I grew up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in the mid-'60s to the '80s, lived in Manhattan from the mid-'80s to late '90s. My neighborhood was predominantly Puerto Rican and Dominican, so it was full of the sounds of bongo drums and the early hip-hop scene. I skated at Roxy and later in the 90s at the Central Park Skating circle. Central Park Skaters have some die-hards still there, but it sort of was gentrified too in a way. Terms like "yuppy" and "dink" were used in a derogatory manner. I have always thought that class has been the true divider and not race having grown up a white minority in a predominantly Latino neighborhood. My group of friends were a motley crew of good kids and gutter snipes. I came away speaking fluent Spanish and the ability to salsa, so I never saw growing up in poverty as such a bad thing personally. I didn't have the internet or more than 13 channels to tell me otherwise. We didn't get a phone until I was like 11 and a color TV until then too.
Shout out to Danceteria and CBGBs!
Memories of the Tom Tom Club's hit, "Genius of Love". Mariah Carey used it in her "Fantasy" song in 1995.
As someone who has done a fair bit of research on the urban decline nearly all American cities experienced in the latter half of the 20th century and parts of the 21st the idea of “gentrification” has always confused me.
Gentrification seems to be a negative way of saying these areas are returning to the norm? The parts of these cities associated with being poor and blighted haven’t always been that way. Why would anyone expect or want that to continue indefinitely?
Appeals to keeping a music/food culture fall somewhat flat to my ears when you just look at pictures of these areas or crime statistics of those periods.
It’s like the city fails the poor twice: first they have to enjoy substandard living conditions, and whenever this changes, they get priced out.
Gentrification refers specifically to this displacement, and it shouldn’t be hard to understand why this is considered negative. No-one likes to have to move.
It’s also an effect of how the housing market works almost anywhere, so it’s not so easy to imagine an alternative within these market economies—a challenge the article doesn’t really touch upon.
Gentrification and displacement are distinct concepts, even if they are usually conflated in colloquial usage. Obviously nobody wants to be forced out of 'their neighborhood' if rent is raised, but this isn't an inevitable consequence of improved conditions. This Vox article does a great job explaining possible policies to mitigate this harm, like building more housing, stronger tenant protections, and upzoning wealthy segregated neighborhoods.[0] As you say, existing residents of a neighborhood should be able to enjoy the benefits of increased investment and improved conditions in their neighborhood.
Thanks for the link.
I am not sure I like the article, it seems to be doing a lot of dancing around and have the issue appear more complex than it really is.
Saying two concepts are being conflated without explaining the differences sounds a bit... pedant ?
And it is because from what I can read, gentrification is when richer people arrive in a place. No wonder why people conflate it with rising prices and displacement of the poor, this is just the "natural" consequence in a market economy where housing is a commodity. Sure, you can (should!) have a policy to mitigate that problem but if you don't, as is usual, it just happens.
> As you say, existing residents of a neighborhood should be able to enjoy the benefits of increased investment and improved conditions in their neighborhood.
Is it possible got some of the existing residents to be partly responsible for undesirable conditions? If so, then displacing them seems like a necessary component.
Note that I specified “some” residents, and “partly” responsible. A mechanism to cleanly identify and displace only them seems difficult to implement.
? Some people think it is not a good thing to give people a preference to stay in the neighborhood they are in because this entrenches racial segregation.
Something that's always confused me in contemporary American discourse is that it's "white flight" when white people move out and "gentrification" when white people move back in. Can someone help me grok this?
I'm not sure what you're asking. The terms describe inverse/opposite movements of mostly middle-class, mostly white populations. And (very generally) white flight occurred from the 60s to the 90s or 00s. And gentrification became a "big deal" in the 00s and into the 20s (very rough year ranges - varies significantly by city).
I'd just add that gentrification of cities has been pretty selective overall. There are a ton of cities that haven't really gentrified or that have gentrified very narrowly (e.g. Detroit) in the US. One of the things that has led to housing affordability problems in that the mostly young professional influx to cities has mostly been to a fairly small selection of cities and has happened over the course of just a couple of decades.
