To be fair, we still have a ton of great indie coffee shops, including two that sell alcohol along with coffee! So it’s not all bad. But with the appearance of Ponce City Market, it’s only a matter of time before we see the backside of Criminal Records and the Clermont Lounge… and then all the hipsters will be pissed off, but hey, you stop calling the murder Kroger the murder Kroger, then that’s what you get…
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So funny. I have always liked parodies in this pseudo-biblical prose.
What do you call the consumer-landscape and culture-changing process when places not quite as up-scale as Whole Foods and artisanal cheese shops move in to an area? Places like Bass Pro Shops, Olive Garden, and Target? I guess that’s just mallification? That’s what is happening in Anchorage. I wouldn’t call it gentrification. The city calls it revitalization, but it’s way more numbing to me than vitalizing.
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Nneeeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiigghhhhhh!
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Let’s see… Old diner, machine shop, discount grocery store, srtrip club, toyato dealship, high school, excellent Thai, couple of friendly gastropubs (local), pizza, and some of the most authentic Chinese I’ve ever had.
I dont mind a touch of gentrification, but if I hear HOA I will riot.
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Out of curiosity, can anyone point to any examples of good public policy preventing gentrification? I hear lots of complaining, some of it justified, but I don’t see any examples of how to prevent it in any kind of long term and meaningful way.
urban growth bounderies, buildinging hight limit, green space requirements, things like that. but if someone somehow made Falling Waters their private home, they could probably put a star bucks in it.
Totally off-topic but since you appreciate this sort of thing…
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Yeah, but those indie shops are often powerful engines for gentrification, too. Octane comes to mind, which I assume you’re thinking of re: alcohol and coffee. There’s also Taproom and a few others that the gentry just love. Yuppies come in all kinds of flavors, but there are at least two that come to mind–the indie localvore trendheads, and the ones who sneer at anything that isn’t a well-known franchise surrounded by wide expanses of concrete. When white suburbans are done re-taking the city in a decade or two, there will still be plenty of small businesses and indie shops (plenty along the Beltline, I’m sure), but they will just have a wealthier, whiter consumer base.
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I don’t know if that’s true, though. Criminal is just hanging on still, from what I understand from those in the know. And as the price of commercial real estate continues to climb, few indies will be able to afford their rents and chains, even hip chains like Trader Joes or whatever, drive up the rents. I don’t know if you heard this on the radio a couple of weeks ago, but rents for apartments are going way up. The majority of new builds (along Ponce, Moreland, North Ave., among other places) are higher end condos that those indie localvore types aren’t able to afford. Because they don’t make as much as your traditional yuppie working in a corporate office.
It’s also a question of what kind of small businesses. If white yuppies are the only ones who can afford to run an intown business, what’s that going to be like along the beltline.
I dunno. I just don’t want them to tear down the Masquerade! I mean is Manuel’s next?
In general, local governments only care about their tax base, not their voter base. So you’re typically not going to see public policy that opposes gentrification, since it’s good for the city’s bottom line, even if it isn’t good for the overwhelming majority of its residents.
In Atlanta, for example, the Public Schools Board gave, when asked, something like $124M to fund a privately owned development project known as the Beltline, with the understanding that one day, the increased property values and resulting increase in taxes would basically pay the school system back. Their constituents are the wealthy, not the majority of people who actually live in their voting districts, so they’re basically implementing policy for lately arrived gentrifiers and the ones who haven’t arrived yet.
The Beltline is the biggest economic development project in the region and has billions of dollars behind it. It’s basically a ring of parks, expensive shops, and luxury housing that circles the heart of the city. (The oft-promised affordable housing hasn’t been rebuilt yet, over a decade into the project.) Back when it was a fledgling idea, there were campaigns to raise awareness about it and to stop pouring public dollars into it, but hardly anybody listened and most people believed the nonsense about “revitalizing” the city, which really just means making it unaffordable for the people who live here today so that rich people can move in tomorrow.
I think that in order to prevent gentrification in a long-term and meaningful way, there needs to be widespread, organized awareness of and resistance to it. When public policy fails (and it will), then it will be on the people to demonstrate, agitate, and generally make it impossible for developers to carry out their plans. But since mass social movements in the US and most other developed countries are relatively weak right now, and have been for decades, there is little that anybody can do to stop the tide of gentrification. It’s a worldwide phenomenon right now, and I don’t think it will stop until it has run its course, or until some other factor (like the looming student debt crisis) brings on a major financial disaster.
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Actually all of those things are increasing the pace of gentrification in DC by constraining the housing supply and driving developers to only build for the highest end. People have been up in arms about developers taking single-family row houses and dividing them into two $600,000 “gentrifier” condos by adding a top floor, so we adopted a law restricting the addition of top floors. Now builders take single-family row houses and upgrade them with the highest end finishes and market them at $1.1M to make the same profit.
