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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:The basic gist that I get is that gentrification is basically rich (or at least, wealthier) people finding a city neighborhood they like and buying up homes in it, causing an increase in property values and forcing established community members out through real estate market pressures: landlords raise rents because they know they can get more for it from someone else, or worse, sell the property outright. Property owners might be pressured by increasing property taxes due to rising home values (although in some areas I would think this is already ameliorated by tax laws which limit the amount property taxes can increase year over year), sell because the allure of money is too much, or leave because the neighborhood has changed in a way they don't like. This results in the erosion and eventual destruction of established local communities and cultures. Yes and no. You've got the basic short term idea correctly - but why does this happen? Isn't it a sign of inefficiency that there are undervalued urban places to begin with? Why such dramatic swings in price over timespans of a decade or less? Historically, first world anglo countries which depended heavily on automobiles in the 20th century (US, Canada, some others, generally non-Euro and Australia) rapidly developed suburban land and encouraged suburban settlement, leading to a relative hollowing out of cities. You end up with this deep impoverishment of urban land due to lack of demand from the wealthy and middle class, where relatively poor people were able to own houses close to the city center. Eventually wealthier people got over their fear of the city, and these areas rapidly increased in price. The correction over time is when urban land became more valuable, which is natural, as urbanized areas are scarcer then suburban areas. The main thing though is that gentrification is a very long term development largely based in collective economic decisions made 60+ years ago, with a huge amount of economic intertia behind it. Farmer Crack-rear end posted:What would an ethical individual or family looking to move to a different region do in order to not cause gentrification? You can't really fix this through consumer behavior. Sorry! At best you can buy a home in a neighborhood which isn't way below your price range. Then again, wealthier people moving to a poorer neighborhood has positive impact on school district funding, police presence, etc. The main problem is that we need people of all income bands to be living in the same neighborhoods. Gentrification is worst when an all-poor area becomes an all-middle class area. Farmer Crack-rear end posted:What policy decisions at a city, state, and federal level would be prudent and effective in preventing gentrification? Without typing too much, the basic solution is government interference to prevent the unwarranted displacement of persons who can't keep up with the economic shift in their neighborhood, as well as strong regulation to enforce some level of 'affordable' housing to prevent areas from becoming too socioeconomically homogenous. I'm not just talking about Section 8 and projects - in NYC (and other cities) there is a real problem where cops, teachers, nurses, and other necessary middle class workers are priced out of the neighborhoods they work in. Cities need to forego property tax increases for protected persons, so that they do not get evicted from their neighborhoods through tax increases. Cities also need to encourage if not mandate affordable housing in growing neighborhoods, as well as encourage slow growth across an entire city rather than concentrating resources on one hot neighborhood at a time. Also mass transit etc. States don't have much power, but they can support cities by providing grants as well as encourage the formation of regional planning organizations that support broader regional growth rather than hedonic explosions in one small area after another. Also mass transit etc. On the federal level, the main thing that would help is permitting a mortgage interest deduction on residences other than single family homes. This would encouage people to develop and buy condos, townhomes, and denser residential structures which would lessen the pressure on relatively scarce stocks of urban single family homes. Also mass transit etc. Lord Windy posted:Why do you need to fight it? Yeah. Gentrification is a good thing so long as you do not exploit, destroy, or damage the quality of life of persons with less economic resources. Which is practically impossible given the current political climate, but still.