I think that they are looking at slightly different things.
As I understand it white flight criticizes that white people (at a population level, not each white person obviously) displaying behavior that suggests that they don't want to live in a multi-cultural society. Alternatively, white flight might be a criticism of defacto segregation either due to redlining or due to minorities being priced out of white neighborhoods.
Gentrification refers to the residents of areas that are low cost and low income being priced out by an influx of more wealthy residents. It's also used to refer to development designed to cause that influx. Race is only a factor to the degree that wealth tends to correlate with race in the US.
Gentrification is more about class than race - it's entirely possible for all black neighborhoods to be gentrified to cater to a wealthier black establishment at the expense of poor black base. At its core, gentrification is simply the result of capitalist government incentives to maximize tax revenues the way companies maximize profit. Poor people are driven out so that rich people can come in. In the US, the effect of a long history of white supremacist power structures is that class more often than not (although not always) maps to race.
White flight, however, is entirely just about white people just wanting to get away from black people.
> White flight, however, is entirely just about white people just wanting to get away from black people.
Redlining was one of FDR's racist policies. The resulting non-white areas were cheaper and became cheaper still than white ones for many reasons. Under LBJ, redlining was finally made illegal. Then the threat of declining property values due to "darkening" of neighborhoods could be used to clear out white neighborhoods and buy up real estate at bargain prices! That's white flight.
It's a little more complicated than "I don't want to be near that person on the bus."
White flight in 60's/70's being just about White people want to get away from black people is hard to credit.
White people were living in cities close to Black people for a long time - they suddenly decided they didn't like it?
If the answer is that they suddenly started allowing Black people to buy next to White people then how would moving to the suburbs help? I mean, we can no longer redline in the city but when can still redline in the suburb county?
I don't want to overstate it - some part of it clearly had to do with not wanting to live next to Black people. Some part was clearly not caring for the riots happening contemporaneously. I just think there was more going on.
I've talked to my Dad about house buying in that period in the past and he mentioned places in the city that they almost bought (generally he talks about one place in the city ruefully as it's price doubled after every sale) and the places in the suburbs that they ultimately did purchase. If they settled on a detached house with a yard in the suburbs because there were only white people in the neighborhood (which was largely though not entirely true when I grew up ) he (obviously I suppose) never mentioned that. The main impression I did get was that he valued detached and yard so highly that the places they did buy seemed very cheap.
I'm living in a row home in the city and I can sort of see how he must have felt. I don't really want those things that badly but the places in the city that are detached with a yard are out of my price range. A reasonable price for that - especially if the things you get from living close to city center didn't catch my fancy - would be very compelling.
The problem with this analysis is that it prioritizes physical locations and comfortable people over, well, pain?
I get that its weird, but it appears as if "society/culture" whatnot has a lot of trouble paying attention to pain unless expressed through fun art.
So what people are perhaps subconsciously lamenting is the possibility of really changing things for a lot of people because our focus is at an interesting place being bulldozed by "the rich." Again.
If you want art in a capitalist society, the options are to make it cheaper or to give it money. The cheapest places to live and work in a city are also the least desirable.
I disagree that "Gentrification" started in the 80's in NYC. It was the 80's that made it not a wasteland of abandoned or intentionally burned buildings due to improving finances for the city government itself. However the influx of transplants did not happen until the late 90's. Crime was still astronomical compared today until the mid 90's. It was still considered unsafe. Once the city was comparatively safer, the trend started which still continues today. Areas like Bushwick are now home to transplants from the midwest while 20-30 years ago they would never set foot in there.
Places like CBGB's held on until the 2000s. Working class people could still affordably live in most places in the city until then as well.
The 80s in NYC were still pretty bad although I suppose you could argue they stopped getting worse sometime around then. Yeah, I'd date improvement to the mid to late 90s. Boston probably about the same.
I lived in NYC for a summer in the mid-80s. I never set foot anywhere below about 90th in Manhattan.
