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February 6 - February 9, 2023
Gentrification, at its deepest level, is really about reorienting the purpose of cities away from being spaces that provide for the poor and middle classes and toward being spaces that generate capital for the rich.
In 1927, the Mississippi River flooded, and Louisiana flood control officials decided their best option to minimize damage was to purposely breach a levee in Jefferson Parish, a rural section of Louisiana right next to New Orleans, in order to prevent New Orleans from flooding.
There were at least 375 Teach for America members in New Orleans schools by 2013. Hundreds of Habitat for Humanity volunteers from across the country constructed homes for free that might have otherwise been built by local laborers.
Problems with the over-aiding approach. See how Bono feels about all the unhindered aid provided to Afria (hint: he regrets it)
They don’t seem to understand that people like Bigard might have kids who sometimes make noise.
Ok but... People need to sleep
Glass described the upheaval of certain neighborhoods in London by the middle-class “gentry” from the countryside.
Huh, more you know
Gentrifiers may be seeking art, emancipation from suburban norms, and a sense of discovery, but the entire process would grind to a halt if it weren’t profitable.
In 1979, geographer Neil Smith came up with what has become possibly the most influential academic theory on gentrification: the rent gap. Smith posited that the more disinvested a space becomes, the more profitable it is to gentrify. The idea behind his theory is a basic tenet of free-market economics: capital will go where the rate of potential return (i.e., the potential to make profit) is greatest.
The rent gap was the disparity between how much a property was worth in its current state and how much it would be worth gentrified. The larger the gap in a neighborhood, the higher the chance it would gentrify.
In other words, cities are looking for the rich and the upper middle class to use their tax dollars and spending power to fund what used to be paid for by America’s semi-robust federal welfare state.
The new people, according to Idakula, are not commingling with longtime residents in a melting pot, but instead are reaping benefit from the physical removal of 100,000 black people. “It’s not sharing the table,” Ruth told me. “It’s coming here and shoving our shit off the table and then demanding we eat your shit.”
Interesting
Between 1990 and 2008, 220,000 units of public housing were demolished, and at least 110,000 of those can be directly traced to the Hope VI program.
Gentrifiers see cities through fresh eyes, unencumbered by mental maps that might suggest something more nefarious than revitalization had happened before their arrival.
Houston represented everything wrong with American cities—it was sprawling, it lacked a sense of community and diversity, and they needed a car to get anywhere.
As someone who has been there recently... confirmed
If not even many gentrifiers think gentrification is good, why does it keep happening?
The middle class don’t require a lot of services, but they pay for services that are provided. When your middle class leaves and your poor get more concentrated, your service needs go up—the tax base is gone and you go into a vicious downward spiral. And you get what happened here, and in Detroit, and Newark, and Gary, Indiana.”
He's... Not wrong. How do we overcome this? Continuing to supplement unsustainable construction can't be the answer.
Ever since his landmark book The Rise of the Creative Class was published in 2002, Florida, who is also the director of cities at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and a senior editor at The Atlantic, has been urging broke cities to attract the “creative class” in order to revive themselves. And since there’s quite literally almost no US city more broke than Detroit, maybe it’s no surprise that, as one activist told me, “they love some Richard Florida here.”
The creative class is great and all but who pours the coffee, preps the food, watches the streets?
A real solution to the economics of American cities would require more work—more taxes, more laws, more intervention from the federal government. Those things are hard. Gentrification is easy.
Employees of Compuware (owned by Quicken), Quicken Loans,
Detroit is built on an empire of tax complexity
Quicken has for years insisted it did not engage in the same practices that led millions of Americans into foreclosure after the 2008 financial crisis. But an investigation by the Detroit News found that Quicken had the fifth-highest number of mortgages ending in foreclosures in the city. Half of those foreclosed properties are now blighted.
See my previous highlight
And in other cities, stadiums and ballparks are routinely paid for by governments, all with the hope that they’ll help stimulate revitalization, even though economists nearly unanimously agree that spending public funds on private stadiums is one of the least efficient ways for governments to spend money.
Thank you! Why do we put up with this crap!? See the Olympic stadiums
Detroit neighborhoods, houses are often assessed as if Detroit is still a hot, or at least non-apocalyptic, real estate market. It’s not unheard of for residents to be paying $3,000 or $4,000 a year on a house with a market value of just twice that.
Cobo is named for Albert Cobo, mayor of Detroit from 1950 through 1957 and a notorious racist in both rhetoric and policy. Cobo ran on a campaign opposing “Negro invasions.”
