being offered less money for the same job, higher likelihood of bad judicial outcomes (e.g. disparate prosecution rates & sentencing for things people of all races do like use marijuana), etc.

by Lammy 5y ago

aspenmayer 5y ago

> but the new renters themselves weren't the "gentrifiers" I think this is an interesting historical point, though the distinction is somewhat without a difference. Compare gentrifiers to carpetbaggers; carpetbaggers were a specific subset of Northern gentrifiers of the South during post Civil War Reconstruction. We don’t really have carpetbaggers per se anymore, but gentrification is still with us, unfortunately. It just morphed into redlining and urban renewal. As a value neutral process, we can examine its effects, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it doesn’t occur naturally; those gentrifying do themselves have values, and their actions or lack thereof reflect those values. Gentrification is a consequence of housing being treated as an investment vehicle, instead of being acknowledged as a basic human right.

AvocadoPanic 5y ago
Former Californians bringing their California money to flyover states and buying stuff? They don't have literal carpetbags. Southpark City People
- aspenmayer 5y ago
  Speaking of South Park, this season has to be the best yet. They have really outdone themselves in the satire department.
DiggyJohnson 5y ago
I thought redlining was solved solved. Can you share an example of implicit or explicit redlining (which I interpret to mean realtors, banks, and other institutions enacting policies that restrict black people from purchasing homes in certain areas or neighborhoods. Sorry to ask this sort of question, it’s frankly a pet peeve of mine in internet discourse. In this case though I truly am looking for whatever answer(s) you have handy, cheers
- acdha 5y ago
  Redlining doesn't have a simple solution — after 1980 or so it was probably not the case that someone would outright be turned down for a mortgage but that bakes in a lot of inherited inequality (your ability to qualify for a mortgage in a pricey part of town, or feel welcome in that neighborhood, will vary depending on your race and your parents' economic status) and there were a lot of dubious practices which followed boundaries based on those historic redlining practices. For example, during the previous mortgage bubble the people targeted by predatory lenders and foreclosed on rather than negotiated with were disproportionately non-white. Just recently there was a lawsuit against Wells Fargo alleging unfair lending practices and given how many examples there have been over the years of different credit scores or loan terms for people who appear quite similar financially, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a fair amount of truth to it: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-19/wells-fargo-sued-by-black-borrower-for-refinance-redlining https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-19/wells-far... The interesting question is whether this is intentional human discrimination or more subtle things like algorithms laundering old historical data. For example, if someone was training a model on borrowers' applications and credit histories versus loan default rates it would not surprise me at all to learn that it picked up on details like traditionally Black neighborhoods, colleges, societies, etc. and used that to “objectively” give a higher risk score because the algorithm doesn't have a way to recognize that many old outcomes were due to things like discrimination at work (“last hired, first fired”), being offered less money for the same job, higher likelihood of bad judicial outcomes (e.g. disparate prosecution rates & sentencing for things people of all races do like use marijuana), etc.