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They're not bad at a conceptual level, it's entirely about context. People are looking at a broader pattern where minority communities are largely abandoned or

They're not bad at a conceptual level, it's entirely about context. People are looking at a broader pattern where minority communities are largely abandoned or attacked when they have troubles. However, whenever they build something popular or suddenly have something of value, then the spaces they inhabit rapidly evolve to push them out, and (whether purposefully or not) eventually the benefits of whatever infrastructure or invention or good fortune gets thrown their way end up going primarily to white people. You might draw a comparison here to movements like "none of us without all of us" or to conversations about appropriation. My understanding is that they're driven by the same ideas. Subcultures and minority cultures have noticed that they are widely demonized as being too niche or having bad culture, but then whenever they make something popular, that gets absorbed into majority cultures, the majority culture makes most of the profit, and in many cases it's forgotten that it even originated out of the minority/niche culture in the first place. Gentrification and white flight can't be separated from the prevalence of arguments over the "problem" of Black culture and the prevalence of bad-faith arguments (even on HN) about how Black communities need to address their own problems. ---- Two examples, just off the top of my head that might make this pattern clearer: - The Freedom House Ambulance service was the first ambulance service in the entire United States, created to serve Black community members largely by Black community members. They single-handedly revolutionized how paramedics respond to medical emergencies. Once it became clear that ambulances and immediate medical care before (and during) transportation drastically increased survival rates, nearly all of their resources were redirected to majority-white neighborhoods and the communities they were originally trying to serve were left with practically nothing. - Black hair and pride about hair has been a contentious issue among the Black community for ages; kids that let their hair grow naturally were demonized, Black hairstyles were seen as indicative of flaws in Black culture. Black communities fought really hard to see their hair as a point of pride and as a legitimate form of expression that didn't need to be suppressed. At which point the hairstyles started getting adopted outside of Black communities. The problem isn't that the hair styles are being "stolen", it's that none of the demonizing or suppression was ever addressed. Black people were criticized for something that then became wildly popular but the benefits of that thing never work their way back to the community; the stereotypes about their communities persist even after the things they were criticized for are adopted into the wider culture. ---- So conversations about gentrification, white flight, appropriation, etc... make a lot more sense when you view them through that lens. It's not about where white people are allowed to live, it's about selectively benefiting from the best of Black culture and communities while abandoning and demonizing those communities for everything else about them -- sometimes even benefiting from aspects of Black culture that were demonized only a short while ago. It creates a feeling of being "farmed" or "dissected". Black communities that become attractive to white people quickly become white communities (and the people in those communities often end up either displaced or forced to change their culture). Communities that are struggling turn back into Black communities. You talk about feeling like it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, and my understanding is that's also exactly what it feels like in those communities. You can revolutionize American health care, but you aren't going to get the benefits from that. You can fix up a community and start generating business profits and opportunity, but those opportunities aren't going to go to you. And if that community gets messed up or runs into hardship, you're going to get stuck with the bill. There isn't a way to get out from under the rest of society. Even if you build something or create an environment that the majority culture wants -- that doesn't elevate you or your community; they take that thing and then they leave you behind. ---- In contrast, I look at other forms of appropriation, and they don't really bother me that much. I'm a Christian, I heckin love it when I see Christian imagery adapted and cherry-picked out into foreign films from cultures that don't have much Christian influence, because it's fun to see people remix and pull out parts of something I'm familiar with in unfamiliar contexts. Likewise, when I see bad hacker movies that misunderstand computers, that doesn't make me angry, it makes me laugh. If a nontechnical person starts using terminology that originated in hacker spaces, that's great. But I can have that reaction because of the context -- modern Japanese movies and culture aren't demonizing people like me or redirecting resources away from me because I'm a Christian. Likewise, I'm advantaged in my day-to-day life because of my technical competence with computers, not disadvantaged. Not that this is at all the same as gentrification, but in contrast to the above, I do get angry when I see attempts to appropriate Free/Libre software terms to promote non-Libre ideas, even when that appropriation isn't necessarily purposefully malicious. Because I know where that process tends to end up, and I get angry about attempts to pull out the best of FOSS communities and terminology while abandoning the ideals that spurred people to create that software and to evangelize that terminology and create that goodwill in the first place. So it's not that moving into a minority community or moving out of a minority community is inherently bad. It's the context and overall trends. Neutral and even natural actions take on a different tone when looked at as part of a broader system that has predictable effects.

