
How gentrification really changes a neighborhood - pmcpinto
http://www.atlantamagazine.com/homeandgarden/the-gentrifier/
======
jcizzle
Every place has a story, and every place changes. It's good to hear a story,
it's good to see how things change and it's good to respect and understand the
past. I could have really enjoyed this story, specifically because I've spent
a lot of time in Kirkwood.

However, this signaling, righteous superiority masquerading as guilt ruined
the whole story for me. It is as though the author feels he is a conqueror,
having compassion for the community he so savagely destroyed with his amazing
strength. But really, he just bought a house in a pretty normal neighborhood
because that's what he and his wife can afford.

The jobs Anna and Tommie had decades ago are analogous to the jobs the author
and his wife have today. He is in no way better than them. The author fits
right into that neighborhood, he isn't changing it at all.

------
embarcadero
I've been both gentrifier and gentrified.

As a white man from a relatively privileged background, I lived in Harlem long
before it was deemed "safe". I remember apartment hunting north of Central
Park around 2003 and getting a lot of dirty looks from the black Americans who
had been there for generations. Who could blame them? To them I was another
invader from Columbia U. And while I was there as a "pioneer" and not a
"settler", as one paying about as much as they did, and while I resented the
charm-bracelet girls as much as they did, I was changing the tone of the
place, like it or not.

New York is now in the midst of a battle over absentee landlords. You might
call it ground zero in the battle over the future of the US. You walk through
Central Park and the Plaza Hotel, now mostly condos, sits dark. No one home.
And behind there's a string of supertowers twice as high as the average
skyscraper. The New York Times last year had an expose
[[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-
foreign...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-foreign-
wealth-flows-to-time-warner-condos.html)] about the buyers: many foreign, many
dirty, most masking their identities with shell companies. Since the owners
often do not reside in New York, they're contribution to the city's coffers is
mixed. More importantly, it seems pretty clear that a majority of New Yorkers
resent the shadows being cast over their parks. We may have "air rights", but
unlike San Francisco, we have no law guaranteeing sun rights. No wonder many
of us are deficient in D.

Meanwhile, the mayor, Bill de Blasio, is happy to let the builders have their
way, so long as they support his "affordable housing" agenda, ie, contribute.
Until recently he refused to acknowledge what has been plain: that the
homeless population has ballooned -- to 60,000, almost half of them children.
Many of these people got priced out.

We can debate the fairness of all this as well as the wisdom of price
controls, etc. What we should acknowledge, though, is the fact that policies
have consequences, that sometimes change outpaces people's ability to adapt,
and that we as a city / society will pay the costs, directly or indirectly.
For a very moving but also nonjudgmental look at these dynamics, check out the
documentary Homme Less:
[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=homme+less](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=homme+less)

------
em3rgent0rdr
Change happens. Part of living in a dynamic society. Gotta get used to it. Or
else we'd all still be hunter-gatherers.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
I hope you have to try living in Mountain View on a minimum wage salary.

~~~
aetherson
Nobody "has" to try living in Mountain View. It's not like commuting to
Mountain View from Sunnyvale or Santa Clara or, hell, San Jose is some kind of
unbearable hardship.

Where does this right to live exactly where you want to end? I'm a fairly
wealthy software developer who lives in San Francisco, but I can't afford a
home in Monterey Heights. If it's rank injustice for someone poorer than me to
not be able to afford my neighborhood (Outer Mission) and they have to move to
Daly City, is it also rank injustice for me not to be able to live in a
swankier neighborhood? What if I really just want _that_ house over there? Can
I do that?

These are serious questions -- I genuinely don't know where this line is
supposed to be drawn.

~~~
mbrock
Resisting gentrification is not about the right to live "exactly where you
want." Often it's about the ability to keep paying an increasing rent in an
apartment where you've lived for many years.

It's also about entire city cores becoming entirely reserved for wealthy
people. That doesn't mean lower income people want to point at a house and say
"gimme."

Doesn't have anything to do with wanting to live somewhere "swanky." Often
it's about neighborhoods transforming from "livable and affordable" to
"swanky," which increases landlord profits and is very nice for wealthy
people, but also destroys communities.