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Feb 24, 2015 10:25
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computer parts posted:There's a common theme on these forums that urban living is ideal and rural and suburban living is unnaturally subsidized by the state. This is somewhat true. The biggest problem with suburbs in this urban context is not that they exist but that they depend so heavily on cars for transportation. They're just poorly designed from an efficiency standpoint and thus require an abnormally high amount of resources per capita. Which was fine when it was relatively wealthy people moving there, but decaying inner ring suburbs are becoming the new ghettos as poor minorities are pushed out of desirable areas. In Europe suburbs have long been ghettos, but at least people can travel to and from them. American-style suburbs compound poverty with spatial isolation, because a car is mandatory to navigate these areas in any reasonable timeframe. I have family who lives in one of these suburban ghettos and since there are no sidewalks, just grassy shoulders, there are loooong trails marking the 2ish mile walk from the neighborhood to the nearest corner store. boner confessor fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Feb 24, 2015 |
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Feb 24, 2015 16:27
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Jackbooted statist thugs violating the third amendment forching me to house 0bama's shocktroop illegal immigrants AT GUNPOINt
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Feb 24, 2015 17:36
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TwoQuestions posted:The right to existence is predicated on your ability to provide for yourself. If you live off rabbits in the woods, more power to you, but it's wrong to take someone else's money, even FU money, to keep someone else alive. Maybe there is a middle ground between people 100% able to pay their own way and people 0% able to pay their own way? What if you're working, but also poor? Some kind of working poor. Can that exist? TwoQuestions posted:On a moral level that seems wrong, but I can't put my finger on why, so I can't in good conscience recommend policy that I can't prove correct. It's wrong because it is both incorrect and evil, hth
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Feb 24, 2015 17:46
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wateroverfire posted:Less trolly, the notion that the people who live in a neighborhood pre-gentrification should be expected to stay there seems like something worth examining. They're not the "original" residents except on a very arbitrary time scale, they're not being illegally displaced (if they are that's a problem that needs addressing), when they move out they´re moving into another neighborhood - maybe with a nice payout if they sold property. So what is the great wrong being perpetrated? Less trolly, the notion that the native people who live on land pre-settlement should be expected to stay there seems like something worth examining. They're not the "original" residents except on a very arbitrary time scale, they're not being illegally displaced (if they are that's a problem that needs addressing), when they move out they´re moving into another area - maybe with a nice payout if they sold property. So what is the great wrong being perpetrated? I'm being dramatic, but it's the same basic idea. Indian reservations aren't bad per se, it's just bad when you dislocate someone from the place where they lived and they get very little in return. If you uproot a people and stick them in a shithole landscape with no resources and nothing to do, they're much worse off. Likewise, if gentrification displaces people from established neighborhoods with useful social/physical infrastructure and they end up getting pushed into transient, decaying neighborhoods with a lower level of social/physical infrastrucure then you're kind of loving them over. So long as we prevent that inherent loving over then gentrification isn't a bad thing. wateroverfire posted:One, I thought the deal with gentrification is that the housing started off lovely. Nope! The housing is only "lovely" because it is in a "bad" neighborhood with "poor" people and "dingy" houses. Gentrification can be directly and causally traced to mid-century White Flight and suburbanization. wateroverfire posted:Second, I find it really hard to believe there is a housing shortage of the type you describe. I mean, maybe if you qualify it (ie: in Manhattan) but otherwise why do you believe that's a general thing? Do you have any sources? https://www.google.com/search?q=america+affordable+housing+shortage http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ralph-da-costa-nunez/low-income-housing_b_2082377.html http://fortune.com/2014/03/25/americas-thorny-affordable-housing-crisis/ boner confessor fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Feb 24, 2015 |
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Feb 24, 2015 18:56
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wateroverfire posted:A middle manager is a necessary cog in an enterprise once it has gotten large enough to need cogs. Sperging out about whether they're more productive than the people they manage is missing the point. alas, i doth sperg *dies, spergily*
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Feb 24, 2015 19:01
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ToxicSlurpee posted:If you're talking about American poor they don't own the land and aren't being given any sort of payout. This is not axiomatically true - homeownership rates are lower among the urban poor, but not as low as you think. In 2005: "While 69 percent of all households are headed by homeowners—a record high reached in 2004—many are left out. Only half of the households in the lowest fifth of the income scale are homeowners, and the homeownership rates among both blacks and Hispanics are slightly under fifty percent." http://www.urban.org/uploadedpdf/311184_improving_homeownership.pdf Of course mortgages don't really own the land etc. so on and things have changed in the last decade but my point is that a larger proportion of urban poor are homeowners than common knowledge would believe. ToxicSlurpee posted:Something doesn't necessarily need to be illegal to be wrong. Deliberately pricing the poor out of a neighborhood or doing so indirectly without giving them some kind of option is terrible no matter which way you slice it. uh i agree with you
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Feb 24, 2015 19:09
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wateroverfire posted:I don't think people are getting hosed over - there's no one doing the uprooting, nobody doing the loving, unless we view people moving into the neighborhood from outside it as doing something wrong and that seems like a weird way to look at it. That doesn't mean there aren't consequences we should think about, though. Society is doing the loving. It's like saying racism isn't a systemic problem if you can't identify particular racists pulling the strings. wateroverfire posted:I mean, that's a pretty big simplification, right? It's a well accepted fact, if you have some substantive theory that says otherwise I would like to hear it. wateroverfire posted:The housing is lovely because it's poorly maintained, in areas where crime is high, etc. To hold the people who moved out 60 years ago responsible for that seems kind of questionable when the group of current residents is absolutely, directly responsible for that state of affairs. [img-fry-not-sure-if-trolling-or-stupid] wateroverfire posted:Interesting reads. I think the standard of 30% of your annual salary being affordable is maybe questionable. If you have questions, ask them. 30% is a well accepted standard by experts in housing policy.