You can actually pinpoint the moment in 1994 when the derivative changed. David Schwimmer goes from side character in season 1 of NYPD Blue who ends up dead trying to save an old lady from a mugger to...Ross.
Adding new housing units at any price point lowers housing costs in the area; so long as the luxury condo high rises are increasing the number of units in the area, they are reducing the cost of housing. There are counter-theories of "induced demand" (whose premises aren't even operative in Chicagoland), but this is reasonably and recently well studied, and those theories don't seem to hold up.
"Induced demand" does exist, but not in a normal market. It exists in markets where positive externalities are not fully priced in. When you have a road without congestion charges, then building a second lane to expand capacity just adds more "free shit" to the local infrastructure. The demand for "free shit" is infinite, giving rise to the appearance that supply is driving demand, when it is actually the price that is biased towards demand structurally exceeding supply.
This doesn't apply to housing at all, because the landlord would simply price in all positive externalities, such as the free road infrastructure mentioned above. The "free shit" would go straight into the pocket of the landlord, which would stimulate supply and discourage demand. The problem is that these places are constrained by geographics, local politics and the willingness of previous land owners to move out so you can't just build more.
> Adding new housing units at any price point lowers housing costs in the area;
This isn't really true in housing. Housing is not a market commodity, it's not priced primarily via supply or demand. Housing is priced based on comparables, quite literally, what is the most expensive thing that sold recently, and how close do we compare to that.
In this way, building a fancy new condo building will literally raise prices, even if the number of people remain constant, and even if it "increases the number of the units in the area", because now pricing comparables will get to take the new condo's higher pricing into effect, and things like comparables and federal interest rates have a much higher effect on sales price than traditional supply or demand.
To be clear, this is NOT an anti-build argument, we need more housing, the only way to get more is to build it. We just need to be mindful of the real-world consequences of it, new luxury condo construction creates a form of financial "pollution" into that area, and all nearby housing stock will absorb that pollution in higher prices.
This is something anyone who cares about affordable housing needs to understand, and plan for.
Those are just how people work out the actual price to offer; that is almost orthogonal to the actual transaction that occurs.
Because otherwise prices could never decline (because comparable could never decline) - but we know that price drops do occur.
The biggest issue is that when prices are increasing year over year, it can be hard to tease out that "prices would have been X% higher instead of only Y% if Z, G, and B hadn't happened".
Or another way to put it - if you overbuild; prices will drop, because nobody will buy/rent a crappier house/unit right next to a nicer one when both are on the market for the same price - the crappier one has to drop price until competitive, or sit empty. And sure, some people will allow it to sit empty for some time, but eventually carrying costs eat it alive.
If you're going to make a claim this strong, you really should provide a better supporting argument.
> new luxury condo construction creates a form of financial "pollution"
One thing about "luxury" is it's another word for "exclusive." That is relevant because if you flooded an area with "luxury" housing, then the features that define "luxury" would have to change.
One can easily see this has happened as buildings that were "luxury" in the 1960s are (unless they have undergone wholesale renovation) no longer considered "luxury." (Two of my favorite luxury amenities are indoor plumbing and A/C.)
One can also observe this across American cities. Some "luxury" apartments in NYC are not very expensive in other cities, because the supply & demand are not as out of balance.
In addition to the strong arguments you've seen in my sibling comments, we know empirically from recent studies that this "financial pollution raising nearby prices" argument (paraphrasing you) is false. The opposite thing occurs. Which is what you'd expect from basic economics!
Causality goes the opposite direction: constructing a high rise is very expensive, therefore you will only see them built where housing cost is already high enough to justify luxury condos; otherwise, such a project would not be profitable.
But, we have such a supply problem (in popular US metro areas) that prices continue to go up, even when we add capacity.
In my immediate area, there is very little SFH stock being added - it's almost exclusively large THs and rental apartments (but not condos).
The apartments rent for "luxury" prices ($2500-$3500+/month) but are just generic 1-2 bedroom flats without any true luxury features.