Likewise in Manhattan it is unbelievably difficult to work through the regulations, so anyone who is able to do so will only build housing for the absolute top end of the market.
Some of the poor are somewhat protected because there are politicians who view them as constituents and demand “affordable housing” / maintain public housing blocks. The people that don’t get helped, and are squeezed out, are the middle class.
I think record stores and bookstores are just very difficult to run in today’s economy; other indie-style business models might succeed where they fail, like the boutique clothing stores in L5P. Bound to Be Read Books in East Atlanta closed recently after about 14 years in business (albeit while operating at a slight loss). I think they were the last small bookshop besides Charis and A Cappella. There might be one or two other hangers-on, who knows.
I’m definitely not able to afford living in Atlanta anymore, and I suppose I fall in the millenial anarcha-hipster category myself. I started out in Midtown and have been slowly moving every few years further outside of the city. Most of my friends are in the same boat, but they’ve adapted by moving in with one another. Hence the odd punk house here and there in expensive neighborhoods like Kirkwood and Edgewood. When people can’t afford apartments, they just move into houses with each other. I know architects and coders who make good money but still need roommates. That’s how people are going to cling to city life when it gets to be exorbitant. On the positive side, it’s still pretty affordable to live in the southwest and southeast extremes of the city, so long as you don’t have nice things for the neighborhood junkie / naughty kids to steal while you’re at work.
As for Manuel’s, they’ve been going down the tube for 10 years now and they’re going to build some kind of housing complex right on top of it (I’ve heard they’re going to leave the original building intact instead of ruining it like they did West Egg Cafe on the other side of town). I think it started after Manuel died. They waited a few years, stopped making all their food from scratch, started asking for ID’s and hassling people when they wanted to split their tickets, their wait staff that seemed to have been there forever was replaced, etc. I don’t even bother going anymore, it just doesn’t feel the same to me, but I’m not that diehard about Manuel’s. I used to be when I lived above Videodrome. (Hey, there’s an indie model that I bet will be there forever and ever!)
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But I think rather than just throwing our hands up about the institutions that have been good for the city (as happened with WRAS), maybe we should push back against this sort of gentrification that allows developers to build high price condos right on top of Manuels and on the grave of the Masquerade, and instead forces the city to push for price controls so poorer residents don’t get pushed out. I think the problem with indie book/record shops are more about the prices of leases/rent, which a city CAN decide to control for. There really isn’t anything stopping the city and county governments from creating regulations around rent pricing, other than free market ideology. I think it comes down to what kind of city do we want to live in.
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You’re absolutely right, but I just don’t have any hope for Atlanta. We live in a very conservative state, and now reverse white flight is destroying the traditional left-wing strongholds in the city that have typically produced more organized resistance. I poured my heart and soul into organizing against shitty things like the Beltline for several years, only to see it all kind of disappear into the void. A friend of mine in his '70’s, pretty much the only elder we’ve had around, says the same thing about his experiences. When we have no organized resistance prepared to take on fights like saving WRAS, it’s extremely hard to start from scratch in time to actually win the battle, not to mention the fact that the student body at GSU has changed dramatically in the last 10 years; they’ve pretty much gentrified the campus by ramping up prices, getting the football team, building Greek and student housing, etc.
Tactically I think that it makes the most sense to pick battles that can be won. In my experience those have been centered around solidarity unionism. In Atlanta a lot of that has been modeled after SeaSol, the Seattle Solidarity Network. That’s how the Pittman house in the Fourth Ward was saved (only to be lost again a few years later), and also the much lesser known battle for the Calhoun house in Kirkwood (which was bought back from the bank for $1). Also when the Atlanta Solidarity Network was still active there were several successful battles centered around workers who weren’t getting paid by their bosses. This is very small-time stuff, but given the right political trajectory and strategy it can be funneled into sustaining larger, lasting structures based on organizing the neighborhoods. I think that’s what it takes, but I just haven’t experienced that myself. The groups that do stick around are pretty generic established Left groups like Occupy Our Homes Atlanta, which I don’t think is very effective at mobilizing people outside a very limited group.
That’s part of the tactical brilliance of gentrification. Besides actually generating billions of dollars for developers and local governments, it pretty much obliterates social movements by putting the participants in a perpetual state of diaspora, leaving them with no neighborhoods to organize around.
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Starbuckses (?) in my 'hood are applying for liquor licenses! I anticipate a mediocre experience in line with their other offerings.
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Who want to buy Half Foods anyway?
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My nearest one in Seattle serves booze. Don’t really see the appeal:
Up in Capitol Hill they also had a couple of Stealth Starbucks. I think one rebranded back to a normal Starbucks, though.
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Outhipstering the hipsters.
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Around here, gentrification has two components: housing stock, and retail. It’s possible to have one without the other. (Hint: even when the housing stock improves, if it’s a black neighborhood the hipster retail doesn’t follow.)
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