3 ms·

And yet, gentrification.

by ms_menardi 6mo ago

triceratops 6mo ago
God forbid bad parts of town ever get good.
- KPGv2 6mo ago
  That's not what gentrification is. Relevant to this article, I lived through the gentrification of large parts of Austin in the early 00s. What happened was that good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives began gentrifying, driving up property values, which drove up property taxes, which became unaffordable to the existing residents (who had owned their homes for a long time). Many (actually, most) of these artists had to sell and leave. They often left for other cities. But hey at least the good houses everyone liked all got torn down to be replaced by McMansions for the influx of techbros. Austin still has that slogan, "Keep Austin Weird." It failed. Austin isn't weird anymore. The University of Texas still is responsible for a lot of great stuff about Austin, but huge chunks of the city are just boring these days. There's certainly much less interesting culture happening. It's been airbnbified.
  - mmooss 6mo ago
    > good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives It looks like - it might not be what you mean, but it looks like - you're saying 'good housing' is housing that has "artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives", as opposed to poor working people.
    - JuniperMesos 6mo ago
      Many artists and self-employed creatives are themselves poor working people - making art is work (and so is marketing it to potential customers), and most artists are not lucky or successful enough to become wealthy doing it. But yes, I think there is a sense in which people who are driven to create have some kind of ineffable, cultural capital that people without this drive do not have. So a neighborhood that is full of artists is more interesting, and therefore more valuable to spend time in, than one that isn't.
      - FarmerPotato 6mo ago
        See the photo in the above East Side article. In the old neighborhood, people talked to the photographer because the front yards didn't have privacy fences.
  - terminalshort 6mo ago
    My heart breaks for those poor people whose houses became worth multiple times what they paid for them. A true tragedy. I would be devastated if my house became so valuable that the property taxes were more than I could afford.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      Even if we don't enact Prop-13-like things to keep property taxes reasonable I'm sure we could get a compromise where your property tax remains stable as long as you deed the appreciation over baseline to the city/county. Win/win, right?
  - triceratops 6mo ago
    My interpretation of your comment: The existing residents (artists) made money by selling their appreciated houses. Those who could afford to remain were now in areas with less crime and poverty. The new residents spent a ton of money to live in a place they themselves culturally diminished. We should re-evaluate the winners and losers here.
  - FarmerPotato 6mo ago
    Let's talk about the East Side. https://www.austinmonthly.com/in-photos-what-gentrification-has-done-to-east-austins-rich-culture/ https://www.austinmonthly.com/in-photos-what-gentrification-... I don't think many home owners got a price for their land that allowed them to buy a similar house elsewhere. The world is far from an ideal model where what you get is what you deserve. Note the history of the East Side power plant, which depressed property prices. Ditto, I-35 construction plans. The article says the plant will become a park now. After the new developers locked in purchases.
    - cucumber3732842 6mo ago
      You see this business model everywhere. They buy up all the land around an industrial site, small airport, race track, pig farm that smells bad, etc, etc. Then they and their Karens lobby for rule changes that force that use out or make it non-competitive in the broader market. Then they develop the land. Nothing will fix it until some case goes up to the supreme court and results in some sort of "they were there first the .gov can piss off" doctrine.
