If you think gentrification is bad, you should see the alternatives. They are real. https://goo.gl/maps/veQSXmD7Z5G2
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.
"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.
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.
But we wouldn’t want them to have to pay interest now would we? They should be able to pocket that huge financial win for themselves.
Limiting property tax increases to RPI + one or two percent would be fairer to the lower income housholds
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.
Maybe that's true somewhere (I doubt it, for reasons already articulated in sibling comments), b ut certainly not in CA, because Prop 13.
* 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.
HN, your viewpoint is clear. Try visiting oakland! It’s getting more photogenic every day.
Gentrification is a consequence of improving economic circumstances. Decay is a consequence of declining economic circumstances.
Public policies can plaster over this fact somewhat, but generally policies like rent control or CA's Prop 13 make things worse rather than better.
I have visited Oakland plenty. It's a terrible place, due at least in part to bad public policy as described above.
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 entitled to live in a certain community for a certain price. That road leads to a planned (and failed) economy.
I’m guessing you’re not.
Finally, there is obviously a huge spectrum between free and planned economy. You can probably fill in the rest of the argument from here.
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.
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.
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.
-- Edit: like this.
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 not opposed to consumer protections here.
And not all old things are good. Hell, the oldest human social institutions are arguably the worst. Do you have an argument for its morality?
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.