Which is why I consider my route ‘addition by subtraction’
I think it’s also really important to note that the mechanisms are secondary! The whole design was very specifically (as mentioned to @anon50609448 ) to create a civil, forward moving society where everybody has every opportunity. Exploiting existing laws and systems is just a practical offshoot of that because I’m not waiting for some huge enlightenment to happen.
I think intent is important and (just like the discussion on laws @Kimmo’s thread ) if you don’t have the intent on top with the other components progressively more subservient then you’re creating a soulless undefined monster. I don’t think it’s a ‘right wing vs. left wing’ thing though since this is explicitly only for people who want to join and honestly if there’s one other thing we have in common it’s that they’re partway down the same path.
Except I don’t think it’s generally poor people getting richer, it tends to be new people moving into a neighborhood that is starting to be considered hip, which drives up the cost of living, and drives out poorer residents. That’s the problem and that is precisely what’s going on in many cities. Do you really think that the working class people in cities aren’t having to leave their homes to find more affordable housing when people with more means move into their neighborhoods and start fixing up houses, which they often just resell?
Otherwise, I don’t disagree with much of what you’re saying.
We don’t need to do 10 back and forths on the nature of fascism in the 20’s versus now either but saying fascists are progressive is going to get the same kind of reaction as saying the Nazis were socialists.
It depends on your definition of “progressive”, of course, but the Nazis certainly weren’t conservative! They were trying to completely remake the world! You may disagree with their definition of “progress”, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t trying to implement what they would consider progress!
It’s a semantic disagreement, but if “progressive” means “in favor of (some form of) progress”, then Nazis qualify. If that gives you badfeels then just tell me what definition of “progressive” you’d prefer I use.
That’s possible, and in some sense inevitable – even if poor residents of a neighborhood start to get richer, the increase in wealth won’t be uniform and the less fortunate among the residents may very well get priced out.
But let’s think this through temporally. We have a poor neighborhood that is not hip (that is part of why it is poor). Then it suddenly becomes hip. Then rich people move in and price out the former residents. I think this narrative is missing a step: how did the neighborhood suddenly become “hip”? What does that even mean? Is it just completely random like the roll of a die? I doubt it. I think which neighborhoods become “hip” reflects some economic reality, and that the economic reality that is reflected is that the neighborhood in question is becoming wealthier.
For example, a neighborhood might become “hip” if interesting new restaurants open there. But those restaurants won’t open there without a market – presumably more people in the neighborhood are able to eat out. Or at the least, the restaurant provides more jobs which lowers unemployment and increases wages.
In short, I think it’s rather silly to suppose that wealthy people randomly decide to move into poor neighborhoods for no apparent reason. If you have any empirical evidence that such a thing happens, I’ll happily consider it.
Well, I think the real answer to this is usually “it was adjacent to a wealthy area that ran out of room.” Someone wants to open a new restaurant that caters to wealthier people. Now rich block people start going to poor block restaurant and poor block people have a commercial space used up by a place that isn’t in their price range. Or someone who wanted to live within a 5 minute walk of their work realizes that they are going to have to settle for a 7 minute walk. There’s just a creep of richer neighborhoods.
I’m pretty sure in Toronto you could make a decent living by moving two blocks west on Dundas every three or four years. The wealthy just spreads that way.
Restaurants provide jobs, which decreases unemployment, which increases wages. And since it is in the poor neighborhood, locals who get a job there get to save themselves transit costs.
Edit: I think it also strains credulity to imagine 8 or 9 restaurants all springing up in a lower class neighborhood where no one can afford them. Usually restaurants that are targeting the same demographics don’t start up right next to each other for obvious reasons.
New businesses opening up in poor neighborhoods are good for the people who live in the neighborhood. Not to mention that the riches visiting the neighborhood might want to buy cigarettes, candy, magazines, etc. This creates entrepreneurial opportunities for the local residents.
New restaurants also mean that local distributors of tableware, foodstuffs, and myriad other good have more business – and can provide more jobs, lowering unemployment and increasing wages.
I have to ask: how do you think that poor people can actually become less poor? Or do you think it is impossible for poor people to become less poor? Or do you think it is undesirable that poor people become less poor?
Edit: Also, the claim has been made (but not supported) that wealthy neighborhoods maintain their identity over LOOOOOONG stretches of time (>100 years). That’s not true of poor neighborhoods? But then how are there any poor neighborhoods at all? If rich neighborhoods stay rich, AND if rich neighborhoods expand into poor neighborhoods, shouldn’t all cities evolve in the direction of being dominated by rich neighborhoods? If we look at actual cities in the real world, is that something that we see?
Another edit: You should look into the history of Boston’s North End.
I take it that you’ve never lived in a gentrifying neighborhood. I have for the last 10 years.
