There seems to be a logical pattern of receiving investment -> community gets more resources/becomes better -> more people want to live there -> prices increase -> gentrification and the original residents being forced out.
What am I missing?
Fixing this problem will be huge steps towards addressing homelessness, gentrification, desegregating schools, and general wealth inequality.
If there is a focus on high density housing near public transit, then this will also have a positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions
Land value tax (and relaxed/rationalised zoning & building codes) seem a more likely route.
I see this opinion far too often from people who have never studied urban planning and development. It smells like of those 'I took an econ 101 class, let me tell you how the world works' kind of opinions.
Here is one of my favorite illustrations: http://densityatlas.org/measuring/far.shtml
Another nice one: https://twitter.com/euanmills/status/969132807548260352/phot...
You look back at this neighborhood in five years. Wouldn't you consider it to have gentrified?
I thought we were past framing the discussion in terms of increase/decrease in value. NIMBYs (generally) aren’t against it because it’ll lower value and bringing high density housing doesn’t increase value (except in the extreme long run).
There's a train station nearby, but there was a lot of open area as well. We are also in an opportunity zone. Within the last couple years, construction has started for over 1000 housing units on all greenfield sites (except one of the 200+ unit complexes which was on a single family lot).
I'm not sure if the term gentrification applies here, but I'm really hoping it turns into a nice little transit oriented development. Construction is still ongoing, so we'll see.
This is all within 4 miles of downtown Denver.
Edit: I'm aware this will likely create more demand for the area, and might cause some displacement, but seeing that development is taking place around a transit station, on green/brownfield sites, and nearby an urban core gives me some hope regarding city planning.
The problem is that, due to historical and ongoing discrimination, most of the existing residents in neighborhoods being gentrified are renters with no equity: https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history....
Indeed, black and brown residents face the problem that their very presence depresses property values, and property values skyrocket when they leave. In DC, the area east of the Capitol has been gentrifying over the last 15 years. If you look at homes districted first Maury elementary school, their prices have skyrocketed (doubling in many cases) in the last 5-7 years. That’s far faster than the city as a whole. Why? Because in that time frame Maury flipped from majority black to majority white. Everything is in DCPS. The district has a highly equitable funding formula. It’s the same teachers, etc. Many of the fancy new school buildings are in fact majority black schools. But upper middle class parents are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars more to send their kids to majority white schools. So the very fact of black residents leaving causes property values to go up—gains which obviously those former residents cannot capture.
What does it even mean to "lead a people" in the context of a city with immigration and emigration? You quickly run into the Ship of Theseus[1] problem.
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I think, in practice, there needs to be something of a balance between prioritizing place and people, probably not an equal balance though. I think people are more important.
As a citizen, if I elect a leader, live by the laws, and pay taxes, I want the government to look after me and my well being and not try to optimize the local stats for GDP or median income or whatever if that comes at the expense of people who live there.
Do you disagree with that?
Not at all. But it doesn't matter if I agree or not - I was just making an observation.
But, then you must also discourage or disincentivize the relocated residents from immediately losing and/or selling these homes to newcomers who are willing to pay more. Owner-occupied homes allow each owner to evaluate whether or not they wish to sell, whereas renters rarely get a say. If all owners willingly sell to richer newcomers, would you look back and consider the community to have gentrified?
Rent control is one such market distortion. Prop 13 is another. These tools serve to keep certain houses off the market, while largely allowing their residents to stay in place.
These mechanisms are irrespective of supply, because the supply is always finite. The mechanisms act on the demand-side.
However, this isn't a complete solution because it's not just a side-effect to have mid-to-high income people moving in to a lower-income area; it's intended. Concentrated poverty leads to weaker education and healthcare systems and other social disorders that perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Making those areas mixed-income is something social planners dreamed up as a way to increase access to jobs and improve schools etc. Mixed-income environments have a good track record where they occur naturally, so we've tried to replicate that success.
