I love how they say, "gentrification can sometimes displace long time residents of a neighborhood."
The neighborhood is improving.
Housing prices are going up.
Crime is going down.
Said residents were no doubt PAID for their properties.
But no, the leftist virus infects journalism majors and they HAVE TO just find something bad about inner cities improving.
8 comments:
I have a bit of sympathy here. I have lived in my house for ten years. I intend to live in this house until I die. I don't care if the value of my property goes up or not. It was not bought as an investment, it was bought as a place to live. The only thing an increase in property values does for me is increase my tax bill. I will still only get my garbage picked up once every two weeks. I will still only get the street plowed 2 days after a snow storm, but as the value of my property increases, year after year I get an increase in my taxes on what is basically an unrealized capital gain. The local government gets a windfall tax increase and doesn't do anything productive with the money. This is how people are forced out of their neighbourhoods. They own the property, but get stuck in a position where they an't pay the tax bill.
Gentrification is a wonderful thing. It keeps the human garbage moving ... if you let them settle in like they have in Vancouver BC ... east side .. you will see a large community of zombies drugged out and often mentally ill .... liberal voters when they bother.
Low lifers and druggies need to be pushed to reform ... removing their habitat is a good start. The belong in smaller centers where it is cheaper to live and where they will have less autonomy and therefore unable to get away with the petty crime that funds their depravity.
Its quite true.
It reminds me of the fact that when you are voting, it is pot luck as to the chaplain you get to advise you (if any despite the government increasing the payments!). In Afghanistan, I deployed with a unit that had a Protestant chaplain, so there was no access to the Mass or the sacraments until he took mid-deployment leave and was replaced by a Catholic Padre for a couple of weeks and only then did they hand over the ballot papers but too late the Greens had taken over via Gillard/Slipper/Thompson and other political correct brigades. The only other chaplain on the base was Dutch – and that “chaplain” was an atheist humanist: the Dutch include atheist humanitarians as part of their “chaplaincy” service, which is a concept that I found ironic, but definitely in keeping with the interesting times in which we live and he aslo gave out how to vote cards for a satanic party! As to Rudd’s comment “… Catholic soldiers died without the sacraments and were even buried without the support of Catholic military chaplains.” – what he correctly means here is that it is probable that a Catholic soldier killed or gravely wounded on operations will NOT receive the last rights (Extreme Unction), simply because there will probably not be a Catholic padre there or if they are they are in the voting booth.
Everyone wants to buy a warehouse and turn it into a batcave these days ...
I guess it's a good thing. Heavens know that reduced crime, reduced poverty, and improved property values are a good thing.
But--
--The crime didn't go away. It just moved somewhere else, probably somewhere where working-class people are fighting to hang on to some kind of standard of living and a safe place to raise a family. And, for all they're clean-living and hard-working, they can't afford to run. My neighborhood is in that state. We COULD have gotten a better neighborhood, of course, but that would have meant either a 90-minute commute or a massive mortgage. As it stood, we could buy a house and an acre in a working-class town outright. We CAN leave, if we need to. Most of my neighbors can't. They're struggling to hold on (and I rather suspect quietly dealing to make ends meet) as it is.
--The poverty didn't go away. It just moved. I have no respect for poor, violent, and criminal. But I know a lot of honest poor people, living in Ghetto Hell and trying to scrape together the resources to get out. Every time "urban development" forces them to move, they have to use whatever resources they've gathered up to relocate and start over. Being decent, careful, and intelligent doesn't necessarily get you out of poverty. It can, and it's the best route to go even if it doesn't work, but the nature of capitalism is that there will ALWAYS be poor and there are no guarantees. That's not a knock on capitalism-- it's still the best system going-- but it is a fact.
--Often enough, thanks to crony capitalism, they're NOT paid for their property (if they owned any). Instead, developers work with city councils to have the properties condemned. I did 8 years in a college town, watching affordable (if crappy) housing disappear to be replaced with condos, townhouses, and apartments that no student could afford (even with as many roommates as code would allow) unless they WERE trust-fund brats (or being bankrolled by Mommy and Daddy).
--We're well-off now. We got here by starting at the bottom, in a crappy trailer I bought with $4000 of the money I saved up in high school. We paid $175 a month for a place to park it. It wasn't a pleasant park, but it was clean and safe and close enough to school/work that we could share a car without a whole lot of inconvenience. You could get places, and you could sit on your steps in the evening and not be afraid. "Urban development" shut the park down (10 years after they made everyone clear out, one of two local hospitals put up a parking lot there). We paid $800 to move the trailer to another park outside city limits (the nearest one to town that would accept a 35-year-old singlewide). It was woody and pleasant-- or would have been pleasant if it wasn't filthy and crime-ridden. You couldn't sit on your steps in broad daylight-- you didn't feel safe sitting on your couch! We could still share a car-- we had to-- but it was a lot more difficult, considering that we could walk to exactly nothing and were about 3 miles off the bus line. Ultimately, after a murder went down, my grandmother lent us $10,000 to buy a trailer that was new enough to be allowed in a park that was owned by a member of the city council (and therefore not likely to be shut down).
We weren't ghetto royalty. We weren't welfare bums (we weren't even on welfare). We weren't moochers. We were two 20-somethings trying to get an education without having to beg from family or the government to make it through. We're in excellent shape now because we DID get that education, but "urban improvement" sure made it harder than it had to be.
It's great in theory.
In practice, there's a lot of corruption involved.
And, along with the human trash, it also drives out a lot of people who are trying to pull themselves up by the bootstraps instead of demanding to be carried or handed a life on a silver platter.
The people displaced by gentrification didn't own their homes. If they had done that, they wouldn't have been displaced, since the market price of their homes would be largely irrelevant to them. It's the renters that are displaced by rising rents.
I notice they don't bring up the "bad thing" of the effort by the Obama administration to push the poor/subsidized housing into the suburbs via their efforts to "diversify" those neighborhoods. Got to move the welfare poor somewhere. Now the upscale voters in the inner city are voting to move them out to the suburbs.
The problem with gentrification is that you get two extremes: the $200k/year guys who can afford the gut-rehabbed brownstones, and public assistance people in the rest.
Chicago was a blue collar, working man's city. Bungalow for the wife and 5 kids while you worked at the factory or warehouse. 60s white flight was affordable cars and new highways where you could have a house with some green yard around and not be on your neighbor's shoulders, and the garage isn't getting broken into every week or your kids roughed up at school, and breathing soot with 24/7 noise, and still be 20 minutes from work. Even if it wasn't racial you'd have had the "suburban bedroom community safe for kids and parents" boom. My aunts and uncles who moved out of Gary when it was still white said they moved because "who the hell wants to live next to a steel mill? The Crown Point sky is blue like it's supposed to be, not orange."
Cities environmentally cleaned up (coal and oil burning to gas heat was a biggie), white collar professionals rediscovered them and rammed prices to the stars. It wasn't Joe the Plumber, it was Pajamaboy and Yuppies and dinks (dual income no kids) who moved out when they started families since who could afford a family and city living. Jim Lunchbucket still lives in Berwyn and Lynwood in a 1970 ranch with the basement bar.
MC nailed it, in spades - where do the working average income people like he and I belong? It would be sweet to have a rich neighborhood where the doctors and lawyers lived, then safe, solid housing for the working folk, then you are always going to have rough spots and derelict housing. where you hope the locals try to keep on the landlords to keep safe and not drug house fire hazards.
But new housing is all McMansion, people maxing out on a mortgage to where they can't afford to furnish it, freaking Potemkin villages. How'd that work out in 2008? No more 1000 sq. ft. bungalows.
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