Call me cold, but after reading this I come away with almost no sympathy for the evicted senior citizen. She comes across as very entitled.
They could have chosen between any of the Ellis Act evictions in the dabrownstein figure (~4000 of them), and yet the person they chose to interview
* has health care retirement benefits
* has the ability to go back to Germany and use their social programs
* has personal attention from social workers and relatives finding her options
* has a car
* has a shelter offering a place to stay for the night
* is a member of a social group (female, white, older) that is not the bottom of the charity priority list
* hoards, smokes, intentionally antagonizes her landlord
All of this raises questions about how representative Inge is of the evictee population. I suspect the answer is "not very."
It seems you were talking about rich assholes getting evicted for unconscionable behavior after all. Sorry, but I still don't see what they have to do with gentrification. Explain?
>"this raises questions about how representative Inge is of the evictee population. I suspect the answer is "not very."
You are correct in your fuzzy logic, I was first making the point that the author could have picked a less sympathetic individual, if the author's intent had been to malign evicted tenants. My second point was intended to state that I am not sure what type of person would be "representative" of the individuals evicted; criticizing an author for not finding a person who does not fit an undefined descriptor seems unfair to the columnist.
Your specific example was outside the scope of gentrification, which is what we were all discussing. I accused the article of baiting us into falsely generalizing from Inge's case to conclude (fuzzily) that "evicted poor people only mind being kicked out because they're a bunch of ungrateful slobs that turn down the abundant opportunities everybody heaps upon them because they believe they are entitled to something better". Inge's hypothetical wealthy twin evictee would not have been a better candidate to advance this agenda because smearing her would not have smeared the protesting masses who, by and large, are not as wealthy.
> My second point was intended to state that I am not sure what type of person would be "representative" of the individuals evicted
I gave you three examples. A fourth example would be to choose an evictee at random and investigate them. It's entirely possible that this is how the story came about and that it's coincidental that she is such an unsympathetic figure. My original post observed that the likelihood of interpretation #4 is lowered by the extreme nature of Inge's case.
> criticizing an author for not finding a person who does not fit an undefined descriptor seems unfair to the columnist.
In a world of incomplete knowledge, finite opportunity cost, and human-resource-intensive processes for rigorous inference it's entirely fair to have a complaint that is not mathematically precise.
My main take-away from all of this is that being evicted in SF is quite the feat, right up there with climbing Mount Everest or swimming the English channel. We should commend her for accomplishing something so difficult, despite all the people who told her it could not be done (read: tried to help her).
And make no bones about it, it wasn't a sense of charity that made them decide to let her stay. They were charging her rent (and in fact, attempted to raise it at least once).
SF's land use policies are horrendous, but anecdotes (in any direction) are not evidence for specific changes.