- mmooss 6mo ago
  Good for whom? If it's good for the residents, that's great. If it's bad for the residents, who get driven out, but good for some developers and outside rich people - that's what gentrification is.
  - triceratops 6mo ago
    Unless all of the housing is owned by non-residents prior to gentrification, some residents always benefit from their neighborhood going upscale. Either through increased home values, allowing them to sell and improve their lives. Or because it's now a more pleasant area to live in. Even renters in gentrifying areas may profit if housing construction outpaces population growth. Yes, they may have to move, but also the places they move to on their current budget may be nicer - because the people who can afford better have moved too.
    - mmooss 6mo ago
      > increased home values, allowing them to sell and improve their lives That also raises property taxes, making the neighborhood unaffordable and driving them out. > it's now a more pleasant area to live in. For new wealthy residents. People who have spent lifetimes there don't want everything to change and have their communities destroyed. > Yes, they may have to move, but also the places they move to on their current budget may be nicer - because the people who can afford better have moved too. These are theoretical and very general averages. The actual individuals often do not benefit. Being forced to move is not a mere inconvenience to your theory.
      - triceratops 6mo ago
        The alternative: new housing doesn't get built. Existing housing - including the "bad" neighborhood that isn't redeveloped for fear of "gentrification" - gets bid up to the moon. People who can't afford rent end up moving anyway and commuting from very far away, if they're lucky. Or they end up on the streets, if they aren't so lucky. That isn't theoretical. I just described the SF Bay Area.
    - 6mo ago
- 7speter 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - hunterpayne 6mo ago
    Can you guess what the #1 source of wealth increase in the AA community has been over the last 20 years? That's right, grandma's house...guess where she lived.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      This is a huge important part - if gentrification of an AA community occurs in an area where the homes are owned by the residents, it's a great wealth-growing event; generational even. If the gentrification of an AA community occurs where the residents rent then they capture none of it and are forced out.
      - triceratops 6mo ago
        Let's assume communities are rated on a scale of 1 to 10. A "gentrified community" goes from being a 3 to being an 8. Renters are forced to move because they can't afford 8/10-rated-community rents, while existing owners profit handsomely. On this we all agree. Where do the new residents of this now-8/10 community come from? Probably a place that was less than 8/10 - maybe it was 7. So now there's less demand for all the 7s and their rents decrease, allowing residents living in 6s to move there. And so on. Assuming housing construction in the region has kept up with the population, even the renters who were forced out of the previously 3/10 community will likely find new housing in a 4/10 neighborhood at the same price. Their relationships from the old place were probably disrupted by the move (bad) but they also got better housing for the same money (good). The key in this is housing construction must be allowed to increase with population.
        bombcar 6mo ago
        Exactly - when things are happening "naturally" for some value of "not artificially constrained" you find that people move over time and what were the luxury dwellings of 20/30/50 years ago are the new "starter homes" of today. When supply is artificially constrained, the old homes get torn down and replaced with luxurious ones - without increasing dwelling spaces available.