Aside from that, there are the larger questions... like, how the whole
gentrification process is tied up with income distribution... we software
developers tend to be relatively wealthy, because of market forces, and this
money becomes a powerful reason for landlords to keep increasing rents... etc
etc...

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Often it 's about the ability to keep paying an increasing rent in an
apartment where you've lived for many years...That doesn't mean lower income
people want to point at a house and say "gimme."_

You just contradicted yourself.

Also, what's wrong with "entire city cores becoming entirely reserved for
wealthy people"? The problem is N people want to live there, but there are
only K < N houses. N-K people don't get what they want, by simple arithmetic.
Why is allocating by willingness to pay a bad way to go?

(There is an obvious solution - legalize increases in K. Good luck with that.)

~~~
mbrock
Would you point out the exact contradiction, so I can explain the
misunderstanding?

Whether there's anything wrong with reserving the city core for wealthy people
only, I didn't really make any normative claims about that.

There are of course many reasons to consider it problematic: cultural
segregation, justice, etc, but you probably don't care about those things, so
I won't waste my time.

Oh, and "willingness to pay" is a pretty yucky way to put it.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The low income person you describe, attempting to continue living "in an
apartment where you've lived for many years" is a poor person pointing at a
specific house and saying "gimme".

~~~
ahoy
This comment is the kind of heartless, dispassionate thought that makes people
hate "tech people".

The response to someone being forced out of a home they've lived in for _their
whole life_ needs to be something more compassionate than "tough shit, you
greedy poor".

~~~
yummyfajitas
You are right that tech people are easy to hate on because we often think
differently. Unlike the rest of us, you've signaled mainstream virtue with
your comment. Congrats!

Is there a point beyond that? Note that I didn't advocate any specific policy,
I just pointed out that a specific argument was internally contradictory,
which you don't seem to disagree with.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Signaling an autistic disregard for morality and compassion as everyone else
knows them doesn't exactly do your ideology any favors.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I'm not disregarding morality - again, I made purely positive (not normative)
claims. If you want to discuss morality then state your principles and we
reason from them.

I'm just calling out ahoy for writing a post that's little but virtue
signalling and nerd shaming.

------
sosuke
Too bad the author didn't take the time to learn about Anna when she was
alive. I'm sure it would have been priceless to Anna to have a friendly
neighbor. Instead the author felt guilty from the gentrification after the new
house went up and used that emotion to write a story for their career.

That was unfair to the author.

I can sympathize with the author and with Anna having watched my own family be
priced out of their neighborhoods and the homes their parents built
demolished. These homes weren't even derelict; just not large enough for the
much richer buyers. Now I'm trying to get a home of my own and can't afford a
house at 1/5th the lands value.

This is a constant motion, one generation moves into a new area for cheap and
spends a lifetime cultivating it. The generation after the next then moves
into that same neighborhood at very high cost as demand increases when the
current home owners die.

I'm not going anywhere with this. Gentrification is bad and good, progress is
bad and good.

------
yummyfajitas
So back in the day, "Anna" and a bunch of black people moved in and
'displaced' locals: _“Due to the circumstances of the section going colored,
we have sold our house. The school is surrounded.” One anonymous landlord was
perhaps the most blunt: “We own about five houses in that section, and we wish
to sell all of them, if even one negro moves in.” Given these attitudes, it’s
not surprising that some 40,000 homes, in Kirkwood and beyond, were sold by
whites to blacks—for as little as $10,000—in just a few months in 1961, as
Newsweek’s Atlanta bureau reported later that decade._

I wonder if people like Anna moving in also felt the same guilt that the
author of this piece does?

 _Still, it’s hard not to feel like an interloper after you’ve moved into a
historically black (well, after it was historically white) neighborhood...The
guilt intensifies when you realize that your [house] belonged to the family
next door for longer than you’ve been alive._

I'm curious if these feelings of guilt are common when moving into a
demographically different neighborhood? Maybe they are just a convenient way
for (culturally, if not financially) upper class whites to signal virtue to
each other?

Would the author feel less guilt if he instead stuck to a lily-white enclave
full of "blonde wi[ves] and ...Nordic-looking cherubs"? What must a mixed race
couple do to avoid feeling guilt, given that at least one of them is probably
displacing a demographically different person?

(Yes, I'm obviously mocking the author of this silly article a bit.)

