How gentrification really changes a neighborhood
atlantamagazine.com
atlantamagazine.com
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.
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...] 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
(Hard to say what the just solution is though. As a first-pass filter, changing the rules so people don't have to rent for twenty years might be useful, if there's a practical way to succeed at that).
Life was hard when we had to forage for food.
Life was hard when infant mortality was massive worldwide.
Life was hard when we didn't have a cure for polio.
Life was hard when the economically disadvantaged generally just quietly died out because no programs existed to help them over a bad chunk of time.
And life is now hard when you get cancer, lose your job, or are forced to move because the economics of your town have changed and you can't afford to live there anymore. Worth noting is that sometimes, these three are inter-related. ;)
The hard things are not fixed in stone; they are challenges to be solved. That's why we bother with society; if it weren't worth our time to take on the hard stuff, we'd have stuck with hunter-gatherer life style because it's a lot structurally simpler.
Evidence shows that hunter-gatherer people were much taller (a full foot) than their ancestors who turned to agriculture. It's only been in recent years that we've finally caught up with the heights hunter-gatherers reached: that's around 10,000 years that we've been deficient.
The reason we didn't stick with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is because we humans became overpopulated and ran out of resources. Agriculture was the only way to survive, because growing crops on a farm and herding domesticized prey animals is much more efficient than hunting and gathering in the wild. But it's also a lot more work and has a lot of problems with disease and malnutrition (potatoes and rice have terrible nutritional value by themselves). Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had generally superior and happier lifestyles, but they were living in an age when they didn't have a lot of competition for resources; it was like a "garden of Eden". The natives of Hawaii (before European contact) are probably one of the closest cultures in modern times to this.
People adopted agriculture because the forests no longer had enough food. Hunter-gatherer lifestyles were no longer viable. So of course they wanted a more predictable food supply.
Long before this point in time, that wasn't a concern: the forests were full of food, so there was no reason to bother with agriculture. People invented agriculture out of necessity, like most inventions.
Where did I talk about "agricultural mass-starvation"? Agriculture is how people avoided starvation when the resources ran out. But it wasn't as nice as the "golden years" when the forests had plenty of food and there weren't many humans competing for it. But there was no way to go back to that time, just as there isn't now.
"Garden of Eden"
People agreed to rent, perhaps they had no other choice, perhaps they where forced by factors outside their control. But those things happen. When I was younger I had a dear friend move away because his parents got a better paying job somewhere else. It's the same sentiment, he had his roots there and still had to move (if for other reasons than not being able to pay rent).
The short of the story is that when entering into a contract you should switch to a mercenary mode, and get the best deal you could possibly make. Don't lay down roots if you don't own your house. Buy don't rent, etc.
ps, does anyone know the(an) average commute time for someone who is not able to afford a living place next to their employer in these areas?
And anyway, sometimes renting is cheaper than buying. It's not inherently bad and there are certainly circumstances where it makes sense to rent for decades at a time.
Individual on a fixed income that is too low to pay the cost of living in their home and must therefore move, because the fact that the local economy has improved (making things more expensive) doesn't imply their income improves to match it.
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.
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...
If that were true, rent control and Prop 13 would have means-testing, and leave seniority completely out of the equation. Because they do not, they're actually about benefitting the establishment (even if wealthy) at the expense of newcomers (even if poor).
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.)
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.
Buying low and selling high, how awful.
Furthermore, most low income households who own property aren't engaging in speculation, they are simply trying to keep the property they inherited.
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".
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.
I'm just calling out ahoy for writing a post that's little but virtue signalling and nerd shaming.
You're taking this thread into personal attack, plus slinging a lot of sarcasm around, which has the effect that trolling does. Please stop doing these things.
It's a personal attack to say someone is right and that people might like them?
(I'm assuming since you've singled me out for reply that you have little problem with ahoy's comment.)
