A Tale Of Two Latino Areas In Miami And San Francisco
marketurbanism.com
marketurbanism.com
The reason I'm asking is that, to the best of my knowledge, there was a period of "white flight", when urban core was basically left to poor people (or at least that's how I interpret this). My understanding is that at the time that was bad. Now rich people "move back in" and I get a vibe from similar articles that this is also bad. So, which is it?
Depending on how far you want to follow this you may even decide that gentrification is racist because it drives up property prices as richer, usually whiter, people move in and the original poorer (and therefore usually disproportionately non-white) demographic is priced out of the area.
I tend to think this is bullshit and that places becoming less sketchy/shabby/crime-ridden is good...
Some people like living in cities that have a mixture of incomes, cultures, and lifestyles. Furthermore, some people see the various architectures and institutions of some neighborhoods as a kind of historical treasure. They think, in a sense, that the whole neighborhood, in some form of intactness, belongs on the National Register of Historic Places, or some equivalent.
Some people might also decry a person's smug dismissing of such concerns as a kind of ignorance propped up by privilege. Such a person wouldn't have the liberty of such smugness if they weren't so privileged. But the harm (if there is any) is not the privilege itself, it is the loss of (supposed) cultural treasures.
That doesn't square well with some people's values.
Me too, generally, I'm not sure I see that as a good reason to hold things in complete stasis though. Particularly where such areas have problems with crime.
>> Furthermore, some people see the various architectures and institutions of some neighborhoods as a kind of historical treasure.
Architecture is good. "Gentrification" doesn't have to involve knocking things down (see London as an example of many, many waves of gentrification not affecting the architecture).
Institutions such as ... ?
>> They think, in a sense, that the whole neighborhood, in some form of intactness, belongs on the National Register of Historic Places, or some equivalent.
What gives people of a set ethnic or class background the right to live in a particular area and exclude other people who are not part of 'their' community? If a privileged white enclave claimed that right we would, obviously and rightly, be up in arms.
>> Some people might also decry a person's smug dismissing of such concerns as a kind of ignorance propped up by privilege.
And now you're just being insulting.
There was a report last week on NPR that talked about how difficult it is for people to escape these closed-in neighborhoods:
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/wealth-poverty/what-makes-...
Essentially they found that the more rich and poor people intermingle in their daily lives, the more likely it is for those poor people to pull themselves out of poverty.
"The case against it is simple. Newcomers with more money supposedly crowd out older residents. (...) Young, mostly white singletons have crowded into a district once built for families. (...)
Yet there is little evidence that gentrification is responsible for displacing the poor or minorities. Black people were moving out of Washington in the 1980s, long before most parts of the city began gentrifying. In cities like Detroit, where gentrifiers are few and far between and housing costs almost nothing, they are still leaving. (...) They did find, however, that the average income of black people with high- school diplomas in gentrifying areas soared. (...)
Gentrifiers can make life better for locals in plenty of ways (...) When professionals move to an area, “they know how to get things done”. They put pressure on schools, the police and the city to improve. As property prices increase, rents go up—but that also generates more property-tax revenue, helping to improve local services. In many cities, zoning laws force developers to build subsidised housing for the poor as well as pricey pads for well-off newcomers, which means that rising house prices can help to create more subsidised housing, not less."
Also, I think it is very funny how most of the criticism of gentrification is done by the white-liberal types and it reeks of classism. The original article says "It’s not unusual to find live chickens running through people’s backyards" like it is a good thing. I can almost read an implicit defense of segregation.
I've on several occasions been accused of gentrification, sometimes even by close friends or coworkers. But all I can think of is the fact that most of these coworkers are either under rent control, paying less than half I do for a comparable place (and come the fuck on, you work in tech, you don't need rent control), and the other half live in luxury high rises.
I'm a foreigner, I don't always understand race relations. I thought segregation was bad. But apparently my friends self-segregate, and when I dare to live in 'their' neighbourhood, I'm the bad guy.
Life's a lot better when you think of other people as human beings, instead of a weird separate group to be left alone, don't you think?
It's the ol' "searching in the street for the keys you lost in the yard because the streetlight is the only light you have."
Everyone wants an affordable place to live. It takes the power of government to wrench that land out from under people without fair compensation and pass it over at below-market rates to big-business to be redeveloped and resold at higher costs to ultimately increase property and income tax revenue.