~~~
rayiner
I lived in Atlanta for a long time. It's hard to live there, and see the lines
drawn by de jure segregation still there, as clear as daylight, and not feel
like something is wrong. There is a really deep philosophical question here:
do people walk free of the sins of their fathers? It may be the immigrant in
me talking, but that's a difficult idea for me to swallow. Atlanta is a place
where the sins of past generations permeate the soil and bricks of the city.
You can ignore it, but that doesn't make it go away.

I think the author is reasonable in feeling guilty. Why are those
neighborhoods so cheap? They're cheap because of segregation and the other
injustices inflicted on the residents of those neighborhoods. The U.S. in
general, but southern cities like Atlanta in particular, would look totally
different if it weren't for slavery and segregation. At the very least, the
author is benefiting from that injustice when he buys into a walkable urban
neighborhood at bargain prices. So what's wrong that he feels guilty? It's
virtuous to feel guilty when you're benefiting from someone else's misfortune.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_There is a really deep philosophical question here: do people walk free of
the sins of their fathers?_

There is no evidence Josh Green's parents actually committed any sins. Is he
just supposed to feel some sort of collective racial guilt? Should black
people also feel collective racial guilt over the disproportionate number of
murders that blacks commit even nowadays?

(Note: I only bring up the latter fact to illustrate the unpleasant and
nonsensical consequences of collective and ancestral guilt. I think the whole
idea is nonsense.)

As for the problems you bring up, if low prices are the problem, he's
contributing to the solution by increasing demand. I segregation is the
problem, he's bringing his nordic white family into the neighborhood and
reducing segregation. This seems like one of those wonderful situations where
greed, self interest and capitalism make everyone's lives better and solve all
the problems.

Why should he feel guilt? The Copenhagen interpretation of ethics?
[https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-
eth...](https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/)

~~~
rayiner
> Is he just supposed to feel some sort of collective racial guilt? Should
> black people also feel collective racial guilt over the disproportionate
> number of murders that blacks commit even nowadays?

Josh Green is entitled to feel guilty not because he's white, but because he's
a member of a group that unjustly voted itself privileges in the area of
housing, to the detriment of non-members of that group. Race is relevant only
to the extent that race was the _legal criteria_ used to distinguish group
members from non-members.

> As for the problems you bring up, if low prices are the problem, he's
> contributing to the solution by increasing demand. I segregation is the
> problem, he's bringing his nordic white family into the neighborhood and
> reducing segregation.

The residents of the neighborhood may be incrementally better off as a result
of gentrification. But are they as well off as they would have been but for
segregation?

The Copenhagen Interpretation of ethics captures an intuitive concept: making
things a little better at the margin doesn't relive you of the responsibility
for having made things bad in the first place. Consider the criminal justice
reform. Right now, we're tweaking the laws to help those who received
draconian sentences under "three strikes" type laws. But that doesn't undo the
sin of a generation that lost its collective minds and put those laws into
place to begin with. And it's totally valid to criticize those dickering
around at the edges of the issue by pointing out how little it does to right
the original injustice.

~~~
tpallarino
He's a grown adult and he can feel however he damn well pleases. As if there
are rules governing when you are and when you aren't allowed to feel
something. What a load of garbage.

"doesn't relive you of the responsibility for having made things bad in the
first place"

Are you serious? Just because someone shares the same skin color doesn't make
them responsible for the actions of others with that skin color. Suggesting
that "whites" are a single group is totally absurd. Should I also be
responsible for the crusades because I'm white? Should modern day Romans be
reaponsible for the sacking of Carthage because they sacked the city?