> I'm assuming since you've singled me out for reply that you have little problem with ahoy's comment
Quite the opposite, and I'm surprised you'd fall for that non sequitur. The comment was bad by HN's standards. It added noise and indignation much more than it added information.
I replied to you, though, because you've posted more in this thread and because the pattern I described is problematic.
I honestly agree with ahoy that "heartless, dispassionate thought" is likel to cause a lot of people to dislike me and other tech people. (I also think it's more likely to be correct.) You've clearly been following my posts, is this an implausible belief for me to hold?
If I incorrectly interpreted a comment replying to me as as singling me out, I offer my apologies. Perhaps I'm being oversensitive. I was attempting to make a measured response to what I considered a less than pleasant comment.
Is this an ad hom?
What about this bit
In-fill development might slow gentrification a bit, but it certainly won't make San Francisco or Mountain View affordable to people who make $50k per year, much less those who make $25k per year.
If a city wants to have people working there (to run the local businesses: restaurants, etc.), but is so expensive that those people cannot afford to live near their workplaces, and the city refuses to do zoning to support lower-income housing, then the cities where the poorer people live should be able to levy taxes on the cities where those residents work, to help pay for all the transportation issues. Obviously, the federal (or maybe state) government would have to enact this legislation.
This will create a big incentive for cities to do better zoning, and if they refuse, then they'll be transferring a lot of wealth from their own residents (in the form of property and sales taxes) to the places where their lower-level workers live.
For example, you say, "entire city cores become entirely reserved for wealthy people." That's a sentence fragment replete with lineless definitions. What's a "city core"? If I can afford a house one block outside of the imaginary line that bounds a "city core," is that actually much different from my being able to afford a house one block inside that line? What constitutes a "wealthy" person? If the "city core" (however that's defined) is "affordable" (however that's defined) for someone whose income is $60,000, but not $50,000, what does that mean?
I have no trouble with the sort of general intuition that it's a shame if someone can no longer afford to live in a neighborhood that is deeply meaningful to them. What I have trouble with is any way to quantify that intuition and put it into a practical set of policies that actually increase justice and do not diminish it.
For instance in Minneapolis where I live, once they put in a lot of low income housing in, a majority of the whites move out of the city, and into the first ring suburbs. Then several immigrant populations moved into Minneapolis and pushed a lot of the african-american population into that first ring of suburbs where the whites had moved. Sure enough, the whites pushed out into the next ring of suburbs.
This has happened several times and now the ironic thing is they're taking out (or demolishing) all the low income housing and putting in swanky town homes and condos and guess what? All those families (and their kids) that moved out in the 60's and 70's are the prime movers for the new era of gentrification.
My point here is even though communities get shuffled and pushed out due to gentrification, they tend to stick together regardless and create new communities where they move to and find like minded people who have the same common cultural traits as themselves.
As others have said, there is a cycle which develops --be it homogenous pops of heterogeneous populations, in vibrant economies. In stagnant economies, you pretty much get to stay where you were born as there is no upward movement or sideways movement clearing housing stock for others and giving them a chance to move in.
So I both agree that no one has a "right" to live in a particular neighborhood or city, implying that housing should be available at a price affordable to anyone who works, I also believe builders should be encouraged to build for different income levels.
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.
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.)
I never took the initiative to walk next door and chat
There is also no great tragedy in two parties coming to terms on a transaction when both of them agree - by definition, they're both better off because of the transaction. $70K for a the weeded lot next door it not a bad deal.
The real tragedy here is land-use restrictions that most municipalities instituted in the '70s and '80s, which prevent the supply of housing to meet demand (http://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-t...).
Many "gentrifiers" in many Atlanta neighborhoods would probably prefer to live in NYC, LA, SF, or Seattle, but those municipalities have strict rules that prevent the building of sufficient housing to meet demand. So people move elsewhere. Matt Yglesias discusses this in more detail in The Rent is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/TheRent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp...).