The idea that some of us just aren't racist/sexist/classist/etc. is very much what is being argued against by "most people who want to talk about *isms".
Obviously, I can't provide a full survey of all thought on this matter, but here's the most recent racism article I've read: http://www.salon.com/2015/04/10/white_americas_racial_illite...
I think it does a decent idea of expressing that it's not a binary.
When you treat the negative spaces of non-activity as equally evil to the positive spaces of activity, you shove people who are straddling the middle away from your side and towards your opposition. That keeps the middle ground right where it has always been, and nothing ever gets better. Mechanically, that's just incredibly stupid.
What's the message of this Salon article? "White people, you're always going to be a part of the problem, and nothing you can do will be considered part of the solution, because your desire to be involved is part of the problem. You are always wrong." Do articles like this make it more or less likely to convert people who have started to think about it? To me, "you're always going to be wrong" is just driving people away. It is too easy to turn that into "then why even try?"
If that's not the message, then someone in one of the sociology departments of universities across America needs to come up with a much better way of talking about the issue, because that's how I and a lot of people take it.
Outside of the recent spat of police shootings, the white-privilege topic is the only one I've personally been seeing coming out of academic circles and into the public. I guess that's part of my privilege that I get to live in a world not surrounded by concern about race. But I'm not a social worker or community organizer or politician or sociologist. I'm a software engineer. I'm busy making a living for myself. That doesn't make me a part of the problem or the solution. That just makes me a person. I'm not asking to be held up and congratulated for not being actively racist. I'm just asking to also not be vilified for keeping my nose in my own business.
That's my point of the issue not being binary. "You're either for us or against us" is a totalitarian rhetoric, one that is not compatible with healthy democracies (though I belabor under no illusion that we live in a healthy democracy).
People are going to draw conclusions based on their internalized sense of the world; you can shape that to an extent by just, y'know, hanging out and talking with your neighbors every once in a while.
Did the average income of black people with high-school diplomas in gentrifying areas soar because the economy was better, or because they were the only ones who could afford to stick around?
In peoples' minds, gentrification is bad.
Most of the arguments against it are poorly supported and/or disingenuous. But the legitimate ones all refer to the instability created by gentrification.
Gentrification has large short term negative effects. Quickly changing neighbourhoods that rapidly rise in value force people who can't afford them to leave. If you're a lower income family barely getting by as it is, you might resent being suddenly displaced from the place you've lived for 30 years. Hell, if you're a lower income family, you might not be able to afford the cost of moving.
The big problem with gentrification is that we lack viable social supports to help people in transition during periods of gentrification. Too many people want to stick their head in the sand and ignore it, or foolishly try to legislate (or activist) it away.
Gentrification largely occurs because we don't have viable social supports to help people in economic transition in general.
I would say the opposite. Most of the good effects of gentrification happens in the beginning. Then time becomes a more important factor than gentrification itself. If you can't slow gentrification at that point the bad effects really starts kicking in and you're replacing rather than transforming.
All successful examples of gentrification I've seen is when you gentrify up to a point where regulation gets in the way and then because of that another area starts getting more popular, which then gentrifies up to a point etc...
"White flight" is bad for the poor that are left behind in a community with less resources.
"Gentrification" is bad for the poor that are displaced.
I lived in Philadelphia the last few years and it's gentrifying out from the center. People who worry about gentrification are usually white middle class people seeing poor and racial minorities priced out of a location, but they fail to see what the larger implications of pricing out are. Yes, poor people sometimes are forced to move, but rarely is a poor person's goal to stay in one place. More often their goal is to not be poor and gentrification frequently drags the poor into the lower middle class. I'll give three examples:
1. A friend of mine's father lived in rent-controlled housing just south of center city since the 80s. The area exploded in value in the last decade and he was making less than $15K/year as the area gentrified around him. Last year he was paying $500/mo rent while his neighbors were paying $1400/mo rent. His landlord, unable to evict him or raise rent, offered him $14K--almost a full years salary--to move out. My friend's father was "displaced" but used the money to make a down payment on a $70k house in far south Philly. And if this seems unfair to the apartment owner, keep in mind that he will make that he probably easily made that money back in the last year with raised rent. Everybody won here.
