Opinion of Gentrification

[minionofmidas]

Ask a specific question and you can get a meaningful answer, then.

[minionofmidas]

It depends what you mean by gentrification and even then it depends a little on the circumstances, but, basically it's a bad thing. It also tends to lead (and quite inevitably) to the creation of banlieues (there isn't a good word for this in English), which is something that middle class people have a strange tendency to forget.

Why are "slums" more desirable in the inner city, than in an outside ring ala Paris? In all events, it would seem to me to be good social policy ceteris paribus for the lower SES types to have housing near where they work.

Slums on the outskirts are far more invisible, far more easy to ignore, far more isolated as no one who doesn't live there will ever travel through. (Of course, Americans managed to create banlieues in the middle of cities to an extent, but then Americans are ... special. In the bad way.)

Anyways, we usually use the term "gentrification" mostly for the final phase, when a vibrant mix of urban working class and "creative", bobo types like what I grew up in is destroyed as the last of the working class and the poorer of the original gentrifying bobos are being driven out and the place gets dready posh with bars catering exclusively to yuppies replacing the pizzeria I used to go to as a kid and the drinking holes of my wayward youth. Bornheim I fear for you. There's a little too much council housing to drive out all the working class, admittedly.

[minionofmidas]

There are no "free" markets in housing. Anywhere in the world. The thing being traded is just too fundamental to survival, and besides there are no "free" markets in credit either - and that is rather fundamental to private gentrification. It's all shaped, directly or indirectly, by government decisions. That is not to say there aren't market mechanisms at work, there are. But they work in the directions they are allowed to work in (though not always intended - politicians don't always understand what they just did.)

[minionofmidas]

To left-wing opponents of gentrification: What alternatives do you have in mind?

(I'm genuinely curious).

Governments should never have stopped building council housing virtually entirely. (And before that, they oughtn't ever have built them without any input from the people intended to move into them, but that's a different story.)
Even the housing the ABG (the city owned corporation that is the biggest landlord here in Frankfurt and that has roots in building coops of a long time ago) now builds is not in any ways means-tested and too expensive for the genuinely poor - though cheaper than similar will be on the private market.
At least local protest and city politics managed to get them to abandon their plan of tearing down much of the Mainfeld estate. Not that the Mainfeld is a nice place to live.

[minionofmidas]

I guess the thing I don't understand in the mindset of the people who oppose gentrification is where should the rich people live? If they live in the city it's gentrification but most of the people who'd oppose that also oppose suburban development.

That's what we have prisons for.

It's not as if their numbers are rising, anyways; there's no reason why they shouldn't just stay where they are. (Actually there's some very good reasons. Beyond a certain income level relocations stop to seriously hurt your finances, so the rich tend to move around a lot until retirement age. Though so do the very poor.)

[minionofmidas]

For example, I have a bunch of neighbors who bought their 3 family brownstone for less than $30k and now it's worth $700k and they have $5k a month in rental income.  Those homeowners aren't being pushed out.  Some of them choose to cash in, some of them want to live elsewhere, and that's totally their right.  But seriously, they can cry me a river.

They are agents of gentrification, not victims. Presumably they put some borrowed money in to drive up the rental income and value, too.