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Feb 24, 2015 19:21
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Nintendo Kid posted:Now this negative consequence can be easily negated by ensuring there's sufficient city services including public transport and housing all over the city so that the moving will not be detrimental. Unfortunately a lot of cities are run by people that don't like to raise the necessary taxes and have patterns of under-serving various areas. There's also the issue of jurisdictional fragmentation, as metropolitan population movements can be regional. So you can end up displacing people from Capital City to the outlying suburb of Rotsville, a completely independent city beholden to no regional planning oversight, which because of its lack of employment and subsequent poor tax base just so coincidentally happens to have terrible service provision and therefore the cheapest housing around! And if the Rotsville City Council doesn't see any need to provide more services, welp
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Feb 24, 2015 19:35
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Nintendo Kid posted:Most of the places where gentrification is happening, though, are relatively large cities that have been around for a while and annexed significant chunks of their surrounding areas long ago. I would be very entertained if you could even attempt to back this statement up with facts. Gentrification is happening in every major metro city in America, which exist on a spectrum from centralized to fragmented.
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Feb 24, 2015 20:03
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icantfindaname posted:Would it be fair to say gentrification is only a problem, or much more of a problem, in the more politically fractured metro areas? No, gentrification is a problem anywhere you have a large income disparity as well as concentrations of poverty in places with relatively good levels of physical infrastructure. Gentrification tends to impact larger metros over smaller, more populous metros over less populous, and areas with a heavy reliance on automobiles over metros with relatively more mass transit. Political fragmentation only matters in as much as it precludes active regional planning to mitigate the harms of gentrification-related population displacement.
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Feb 24, 2015 20:18
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Kumo posted:I worked a local political race last fall, and gentrification came up occasionally in the context of city demographics, and I've thought a bit about it since then. At least enough to come to despise the tortured liberal soul-searching that comes with the word gentrification. I guess I must arrive at the conclusion that I am a gentrifier and therefore am part of "the problem;" but the devil is in the details. Gentrification is like horrible working conditions in Chinese factories. Yeah, you're complicit by owning things, but there's really not much you can do about it except agitate for a safety net. Except where we have very little control over Chinese labor conditions we do have some level of control over local government planning and politics.
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Feb 24, 2015 20:48
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Kumo posted:Except the real estate developers have most local government planning and politics well within their control. This is by and large true, but not necessarily true. Developers calling the shots by being buddies with planning commissioners is a thing, so are apathetic planning commissions that don't have or care to have a master plan. These are too common. But there are places that have integrity and give a poo poo, so there is hope! icantfindaname posted:The thing is though, the 'solution' to gentrification isn't actually to prevent rich people from driving property values up and drive out poorer people, it's to ensure that all areas have adequate access to services and employment. It's not actually desirable or possible to prevent gentrification in the first place. 
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Feb 24, 2015 21:27
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Doctor Spaceman posted:Good public transport still does not have the capability of warping space and time. A broader transportation network means a wider dispersion of jobs as well as residences, reducing the net problem of spatial mismatch. You can easily make the same complaints about private transportation not being instantaneous. I mean really: PT6A posted:Because people value their time. Even robust transit is far from instant. What is this but decrying any/all non teleportative modes of travel?
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Feb 25, 2015 00:07
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Doctor Spaceman posted:The main drive for gentrification here was industry scaling up and moving out of the older inner-city suburbs. The working class jobs moved outwards (or disappeared) at the same time as the CBD became a bigger source of employment. Employment concerns weren't the only factor (the increasing prevalence of cars, the post-war migration boom played their parts too) but it was the biggest. gentrification flows the other way in the southern hemisphere
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Feb 25, 2015 01:07
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Crazy Mike posted:tldr: How do we turn a poor population into a population that can live in gentrified areas? Full Communism.
