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Thoughts on Gentrification
Posted by Carol Coletta on December 31, 2008 |
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…
Changing Harlem
Posted by Kristian Buschmann on September 08, 2008 |
Nice collection of stories in this New York Times article about the gentrification of Harlem, with perspectives ranging from happy integration to fear Harlem losing its character. I particularly like the viewpoint of one resident who takes the confrontational attitude of his neighbors as an invitation to talk about the issue: instead of getting angry back, he asks "what are you angry about?" I think we could all learn more about gentrification if we took this approach.