Dynamic Models of Gentrification
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
It’s sort of like being the person who buys the really cheap used car that’s always in disrepair. The reason you got that vehicle so cheap, is because it’s dilapidated. If they had built the car to last, you wouldn’t have been able to afford it anyways. If you live in the cheapest neighborhood then it’s going to be a neighborhood that has problems. If they remove the problems then the value of the property is probably going to increase and suddenly you can’t afford it anymore.
They were not built for affordable housing so much as to break up a burgeoning Black political party and to punish neighborhoods and politicians that were bucking the dominant at the time political machine. This in combination with the interstate and UIC campus were used to first break up the existing neighborhoods and then isolate them from the surrounding middle class areas that were more aligned with the dominant political elite.
It should be fairly obvious that complexes not designed primarily for housing and populated intentionally by the marginalized would not do a good job.
There were public housing complexes in Chicago before the big projects that were mixed income and desirable for middle class families.
The Daley biography American Pharoah documents that process.
I live in "Affordable Housing". The only commonality with my neighbors is the amount we pay for rent. I am unlikely to share any cultural touchpoints with my neighbors: we have disparate ethnicities, politics, religion, taste in music, vernaculars, holidays, favorite YouTube channels.
My community is managed by a social services organization dedicated to a certain ethno-linguistic group. Their employees are 100% from that group. They indeed do not discriminate among renters. Nevertheless, there is a single gang which has moved in and taken control. This gang is of a different ethnic/cultural group, different from me and different from the management. We all have a relatively peaceful coexistence, and it's rather quiet around here.
But we do not share any culture.
It used to be that when immigrants reached these United States, they would settle and coalesce around their native lands' culture. There would be an Italian neighborhood, a Slavic neighborhood, a Polish neighborhood. These communities would be (at least initially) poor, filthy, and crime-ridden, especially as seen from outside. But they enjoyed solidarity, they enjoyed unity around a common culture, and often a common religion as well. A church would pop up on the street representing them, and speaking their language, and they'd all attend there.
But solidarity in neighborhoods and forming cohesive communities is dangerous for the status quo, especially when foreign allegiances are concerned. America is a disestablishmentarian melting pot where we're supposed to be assimilated. So the best way to do that is to break up these ghetto neighborhoods and splinter all the diaspora so that we're far away from one another, no matter what, and we have no opportunity to form a cohesive community or exercise solidarity, or show up at the polls or protest in one voting bloc.
Yes indeed, Equal Housing Opportunity prevents racist White suburbs. It permits Blacks to move in wherever they please. Yet, it is an effective bulwark against the formation of any neighborhood with Black hegemony or majority.
Equal Housing also destroys and homogenizes every culture, and weakens everyone uniformly. Congratulations.
[0] https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...
Ever wonder why people live in industrial waste sites, on steep hillsides, swamps, etc? It’s because if the locations weren’t so undesirable, they would have been cleared and replaced already.
Could have something to do with the extreme land scarcity. The super rich still live in private houses though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Singap...
Usually by hanging.
Wealthy individuals moved into "gentrifying" neighborhoods _after_ massive movements of capital, not before. In 2007, no professional was leaving the upper east side to move to Williamsburg or Prospect / Crown Heights. After Bloomberg rezoned the waterfront and rammed Atlantic Yards through, boatloads of money moved in. Vacant lots and abandoned buildings were torn down, new ones were built, "luxury" housing stock was created and _then_ rich people moved in.
It's not all that different than VC money in startups - investors are sheep. Once it becomes clear a big fish has made an investment in an area, money floods in and drives up prices. To justify the increase in land values, investors have to raise rents. To raise rents, they need to improve the housing stock. This creates the inventory that the wealthy purchase.
Priming the pump is the economic term for this, old Timey pumps needed to have a bit of water poured into a mechanism to lubricate and and make it possible to pump water out.
City councils talk of "revitalising" an area, but it's really about getting the most out of prime locations where the rich would had moved in already if it weren't for the dilapidated state of the mentioned.
Interestingly the shift seems to affect businesses the most. The moment the first luxury condo is built/renovated you start seeing a change in the types of services offered. The other day I bought a particularly expensive bagel in a cafe that looked really out of place in the barely standing building where it was located. I'm sure almost none of the people that are long-term residents of this area go there.
So to summarize, when rich individuals wants to move, they do. Seems logical given they have the excess opportunity to do so with minimal risk / cost often associated with taking on whatever risks are associated with 'gentrifying'
There are a lot of us who definitely do not want to live near other people.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w25809
https://www.philadelphiafed.org/community-development/housin...
2) condense data into math (this article)
3) collect more data to verify predictions from that math (future work)
Gentrification is just making safe spaces for straight white people.
[1] https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-role-artists-p...