Gentrification

[Alexander II]

Do you think gentrification is a net positive or negative thing?

 

[Azaghul]

Mostly negative, but it's complicated, depending on how you define gentrification.

In many cases it's historically marginalized communities being displaced by rising housing prices.  This is often brought about by NIMBYism when generally wealthier folks fight against density in cities and don't allow supply to meet demand, driving up housing prices and pushing the middle class into formally working class areas.  That's at least what is happening in Austni.

Pro-tip: In city council elections, the candidate most focused on "preserving neighborhoods" is probably a NIMBY and someone you shouldn't vote for.

 

[Woot]

The same people who complain about gentrification will often complain about white flight when it suits them. 

The economy changes all the time. It's usually a net positive, but some people are always on the losing end. They stuff they have is suddenly worth less, or the stuff they want is suddenly worth more. If we caved into all complaints, the economy would grind to a halt. I can accept some kind of temporary help to the people on the losing end, but not some permanent, horrendously inefficient protectionism. That's basically what I think on this issue and a million more like it.

 

[Rin]

My theory is that all great cities have an economic focus. NYC has finance and acting. Boston attracts academics. LA attracts film stars. SF attracts startups. Others centered on mining, oil, manufacturing, shipping, transportation, fishing, governing, cars, crackers, bread, rice.

If you're doing a job that revolves around the economic focus, you'll have a good time. If you do something that that makes use of side effects, e.g. BMW repair shops in LA or cheap restaurants targeting actors who can't find gigs, you'll also have a good time.

If you're doing a specialist job unrelated to the focus, like engineering, manufacturing, or finance in LA, you'll likely be negatively affected.

 

[Memph]

My theory is that all great cities have an economic focus. NYC has finance and acting. Boston attracts academics. LA attracts film stars. SF attracts startups. Others centered on mining, oil, manufacturing, shipping, transportation, fishing, governing, cars, crackers, bread, rice.

If you're doing a job that revolves around the economic focus, you'll have a good time. If you do something that that makes use of side effects, e.g. BMW repair shops in LA or cheap restaurants targeting actors who can't find gigs, you'll also have a good time.

If you're doing a specialist job unrelated to the focus, like engineering, manufacturing, or finance in LA, you'll likely be negatively affected.

IMO it's more about being poor sucks. There will still be a need for engineers in LA and they'll still do ok.

I mean I guess you have somewhat of a point, like lets say that 5% of the population wants to be engineers and goes to study engineering, but in some cities, there's only a need for 3% of the population to be engineers (say LA) and in other cities it's 7% (say Houston). In that case it's probably better to be in Houston. But the US population is pretty mobile, so a lot of the wanna-be engineers that grew up in LA will have moved to Houston, so the imbalance in supply of engineers won't be that bad. Plus not everyone has strong opinions on what they want to be when they grow up and just go for the career that has the best opportunities, which helps with that imbalance. So I don't think being an engineer in LA would be too bad.

There's other factors too. Some cities might be seen as a better place to live due to climate, crime, culture, geography etc and living there will be more expensive relative to what the economy is like ex San Diego.

Mostly negative, but it's complicated, depending on how you define gentrification.

In many cases it's historically marginalized communities being displaced by rising housing prices.  This is often brought about by NIMBYism when generally wealthier folks fight against density in cities and don't allow supply to meet demand, driving up housing prices and pushing the middle class into formally working class areas.  That's at least what is happening in Austni.

Pro-tip: In city council elections, the candidate most focused on "preserving neighborhoods" is probably a NIMBY and someone you shouldn't vote for.

There was a point made on other websites that displacement by rising housing prices in gentrifying cities is often less than loss of low income populations due to abandonment in cities experiencing decline.

I definitely agree that allowing more new housing to be built can limit displacement caused by rising housing prices in areas experiencing gentrification though. Doesn't mean you should let all of the historic buildings get destroyed but pretty much every city has plenty of buildings that aren't that historic but can't get redeveloped due to NIMBYs.

 

[Azaghul]

There was a point made on other websites that displacement by rising housing prices in gentrifying cities is often less than loss of low income populations due to abandonment in cities experiencing decline.

I definitely agree that allowing more new housing to be built can limit displacement caused by rising housing prices in areas experiencing gentrification though. Doesn't mean you should let all of the historic buildings get destroyed but pretty much every city has plenty of buildings that aren't that historic but can't get redeveloped due to NIMBYs.

