How did I know it was Detroit before I even clicked?
Fact is, both gentrification and decay suck. I like to use the analogy of strip-mining a landscape, desert-ifying it, and then when the rain comes ... instead of a life sustaining event, it's a flood that removes it.
False dichotomy. Most of the complaints about gentrification are coming from lower middle class families getting pushed out of their home in a cute little neighborhood because taxes are too high.
getting pushed out of the neighborhood you grew up in because of the rising rents sounds pretty sad. getting pushed out of your family home because it got so valuable that you can't pay the property tax on it doesn't really sound as tragic. in fact, i hope that happens to every house i ever own.
"My tax bill went from $8K per year to $32K per year, poor me!" doesn't buy much sympathy when your house went from $200,000 to $800,000 over the same time period.
Actually the reverse happened in Detroit. Your houses value dropped 80% but your property taxes didn't drop.
Imagine you're retired and over 65 so you no longer owe property taxes. But you don't know it, the tax bills keep coming and you lose your house. It is still happening in Detroit.
You've lost your job in the 2008 recession (in Detroit with 35% unemployment it was a depression) so you don't have to pay your property taxes until you go back to work. But you don't know, the bills keep coming and you lose your house. It is still happening in Detroit.
You're a lucky one, you kept your job and are still able to pay your now inflated property taxes. But neighbors on both sides of you lost their houses and they're empty. An arsonist sets fire to both of them and the resulting blaze burns your house down. Yes, it's still happening in Detroit.
Sure they're sitting on a lot of wealth, but it's not an investment if you're living in it, because there's no income.
Also, having to move out of an area because you can't afford the taxes on your house says to me that the taxes are out of proportion (or should be reduced for primary residence), or the house values are crazy.
That's a typical attitude for someone who makes enough money to live where they are living. Sure, why not, you can just upgrade houses.
But, how much money would it take for you to quit your job and leave your home, family, and friends behind? Because that's what it amounts too. Few people are able to sell their newly expensive place and find a cheaper or equal option that doesn't require completely uprooting.
> Most of the complaints about gentrification are coming from lower middle class families getting pushed out of their home in a cute little neighborhood because taxes are too high.
Maybe that's true somewhere (I doubt it, for reasons already articulated in sibling comments), b ut certainly not in CA, because Prop 13.
Depends on your definiton of bad, I suppose. Care to state what you think is bad? You linked to google maps, from which I can draw a million conclusions, none of them worth devoting effort to responding to without clarification.
Taking the question in good faith, here a few examples drawn from the example above.
* The neighborhood is mostly burnt down, derelict, or razed: think of the important stories in your life and where they took place, and imagine those places transformed, not into a high-end sushi bar, but cracked sidewalks and rubble.
* A generation of home owners probably lost the majority of their wealth
* The city lost tax revenue and struggles to provide basic services like streetlights or the enforcement of law.
This was not the lack of gentrification. This is the effects of unemployment. If a high end sushi bar would “revive” the neighborhood, it would only be because the residents were forced out. So what’s the point? I’d rather care about the people in the neighborhood (...which does involve maintenance) than how the neighborhood makes people feel. People live there. This lazy attitude towards justifying gentrification is disgusting. It’s a hard problem that deserves thought, and this is just classism.
HN, your viewpoint is clear. Try visiting oakland! It’s getting more photogenic every day.
Yea, I’m not buying that you need to kick people out of their houses to improve the economy (whatever that means to you...). Employment and gentrification are linked and cause each other.
Please, stay away from the terrible cities! Would you go so far as to call them shitholes?
I'm not tracking the argument you're making. Between the frequent revisions of your comments, I've gathered that HN users are bad for not visiting Oakland, but once you discover that we've been there, now you want us to stay away? I thought I was preferring gentrification to decay, but now I'm personally kicking people out of their houses?
Life is hard and unfair. I get it. But if you make choices based on a short-sighted compassion for the disadvantaged that entirely neglects long-term consequences, you will make life harder and more unfair. Exhibit A: CA's Prop 13.
> Nobody is walking up to a door and dragging poor old grandma out.
What exactly do you think happens when an apartment complex gets purchased by a buyer whose plans are to redevelop (either remodel or demolish and rebuild) it for a more upscale market.
> Nobody is entitled to live in a certain community for a certain price.