I got my place in Oakland in 2006. The neighborhood was mixed race and class but largely poor and black (it was an old redlined neighborhood for decades). We bought here because we wanted to live in city, not in the 'burbs, and we couldn’t afford to buy into Berkeley or a more affluent urban area (like San Francisco). We’re literally a block from the Berkeley border but there is a mile plus transition zone north of us before you get into what people think of as traditional Berkeley.
When I moved here, there was a McDonald’s and a really bad tacqueria. A few years after I moved in, I noticed more white folks in the neighborhood. The main drag a block away from my house, which had 50% empty seeming storefronts, had a new cafe/coffee shop two blocks away next to some condos that had been finished the year before. Hell, the city even put in a street light on its corner so you could get across the busy arterial to it. That same year, two more cafes opened within four blocks in two directions. Mostly filled with younger white folks during the day (but not entirely).
A couple of years after that, a LOT more white folks (hipsters and professionals) are clearly in the neighborhood. Houses are being bought and sold much more quickly for a bunch more money than before (this is as we’re exiting the recession’s worst). One cafe opens up a burger place as a separate business next to it. A beer garden and restaurant opens five blocks in another direction, trends continue.
Now, for the last year or two, I’ve noticed my neighborhood is predominantly white now. There is still a large number of working class black folks but probably not more than the overall average for Oakland, which is around 30% black. I see joggers all the time (which you never saw 7-10 years ago), groups of whites riding bikes together, etc.
The tl;dr answer is that people who want to live in an urban environment will go where they can afford. Generally, artists (and Burning Man types around here) will lead the gentrification and then a few more well to do families. None of these are the “rich” people that you keep mentioning. Middle and Upper middle class following the artists, mutants and freaks. Those folks can afford to buy houses, not just rent old storefronts or shitty beat up apartments that are quite common in poor neighborhoods (hello, decades of slumlords). As they show up with their money, some of them open businesses (most of the businesses are owned by locals here but they’re locals with money) or others come in because there is money to be made. Keep repeating this: people move in because they can afford, businesses show up to make money off of these more monied classes. After a decade or two, the poor people are gone. They can’t afford to rent. The ones left are either in rent control or own their houses (often inherited) and the neighborhood is now gentrified.
We’re in the middle of that now for my neighorhood. Got a few more restaurants and a gym planned for 2016 now. The only reason working class locals get jobs in the local restaurants and such is because they’re the only ones willing to work for minimum wage. Otherwise, people seem to hire people that look like them (class or race).
What happens is that rents go up, and then real estate taxes go up. Meanwhile, the little local mom-&-pop stores are sold to the shiny new hip stores, so there’s no inexpensive local shopping anymore. Prices go up in the local bars. There’s no place on the street to park your car when you drive home exhausted from working in a factory all day. It takes a couple of years, but they goes by very quickly as the old residents scramble to find someplace else as affordable as their old neighborhood used to be.
The locals don’t switch their jobs to become sales clerks at Urban Outfitters and dog boutiques. That’s not how gentrification works, for the people who used to live there before it was cool.
In California, real estate taxes only go up when property changes hands except by a tiny amount (thanks, Prop 13!). You have people in million dollar houses paying taxes on a $70,000 house.
Rents don’t go up as quickly because San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, for example, all have rent and eviction control. You can’t throw people out of most places just because you don’t want to rent to them anymore. They stay until they decide to leave.
In Berkeley, for example, rents go up about 1.5 to 3% a year. The rent control board of the city government tells landlords how much they are allowed to raise rents. The only exception is when a new tenant rents a place, rent can be set to market rates. So, lots of people find a decent (or a shitty, for that matter) place and don’t move. I have a lot of friends who can’t move because their $1,000 a month apartment is actually a $2,000 apartment now as a new rental so they’ll never find a better (or affordable) deal if they move. Why you hear controversy around evictions in San Francisco is that there is a loophole in the laws that if you “go out of business” as a landlord, to sell a building, for example, you can evict the tenants because you aren’t renting anymore.
I mean, have you read Hannah Arendt on fascism? Or, like any books on the history of Nazi Germany itself? They were transformative, sure, but the Nazis were looking back to an imagined ideal of the past. The Italian regime (even with their connections to the futurists) and the Spanish regime even more so. I sincerely doubt actual progressives of the day would see it that way, even if you get progressives (especially in the American South) who played off race. They still sought to implement progressive, modern-thinking policies which employed science as a means of lifting people out of poverty and did so through democratic politics. The fascists movement reacted to that, more than anything else.