2. Another friend of mine, without graduating high school, lied about her age and got a job at a local bank and at age 19, bought a 3 bedroom house in Northern liberties, getting a good mortgage from her employer and paying it partly by renting out bedrooms. In 2013 her property taxes more than doubled and she was forced to sell the house. But the house she bought for $80k sold for $375k--and at this point she owned most of the house. She complains about the tax increase to this day, but lives in SF now with her husband, a software company research programmer, well established in the upper middle class. They're buying a house in SF as soon as possible, using the money from her Philly house to make a down payment and his income to pay the mortgage. I can't muster much sympathy for her.
3. In Philly I lived in an Ethiopian/Egyptian neighborhood. I worked at a food cooperative on food justice initiatives. However, a few businesses had predated the coop in bringing healthy food to the low-income neighborhoods. As the neighborhoods gentrified these businesses were no longer bringing nutrition to the poor, but they all were making a lot more money; enough to expand and open new locations further out where there's still low-income neighborhoods. The high income stores and restaurants fund the low income ones, while the low income locations achieve their mission. And the low income locations are good investments because it won't be long before gentrification reaches there too.
Now I realize that these are anecdotal stories and many poor people are not as well-positioned to benefit from gentrification. But this should at least establish that simply looking at housing price displacement doesn't tell the whole story.
(That was my impression of parts of SF / SV last time I visited: a six figure slum.)
A little vitamin E is good for you too, but too much seems to increase your risk of cancer. Even more will make you sick on shorter order, and even more than that could kill you.
Seems like you confused your personal desires with something meaningful, then decided to drop a backdoor condescension on those of us who don't share your personal desires.
Not a super compelling argument from my point of view.
Meanwhile, Sacramento is a 2-hour-drive away. It has a much lower cost-of-living in general, yet doesn't sacrifice any cultural diversity (in my own observation, at least); if anything, it's even more culturally diverse. It's also telling that a lot of people would rather live in Sacramento and commute to San Francisco (and adjacent Bay Area / Silicon Valley areas) than live in the Bay Area; somehow, the cost of commuting that distance manages to be offset.
Gentrification would be wonderful if people owned their homes, because they would get the benefit of rising property values. Instead, the landlords get that, and most people have to face the costs of uprooting from their home.
It may be worth mentioning also that many urban neighborhoods were formed in the mid-20th century when many African Americans were excluded from home ownership and suburbanization by explicitly racist laws and practices, such as redlining, blockbusting, restrictive deed covenants, and other practices now illegal and unconstitutional. TNC lays part of this out in the first part of this article http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...
Property tax, which in most places scales with assessed property value over time, is essentially a rent you pay to the government to own property, and thereby makes owning property and renting property remarkably similar. In California we tried to fix this issue with Proposition 13, but that ends up causing the same kinds of broken incentives on municipal service costs as rent control does on landlords. The phenomenon of "gentrification" is very general and, I think "fascinatingly", mathematical in nature.
Little havana is actually getting new construction, but slowly. Little Havana has trailed mostly because the existing housing stock there is all older low slung multi unit housing, and the core of it lacks public transportation. Many of the core Little Havana buildings are technically historically protected, so that limits developers building there. We are seeing mid-rises go up in the area though.
San Francisco is seeing gentrification faster because of market forces dictating that if the money can't go vertical it has to go horizontal and displace the lower-income areas historical residents. SF will need to do something about affordable housing stock soon. Though that gives oakland a huge opportunity to seize that opportunity if they want it.
Last comment: San Francisco "warm" ??? really? maybe Millbrae, but not SF proper.
The Bay Area is just microclimates everywhere.
You were thinking of Milpitas. I was freezing my ass off dropping my motorcycle off at the Millbrae BART station when I had that 1-hour-45-minute-each-way commute.
SF by comparison is just more or less nice and temperate all year long. :)
They aren't speaking Spanish to be nice, they are speaking Spanish be a use they are Hispanic.
It is like French speakers in Quebec who avoid speaking English. ( but most Quebecois do speak fluent English. Many Miamians didn't)
It really is quite an insular society. (I've lived there twice, once as a child, then again for the first few years of my child's life; now live across the river in Ontario. Night and day, culturally.)
I've also seen people "close ranks" when confronted by the "ugly American" who speaks not a word of French and shouts to make themselves understood. I've even joined those ranks until the person became far too annoying, at which point I offered a brusque and factual, pithy translation, delivered as if talking to a spoiled child.