Whether entitled or not, people are in fact harmed by being forcibly displaced from their home.
What happens in our markets up here (MA and NH) is the new building owner inherits the leases of the existing tenants and must fulfill the obligations of those leases. I assume the laws are similar in CA.
Once the building owner and tenant both fulfill that which they’ve agreed to, they can mutually choose to extend renew or not. If the building owner wants to redevelop, they need to wait for leases to run their term or they need to buy out of the lease with each tenant.
When they do that, they’ve fulfilled their end of the bargain. If a tenant wants more than that, they can negotiate (and pay for) lease renewal options. Most residential tenants do not (most commercial tenants do), but should then not be surprised when they don’t have that ironclad option to extend the lease that they didn’t choose to buy.
Then people need to adjust their living styles. "Forced" is the wrong term here. Either you can afford your apartment or not. Nobody deserves cheap rent.
Yes, that's exactly a downward distribution of pain.
> "Forced" is the wrong term here.
As they are compelled by the actions of others, it is exactly the right word.
> Nobody deserves cheap rent.
That certainly includes the wealthier beneficiaries (the new residents, not the even wealthier investors) of government-subsidized gentrification, who are, after all, getting exaxtly what the poorer losers in that process are losing.
If nobody deserves it, taxpayers shouldn't be paying to transfer it from the poor to the wealthy.
When you significantly edit your comments after the conversation has moved on, it's really helpful to include the edits below the original post so that others can view the actual conversation.
They are only "forced" if you believe they were originally entitled to live there at a certain price.
Which, in a market economy, they were most certainly not.
The moral argument around gentrification is a weak one. Gentrification has been happening since cities existed. At some point we need to accept that people should make sound financial decisions.
I'm just saying the moving of people throughout cities and neighborhoods is a very natural thing. Someone no longer being able to afford things in their neighborhood is not inherently a bad thing. Responsibly adults should be able to manage their finances, move, and adjust. That's life.
> They are only "forced" if you believe they were originally entitled to live there at a certain price.
No, they are forced independently of that.
Whether you view that as categorically wrong may be impacted on views of entitlement, but most of the suggestions I've seen about it being wrong are utilitarian, not categorical, and are thus not dependent on any system of entitlement.
Do you think the burned out, half-missing roof house adds beneficial je ne sais quoi to the neighborhood? Which of those houses would you like to have a next-door neighbor? Which of those houses would have the greatest positive effect on your willingness to move there, raise a family there, and invest there?
Some places were overbuilt, and it would probably be better to tear down the remaining structures, clean it up and designate the block as a park. The wrong approach to development can make things substantially worse for people who live in marginal neighborhoods.
The gross majority of opportunity zones are not at risk of gentrification from opportunity zone investment. Most opportunity zone census tracts sorely need an incentive for new investment.
Sounds like what is going to happen to me is some "opportunity zones" are going to increase in value, and its going to lead to a runaway feedback effect where all this opportunity zone investment is going to be plowed into a few rapidly price increasing zones for maximum return and nowhere else.
End result is going to be an entire neighborhood of 3 million dollar condos nobody lives in (but prices have skyrocketed due to the huge influx of money), a huge tax free payoff for millionaires, and next to zero real societal value created.
The benefit of investing in an opportunity zone is not that great. It’s an incentive, but a rather modest one, for a specific group of people with ‘captive gains,’ and these investments will tend to be rather risky by nature of being in OZs. I have trouble fathoming a runaway investment situation (?). If, in 10 years, OZ policy has dramatically changed the state of a substantial portion of low income census tracts... is that a bad thing?
I live on the edge of one and real estate around here has tripled over the last decade already. I have lost a lot of friends and neighbors to endlessly rising rents over the last 5 years. Something tells me the hot money isn't going to fund the construction of homeless shelters or enough housing to seriously push down rents.
The fact that that the original residents are displaced to a place without those benefits and bear the cost of relocation, while the people that enjoy he benefits are people who could have afforded to get as good, or nearly so, conditions in existing places with them, anyway.
Gentrification is a magnifying downward redistribution of misery, where the new residents get a small gain in exchange for the old residents (particularly renters) getting a big loss.
Yes, property owners—who tend to be more wealthy than renters to start with—may see benefits. That kind of reinforces the point, rather than contradicting it.