Should community residents not have the freedom to enforce restrictions on their own communities? Would these communities be as desirable if they allowed new residents to crowd out the old residents?
Definitely not. Land is a common asset of all of society: taking away building sites while basically all urban areas (ie: with jobs) suffer housing shortages is exploiting the commons.
Probably not, but I'd have their site planned at the regional/state/province level rather than allowing each individual municipality to say "NIMBY!" to everything. Because most NIMBY measures aren't about chemical refineries, they're about the working class, about sites of housing and employment for ordinary people.
The whole view that dense housing somehow equals violent crime is decades out of date and largely only ever applied to deliberately-created black ghettoes in the first place.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...
I'm not sure if we should feel betrayed by this sort of behavior, if you're going to post a link to a book anyway.
I didn't care for the article, but this comment is awful and you ought to feel bad about writing it. Did black people moving into an overtly racist white neighborhood in 1960s era Atlanta feel guilty about it? No, they were probably fucking terrified.
One day in June, a black family moved into a home on Woodbine Avenue, just over the southwestern Kirkwood border in Edgewood. That night someone set fire to it.
Did you read that part? Come on.
Whatever your explanation, please reconcile it with: (Yes, I'm obviously mocking the author of this silly article a bit.)
ergo
the author feeling guilt => absurd
.
the author is being mocked for the absurdity of their feeling guilt. i think the crux of the insult is gentrification guilt is reserved for the privileged.
Is that the relevant thing in terms of causing guilt? Who knows? As I said, I think the only relevant thing is this guy signalling to all the other white people what a virtuous fellow he is.
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.
By the way, the neighborhoods are so 'cheap' because poor people lived there for a long time. (I put cheap in quotes, because homes in this neighborhood are significantly more expensive than the average home in America.) The homes require more work and the school systems have less resources.
If you want to walk back in history and find out why poor people live in this neighborhood, great, understanding history is important so that its negative aspects don't repeat itself. But what are you suggesting, that the neighborhood stays poor? Or it stays segregated?
If anything, the raising prices of homes in neighborhoods like these indicates that people no longer care about their neighbor's skin color. That's a good thing.
> By the way, the neighborhoods are so 'cheap' because poor people lived there for a long time. (I put cheap in quotes, because homes in this neighborhood are significantly more expensive than the average home in America.) The homes require more work and the school systems have less resources.
Gee, why do you think all that is?
I'm not saying "those neighborhoods were poor 50 years ago because they were segregated, that's so unfair!" I'm saying "those neighborhoods are still poor because they were segregated 50 years ago, and nobody has undone the effects of segregation and put those people back in the position they would have been but for segregation."
Why repeat an argument you know to be flawed?
I'm also not really sure how you can suggest the historical hardships that Korean Americans faced weren't a lot worse than black Americans. Korea was dirt poor (think worst part of Africa levels) since forever, then a war, then refugees into the racist US. Post WW2 Filipinos and post-Vietnam war Vietnamese have a very similar story.
So tell me; why again is Rayiners "nothing ever unbends itself" story remotely plausible?
"Any person...who shall rent any part of any such building to a negro person or a negro family when such building is already in whole or in part in occupancy by a white person or white family, or vice versa when the building is in occupancy by a negro person or negro family, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not less than twenty-five ($25.00) nor more than one hundred ($100.00) dollars or be imprisoned not less than 10, or more than 60 days, or both such fine and imprisonment in the discretion of the court."
EDIT: My limited recollection of American history reminds me that there were protectionist laws against Chinese immigrants on the Western frontier. For the sake of this exercise, let's limit your law search to 20th century discrimination against non-Japanese, non-Chinese immigrants.
My point is that the properties of each paperclip are unique. Trying to make the sort of extrapolations between paperclips that you tend towards (misery poker) is not an exercise that leads to improvement for anyone.
Colored includes Asians.
http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/links/misclink/examples/homepa...
