I’ve heard the punk and hippie types referred to as first-wave gentrifiers. But like you said, at first it’s usually just people following cheap rents. That’s what all renters have to do when they can no longer afford to live in an area, so as it gets more expensive they spread around. I think the later waves of white gentrifiers come in because they feel more comfortable around other white people.
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How about non-white gentrifiers? Or is that not A Thing?
Google is failing me, but there was an article in Toronto a couple years back saying that it was artists, then art galleries, then everyone else. I’m not sure the “punks” are part of it anymore… probably not since the 90s… 
But lemme tell you, there are TWO new art galleries on my street and I am CHUFFED!
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One obvious solution to the art problem is to not offer your art for sale. If what you have cannot be commodified, then it cannot be taken from you. If you have trouble “making ends meet”, then start a local government and institute collective property. That works.
For those who might fuss that this is unrealistic - I have entertained the same objections by hundreds of artists who’s preferred strategies did succeed in marginalizing them from their own (former) neighborhoods. But, hey, that many people can’t be wrong, yes? Surely their success was proof of its practicality…
As the saying goes: Wish in one hand, and spit in the other.
I think it can be now. I do want to point out that in Kevin Kruse’s book on white flight in Atlanta, he points out how when African Americans began to buy into white working class neighborhoods, property values spiked at first, in part because the people buying from the white working class were on the whole more affluent - this is the black, activist middle class moving into white working class neighborhoods. But as more white residents left, property values nose-dived in these neighborhoods as they became blacker. Now there is a reversal in that. While it’s not entirely white, as black middle class people can also buy into these neighborhoods, the residents being displaced are disproportionately black, and the new residents are disproportionately white. It is a very racialized thing, historically speaking and is well documented in many books on white flight in the wake of civil rights.
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Non-white gentrifiers are of course part of the dynamics of gentrification, but not as prominent of a driving force for this context. There was an interesting article from the perspective of a black gentrifier in Harlem written a few months back, and there are many others like it to show that it’s a common enough phenomenon. I remember campaigning against gentrification development projects in Atlanta and met some isolated resistance from black gentrifiers, although overwhelmingly the people in support of the BeltLine are white. In a related vein, there are rural poor white communities that get gentrified; mountain communities for example can be a common target for developers looking for tourist and vacation projects.
However, overwhelmingly, gentrification is a process happening in our cities, which have housed concentrations of black and brown populations for a long time, going back to the roots of modern urbanization. With white flight following integration in the U.S., as @anon61221983 points out, the demographic makeup of cities was even more pronounced. Nowadays, with so-called reverse white flight, the dynamic is overwhelmingly of white suburbanites moving into the city. There are other changes happening, but reverse white flight is the main one, particularly regarding successive waves of gentrifiers. Given that different races and ethnicities often tend to live in the same general area, when you get reverse white flight you get a snowball effect of white people moving in (excuse the pun). Plus there’s the whole racism thing, what with white people often being uncomfortable or scared around people of color.
Part of it is also just a reflection of race and class realities. Working-class people of color live somewhere, making it affordable to live in with low property values. Working-class whites, usually slightly better off than their neighbors, one day move in for the cheap property (incidentally, this is becoming a big phenomenon about a generation or two after white flight). This is often a lot of punks and hippies. Then a group slightly better off than them moves in, raises the property values even more by building more expensive structures or renovating old ones, and so on. And the further you go up the socioeconomic ladder, the more white people you find, so as the area gets more exclusive it will tend to house more white people, increasingly reflecting the goals and values of the new gentrifiers.
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I wouldn’t call that the root. Punks and artists don’t have much choice, having been priced out of their erstwhile lower-income or light industrial neighborhoods. Unlike the yuppies who displace them, they don’t really have the option of buying a house in the suburbs. The root of gentrification is people who do have that option and instead decide that 20’ ceilings sound really nice and isn’t that just the most charming little bookstore and yes it’s edgy but not so rough we can’t invite people over for wine & cheese.
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I still wonder how ethnicity fits into this. I know that immigrants and drifting populations often cluster together. But they seem to often not really bring their own economic system with them. So are black families who are dollar-fueled, employed, and Euro-nuclear really bringing black gentrification, if they are appropriating/assimilating other lifestyles? To me, the concept of “gentrification” carries with it assumptions of a Eurocentric/colonial outlook. How and why be on any sort of “socioeconomic ladder” if you use a different sort of economics? Like I joked about in that Bernie topic, what if you start a kibbutz instead? The ladder implies a hierarchy, which can be difficult to reconcile if it doesn’t apply to one’s way of life because of their ethnicity, subculture, etc.
This factors into why I have often enjoyed and advocated homelessness/nomadism. It works against the dynamic of where one can “afford” to live. And arguably provides far greater mobility than any mortgage possibly can. Not to mention more efficient use of resources.
So, why not black gentrification which is actually properly African? Developing communities on tribal, extended-family model more like African culture?
Hasn’t that typically been referred to as “ghetto-isation”? Because racism?
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Like anything else, it depends upon who you ask!
As I understand it, the term “ghetto” refers only to containment, not independence. Most so-called ghettos in my experience still use the same basic frameworks of ownership and commerce as colonial society, but augmented with other niches.
Well, a single word is never adequate for trying to describe causal relationships. Again, this tactic relies upon leaving most things implicit. If you trust that sort of thing.
If “ghetto” is a racist term, it would traditionally refer to Jewish communities. Meaning that a group are forced to live there. This is not usually directly necessary, since new immigrant generations often prefer to live together. But the economics can certainly form an indirect form of coercion and containment.
I suggest reading:
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Uhm, exactly, and it expanded from there to mean the marginalized areas that minorities were pushed into, especially Black Americans. In most American cities, this was facilitated through red lining as well as outright harassment.
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There’s that foreign dictionary again…
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I time hat at you sir. You have more patience than I.
No, I’ve given up for at least a few months.
We had a multi-month break before too so I think we tend to cluster.
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According to songwriter Mac Davis, “In the Ghetto” is about the ghetto where his black childhood friend lived.
Originally, the term, “ghetto,” seems to have been used to describe the area(s) of the city to which Jews were restricted. So, I think @popobawa4u’s point is still fair.
Made sense to me. Brine = pickling of random foods, as a symbol the whole minimalist-artisanal-faux-rustic-superfluous-aspirational-lifestyle-status-objects-for-rich-young-people movement, as embodied by the infamous $300 axe and $75 maple syrup guys (you just know they’re guys).
I think that’s it, at least. Theology is hard work.
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Gold star for you. There is nothing in what you wrote for me to trollback. I often think of the internet as a place for figurative brine. Brine, as in interjecting trollish, annoying, snarky, “salty” stuff into other people’s serious conversations, in order to derail and draw attention to oneself. I do it all the time. There is a code we Briners Brineys live by:
If not by counter-example, then by strawman.
If not by strawman, then by diversion.
If not by diversion, then by non-sequitur.
If not by non-sequitur, then by concern-trolling.
If not by concern-trolling, then by rules lawyering.
If not by rules lawyering, then by animated gif.
Sometimes we Briners Brineys skip directly to the end, like so:
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