My personal experience in Chicago is that the government had public housing projects that generated high crime rates and drove people away that ran in a ring around the city center, but otherwise were in premium locations. Then large public housing projects went out of favor and they were largely torn down and removed from 2000-2015. As the crime rates in these neighborhoods declined, suddenly the reason why people wouldn’t live in these places was removed and the intrinsic value of property so close to the city center skyrocketed.
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.
It is worth noting those large public housing complexes were unpopular with housing professionals, advocates, planners, architects and economists when they were created.
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.
Indeed, Equal Housing Opportunity is an extremely bad idea.
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.
Your post has reminded me of Vimes’s Theory of Socio-economic Unfairness[0], but I can't figure out if you think that the way the system works is a good thing or more just "this is the way the world works"
This is why slums are in such inhospitable places.
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.
Mind you, if everyone lives in the cheap neighborhood then "problem people" are diluted to the point there isn't a neighborhood-wide problem meanwhile everyone gets to pay cheap rent.
That's the model Chicago converted to ("problem people" jab aside). It's fine. But the expensive areas are still expensive. It's hard to see schematically why rents would stay cheap in this model.
Having lived in Brooklyn and Jersey City for a combined 12 years, starting when an office worker could still buy a literal house in Prospect Heights, I'm fully convinced that "gentrification" is a meaningless phrase and we need a completely different way of studying this issue that looks at the role of finance and government in displacing the poor.
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.
> 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.
My memory from the US Midwest is that Williamsburg already had a reputation as a hipster-level gentrifying area--to the point that the PBR-sipping indie set was already eschewing it for Bushwick. Then again, whomever I spoke to could have been parroting an odd blogosphere take by then.
I can attest to that, as I've seen something of this sort happen in two cities already.
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.
I wish the term 'displacement' would be more commonly used, because it encapsulates the negative aspects of gentrification. On the other hand, gentrification has objectively positive aspects (improvements in safety, amenities, livability of a neighborhood). But it's too late now.
It's long become a meaningless term in housing discourse. More or less boils down to "the vibes are off" When millionaires who live in houses started describing non-millionaires being allowed to live in apartments nearby as "gentrification", you know it's time for a new word.
god so fucking true. you have to understand in SF housing discourse that 'bringing in undesirable elements' means 'letting people that "only" make 100k live here'
I'm curious how their model responds to interventions like rent-control. Does it merely slow the process, or does it provide stabilizing damping to an unstable process?
"Within our modeling framework, we show that gentrification emerges
only when high-income residents have some mobility, even if minimal, highlighting how their movement patterns catalyse the process. We treat relocation flows of agents in our city as time-varying edges in a temporal
network, leveraging established tools from network science and human mobility research."
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'
Why study an idealized simulation of gentrification when you could just study the real effects in the real world? Plenty of studies exist on this topic:
That's interesting. I was hoping to see some comparison of their model with the data in the paper, but haven't found it (I looked at the figures). That's a bit disappointing...
My personal experience in Chicago is that the government had public housing projects that generated high crime rates and drove people away that ran in a ring around the city center, but otherwise were in premium locations. Then large public housing projects went out of favor and they were largely torn down and removed from 2000-2015. As the crime rates in these neighborhoods declined, suddenly the reason why people wouldn’t live in these places was removed and the intrinsic value of property so close to the city center skyrocketed.
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.
It is worth noting those large public housing complexes were unpopular with housing professionals, advocates, planners, architects and economists when they were created.
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.
Indeed, Equal Housing Opportunity is an extremely bad idea.
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.
Your post has reminded me of Vimes’s Theory of Socio-economic Unfairness[0], but I can't figure out if you think that the way the system works is a good thing or more just "this is the way the world works"
[0] https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...
This is why slums are in such inhospitable places.
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.
Mind you, if everyone lives in the cheap neighborhood then "problem people" are diluted to the point there isn't a neighborhood-wide problem meanwhile everyone gets to pay cheap rent.
I'm dubious of this idea. Examples of locations where this dynamic exists?
Singapore is the only place I heave heard of where rich and poor live in the same public housing buildings.
Could have something to do with the extreme land scarcity. The super rich still live in private houses though.
Singapore also deals quite harshly with “problem people”.
How do you mean?
They are quite famous for using capital punishment for drug trafficking offenses:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Singap...
Usually by hanging.
Caning spoiled ex-pat brats comes to mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Michael_Fay
“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.”
That's the model Chicago converted to ("problem people" jab aside). It's fine. But the expensive areas are still expensive. It's hard to see schematically why rents would stay cheap in this model.
Having lived in Brooklyn and Jersey City for a combined 12 years, starting when an office worker could still buy a literal house in Prospect Heights, I'm fully convinced that "gentrification" is a meaningless phrase and we need a completely different way of studying this issue that looks at the role of finance and government in displacing the poor.
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.
> 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.
My memory from the US Midwest is that Williamsburg already had a reputation as a hipster-level gentrifying area--to the point that the PBR-sipping indie set was already eschewing it for Bushwick. Then again, whomever I spoke to could have been parroting an odd blogosphere take by then.
I can attest to that, as I've seen something of this sort happen in two cities already.
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.
I wish the term 'displacement' would be more commonly used, because it encapsulates the negative aspects of gentrification. On the other hand, gentrification has objectively positive aspects (improvements in safety, amenities, livability of a neighborhood). But it's too late now.
It's long become a meaningless term in housing discourse. More or less boils down to "the vibes are off" When millionaires who live in houses started describing non-millionaires being allowed to live in apartments nearby as "gentrification", you know it's time for a new word.
god so fucking true. you have to understand in SF housing discourse that 'bringing in undesirable elements' means 'letting people that "only" make 100k live here'
I have never read the word gentrification in a positive light, only as the "displacement" meaning.
I'm curious how their model responds to interventions like rent-control. Does it merely slow the process, or does it provide stabilizing damping to an unstable process?
"Within our modeling framework, we show that gentrification emerges only when high-income residents have some mobility, even if minimal, highlighting how their movement patterns catalyse the process. We treat relocation flows of agents in our city as time-varying edges in a temporal network, leveraging established tools from network science and human mobility research."
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'
Also: "as city population density increases, so does the propensity for gentrification" summarizes to people want to live near other people!
I suspect it's more to do with living close to work. Only a small percentage of people are able to move without that concern.
There are a lot of us who definitely do not want to live near other people.
Why study an idealized simulation of gentrification when you could just study the real effects in the real world? Plenty of studies exist on this topic:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w25809
https://www.philadelphiafed.org/community-development/housin...
1) collect data from the real world (your links)
2) condense data into math (this article)
3) collect more data to verify predictions from that math (future work)
That's interesting. I was hoping to see some comparison of their model with the data in the paper, but haven't found it (I looked at the figures). That's a bit disappointing...
Tom Toles explained the process in 1998: https://laviedesidees.fr/local/cache-vignettes/L500xH449/1to....
Unnecessarily racist and anti-white.
A more fun article on this.[1]
Gentrification is just making safe spaces for straight white people.
[1] https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-role-artists-p...