Thoughts on Gentrification

Gentrification is not exactly a hot topic at the moment, given falling real estate prices. (I've been in Aspen since Christmas, and there are "For Sale" signs all over town.)  However, Joe Cortright sent me an interesting post on gentrification from Matthew Yglesias.

Matt writes he doesn't like to use the term "gentrification" because the term obscures more than it clarifies, and tends to cover a widely disparate array of situations."  But he does have a lot of thoughts on the matter.

Bad gentrification is a relative scarcity issue, he writes. "It’s very expensive to live in low-crime walkable transit-accessible neighborhoods featuring good public schools because housing in such neighborhoods is in short supply. To reduce the cost of housing in such neighborhoods there are a few things you need to do. One is that where you have neighborhoods with some of those characteristics you need to allow for denser construction of housing units. Another is that you need to work on the social policy problems of crime and school performance in existing walkable urban neighborhoods. And a third is that you need to build more transit lines and transit nodes and ensure that such nodes as exist have “smart” (i.e., dense, walkable, mixed use) development around them. And a fourth is to not waste the opportunities that we have — there’s a giant open-air parking lot right by the Rhode Island Avenue Metro Station in DC, which is just a dumbly low-intensity use of land adjacent to scarce Metro stations.

"Long story short, the greatest villains of these kinds of stories aren’t the gentrifiers so much as the folks living in the already very nice areas who’ve tried to “pull up the ladder” and boost their own property values by choking development in the parts of the metro area where they live."

Matt also points to neighborhoods where gentrification is recognized when interesting retail shops begin to disappear.  But that's mainly a function of high retail rents.  "Simply put, it’s much easier to run an interesting retail business in places where rents are low. Very high rents lead to homogenization, chains, mediocrity, high prices, etc."

There is much more to read, both on this post and many others.  His blog is consistently terrific.

  

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