So apparently all paperclips are unique, some move by themselves, some don't? Then how can rayiner so confidently assert that the state of the black paperclip is entirely caused by what happened 50 years ago?
Yes, every individual person's experience is unique. However, that was not my point. My point was that the typical Korean immigrant's experience is a different situation than the typical experience of an ancestor of an African-American today. (Call it two brands: the general "Korean-American" paperclip, and a general "African-American" paperclip.)
Korean immigrants and their descendents, simply put, were and are in a different situation than African-Americans or their ancestors. Some parts of either of their situations are outside the control of individuals.
Can you say with a straight face that 200 years of legalized segregation, and concomitant economic starvation, should disappear ("unbend") within 60 years of it being de facto uplifted?
I thought "colored" == "not white" was common knowledge, but if you want a specific definition, take Virginia:
For the purpose of this act, the term “white person” shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jim_Crow_law_examples_...
Colored explicitly includes "Negro, Mongolian, American Indian, Asiatic Indian, Malay".
As for whether I believe human populations can rapidly rebound, the answer is yes. I believe this because so many human populations have actually done this. I've cited many examples and they in addition to suffering poverty and oppression far worse than any in the US, they also satisfied your criteria of having Jim Crow laws applied to them in the unlikely event that they were permitted to enter the US.
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...
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.
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.
He was definitively not a member of white people in Georgia during the 50's and 60's. He wasn't even born at the time this group lost their special privileges, as noted in the article ("your one-sixth-acre slice of Atlanta had actually belonged to the family next door for longer than you’ve been alive").
Now it might be right for him to feel guilty about not doing enough. But he should certainly feel less guilty than most of us; he's done something, I've done nothing. Never even been to Atlanta. I have many friends who've never been to the US. Should they also feel guilty?
In any case, that's not Copenhagen. Copenhagen says that Josh Green should feel guilty since he observed the situation, but Igor Muscovite (a Russian who never left Moscow) doesn't need to feel guilty since he's didn't make the observation. I guess the best way to avoid guilt is to bury our heads in the sand?
It didn't just happen in Georgia, it happened all over the country. And it's reasonable to believe some of Josh Green's ancestors were in the group that voted special privileges for itself. So the question comes back to: do you carry around the guilt of your ancestors? I think you do, especially when you benefit from the ramifications of their actions. And Green is benefiting from segregation: that neighborhood would've been a lot more expensive for him to buy into had it not been for segregation.
But YOU'RE responsible. Your group was responsible for the death of this kid, who knew no better than to steal. Should you be guilty? Should you go to jail? Should you live worse to repent?
Don't be silly. You're not responsible for any actions other than your own.
If everyone started from scratch, I'd agree with you. But in Atlanta, you get water from pipes built by people just after the civil war. Residents of Atlanta inherited the infrastructure and benefits of what their ancestors built. I think it's absurd to say that they can inherit the benefits, but don't inherit the obligations.
This is like saying I "inherited" something from Tata and Aditya Birla and that I'm also responsible for their crimes. That's silly. I pay 300rs/month and IDEA gives me voice+data and runs MITM attacks on unencrypted connections. That's the end of our relationship.
Should the children of murderers and other criminals feel guilt over the actions their parents have directly engaged in?
That's a point you seemed determined to dodge here, just as when you ask if your friends who have never been to the US are somehow implicated in US segregation.
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.
Insofar as he's benefiting from these problems semi-directly it's because he's helping to solve them.
As for me, I've passed through Georgia once on a family road trip when I was 11. Insofar as more diffuse benefits like "well those actions caused a good economy that you benefit from", I work for a Indian SAAS with American customers. How's that any different from an Indian guy working for an Indian SAAS with American customers?
That also moots your earlier dodge of "doing something to help with a problem is better than the nothing I personally do", because that nothing you personally do is not offset by profit you are reaping from the misfortune of others.
I don't have a strong opinion about this debate, and I am also skeptical of anti-gentrification narratives, but the logic you're deploying here seems very sketchy.