It's unfortunate what happened and people are still suffering consequences,
but to collectively punish people who had nothing to do with it, for reason
only because of their race, is downright terrifying. Every race on Earth has
committed wrongdoing in the past, whites aren't magically the sole arbiters of
the world's wrongdoing.

~~~
rayiner
> He's a grown adult and he can feel however he damn well pleases. As if there
> are rules governing when you are and when you aren't allowed to feel
> something. What a load of garbage.

Sure there are rules governing what you are and aren't allowed to feel (or at
least, rules that allow other people to judge you as a bad person for not
feeling the right things at the right times). The idea that we should be able
to waft through life guilt-free is a very modern one, even in the west.

> Are you serious? Just because someone shares the same skin color doesn't
> make them responsible for the actions of others with that skin color.

His skin color is only relevant to the extent that he lives in a society that
made it the _legal criterion_ for distinguishing between favored and unfavored
groups. And unlike your historical examples, he is a member of the same polity
that made those laws. It wasn't some long-ago empire, but the same exact
municipal corporation that enforced those segregation laws.

> Every race on Earth has committed wrongdoing in the past, whites aren't
> magically the sole arbiters of the world's wrongdoing.

Nobody suggested punishing any particular group of people. But given that the
institutions that imposed these unjust policies are still around (the State of
Georgia, the City of Atlanta), it would be totally reasonable to hold _them_
to account.

~~~
ethbro
The reparations debate is a slippery slope.

Is a modern African American living in the South statistically speaking likely
to have been disadvantaged by racist policies of the past? (Setting aside
whether any continue -- at least I think we can all agree any modern policies
are less racist than legal slavery)

I would definitively say yes due to the deeply institutional and long-lived
nature of the historical injustices.

However, what the best way to redress that through modern institutions (who
did not themselves perpetrate the acts) or modern taxpayers (")?

Do you pick an "average life" and do what is necessary to give it to any
current African Americans below that threshold? What about those who, through
luck or toil, lifted themselves (and their children) above that threshold?
What about modern day whites that such beneficence injures? And what then of
modern day whites under such a threshold?

It seems like there are a million edge cases in trying to hold future versions
of previously unjust groups/institutions to account, given only an ability to
take from and give to modern descendants of same.

Imho, if we want to move to a more just world then we must seek to alleviate
_human_ suffering and facilitate _human_ aspiration. Differentiating based on
the race of the human in question only exacerbates past racism (even if for
good reasons).

... And if the recipients of such aid tend to be disproportionately of a
certain sub-group because of past injustices, then all the better.

PS: Fwiw, as someone who's lived in Atlanta for a substantial amount of time,
the current geo/racial distribution of the city is more determined by income
than race. You're just as likely to have an affluent African-American resident
laugh at the though of moving to English Avenue as you would a white one.
Unfortunately, as noted in previous comments, the income distribution is still
racially inequal due to past injustices (but at least more flexible).

------
thex10
Interesting perspective of gentrification from somewhere I know little about
(an Atlantan suburb).

The neighborhood I grew up in (Lower east side of New York City) is
gentrifying these days as well. It's a bit disorienting for me to think that
if I moved back (these new rents are insane, but I can pay it) _I 'd_ become
the gentrify-er. Personally, I'm more interested to read about the forces
precipitating gentrification than about the effects of it (which I think can
be quite mixed and subjective).

------
rdlecler1
I found it interesting that the writer would divulge information on how much
Anna bought the house for, how much they sold the lot, how much they sold the
house but he seemingly wanted his privacy and didn't divulge the purchase
price of his own house.

~~~
aetherson
It's public information. I don't want to dox the author, but he gave the
street address of his neighbor and showed which side of his neighbor's house
he was on. I did a tiny bit of investigation with Google Street View, found
his address, and then looked up the sale price of his house -- you can do it
too if you care.

~~~
gph
Is it really doxing if he said his neighbors address and put up a picture of
his house? Doesn't seem like he's exactly trying to hide which house he's in.

~~~
aetherson
Honestly, I don't know. I was about to put the full information up, and then I
was like, "Well, does this cross a line?" I genuinely don't know, and am not
trying to impugn anyone who decided differently from me.

~~~
gph
Yea it's hard to keep track. I know some communities remove any posted
personal info even if it's readily available with a simple google search.
Seems silly to me, but I guess it makes sense to have a zero tolerance policy
with something like that.

------
taneq

        Some metrics say my zip code, 30317, is already too
        wealthy for the household income of my wife, a tenured
        Atlanta Public Schools teacher, and me, a freelance
        writer and author, to technically be gentrifying it.
    

So what they really mean is "we moved house"?

------
jff
Hey, and if he moves away again, it'll be white flight and he can feel guilty
yet again!

