Posts tagged gentrification
speaking of australian childrens’ books, 45 + 47 stella st and everything that happened is bloody grouse
it’s literally all about yuppies moving into your neighbourhood and how evil they are
Detroit park being sold to developer with plan to build 103 new Midtown apartments | MLive.com
i am just too fucking exhausted at this point to explain why this passage is so significant, so this is sort of a book mark for me to come back to—but if anybody is interested in how non-profits are helping with gentrification, lack of accountability process in local politics and how the hell a “development manager” has managed to gain more power than locally elected officials all while sucking up resources that local populations are *paying for*—google that karen gage or that midtown detroit inc sometime.
and know that “midtown” is the same thing as *cass corridor*—and know that cass corridor is the “pre-gentrification” name. oh, and know that community members that have helped to resource the “98-99 %” occupancy of cass corridor are now being priced out of the area or just outright evicted with a month’s notice.
(via iinventedeverything)
(via iinventedeverything)
remember when the Associated Press determined that Ann Arbor was the least segregated city in Michigan because its population was 7% black instead of 50% black or 80% black or 20 % black in a state that’s 15% black
by “segregation is a problem” we know everyone means “oh god there are a lot of black people in detroit” not “ann arbor is a majority white city just outside of the blackest city in the country and has been pretty strongly responsible for uneven distribution of resources in the region for a very long time now”
I think the context around the use of the term “segregation” when referring specifically to Black people in the USA, in a specific city, is really important. Having said that, I think it’s relevant that last year I read a lot of policy from Australia, North America and Europe that was concerned with “segregation” or “ghettoisation” or similar concepts in the urban environment. Without exception, an area was considered segregated and in need of a policy response if it had a large population of people of colour or otherwise ethnically marginalised people; without exception, disproportionately white areas were not considered “segregated”. This was also true of poverty: poor people living together are ghettoised and need to be broken out of that with gentrification, rich people living together is just the way of the world. Discourses of “integration” in urban policy are almost all progressive-sounding ways to talk about large groups of marginalised people as a problem. Basically you’re right and this is a huge issue in other places as well.
“The so-called creative class of intellects and artists was supposed to remake America’s cities and revive urban wastelands. Now the evidence is in—and the experiment appears to have failed”
(seriously though - this is a good insight into the kind of grotesque bullshit that has guided urban development over the last decade or so. extensive studies of cities and their challenges replaced with THE CREATIVE CLASS. fuck richard florida)
ahahahaha sucked in
like not that the kind of “revitalisation” florida swore to bring was ever anything other than gross gentrifying bullshit, but it’s nice to see him fail even at that
It is with incredible sorrow that I write to share the news that we lost Neil Smith in the early hours of this morning. He had been hospitalized on Wednesday afternoon with organ failures, and despite some moments of hope, could not greet another day with us. Words cannot describe this sudden tragedy. Neil was larger than life, brilliant, an inspiration and loved by so many.
this is really sad news. Neil Smith’s work on gentrification has been a huge influence and inspiration to me. his work was key in getting scholars of gentrification to take a more structural analysis, and not focus on the actions of individual gentrifiers to the extent that we let the state and finance capital off the hook. if you’re not familiar with his work, you should take some time to browse his website; also to read his foundational 1979 article “Towards a theory of gentrification: a back-to-the-city movement by capital, not people”, which remains incisive and sorely needed to this day.
Jerry Mangona: Gentrification: Views From Both Sides of the Street
Reading this article was really really difficult. The entire premise of it is based on the idea that “gentrification” is about *feelings* and “misunderstandings” rather than very real resource hoarding and withdrawals.
These paragraphs are probably the most problematic point in a really problematic article—the idea that gentrification isn’t *that* bad because folks who are ‘shoved out’ can just buy another house!
I’m going to leave the most obvious point alone—that to many many people, even a house that is “only” $5000-10,000 is often prohibitively expensive (which is why so many people are renting even when houses are “only” that much), and I’m going to instead focus on the point this article begins with—the story about how exciting it is to see people making over $100,000 a year organizing community potlucks and get togethers.
It takes a stable strong community for community building projects of any sort to happen. Parents don’t generally leave their children with some total stranger down the street who just moved in two weeks ago—and conversely, what are parents supposed to do when the person they’ve trusted enough to leave their child with leaves after three months because they can’t afford their house payment any longer?
Why is it ok to ask the people who need community the most and who use community building as a way to address actual problems in their communities (vandalism, youth violence, schools shutting down, etc) to uproot (that is: destroy) their community integrity to make Detroit “nicer” for people who, through tax breaks, investments, incentives, city policies, and oh, those nice hundred thousand dollar paychecks, can make Detroit “nicer” all by themselves?
The casual treatment by the OP of poor people’s need for stable dedicated community is astonishing, but sadly, not uncommon. As a good friend and local activist pointed out, it’s just taken for granted in ALL areas of heavy gentrification that poor people have nothing of value to offer a city—that they don’t have community driven agendas that actively make those cities “nicer.”
Gentrification is not about “feelings” or “not liking change”—it’s about an actual competition for resources. Lifetime Detroiters are not suspicious of “the suits” (to draw on OP’s example) because “the suits” were too arrogant or blew smoke from over priced cigars in their faces.
It is because the resources different neighborhoods need to survive as those thriving communities that the OP loves so much have been literally taken from them and given to people making a hundred thousand a year. This *causes* bad blood—but the bad blood is not the problem. The taking the resources is. The casual indifference of the integrity and value of poor communities is. Safe, well resourced, stable communities is a human right *even for poor people* .
Not something to be sold to the highest bidder.