It felt quite good. I'm not proud of that, but it did.
My experience in Paris is consistent with all of my travels: Make an effort, be interested, be nice, get warmth and welcome in return. Be a douche, get douched right back.
Same here, as an American who never studied French, aside from the French-for-tourists booklet once I was in Paris (which I did try hard to learn).
People were delightful; I did not experience any of the negative stereotype when struggling to communicate with people, whether they spoke English or only French.
Same in several other countries, too, but Paris is particularly noteworthy considering the common (and ancient) slanders on that topic.
People have suggested that Parisians are more prejudiced against French dialects than they are against non-speakers, but I wouldn't know.
I do know that presumably-ugly Americans complained about Paris/Parisians, when I found it/them fantastic.
(I'm looking at your post history out of curiosity, excuse' moi (spell?))
The reason why Miami has "avoided gentrification" is multifaceted and complex. But it wasn't due to some top-down city planning, I can assure you.
Painting the "history of Brickell" as some sort of strategy to avoid gentrification is comically false. Brickell and those small banks therein were largely built with laundered drug money. The -- mostly commercial & real estate focused -- banking sector in Miami is not what the author would have you picture. While the cocaine cowboy days are long over, Miami feels less like a mini-wall street and more like a sofa to shove money under if you happen to live in a less stable nation; and the investment capital flow in this city represents that.
Also unlike San Francisco, Miami grew around the automobile as primary transportation. Houses come with parking.
Finally, the primary attraction of Miami is water, and to the degree urban life is attractive it tends toward the velvet rope variety rather than slumming in shared public space.
I didn't get that impression from the story. It said that Brickell helped avoid gentrification, not that it was intended as such. Rather, I understood the story to imply that if cities allow new building fairly freely, then gentrification is less likely to happen; SF doesn't allow it, while Miami does. Miami in fact sounds like the "default" from the article's perspective, so Brickell isn't a clever strategy, it's almost "doing nothing."
Go visit Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
Go visit Danville, Virginia.
Go visit Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Go visit Harrison, Arkansas.
Go visit Atlanta, Georgia. *
There are hundreds of towns that have lost all the industrial and agricultural jobs they once had, and the people have sunk into deep poverty. Many of these areas now face an epidemic of meth, which seems to be how people in these regions deal with the hopelessness they feel, now that the jobs are gone.
*I mention, Atlanta, which is a large region. There are, of course, many areas of Atlanta that are gentrifying, but if you travel around the city at all, you also find huge neighborhoods that have sunk deeper into desperation. I am old enough that I can remember how affluent Atlanta was in the 90s, and I can remember how crime-ridden New York City used to be. The reversal of fortune is really remarkable. Nowadays I feel safe on New York subways, even late at night, whereas I no longer feel safe on Atlanta rail lines, even during the day (depending on the line).
http://www.decaturish.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/1375-Re...
And Five Points used to actually just have gangs hanging out on the sidewalk before they cracked down two years ago. I've been threatened, but never attacked, on MARTA, but I'm a big guy (6' 5" and 210 pounds while I was taking MARTA), and nearly all of my female friends had a "a couple of people tried to block my exit and stop me from getting to my car" stories. My fiancee had two guys wait outside of the station exit gates saying "Here, kitty kitty" at night -- and that was at Sandy Springs MARTA. The east/west line is way worse.
Tuscaloosa, like most college towns has a stable demographic of gentry. No sound statistically based analysis would include it given the level of devastation caused by the EF-4 in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tuscaloosa%E2%80%93Birmin...
Don't get me started on the meth. I love how my "gentrified" friends out here swear up and down how Breaking Bad is such a wonderful show, yet I cannot even attempt to watch an episode because I've seen too much of that up close.
I have been here since the 70s and it's striking to see how much better Atlanta is today than it was in the 90s. I also suspect you live out in the suburbs and not in Atlanta?
There are definitely areas of the burbs that have declined sharply in the last decade (ie: Gwinnett Mall area). I honestly think this is suburban downtrend will continue as the city prospers and people move intown to avoid the 75/85 parking lot system.
in-town white neighborhoods (most north of I-20) have seen massive increases in property values in the last three years or so, probably causing "gentrification" as more whites move into border neighborhoods like grant park, old 4th ward, and reanoldstown
suburban atlanta (the vast majority of "atlanta") has also seen steady property value increases, at least in the northers suburbs. (roswell/alpharetta)
Hell, look at how the article treats ethnic segregation as something that should be celebrated. Disgusting.
