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Comment by dmschulman | Hacker News Reader

This police-assisted murder is a shame but I don't understand why we expect neighborhoods to remain frozen in time forever, never changing their racial or socioeconomic makeup for as long as the area exists.

It's a given that neighborhoods, especially in the city, will change over time. The real issue isn't whether people who don't look like the lifelong residents will move in, it's if those new neighbors will treat the area and neighbors with the same reverence and respect that those before them did. I don't think people resent a changing neighborhood so much as they resent people with different values settling down and expecting the neighborhood to bend to their preference.

This is clearly what's at stake in the death of Alex Nieto.

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I don't think many people would argue with the evolutionary nature of cities. I think what people would say, however, is that when cities change those with the least economic muscle tend to be the most adversely effected (e.g they lose their homes/tenancies when they can't afford to pay inflated rents).

Again, that in itself might not be a problem if there were other places to move that poor communities could afford and wouldn't detrimentally affect their lives.

I can speak from experience in London, poor communities have NO WHERE to move if an area is gentrified and they are forced out. Prices are city wide too high, gentrification has left no where 'cheap'. What that means is moving further from central London, which means moving further away from the main source of work and increasing expense of travel. Which all in turn means an even greater slip into poverty.

Those doing low-paid work in London are obviously important to the city, but I'd argue that those doing high-paid work make more sense to live in the city because theirs is the work that benefits most from the agglomeration that big cities provide.

If low-paid workers have to travel further, then their wages will be forced upwards as a result. Employers are forced to pay prevailing market rates to get the staff they need.

The situation in London is complicated by a large influx of workers from elsewhere in the EU, who are willing to live in sub-standard conditions (many to a room, sharing beds, sheds in back gardens, etc.) and work for minimum wage, or even less.

Some larger employers pay a "living wage" on principle, but nobody feels the need to raise wages for unskilled workers for lack of supply.

This is a very salient point about London. It's not widely known about just how squalid and cramped the living conditions are — though just ask any recently arrived migrant. It is not as black and white as poor people living in zones 3-9 and rich people living in 1-3.

In a theoretically perfect economic market you're right, but there is little if any evidence to suggest there is a causal link between economic displacement and wage growth. In fact wage growth at the low end has stagnated in London[0] despite the advancing economic displacement of it's low paid workers[1].

[0]: https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Economy%20Comm... [1]: http://www.londonspovertyprofile.org.uk/indicators/topics/lo...

Those doing the high-paid "work" are often those abusing state granted powers to issue credit. They say to the poor "pledge more of your working life to me in exchange for the right to exist or I will banish you".

There is no relationship between value added and money gained in London.

If you don't understand the benefit to society of mortgages and business loans, this really isn't the forum for you.

I understand the benefit of credit but not loose credit. If you don't understand 2008 being a problem then this isn't the planet for you.

I also like water but understand I can drown in it.

The problem in 2008 was that credit dried up! Remember? The "credit crunch"? A lack of available credit? Which ground the economy to a halt?

#facepalm

I'm afraid you are looking at the problem from the wrong end. You are looking at an event and associating it with the immediate result.

Banks lost trust in each other and stopped lending because they knew many were going to fail due to over-issuance of credit leaving them far too leveraged.

Citigroup head: whilst the music is playing we keep dancing.

Your use of twitter hashtag in this debate seems very young.

When you fall off a building it's only the last second that is a problem. Your solution is to keep digging a hole faster than terminal velocity. Mine is to not jump off the building.

Housing would be cheaper if they built more of it. Rents in Seattle actually declined this year.

Broadly speaking you're right, but in London in particular housing stock growth has been significant in the last 10 years but it has had consequently little effect on housing price deflation[0].

There are many theories as to why that is, but a personal pet one is that London is lacking in housing stock across the market and as such it is economically more viable to build at the middle and top end of the market where profits are higher than at the low end. When this is combined with a record low investment in local government social housing in London you get London's extreme housing market e.g. demand is high, but supply has all gravitated to the place where returns are highest

[0]: http://data.london.gov.uk/housingmarket/

Very dense residential areas still seem rare in London, compared to other cities of comparable size (it has lower population density than e.g. NYC, Paris, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo...)