A surgeon who reattaches limbs is a pretty ok guy, even if he's benefiting from horrible accidental amputations. So is an Uber driver who drives into a surging area.
I've even personally benefited from the holocaust, the Kosovo wars and the Rwandan genocide; I've met interesting people who would probably never have crossed my path under better circumstances. Is it really reasonable for me to feel guilt over that?
None of that is true of well-off white people taking advantage of a market inefficiency caused by decades of segregation. In fact: providing opportunities for well-off white people to profit in the real estate market is an incentive for segregation, and an incentive along the same vector as one of the most important incentive systems supporting 19th and 20th century segregation: internal economic protectionism for favored ethnicities.
At this point in the discussion I think reasonable people can start disagreeing. That wasn't true given your earlier examples, which simply didn't connect logically to the conundrum Rayiner proposed.
None of that is true of well-off white people taking advantage of a market inefficiency caused by decades of segregation....and an incentive along the same vector
Segregation was a "you must discriminate" law to prevent greedy folks like the author of this article from exploiting the market inefficiencies.
It seems like I've got 3 choices here. (+1) Violate the spirit of that law, reduce the market inefficiency, and make money. 0) Live in Asia. (-1) Make the inefficiency worse by moving into a nice white suburb, pay more money, and obey the spirit of that now absent law.
To me it seems like "guilt follows benefit" implies I need to do (-1).
Not really sure what you are advocating for here.
Redlining had a very direct and profound (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-raci...) effect that's still seen to this day.
If your parents stole a bunch of money and then you got it when they died would you feel guilty about that?
If your grandparents stole a bunch of money, your parents inherited that money, and then you inherited it from them would you feel guilty about that?
Where exactly does the "statue of limitations of guilt" end? I'm honestly not sure.
I was born in the Soviet Union; I am white. I moved to the US state of Georgia as a child. I assume you'd say I benefited from segregation; in any case, just assume that I did. Should/Do I carry this same guilt you feel that "native" white Atlantans carry?
"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.
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.
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).
And IMO the feelings of guilt are the stereotypical "white guilt". Progressive white people feel guilty about the situation that black people are in because we benefit from the institutionalized racism that they suffer from. But we can't really do anything because we don't understand what being a black person in America means.
That means many of us end up confused and feeling guilty because as progressive white people, we want to help. But we can't, so we end up writing about the history that we're destroying as a means of making it ok to ourselves. But ultimately, this is the kind of "local history" that is often lost between generations regardless. It's likely nobody remembers who the neighborhood patriarch was in their neighborhood 100 years ago, so this isn't a phenomenon restricted to gentrified areas. It's just that gentrified areas are filled with guilty white people (who are far more likely to write a tome and post it on Medium than someone poorer and less educated).
Guilt is sort of the word for it, but not quite.
I think the simple fact of recognizing privilege when you have it, is a start. Being aware of history is the next step. The final step is not just wanting to help, but actually helping.
I think a lot of people in this author's situation find that last step difficult. The truth is that if you look hard enough, you _will_ find people in the community that care and are trying to do things. They can point you in the direction you want to go.
That's just silly. You don't know what you don't know. How do people find racial, social, and political consciousnesses? They aren't born with it. Not upper class white people, and not black people either. Something has to perpetuate it, some event that forces you to awaken to all in the world that's shitty and motivate you to do something about it, and, more importantly, change yourself so you don't perpetuate those things.
Blacks can't get away from the various hells of the world, they naturally find that consciousness at a really early age. Whites are insulated from them through a process that, these days, we call privilege.
It's easy to lampoon white people who suddenly find their social consciousness through some picaresque encounter with world-weary minorities, it's a much-mined cultural cliché. But it's the wrong reaction. Worse, it smacks of egotism, perhaps you think that you're one of those white people that aren't affected by privilege.
I believe this is known as the racism of lowered expectations.