Enforcing a uniform profitable culture where all real estate is available for developers' whims is not a "neutral" act.
I'm not saying that this is the right thing to do -- only that there is a reason people resist new development when pricing is based on a limited supply of housing in desirable areas.
SF doesn't quite have that issue yet -- but IMO housing prices are a big reason why startups are looking outside the bay area more seriously these days.
It's not a binary proposition though. There's always an equilibrium, and it's difficult to determine how any given change might affect it.
If you want to preserve the character of the neighborhoods, you need dense residential areas that allow high-rise condos - it prevents the rich techies from going out and buying a row home for $1.3 million because they can get a sweet, brand-new condo for the same price in a better area. This keeps long-time residents in their homes, thus helping to preserve the culture of the neighborhoods.
The entire NIMBY movement can be boiled down to "Yes, we all agree these things need to be built. But I don't want them being built near me because they would cause my property value to decrease." It's a textbook case of the tragedy of the commons.
What evidence can you offer in support of this claim with respect to San Francisco specifically?
Because I can certainly see situations in which citizen objections to building projects would be perfectly warranted even without regard to property values: if a builder wanted to raze a block at the corner of 19th and Dolores and build a 50-story residential tower in its place, for example.
San Francisco is allowing a lot of new high-rise residential developments to go up. Here's a list of 26 (albeit from 18 months ago):
http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2013/10/24/26_highrise_project...
My city Allentown, PA has a very late white flight that occurred in the 80s and 90s. We had a donut economy where the suburbs had all the money and shopping and downtown was a rust belt city that had mostly mutli-family converted homes with low-income.
We now have over $1,000,000,000 invested into Downtown Allentown. http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/american-futures/a...
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09/breathin...
Protesters claim of gentrification is happening. My stance is center city Allentown is not where we dump low income people and for people to have a "better life" they must move to the suburbs. You can have a "better life" and live in our cities. Our schools have an almost 50% transfer rate for children. This means that 50% of the children that started in September will finish their school year at a different school.
I will take diversity over homogeneous non-gentrification. This word is to ambiguous and and not clear in telling anything.
All this, of course, suggests an ironic aspect of urban housing markets that is misunderstood by most government officials and NIMBYs: “if a city wants to preserve, it must build.”
Which I heard as "Hey San Francisco, let Simon Property Group develop this area into a techie zone, we'll make money and it will take pressure off the other neighborhoods because we'll be the cool place to be!"
"My book will argue that cities should instead embrace “Market Urbanism.” This phrase was invented in 2007 by Adam Hengels, a development consultant who founded the Market Urbanism blog [where the OP appeared]. He defines it as the intersection between capitalists and urbanists, and his contributors describe how municipal governments repeatedly harm economic productivity. My book will package his ideology into a series of proposals..."
So it seems like he's taken a development consultant as his role model and is fitting his observations into an already-decided ideology and action plan. That's why the article seems so one-dimensional and ignores obvious facts.
He essentially promises that, by lifting building restrictions, you can preserve ethnic neighborhoods from gentrification (for what that's worth), because development will be channeled elsewhere, e.g. into high-rises that the professional class (in his reading) favors.
Just writing it down exposes how facile this is.
And that doesn't even get into other problems, like the unguarded analogies between San Francisco and Miami ("warm-weather cities").
Here's an article that I enjoyed, which also reached a pro-development conclusion, but with a lot more nuance: http://www.boomcalifornia.com/2014/06/living-in-a-fools-para.... This appeared in a special issue devoted to the SF housing situation.
1. There are virtually no tech jobs to bring people into the city. 2. Public transit is terrible. 3. Lack of white-friendly english-speaking small businesses. 4. Crime. 5. Cost of living is not low enough to negate the above points.
There are other things to consider, like the climate of Miami is not even remotely as mild as SF, the people are fairly horrible, there are no large tech employers, there's nothing attractive to average people about the area (South Florida is kind of a shit hole in general).
Basically, any place in Miami a tech hipster would move is simply too expensive without giving them anything they would enjoy in return. Even Wynwood quickly gets tiring for non-artist non-musician hipsters.