I live in Austin, Texas which is definitely facing displacement from gentrification and not abandonment.

I agree about historic buildings but it should be limited.  For example in Austin, "historic" buildings only have to be 50 years old and they do things like label a house historic because the current mayor grew up in it.  NIMBY's often abuse it because they just don't want it to change.

 

[Memph]

I've lived in 3 different parts of Ontario that are in 3 different situation. Currently in Thunder Bay, which is experiencing minimal gentrification, and it does have quite a lot of run down buildings in the core and even a few abandoned ones (still not nearly as bad as the Rust Belt though) so most residents would probably welcome gentrification. Before that it was Kitchener-Waterloo which was experiencing a bit of gentrification after a period of stagnation so there's probably mixed feelings about whether there should be more or less gentrification. And before that was when I was living with my parents in the Toronto area where gentrification was making core areas of the city unaffordable to not just the working class but even much of the middle class.

As for what's considered historic, I think it should depend on the city. Ex these buildings in Queens:

https://www.google.ca/maps/@40.7448322,-73.9114526,3a,75y,10.63h,94.66t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1srfSpm9wN0Vkd5UEucrCuIg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

Maybe in a city like Austin, it would make sense to consider those historic as "a rare example of early 20th century working class apartment housing". But New York City has probably hundreds of thousands of 100 year old buildings, and those are far from the nicest or most unique examples, so they really shouldn't be protected. Plus they're next to a subway station. So for cities that have tens or hundreds of thousands of buildings, I have no problem with preserving a few hundred or even a few thousand of those (for a big city with a lot of history), but you should still allow some sort of infill to take place in a good chunk of the city and not just in the least desirable areas where no one will want to move to anyways.

I doubt they're protected by historical designation, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were protected by zoning. Zoning with its density limits is a common way to prevent new housing from being built. A lot of the time the supporters of zoning just don't want to see any change, and then if you tell them the zoning should be changed they accuse you of wanting to destroy all the historic buildings. But there should be a middle ground where some history gets protected but you still allow a reasonable amount of new development.

And to be clear to the pro-development guys, there are still limits to how much housing prices can be lowered/moderated by increasing supply. The developers still need to be able to make money by selling/renting out their developments for more than it cost them to develop, and the development costs in urban areas are generally higher just because you often have pre-existing buildings on your development sites (which makes them more expensive) and usually don't have as much of an economy of scale. You can get economies of scale with highrises, but those are more expensive to build because steel and concrete construction costs more than wood frame. Plus pretty sure the financing is more complicated since it's not like a suburban subdivision where you can build a house on spec and use the money you get from selling it to build the next house. Instead, you need to finance the whole building with hundreds of units from the get go, and for a developer to get that much money from lenders to play around with means a lot more hoops to jump through (like selling a high % of units before even breaking ground).

So maybe you can build housing in the suburbs and make money if you can sell it at $100/sf, vs with infill maybe it's $150-400/sf depending on the exact circumstances. So best case scenario for a gentrifying neighbourhood in a desirable city would be new housing around $150/sf and older housing around $100/sf. Somewhere like SF or NYC it will be more than that for sure, because they're denser cities so the development sites will be more expensive and the new development will also have to be denser (higher construction costs). However with San Francisco you're talking about over $1000/sf for the central neighbourhoods and there's certainly the potential for housing to be quite a bit more affordable than that.

Mostly negative, but it's complicated, depending on how you define gentrification.

In many cases it's historically marginalized communities being displaced by rising housing prices.  This is often brought about by NIMBYism when generally wealthier folks fight against density in cities and don't allow supply to meet demand, driving up housing prices and pushing the middle class into formally working class areas.  That's at least what is happening in Austni.

Pro-tip: In city council elections, the candidate most focused on "preserving neighborhoods" is probably a NIMBY and someone you shouldn't vote for.

Usually the most marginalized communities are the last to gentrify though. So you'll have the wealthy move into the upper middle class area, and then upper middle class gets pushed out. The upper middle class still don't want to live in the ghetto and can afford better, so they move into the middle class neighbourhood and push out the middle class. Then the middle class move into the working class area, and then the working class are pushed out into the ghetto.

 

[Something Stuartsy]

Guardian spamming our polls with intellectual shit, disgraceful

 

[RoboMonkey]

Gentrification is bad.

 

[emperorpenguin]

Gentrification is bad.

your mom is bad

Spoiler

Sorry, after Memph's smart post I had to bring the IQ of this discussion back down to tkr level.