Which includes new people moving in and raising the cost of living for the older inhabitants, who often can no longer afford to live there. The wealthy are usually following the less well off hip younger folks or the gay community (such is the case with in the former, the East Atlanta village, which is gentrifying now and mid-town ATL for the latter. From the 70s or so, Mid-town has become home to the gay community, who moved in for the cheap rents. By the 80s and 90s, younger, often straighter kids followed, also attracted by cheap rents. Then, the Olympics happened which had the effect of making the city more on the map. Young professionals, who saw themselves as hip also wanted to move into mid-town, because it had spaces for not only living, but also for opening small, hip businesses near already, popular established businesses (Greens liquor store, Friends Bar, and of course, Clermont Lounge, Manuel’s Tavern, videodrome - getting into Little 5 Points, you have places like Criminal Records, Wax-n-Facts, Junkman’s, Crystal Blue, Stefons, not to mention variety playhouse, Horizon theater, little 5 community center, WRFG, etc, etc). By the 2000s, developers, working with the mayors office, start to notice how popular the area has become (not to mention that Hollywood and the tech industry, an industry full of people who see themselves as being on the cutting edge and totally hip - is starting to be around much more, due to tax breaks the legislator pushed through). Those who build luxury housing start to build condos and higher priced apartments for the new immigrants who see themselves as urban sophisticates and they demand nice housing adjacent to dive bars. But the problem is that the people who OWN the properties want to get as much out of those properties as they can, so they jack up the leases on the tenants, often pricing them out of the market. Soon, people no longer want to shop at the murder Kroger, they want to go to a nice place with organic goods (the Dekalb Farmers market is not close enough, despite having great organics and being much cheaper in price). Whole Foods and the Home Depot come in as the anchors for a new strip mall, with lots of amenities for young professionals, who are now looking to start families and not feel as if they are no longer cool. They want safe neighborhoods, Whole Foods, and Friends and Clermont nearby. They want to have their hipster cake and eat it too. Pretty soon, everyone decides that the old Sears building, which was for a while City hall east, is getting to be a hulking eyesore… and hey, who doesn’t like a mall. Plus, it’s right next to the beltline, which people are walking on and enjoying. But it’s also right next to the murder kroger, which just had another murder, but that also recently got a plan for updating, so FINALLY MAYBE, we can rename it the beltline Kroger and ignore the history of the place, if we tear it down and rebuild. Oh, and that Massquerade place, it’s kind of an eyesore, but people like it. However, PRIME FUCKING REAL ESTATE!!! It’s on the backside of the new mall, Ponce City Market.
I guarantee you that the people living in the those condos and apartments on Ponce and North Ave. are not the same inhabitants that lived there before, because they just can’t afford 2 grand in rent or a mortgage note for half a mill to get those prime city views.
Dude, I usually agree with you on many things, and you’re a smart cookie, but having seen how this plays out in real time over the past couple of decades, the cost of living inside the perimeter is far outstripping the ability of working class Atlantans to pay. The same people who live in those places now are not the same ones that lived there in the 90s. It’s just not. It’s still playing out, but pretty soon, the character of the city is going to be completely transformed. It will be more diverse than other large cities, because it’s still Atlanta, but it will be whiter and richer than before.
You are talking theory. I’m talking about my experience living in a neighborhood where it started with one hip restaurant that seemed out of place (and that was staffed mostly by university students who didn’t live in the area). It worked just the way @enso described it. You can go there now and see it mostly isn’t the same people living there because now it is predominantly white and it wasn’t before. You asked how it happened, I described a mechanism by which it happens. If your question was rhetorical because you already felt you knew the answer then I apologize for intruding.
Well that escalated quickly. But I think this question could be turned on its head. If the poor are getting richer, where are all the new poor people coming from? Is a new addition to the middle class is more likely the grown child of a middle class family or a person who has found an opportunity to move from one quintile to the next? How much social mobility do we have?
There will always been people who are better off and people who are worse off. There isn’t going to be a state where there are no people in the bottom quintile. So if you ask how do the poor get richer, the answer has to be that the poor get richer mostly because of social changes that don’t allow dismal poverty to exist. If gentrification was creating opportunities for the people in the bottom quintile, then we should be a correlation between gentrification and shrinking wealth inequality as the bottom quintile becomes wealthier. If that correlation does exist, then I can only imagine how bad the income inequality situation would be without gentrification.
Actually cities dominated by rich neighborhood would support your narrative - as rich neighborhood expand poorer people become richer so there are more richer people and fewer poorer people. Instead what we see is that rich neighborhoods grow but so do cities, and the poorer neighborhoods get pushed further and further out.
But the basic narrative sounds correct. What do you think the acreage of the wealthy area of Toronto, New York, LA or Chicago was 100 years ago? What is it now? Is the part of the city where the richest people lived 100 years ago still inhabited by wealthy people, or has it been abandoned to the poor?