Let's say you ran for office on the platform of eliminating Black History Month. How far do you think you'd get? Do you think your message that Black History Month is racist would resonate with the people you're trying to help?
In a couple of weeks I'm giving up nearly all [1] of those benefits for what is very far from the first time. The 18-36 hour flight bothers me more than the loss of privilege. I know exactly how little privilege is worth.
[1] I don't have children, so a few items (e.g. 8, 14) don't apply. 35 doesn't apply since I'm not a scheduled caste.
> I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
Is this privilege basically
"If I'm black, I have to spend time with whites, but whites don't have to spend time with blacks"?
I really wish I could find a less stupid definition of privilege to cite, but no one ever gives me a better one.
I might find it hard to find western food in India, or at least if I'm not wealthy. While obviously race and wealth/pop% correlate, this list explicitly frames them as white privilege.
Wealth disparity being racially correlated is a problem, but any other results deriving from this aren't in themselves a problem (e.g. finding a barber who can cut your hair).
Population % certainly isn't a problem (would you go to India and complain about similar things, wealth discounted?).
Right now in my city over 50% of the children change schools before the school year is over. They start in September and half the students are new students in June! That is not a community that is just a transient zone of bad homes and bad landlords. Also the homes are gorgeous and are certainly better made then most homes today. So neighborhoods do change but when an area with no established families turns into a community lets not throw out the word gentrification it is establishing a community and property values go up because it becomes a place people want to move into.
Should they have felt "guilty" because racist whites fled en masse, terrified at the prospect of living next to someone of their skin color?
I don't think so.
You are misreading history by a mile.
My Grandfather actually was one of the first people to participate in one of these full section deals in the late 40s and early 50s in Dorchester and Southie in Boston on behalf of the family company and family trust. he also was one of the first of his family to go to college - for accounting, courtesy of the GI bill, post ww2.
2 things pushed these deals together
1) almost all the buyers were becoming/were middle class blacks/on their way, courtesy of the GI bill/backwages of ww2 and Korea. Southie wasn't redlined, and they went through friends of friends to buy in order to become landlords, not to live there. 2)As part of housing shortage/great society issues, section 8 was introduced, and a number of buildings involved were going to be zoned/legally obliged to take and early version of section 8.
Group 1 didn't run the numbers very closely, my grandfather did. The buildings would have become effectively slumlord properties. My grandfather wanted no part of that. He also assumed the following:
Surrounding 1-2 family house prices would start to drop as the rumor mill started to fly.
Which would buy him time to move.
That prediction proved to pretty much be true with the passing of multiple laws in the 60s surrounding housing and the creation of HUD/expansion of the FHA.
As a result, my father actually spent the first 2 years of his life in Southie/Dorchester before his family moved to Milton.
The primary buyers my grandfather sold to did not hold onto the property for very long, for obvious reasons. People like Anna, especially if they were first wave buyers, did not feel like they were dispossessing anyone since at the time it wasn't clear if these sorts of housing acts were going to pass/what was going to happen involving integration (which was happening roughly towards the end of the 60s). At best, from what I can tell it was about starting to join and integrate into the country, not dispossession.
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).
[1]http://www.zillow.com/homes/49-warren-rd-kirkwood-georgia_rb...
- At that sale price, a 3.25% FHA mortgage (3.5% down min) will be
$375,385 or just a hair over $1,600 a month.
- Property taxes are $500/mo give or take [0]
- PMI will be about $360/mo [1]
They also sold a condo so maybe they had $150k in the bank and have a lower mortgage and no PMI. But looking at these numbers they're certainly not living off a teacher's salary alone.
[0] http://www.city-data.com/forum/atlanta/1286033-property-taxes-kirkwood.html
[1] http://www.goodmortgage.com/Calculators/PMI.htmlYou are correct.
Most counties have real estate sites you can put in an address and get a satellite image of the lot, how much the last sale was for and who the current owner is and what type of classification the lot has.
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.