Completely agree. London really needs to embrace 'up' as a viable building solution. Apparently, a lot of it has to do with some archaic laws surrounding building in London, the 'Protected Views' one is of particular note:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_view

No idea why you are being downvoted. Supply and demand, this is Economics 101. I have made the same arguments about SF and people downvote me too. The #1 way to decrease rent is to build more supply. If there was double the apartments in SF, the rent would not be as high.

Many European countries had big supply pre 2008 and prices continued to rise. China has huge oversupply and yet prices have risen.

It's loose credit. It's the banks.

I'm not familiar with European real estate, but I have to ask: Where within these countries are prices rising? Is it universal or is it constrained to popular, low-unit count areas (like is generally the case in the US)?

> No idea why you are being downvoted.

Perhaps because the parent poster is wrong. Seattle rents did not decrease this year, or last year.

The rate at which rent is increasing has slowed (previously double-digit percentage increases have dropped to single-digit percentage increases). But actual rents have not fallen.

Seattle rents continue to grow each year, just at a slightly slower pace than before.

http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/2015/11/bad-timingas...

(This is not an argument against building new housing, I also believe we need more of that. But the issue is far more complicated than simply "supply and demand, economics 101")

>Perhaps because the parent poster is wrong. Seattle rents did not decrease this year, or last year.

Ah! Then someone really should have just told me instead of downvoting!

I was surprised to see how much of greater London is covered by town houses, detached homes and 2-3 story buildings when I visited.

The population of greater London is about the same as that of NYC (~8.5m people), but the population density is half (5,432/km^2 for London vs 10,756.0/km^2 for NYC).

When middle class families move out it's called *-flight. When poor families move out, it's called gentrification. Both are due to economics, some precipitated, not so much by individual bigotry but rather by self interest (the former wanting to preserve value individually in anticipation of devaluation of property, the latter get pushed out due to economics whereby its not viable to remain in a valuating neighborhood while earnings remain flat for the individual.

While I'm sure there's plenty of self interest at play, it's important to remember that there were explicitly racist legal practices as well. A specific example is the practice of racially restricted covenants, which literally prevents a home from being sold to a someone who isn't white:

http://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1920s1948-Restrict...

And which haven't been enforceable for ~70 years, where they existed in at all. Some stuff has happened since then.

And after that there was the FHA:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-raci...

Yes, "stuff" continues to happen, for better or worse, but it's hard to believe that the state of housing is independent of bigotry given the evidence.

And those policies ended 50 years ago! Liberals have been in charge of housing policy for literally decades.

And yet, race is still today a factor that can be quantified wrt housing:

https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/press/press_releas...

Gosh, it's almost like there are worse outcomes regardless of housing policy.

1. Economics is not morally neutral, it's not a force of nature that blows through a town like a snowstorm. Economics is deliberate human activity. Economic justice and injustice is a coherent concept.

2. White flight and the creation of urban slums was a deliberate policy on the part of the government and its various partner institutions. Redlining by banks, whites only suburbs, highways built through poor and black neighborhoods, tearing up businesses and uprooting families, policing policies that targeted undesirables, etc. I find it hard to believe anyone can examine the evidence and come up with such an apolitical explanation as "self-interest".

>When middle class families move out it's called *-flight. When poor families move out, it's called gentrification.

There's a vast economic difference between a family moving further upscale and further downscale.

I think the difference is choice.

White flight is white folks choosing to move out of an area.

Gentrification is white folks choosing to move in to an area.

No-one else gets a choice. Only the white folks.

> No-one else gets a choice.

Everybody gets the same choices, or can you point me towards a mechanism that prevents e.g. Chinese or Indians form moving?