“Homogenous” areas—identified by HOLC as areas with lots of new construction and filled with “American business and professional men”—were given A labels and colored green on maps. An “infiltration of Jews” or any other minority in a neighborhood would bar it from being given an A and the color green.
Instead, blocks should be purely residential, commercial, or industrial, following the urban planning orthodoxies of the time, which held that space and calm were always good, while crowdedness and chaos were undesirable.
Man, eff the 1940s FHA!
The FHA manual was perhaps the single most detrimental document in the history of urbanism in the United States. With a few lines of anti-density, racist planning policy, the federal government essentially forced the creation of the suburbs and the near-complete disinvestment of the inner city.
I think this is very strong. It seems to be the center of a majority of our racial redlining, car-centric culture problems, and utter waste perpetrated across major areas.
Half of middle-income black kids fall down the economic ladder compared with the previous generation, while only 14 percent of white kids do.
One day Jimmie decided the best way for him to proceed was by dramatizing his life story—by becoming the star of his friend’s movie, The Last Black Man in San Francisco.
Loved this movie! Recommend for absolutely everyone.
Sure, they’re living lives of privilege, but it’s a particularly banal, almost robotic privilege that feels unenviable. Which makes it all the more frustrating that their presence is destroying the rest of the city.
“It’s not rewarding anymore,” Aristil told me. “You used to walk around and be inspired by hearing interesting conversations. Now you just hear people talk about business and about how much the city sucks.”
As our cities’ landscapes have changed, we have too, increasingly viewing ourselves not as community members with a responsibility to each other but as purchasers of things and experiences.
If we are serious about moving toward a saner housing future, the options in terms of federal policy are relatively clear: we can prevent land from becoming subject to market forces, either through government ownership of land (housing projects) or through heavy regulation (rent or land-price control), or we can prevent the ever-increasing value of land from displacing people (programs such as Section 8 vouchers would fall in this category of solution). Instead, we do almost nothing and hope the market works it out.
The suburbs are also a good reminder that housing, planning, and economic policy in the United States is deliberate, and that its main purpose is to produce money, not adequately house people. It’s harder to see gentrification in this way because we’re still in the middle of the process.
The suburbs were not built for poor people. Really, they were not built for anyone. They were built to reinvigorate capital. But they were especially not built for poor people, for people who rely on community, nonprofit service providers, and public transportation. They were built for a life of secluded individuality.
Public transit tends to be so bad that an average resident of a low-income suburb who is reliant on public transit can reach only a fraction of the jobs available in that metro region: only 4 percent of jobs are reachable with a forty-five-minute commute on public transportation, and if that commute is extended to ninety minutes, still only 25 percent of a metro area’s jobs are accessible.
The United States’ interstate highway system is one of the biggest infrastructure projects ever created, spanning some 48,900 miles. Ninety percent of it was funded by the federal government. Roads are still heavily subsidized by the feds: one study found that drivers pay only half the real cost of driving.
For the privilege of enduring traffic, air pollution, isolation, and monotony, Americans subsidize the suburbs to the tune of $100 billion a year.
But cities in the United States are not built for everyone, and so the suburbs are not going anywhere. For one, the National Association of Realtors is the second-biggest lobbying group in the country, right behind the US Chamber of Commerce, and they have a vested interest in keeping the market for single-family homes strong.
Chelsea’s not even the worst: a New York Times investigation found that on a single three-block stretch in Midtown, 57 percent of apartments are vacant for at least ten months each year. Absentee homeownership has grown by 70 percent in Manhattan since 2000.
If the middle class and even some upper-income people can barely afford New York, what does it mean for the working class and the poor?
Right?! By the "rule of thumb" of 30% of gross income spent on rent I would barely be able to afford a 1BR in Arlington, and I certainly couldn't in San Francisco spending almost half, and I'm like top 1 or 2% of earners for my age group! I'm not even saying this to complain on my behalf, I'm just saying how could the average person possibly expect to live like this?
What do you fight against? The invasion of hipsters into a neighborhood? Rent increases and evictions? State and city policies? The lack of federal funds for housing? Income inequality? All of it?
In the United States, housing is not considered a human right, and the ability of people to live in a given place is subject to the whims of the market. Challenging this may sound like a radical proposition, but it is radical only in the United States, in the same way universal health care is a controversial concept only here. Most other industrialized countries have realized the market will not provide for low- and middle-income people, and so their systems have made adjustments.
In Hong Kong, almost half of all housing is public