danShumway 5y ago
If you think through that lens, quotes from the article like the below start to make way more sense: ---- > A recent Vox article discussed the phenomenon of people seeing new buildings and calling them gentrification—despite the buildings being low income housing. I used to work in building low income housing and on two occasions I found people taking photos of my nonprofit’s complexes and calling them gentrification. This conflation of modern architecture as a “gentrification style” was so common that low income builders began erecting signs explaining they were affordable housing. > I’ve seen real people state that improvements to traffic safety is gentrification, as though disproportionately Black and brown people getting mowed down by cars keeps the rents down. An actual supervisor in San Francisco is insisting that removing cars from parks is racist against Black people right now. In Oakland, people argued about whether a bike lane was causing gentrification and whether a $1 rent-a-scooter was hostile to people of color. The scooter narrative died down because it became obvious that the scooter users were largely Black and brown school kids. But the bike lane narrative persisted for quite some time among merchants and nonprofits. ---- In a way, the article is kind of touching on the confusion that OP has. People think about gentrification as being an architectural style, when it's not. Gentrification isn't about what style of house exists, it's about driving Black community members out of communities. There's real danger in making this mistake because it leads (hopefully well-intentioned) allies to get mad about silly things -- as if they're helping Black communities by demonizing efforts to improve those communities, to build better public transportation for those communities, to help improve their infrastructure. It isn't being an ally to advocate for worse infrastructure in Black communities. The way to fight gentrification is to ask who the infrastructure is benefiting, and whether or not that infrastructure is actually accessible to marginalized groups within that community, and whether or not other changes in that community are driving out those marginalized groups. The article addresses some of of the ways this can manifest. Note that the problem talked about here is not that white people moved into the neighborhood. It's the creation of a housing market that is only accessible to certain people, often spurred on by regulations and NIMBYism from the very people that decry bike lanes or accessible public services as being tools of gentrification: ---- > Caricatures like skinny white bike bros or some scooter make convenient distractions away from the longstanding unaffordability that the original gentrifiers often created. Many of the first wave gentrifiers had consumed existing housing back when it was cheap, then made it impossible to add more housing to mitigate additional residents like themselves, thus increasing displacement onto incumbents.

danShumway 5y ago

If you think through that lens, quotes from the article like the below start to make way more sense: ---- > A recent Vox article discussed the phenomenon of people seeing new buildings and calling them gentrification—despite the buildings being low income housing. I used to work in building low income housing and on two occasions I found people taking photos of my nonprofit’s complexes and calling them gentrification. This conflation of modern architecture as a “gentrification style” was so common that low income builders began erecting signs explaining they were affordable housing. > I’ve seen real people state that improvements to traffic safety is gentrification, as though disproportionately Black and brown people getting mowed down by cars keeps the rents down. An actual supervisor in San Francisco is insisting that removing cars from parks is racist against Black people right now. In Oakland, people argued about whether a bike lane was causing gentrification and whether a $1 rent-a-scooter was hostile to people of color. The scooter narrative died down because it became obvious that the scooter users were largely Black and brown school kids. But the bike lane narrative persisted for quite some time among merchants and nonprofits. ---- In a way, the article is kind of touching on the confusion that OP has. People think about gentrification as being an architectural style, when it's not. Gentrification isn't about what style of house exists, it's about driving Black community members out of communities. There's real danger in making this mistake because it leads (hopefully well-intentioned) allies to get mad about silly things -- as if they're helping Black communities by demonizing efforts to improve those communities, to build better public transportation for those communities, to help improve their infrastructure. It isn't being an ally to advocate for worse infrastructure in Black communities. The way to fight gentrification is to ask who the infrastructure is benefiting, and whether or not that infrastructure is actually accessible to marginalized groups within that community, and whether or not other changes in that community are driving out those marginalized groups. The article addresses some of of the ways this can manifest. Note that the problem talked about here is not that white people moved into the neighborhood. It's the creation of a housing market that is only accessible to certain people, often spurred on by regulations and NIMBYism from the very people that decry bike lanes or accessible public services as being tools of gentrification: ---- > Caricatures like skinny white bike bros or some scooter make convenient distractions away from the longstanding unaffordability that the original gentrifiers often created. Many of the first wave gentrifiers had consumed existing housing back when it was cheap, then made it impossible to add more housing to mitigate additional residents like themselves, thus increasing displacement onto incumbents.