Personally, as much as I like San Francisco I prefer Miami's slow road to gentrification. It seems accidental, but it's a model other cities could use. Create your Brickell and leave the rest alone.
The correct title is: Travel Update: A Tale Of Two Latino Areas In Miami And San Francisco.
Mission (in SF) was not historically a Latino neighborhood; it was originally Irish.
He picks 1 example (8 Washington) and proceeds to paint the entire city with it. Did he not bother to look a little south at SoMa, with its tall buildings?
I stopped reading at this point.
I wish there was an easy answer, because none of the surrounding areas wants to locally address low income housing. My hunch is this needs to be handled on a State level to avoid the NIMBY syndrome. I don't think rent control or shaking down new developers to include a few below-market rooms solves much in the face of such an overwhelming supply and demand imbalance.
The sad thing is there is actually shortage in housing and the rents are getting extremely high while wages are absolute shit. It doesn't help that every new apartment complex that gets built are marketed as "luxury" apartments for the ultra rich. There are two separate markets for renters here. When you can build ultra luxury appartments and rent them for $5000 - $10000 a month, there is no reason to construct more lower to middle class housing.
Miami is great but the city overall still depends on the car culture.
Population Density + Car Culture is never good.
The moment people are too lazy that they have to drive one block to get groceries; now thats a problem.
Yea, the Brickell is great and all but I would never live there unless I worked there.
The area has allowed other areas to stay "ethnic" with the expense of poor planning, for me getting in and out of Brickell is a odyssey and I only live 2 miles away.
I can't image what it is for someone who commutes there every day.
Miami lacks the public transportation other cities have developed.
Unless the public transportations keeps up, Miami will just be a vacation home for the rich not the "hub of the Americas" as it is always dubbed.
Don't forget that San Francisco is 550 miles away from the USA/Mexico border. Miami is on the coast and is a much easier destination for new immigrants.
SF's population is also about double that of Miami.
The one thing can be said about the mission is that along with old Chinatown and excelsior they are the immigrant neighborhoods, but the characteristics of the immigrants to these neighborhoods have changed over time and only old Chinatown has held on to its ethnic look and feel, but looking at it through that lens is unhelpful. If we look at Beijing of today, it has not retained the look of the hutongs. Cities change. That said, The new immigrants to these neighborhoods are now not foreign but urban domestic.
Miami, with an average elevation of 6 feet above sea level, will be underwater in the next several decades. Storm surges already threaten the keys and the coastal lagoon, and this pattern is only worsening as drainage on the mainland is impacted by industry and global climate patterns cause more energetic storms, and average sea level rise.
SF, with an average of ~90ft will be much safer from this particular threat - although California will at the current rate, without serious intervention, be desert, on similar timescales.
Long term investment does not make sense when you are faced with a risk of it all ending up in the sea.
"People" generally don't, but property developers do.
It's also not "eventually", it's "imminently". You don't need the entire city to be underwater for it to be uninhabitable - you just need the sewer system to be below sea level, and you are quite literally up shit creek.
That's 50 years, even with current models. If Miami is to survive, it needs new infrastructure, now - and even that will only hold for the short term. The only long term option would be a massive caisson building effort, building a huge concrete sheet wall around the city, buried deep into the strata, down to below the porous limestone it's built atop - at least 20 feet deep in most places. Even then, you'll have issues with sinkholes due to water being removed from the strata... in short, abandonment is where Miami will end up. Nothing else makes sense.
Sea level rise is accelerating beyond our most aggressive models currently, due to ice shelf collapse - Antarctic and Greenland ice shelves are vanishing much faster than anticipated, and will likely all be gone within the decade - expect new models over the next 18 months to predict some rather radical outcomes entirely within our lifetimes.
I'm so excited for that day.
More here: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/
I wonder whether the author only thinks gentrification isn't happening because he doesn't see too many non-Cubans. My understanding is that in the areas he talks about, old buildings are in fact being replaced with high-rise condos left and right.
If almost everyone in Miami is Cuban, then the gentrifiers will also be Cuban.
The problems with the high rents in today's cities is through the use of politics to artificially increase the value of land through zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status. These laws that increase the cost of land serve as a hidden tax on the poorer segments of society to subsidize the wealthy.
See: NYPost Build Big Bill (de Blasio -- Mayor of NYC) http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1....