And yet, gentrification.

triceratops 6mo ago

God forbid bad parts of town ever get good.

KPGv2 6mo ago
That's not what gentrification is. Relevant to this article, I lived through the gentrification of large parts of Austin in the early 00s. What happened was that good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives began gentrifying, driving up property values, which drove up property taxes, which became unaffordable to the existing residents (who had owned their homes for a long time). Many (actually, most) of these artists had to sell and leave. They often left for other cities. But hey at least the good houses everyone liked all got torn down to be replaced by McMansions for the influx of techbros. Austin still has that slogan, "Keep Austin Weird." It failed. Austin isn't weird anymore. The University of Texas still is responsible for a lot of great stuff about Austin, but huge chunks of the city are just boring these days. There's certainly much less interesting culture happening. It's been airbnbified.
- mmooss 6mo ago
  > good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives It looks like - it might not be what you mean, but it looks like - you're saying 'good housing' is housing that has "artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives", as opposed to poor working people.
  - JuniperMesos 6mo ago
    Many artists and self-employed creatives are themselves poor working people - making art is work (and so is marketing it to potential customers), and most artists are not lucky or successful enough to become wealthy doing it. But yes, I think there is a sense in which people who are driven to create have some kind of ineffable, cultural capital that people without this drive do not have. So a neighborhood that is full of artists is more interesting, and therefore more valuable to spend time in, than one that isn't.
    - FarmerPotato 6mo ago
      See the photo in the above East Side article. In the old neighborhood, people talked to the photographer because the front yards didn't have privacy fences.
- terminalshort 6mo ago
  My heart breaks for those poor people whose houses became worth multiple times what they paid for them. A true tragedy. I would be devastated if my house became so valuable that the property taxes were more than I could afford.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    Even if we don't enact Prop-13-like things to keep property taxes reasonable I'm sure we could get a compromise where your property tax remains stable as long as you deed the appreciation over baseline to the city/county. Win/win, right?
- triceratops 6mo ago
  My interpretation of your comment: The existing residents (artists) made money by selling their appreciated houses. Those who could afford to remain were now in areas with less crime and poverty. The new residents spent a ton of money to live in a place they themselves culturally diminished. We should re-evaluate the winners and losers here.
- FarmerPotato 6mo ago
  Let's talk about the East Side. https://www.austinmonthly.com/in-photos-what-gentrification-has-done-to-east-austins-rich-culture/ https://www.austinmonthly.com/in-photos-what-gentrification-... I don't think many home owners got a price for their land that allowed them to buy a similar house elsewhere. The world is far from an ideal model where what you get is what you deserve. Note the history of the East Side power plant, which depressed property prices. Ditto, I-35 construction plans. The article says the plant will become a park now. After the new developers locked in purchases.
  - cucumber3732842 6mo ago
    You see this business model everywhere. They buy up all the land around an industrial site, small airport, race track, pig farm that smells bad, etc, etc. Then they and their Karens lobby for rule changes that force that use out or make it non-competitive in the broader market. Then they develop the land. Nothing will fix it until some case goes up to the supreme court and results in some sort of "they were there first the .gov can piss off" doctrine.
mmooss 6mo ago
Good for whom? If it's good for the residents, that's great. If it's bad for the residents, who get driven out, but good for some developers and outside rich people - that's what gentrification is.
- triceratops 6mo ago
  Unless all of the housing is owned by non-residents prior to gentrification, some residents always benefit from their neighborhood going upscale. Either through increased home values, allowing them to sell and improve their lives. Or because it's now a more pleasant area to live in. Even renters in gentrifying areas may profit if housing construction outpaces population growth. Yes, they may have to move, but also the places they move to on their current budget may be nicer - because the people who can afford better have moved too.
  - mmooss 6mo ago
    > increased home values, allowing them to sell and improve their lives That also raises property taxes, making the neighborhood unaffordable and driving them out. > it's now a more pleasant area to live in. For new wealthy residents. People who have spent lifetimes there don't want everything to change and have their communities destroyed. > Yes, they may have to move, but also the places they move to on their current budget may be nicer - because the people who can afford better have moved too. These are theoretical and very general averages. The actual individuals often do not benefit. Being forced to move is not a mere inconvenience to your theory.
    - triceratops 6mo ago
      The alternative: new housing doesn't get built. Existing housing - including the "bad" neighborhood that isn't redeveloped for fear of "gentrification" - gets bid up to the moon. People who can't afford rent end up moving anyway and commuting from very far away, if they're lucky. Or they end up on the streets, if they aren't so lucky. That isn't theoretical. I just described the SF Bay Area.
  - 6mo ago
7speter 6mo ago
[flagged]
- hunterpayne 6mo ago
  Can you guess what the #1 source of wealth increase in the AA community has been over the last 20 years? That's right, grandma's house...guess where she lived.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    This is a huge important part - if gentrification of an AA community occurs in an area where the homes are owned by the residents, it's a great wealth-growing event; generational even. If the gentrification of an AA community occurs where the residents rent then they capture none of it and are forced out.
    - triceratops 6mo ago
      Let's assume communities are rated on a scale of 1 to 10. A "gentrified community" goes from being a 3 to being an 8. Renters are forced to move because they can't afford 8/10-rated-community rents, while existing owners profit handsomely. On this we all agree. Where do the new residents of this now-8/10 community come from? Probably a place that was less than 8/10 - maybe it was 7. So now there's less demand for all the 7s and their rents decrease, allowing residents living in 6s to move there. And so on. Assuming housing construction in the region has kept up with the population, even the renters who were forced out of the previously 3/10 community will likely find new housing in a 4/10 neighborhood at the same price. Their relationships from the old place were probably disrupted by the move (bad) but they also got better housing for the same money (good). The key in this is housing construction must be allowed to increase with population.
      - bombcar 6mo ago
        Exactly - when things are happening "naturally" for some value of "not artificially constrained" you find that people move over time and what were the luxury dwellings of 20/30/50 years ago are the new "starter homes" of today. When supply is artificially constrained, the old homes get torn down and replaced with luxurious ones - without increasing dwelling spaces available.