The THs are "near-luxury" - better than "builder grade" finishes, but nothing special either. And sell for $800-$1.2 million (for a typical 3-bed, 1-2 garage, 2500sqft floorplan).
pre-covid, the San Francisco greater Bay Area had a quantified dwelling unit (DU) shortage of around 500,000 units. Those numbers are directly connected to jobs available and other demographic factors.
The other issue you have (which confuses the situation) is there may be a 500k shortage in the Bay Area directly (e.g., people who work in the area and would like to live closer, etc, etc).
But if you solve that you may find that you have an additional five million families far from the area, out of state, even out of country that would also like to live there. At some point you can't satisfy everyone, or the Bay Area wouldn't be the Bay Area anymore and it would more resemble New York West.
hypothetical nonsense -- whole cities in California cannot attract new Doctors or uniform police because the person working cannot afford RENT. public school teachers have been priced out of RENT for more than a decade. The ability to purchase a home comes only after personal capital is accumulated for most people. A recent study showed in California that in many areas, household income must be FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND per YEAR documented income to purchase an ordinary home. This housing system is top-loaded with capital for twenty years now.
nonsense like "oh maybe another five million would want to come here" is not only distracting, but bordering on cruel denial.
It seems to me that if one luxury condo takes the space and building cost of multiple smaller units, then building luxury condos could prevent a sufficient number being built.
have you thought that those luxury condo are limiting the housing cost instead of amplifying it? I mean that maybe without them the costs would increase even more
As a major proponent of gentrification, I feel obligated to put in a good word.
Compared to global cities, American cities are woefully under-built and underutilized. 70s white-flight, interstates and inner cities made cities the place for poor people. As things normalize and as young people return to cities, this anomaly is beginning to resolve itself.
This is a great thing for the poor who lived there. They can sell their suddenly expensive land make a big buck. Except, they never owned the land they lived on. They never purchased even so much as an apartment when the prices were rock bottom. Now they don't have any assets to liquidate.
This highlights the key enemies of poor people. Not yuppies or gentrification, but instead.
1. Slumlords - you couldn't have owned cuz they won't sell. You can't built because of horrible housing policy.
2. Bad education and cultural aversion to investing - you could have owned, but you never bought.
3. Bad Public transport - makes the inevitable displacement be a zero sum game.
Don't hate the yuppies who are being forced move to cities to work for companies there. Blame the city for limiting their local populations ability to make money of an a great opportunity.
What about neighborhood character though? Well, what about it. Every neighborhood's character has changed through the generation. The 'my suburb will be the same in 50 years' mentality is a uniquely recent take from American suburbia, and is already being proven wrong as the youth abandons them and maintenence costs are picking up.
1 - These are bad. But you can change slumlords to landlords and you would be making a more pertinent point. Because gentrification is really driven by the market making slumlords less relevant.
2 - Poor people can't invest because they have no wealth... But you are correct in that people are intentionally not taught to think this way. 'The poor' (people) generally aren't dumb enough that they wouldn't buy a house if they could. In other places where renting is more popular it's because renting is a safer bet.
3 - Good transport would be nice, but without solving underlying inequalities it may make the problem worse (yuppies can commute easier and outprice people)
I was recently reminded about an urban environment that I have known for more than twenty years — that cities are living and evolving organisms. Neighborhoods change composition as children grow up and adults change jobs or retire. Bars, restaurants, shops, and hangouts come and go. Immigrants and transplants pick new and upcoming areas. It’s part of a constant cycle of change and renewal. It’s sad sometimes to consider the cultural losses along the way. But, at the high level, it’s a critical part of how cities avoid ossification and retain authenticity.
1. Neighborhood is old, run-down, inexpensive (for numerous reasons)
2. Young professionals (usually white) start moving in to save money
3. Investors/developers notice the trend and start rebuilding/redeveloping at a faster rate
4. The end result is what's frequently perceived as a bland upper-middle-class neighborhood.
Somewhere between 2 and 3, the previous residents are driven out by price increases. They take their culture with them. Between that loss of diversity and zoning restrictions (typical 5-over-2 building pattern), the result usually is pretty bland (IMO).