The difference is narrative: It's currently acceptable to blame whitey. Criticising non-whites is not socially acceptable in left-wing circles. Your comment is an instance of this behaviour.

Wealthy white folks that is. Whites are more than half the population. Not surprising of wealthy pop many would be white. Plenty of poor ones.

And this is SF the gentrfiers are white and Asian

Is there a word for people refusing to move? Because then every possible housing decision by a white person could be framed as a terrible thing.

hehe fair point :)

> No-one else gets a choice. Only the white folks.

That's not really fair. White flight was a result of mandatory school integration policies, which forced middle-class (i.e., by-and-large white) and lower-class (i.e., by-and-large black) children into the same schools; white folks didn't have a choice about that, nor did those who stayed a bit longer have a choice about the continued decline of their cities.

Poor city folks have the same choice now that white city folks had in the 70s: stay & deal, or flee elsewhere. The sticky point is that it's a lot easier for someone middle-class to afford to move to the suburbs & commute to work than it is for a poor person.

To be clear, Brown v Board of Education school integration ended racial segregation, not economic segregation. Things are arguably different now, but back then race was a major component of the perceived "decline."

Really? White folks were forced to move away because their kids might go to school with black kids?

Only in America...

> White folks were forced to move away because their kids might go to school with black kids?

It's really, really unfortunate that race is a proxy for class in America. It's a natural and IMHO good human tendency for folks to want to be around others of their own class; the problem is that in America race and class are so conflated that one gets this horrible self-reinforcing racist spiral, which is unfair to blacks and poisonous to whites. And race isn't even all that good of a proxy for class, but due to the aforementioned self-reinforcing racist hate spiral it has been extraordinarily difficult to eliminate.

> It's a natural and IMHO good human tendency for folks to want to be around others of their own class;

Natural, but not good. Good is when we eliminate class, not enjoy its stratification.

It's always a choice. We have freedom of movement, we don't have hukous, we don't assign neighborhoods to people, racist housing policies haven't been a thing for a while.

People need more housing choices, cities need to build more housing at different price points, bug also without strong-arming developers.

People move due to economics. Looking for better, or looking for affordability.

Middle and upper class will also move away from poor whites. See what happens when school districts are consolidated and blue collar kids and middle class upper middle get sent to the same schools, the ones who can move will move.

Also, it's not as if gentrification does not occur in Tokyo or Lagos or Berlin.

Housing stock goes through phases of attractiveness.

What we need is more housing and less useless blaming, blaming will not address any of the issues of housing shortage.

Well this phase passed through cities like Chicago ages ago when the row homes were bought up literally street by street. Gutted and rebuilt on the inside into much nicer homes. The rising housing costs would increase taxes on adjacent homes and streets accelerating the process.

Likely Detroit will one day face this provided they can ever get themselves in order. It should be considered the fruit of fixing up what drove people away in the first place.

It all depends on who has the money and therefore the power. When the newcomers are wealthier and inclined to view the residents as undesirables, you get this sort of thing.

It goes the other way, too. In Amarillo, where I grew up, some neighborhoods had an influx of Vietnamese working in the meat packing industry; near where I live now, there's a large community of Mexican immigrants doing chicken processing. In both cases, take a wild guess who the police have problems with.

What is a neighborhood if all the people who live in it are completely fungible? What does it mean when a city is far more enthusiastic about spending money on neighborhoods of wealthy people and is glad to neglect neighborhoods of poor people? The most substantial funding American cities are willing to allocate for poor neighborhoods is police.

> I don't think people resent a changing neighborhood so much as they resent people with different values settling down and expecting the neighborhood to bend to their preference.

Honestly, that's just wrong. People resent how the schools only get better when wealthier people move in. People resent how petty violations are brutally enforced on the poor and relaxed once the neighborhood "gets a little better". People resent how a neighborhood improving implies they, the undesirables are forced out. These are all things i've learned from people speaking out about how they feel about their neighborhoods gentrifying. Where are you getting the idea that they care about "values"?

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