(via theaboveground)
This point:
Demonstrate a willingness to participate in the city’s improvement rather than fight it at every turn. You know what’s been great? Seeing community involvement at Detroit Works. It shows that you genuinely care and are more concerned with finding solutions that soothing egos. Let’s put problem-solving over pride… something Detroit (and Detroiters) are not always known for doing.
Is just absolutely stunning to me. This person is talking about the same people who are actively organizing against school closures, heavy industry pollution, and home foreclosures among other massive problems, and who are organizing to create new media economies, youth led movements, food structures that are grounded in justice, health systems that are affordable for poor people…and so so so many other things.
It’s absolutely a sign of the OP’s ignorance that he doesn’t know these things. That he doesn’t know how much of these actions are grounded in the communities that he’s so casual about uprooting.
(via mmmightymightypeople)
Clearly OP and similar folks have never:
1. Tried to live without a car as the only means of transport and how much of life depends on being in the magic triangle of commuting that gives you groceries, work, and access to your kids’ schools/daycare.
2. Tried to get an apartment when you don’t have good credit
3. Had to have family, friends, or neighbors live close by in order to help take care of children, sick, or elderly family
Beyond all that, the housing discrimination. Loan discrimination. This is true both in the downward spiral of Black owned businesses and the ways in which they do not recover from these uprooting.
But let’s also talk about policing. How gentrification doesn’t involve making the neighborhood safer - it involves “increased police presence” which always translates to harassing the people who have lived there for decades in favor of the people who are suddenly moving.
Let’s talk about how cities only redevelop WHEN the plan is to move out the original folks - all the taxes these people paid didn’t go into their communities- it was shunted elsewhere to redevelop some OTHER part of the city - now that the land is cheap enough push these folks out so they can do the same thing again.
(via bankuei)
As someone who had to leave the city I loved and called a home (Brooklyn, NY) due to price gouging and gentrification, I have to say that OP has absolutely no fucking clue what it is like to be put in that kind of situation. I hope they never do, frankly.
I had to give up everything I knew - my friends, my father, and my home - because we just couldn’t keep up with increasing rents and how rapidly the neighborhoods (Park Slope, especially) were/are changing to accommodate all of the out-of-towners coming in.
And no, in certain cities (Brooklyn, for example), sorry - you can’t buy a home for that amount of money. What do you do when you’re a local and you can’t even afford the $1,200 rent for a basic studio/ one bedroom apartment?
I know you can make the argument that one can just choose to live the city, that NYC is expensive anyway, etc etc. Doesn’t matter. It was still affordable to live where I lived - Park Slope and Sunset Park - because it was a locals only/ ‘my family has lived here for generations’ kind of deal. It’s my fucking home. I shouldn’t have had to have left because of this bullshit. But I had to.
‘We have a long way to go’, my ass. It’s been happening for decades.
(via smelltheashes)
I’m not going to put words in the mouth of smelltheashes—but i just wanted to point back to the OP and how he says “it sucks” and makes the injustice of gentrification about “feelings”—and i just want to say that I know several people who have been or are getting priced out of midtown and/or got foreclosed on due to predatory lending—and what they talk about is not “feelings”—but *trauma*. “being nicer” to people you are actively traumatizing—a kinder and gentler trauma experience—is just so unbelievably offensive. i can not express how angry the OP makes me.
(via mmmightymightypeople)
(via iinventedeverything)
Anonymous asked: This all reminds me of Banksy's book where there's a letter from someone asking him to stop stenciling in their neighborhood because it is attracting richer buyers and driving the prices up and Banksy has published this letter to say haha and people say graffiti does the opposite haha in that it is similarly infuriating and missing the point.
oh man, that is the worst! Thank you for sharing this illustrative and super-relevant tale.
I made a zine to distribute at the Students of Sustainability conference about gentrification, how environmental activists often do things that further it, and what they can do about it. it is possibly worth checking out for the ~shocking~ information about the hidden side of public transport. it’s targeted at Australians with a good understanding of environment organising and not much understanding of gentrification. you’ll need to print it out to read it properly but it’s also only 2 pages double-sided. if you really want to read the text without printing it off, or can’t read the admittedly too-small font, give me your email address and I’ll send you the text file. but I’m kind of into zines as zines and blogs as blogs so I’m not going to upload the text here.
guys if I’m going to enter a huge debate about yarn-bombing and gentrification I can at least use my newfound notoriority to do something constructive, which is promote this rally for public housing in Melbourne. 4pm Friday the 6th of July, 140 Brunswick St, Melbourne.
yarn-bombing is IMO pretty annoying, but little more. This, on the other hand, is a very real threat to people who need cheap housing. the Liberal state government is openly hostile to public housing. their latest technique to avoid investing in it is to propose building private apartments on the open space between towers. These towers have 200 apartments each, many of which are severely overcrowded. The loss of open space would be keenly felt by apartment residents.
Judging by Victorian history, they won’t stop there — it’s likely the thin edge of the wedge for the privatisation of existing apartments, to be rented out at market rates. But it’s bad enough. I went to a meeting for the African migrant community in the towers and the women there (it was almost all women) were really worried about the effect losing open space would have on their kids. they were just like “uh, my kid is gonna be completely impossible without an open space to run around and burn off steam in”. like I said, a lot of the apartments are overcrowded, and it’s not like they have backyards. how would you feel if the government sold your backyard to a developer, huh???
if a lot of people come to this rally it will also put the tenants in a better position to make demands for maintenance, better apartment allocation, and so on.
please reblog this if you think you might have a significant number of followers from Melbourne, Australia and you reblogged anything about yarn bombing, because this is a lot more important.