This feels like a swing and a miss. Sure, expensive rent pushed artists and musicians out of those neighborhoods, but they just moved elsewhere within NYC. The genres outlined in this article were fully mainstreamed in the 90s. The concept of "Selling out" and thus becoming uncool had way more to do with killing underground music scenes that real estate cycles.
Also, the Hip Hop scene is alive and well in NYC, maybe just not so much in Manhattan anymore.
EDM, DJs etc are doing just fine despite these factors as well
Gentrification has way more to do with landlords - your neighbors and a couple of corporations - than the people that can afford the prices they were offered
I’ve been to a lot of cities in various time periods and almost nobody in any of them seems cognitively acute enough to recognize this
This seems to benefit the landed gentry as the squabbling they cause from their gambles on the highest rent and ownership prices possible completely exempts them from criticism
(In this model it draws the line at renters who offer an even higher rent to close faster, since there tends to always be units available at the offered price.)
Parts of this article are a little ignorant, in particular the way New Wave is framed as a "gentrifier" of punk.
For starters, some of the more ambitious punk bands became New Wave: Wire went from raw punk to brilliant new wave, and even Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols went on to form Public Image Limited.
> the New Wave scene was created mostly by middle- to upper-class white musicians ... after graduating from private art colleges
Guess the author has some weird beef with the Talking Heads, who went to RISD?
Also one of the first punk bands, the Ramones, were essentially a bunch of white kids from Ridgewood, Queens, which is pretty suburban itself, let's be honest.
There's some I agree with, but all in all, kind of a meh musical take from a non-cultural socialist mag.
Jacobin is not a source to take seriously. They're a very politically-slanted outfit that generally starts with a conclusion in mind from their particular political point of view and then works backwards from there. Like OANN, but on the left.
> For starters, some of the more ambitious punk bands became New Wave
That backs what the article is saying. As punk became more settled and palatable to more people (musicians learned to play their instruments?) first wave punk turned into new wave music.
> Guess the author has some weird beef with the Talking Heads, who went to RISD?
Note that's a college. In the 70s, before college became the new high school. That's fairly upper-middle class. Devo and R.E.M. also met in college.
> the Ramones, were essentially a bunch of white kids from Ridgewood, Queens, which is pretty suburban itself
The Ramones started as a high school garage band in Forrest Hills, Queens (also the home of Spider Man!). Every kid goes to high school, unlike college in the 70s. And I'd call it urban even though it has some greenery.
That said, some things cannot be tamed. Even when Bruce Springsteen covers them, Suicide is still raw post-punk from before there was post-punk. And I think that's where the author's analogy really breaks down - all of the many examples that don't at all parallel gentrification.
Gentrifiers are usually outsiders, not original residents going upscale. That's why I don't think that bands that went from punk to new wave support the author's theory.
I wasn't talking about college as a marker of class. I was referring to the quote "graduating from private art colleges that had prepared them to work in the culture industry". Private art colleges are way fewer in number than college in general, and off the top of my head, I only know of Talking Heads as a new wave band coming from a private art college (Rhode Island School of Design). It's so specific, I wonder why the author didn't name the Talking Heads specifically. (I checked, and Devo and REM didn't go to art colleges.)
> The Ramones started as a high school garage band in Forrest Hills, Queens
Ahh, I misremembered the particular nabe. But from the NYC perspective, that's still the suburbs. I lived all over NYC for almost twenty years. Good place to raise a family, and a bit boring. Not many subway lines, thanks to Robert Moses, so it's car-heavy, which is part of why it's suburban. Just because it's in NYC city limits doesn't make it urban. And it was probably similar when the Ramones were there.
Shout out to Danceteria and CBGBs! Memories of the Tom Tom Club's hit, "Genius of Love". Mariah Carey used it in her "Fantasy" song in 1995.