You've got to deal with the business sector. Analyses that look at housing prices and incomes alone inevitably find that housing price increases don't exceed the benefits of new job availability. But what also happens is that everything else in the community becomes more expensive. Cheap restaurants close, expensive ones open, survivors raise their prices; the same thing happens to grocers, bars, theatres, hairdressers etc. This is the big unsolved problem in "investing in poor communities": even in places with rent control (like SF), this kind of gentrification can price people out.
But do note, however, that the problem described in the first paragraph exacerbates the one in the third paragraph by increasing the mean income of people who move into poor communities and thus increasing the disparity in the price point of services in demand in those areas.
People are confusing gentrification with displacement, which are two separate concepts. Gentrification simply means improvement.
There are some kinds of tax breaks and protections that can help reduce the harm of gentrification by helping people who own their home to avoid losing it.
I'm not totally convinced. If you can afford rent in NYC everything else is actually pretty affordable. An unlimited metro card is much cheaper than owning a car (plus insurance, gas, maintenance). Cheap food is widely available and there's a plethora of services available that don't exist in rural areas.
Food is 17% more expensive. It's harder to get delivery trucks through, more trucks have to get to the city, fuel is more expensive, etc.
Sure a metro card is cheaper in terms of direct cost but you've sacrificed commute time and time really is money. If it takes you an extra 30 minutes to commute home via metro, that's less time to be with your kids or prepare (cheap) food.
More absolute costs but with a tendency to amortize to a lower cost per person or per dwelling. If you have to dig up the street to run a water pipe to a place, it costs exactly the same whether there's one house or two houses or a 4-plex at that place.
In your specific example:
+ More cars parked on the street
+ More existing pipes under the asphalt to avoid or repair if you damage
+ More traffic on the street so you have to work more condensed hours and limit the time the street can be closed
+ Typically more density means less open room for moving machinery/workers/equipment
Ripping out a street and running a new main is endlessly easier in the middle of a small town than it is in downtown NYC, from getting the equipment in place to doing it safely.
Round 1. More people want to live there -> prices increase -> original residents start being forced out -> receiving investment -> Round 2. Even more people want to live there.
Gentrification is only really happening in Round 2+ of this cycle. A lot of people think if they oppose new buildings they cut off gentrification at the source, and maybe it's possible to slow down some occurrences of gentrification this way. But it ignores the factors that put this process in motion in the first place in Round 1 of my example - that new people wanted to live there before the area received any investment. Which is either the result of these people moving from nearby neighborhoods that they may have been priced out of, or the result of overall growth attracting people from far outside the region.
So it's really a lose-lose situation - if you don't build new housing, newcomers need somewhere to live and will end up forcing out existing residents somewhere. If you build some new housing, that's when people take notice and start calling it gentrification, and it may even create a flywheel effect that accelerates the gentrification. (But in a place like San Francisco, I don't really even see this flywheel effect anyway. Nobody is moving here because of the pretty new condos that are going up, people decide to move to the city first and decide later whether that means living in a new condo or an old walkup with charm).
The only way out of it is to build enough new housing to overcome the shortage. If the people being forced out could just move down the street into a new apartment, it wouldn't be such a big deal that they are forced out of that particular unit. As it is now, these people are often locked in and barely hanging on, maybe they've known the landlord for 30 years and are getting a break, or they have a low rent control price and wouldn't be able to afford the market rate price anymore. These things are obviously good in some ways, but it means a lot of people are in very precarious situations. In the long term, as we're seeing, this is clearly not a good situation to be in. And in the short term, we need protections for these people while the equilibrium is fixed, such as having subsidized housing available for them to move to, paying them housing stipends, or paying them out when they are evicted to help cover their costs of moving and finding a new place to live.
For example, a city could plow money into K-12 education and the local college.
Then, it could provide small businesses loans to students graduating from the local university.
This depends on the degree of the improvement, but my hometown had significant changes in housing prices on the same street, where one side was on the side with a better school district.