Way overly simplistic. Lots and lots of people with $ in SF still like the not-rich feel of neighborhood like the mission. SF culture doesn't turn into Miami culture just because you put up a bunch of tall buildings.
Other points:
Japantown is nothing more than a mall and a name on a map -- there is no neighborhood there.
Conversely, Chinatown really isn't changing much; it resists gentrification. The explanation I have heard, which seems likely, is that most of the buildings and restaurants have been owned by the same families going way back, and they are reluctant to sell or lease to outsiders.
That's debatable. The Empress of China, a landmark restaurant of Chinatown since the 60's, closed at the end of last year to make way for offices. A six-floor building with some 62,000 square feet of space inside Chinatown's scant 24 square blocks is no small matter.
The remaining population is increasingly composed of elderly people. Younger people tend to move to outer neighborhoods in SF, or to Daly City or the other peninsula suburbs, as Chinatown is actually a ghetto despite also being a romanticized tourist attraction. More recent middle class Chinese immigrants avoid Chinatown for the same reason and go directly to the suburbs.
E.g. http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/sf-chinatown-restaura... -- the Imperial Palace restaurant estimates that 75-80% of its customers are elderly. The restaurant is empty most of the time and on the brink of financial failure as the customers' fixed incomes do not allow them to eat out very often. Many other restaurants report a similar situation.
Places like the R&G Lounge have already remodeled, raised prices, and transformed in character from neighborhood restaurants to very expensive high end restaurants for yuppie tourists. Those that do not do this will perish.
Similarly, Miami in the 80s was close enough to South America to be an easy sink for the money laundering / "investment" you can do through real estate.
When ~1/3 of new construction is unoccupied & held as investment it sure seems like the driving force at the margin.
http://www.48hills.org/2015/01/27/sf-planners-yawn-vacant-un...
The reason why its not gentrifying faster is a combination of two things, demand and sprawl. Unlike SF, we can build up and out. In SF you cant do either, so you are forced to push people out.
The kind of people that gentrify places like SF, or Brooklyn, or a thousand other places around the world apparently aren't there in Miami.
Because they would never want to be found dead in a place like Brickell.
http://www.floridatrend.com/article/11504/gentrification-fea...
"But nowhere is the change being felt more than in Overtown. At one time the economic and cultural capital of black Miami, it is now among the nation's poorest neighborhoods. Average income is about $12,000 a year. Crime is rampant in the community of 9,000 that sits in the late-morning shadow of Miami's glittering downtown skyline."
"In the last few months, two major mixed-used developments have been approved in Overtown, the first in decades: Lyric Promenade, a $93-million project that will include a 150-room Hilton Hotel, a blues club, market-rate condominiums and apartments; and Crosswinds, a 1,000-unit condo and apartment project that will include office and retail space. Crosswinds, a for-profit venture on city-owned land, was conceived by the non-profit Collins Center for Public Policy, which asked developers to submit plans that would help revitalize the area."
and
"Much of the new housing will be priced well beyond the reach of most residents of Overtown, where homeownership is barely 10%. In June, tempers boiled over when tenants of a low-income apartment building in Overtown were sent eviction notices shortly after an upscale high-rise developer acquired the property."
http://miamitruthandlies.blogspot.com/2011/05/situation-in-o...
"Overtown is located right in the heart of downtown Miami. Given its deserved reputation as a dangerous, crime-ridden area, Overtown creates a unique situation for the city of Miami. While growing in popularity over the last decade, it cannot be argued that unless Overtown cleans up its act, it will hold back the city in terms of economic development and potential"
"While it does not seem as though this was project was ever meant to actually benefit residents of Overtown, it is important to step back and view the facts without bias. Unfortunately, at this point, with the information available, the future of Overtown looks like one of major disappointment and resentment. Overtown will become home to wealthier residents as new infrastructure continues to be built with little consideration given to the current population."
And the government, rather than plan on fixing it, just keeps putting it off for later generations. They keep referencing the Dutch land reclamations efforts in the past without actually noticing how much work and time (centuries) the Dutch put into blocking out the sea.
There are almost certainly larger cultural differences.
Miami has some confinements along it's borders but it's nowhere near as confined as San Fransisco and other west coast cities. This fluff piece is anecdotal and offers no real support of it's conclusions other than the author's loosely defended personal opinion.