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Feb 25, 2015 01:51
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Junkyard Poodle posted:If blight (or relative blight) is a pre-requisite for a communities gentrification, does implementing rent controls set up a communities for future gentrification? I'd say probably not because A) Rent controls are implemented on a fairly granular basis, unit by unit, meaning neighborhoods with rent control are more socioeconomically diverse by default as people drop out of the program and are less subject to large scale external pressure. You'd have to differentiate then between gentrification of a whole neighborhood versus new residents gradually paying higher rent. B) Rent controls are only really a thing in NYC and you can't extrapolate from that extreme outlier to the rest of the country's major metros. C) Buildings don't really have a 'shelf life', poorly maintaned buildings may deprecate due to deferred maintenance but housing is weird and the valuation is hedonic so an old building may or may not be more valuable than a new building, it depends on hundreds of factors. In theory rent controls lead to lowered investment and therefore simulates the conditions that are precursors to gentrification but in reality, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Feb 25, 2015 02:13
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Smudgie Buggler posted:This... doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why would you pay higher municipal rates for living in the city than you would living in the burbs? most handouts to suburbs take place on the state level or above. cities tend to have more services and more of them, raising costs comparatively property values and thus property taxes also tend to be higher in cities
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Feb 28, 2015 02:20
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Smudgie Buggler posted:I feel like I'm missing something. Do suburban areas in America tend not to belong to the same municipality as the city proper or something? Yes. Nations in Europe tend to be smaller, more dense, and thus there's more rationale for the national government to impose regional planning agencies to maintain a relatively centralized level of control across an entire metropolitan area. This is the sensible way to coordinate and steer growth. In the US, we frickin love states rights. Every state can do whatever it wants regarding incorporating cities, establishing regional planning, etc. Most cities in the US do not have ANY regional planning oversight whatsoever. Combine this with the generally larger spread of American cities due to our love for cars, and the colloquial metropolitan area most people regard as a city when they say Denver or Dallas can actually be split among dozens if not hundreds of jurisdictions. For example, I live in the Atlanta metropolitan region, ninth largest in the country, about 70% of the entire state's population in roughly 20% of its land area. Metro Atlanta covers between 12 and 36 counties, depending on what your qualifications are, and at its maximum contains 6.1 million people in the following: 1 city above 250k population (Atlanta, 420k) 3 cities between 75-100k 3 cities between 50-75k 13 cities between 25-50k 3 Census Designated Places (CDP) between 25-50k (a CDP is a place that is not technically incorporated, so is not a city, but is treated as a city socially and may even have a downtown area) 49 cities below 25k 15 CDPs below 25k I live in one of the smaller CDPs, estimated population about 17k in a small dense space, but I can take a short walk to an actual small city, which is a 3 mile train ride into Atlanta proper. My point is that regulatory oversight of American metropolitan areas is enormously irrational and highly fragmented. Atlanta does have an Atlanta Regional Commission, which is largely toothless via state law and mainly issues reports and keeps an eye on things. Aside from that each of these cities can zone and build and tax as they please without having to care at all what the others are doing. Tab8715 posted:The American automotive industry lobbied against Streetcars and had them removed. There's definitely a dislike of buses, subways and an attitude of independence that doesn't support public transportation. Streetcars were dying anyway without NCL and the automakers pushing things along. There's a little truth to the whole Streetcar Conspiracy idea but not nearly enough truth to make an interesting conspiracy. At most, General Motors directly killed about 10% of America's streetcars - what happened to the other 90%? boner confessor fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Feb 28, 2015 |
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Feb 28, 2015 04:41
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Oddly enough that's the other side of it. America cares about little more than corporate profits. Anything that isn't profitable is obviously useless so why should it even exist? If you put money in and something comes out other than "more money" it isn't justifying its existence. Well, yeah. You can't expect a privately owned company to operate a public utility at a loss. Many American cities legislated their streetcar systems out of existence by capping fares and thusly capping profits, and then when streetcars needed public assistance they were widely regarded as inconvenient and antiquated and left to die. By the time the federal government got serious about urban infrastructure they were all about roads and highways - even today many federal legislators struggle to fund urban mass transit, which with few exceptions are largely intrastate deals and thus not subject to the commerce clause. This disparity in funding between roadways and mass transit is the reason for the suburban boom of the mid 20th century - suburbs begain as commuter railroad towns in the 1880s, then as streetcar suburbs from 1890-1930, both reliant on largely privately owned infrastructure, but really started kicking off with mass automobile ownership from 1920-1950 and entered the biggest wave with the development of the Interstate system from the 1950s-present. boner confessor fucked around with this message at 05:07 on Feb 28, 2015 |
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Feb 28, 2015 05:04
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Number_6 posted:This may be more of a general growth question, than specifically gentrification. But let's say you have a small city, or a specific portion of a city, where the residents are concerned about uncontrolled growth or an influx of outside interests or persons. Would it be legal for the city to enact a growth tax, or higher tax rates, for persons and businesses seeking to move into that area, while protecting (exempting) existing residents and businesses? Only projects or residents arriving after a specific date would be subject to the "growth tax" or "infrastructure tax" or whatever you wanted to call it. Or is this kind of strategy precluded by the law or Constitution? Although in any case it's hard to imagine many politicians being actively anti-growth... This isn't illegal, but it's hard to pull off. Cities generally don't have the legislative tools available to target growth in this manner. The most common method is to institute impact fees as a condition of approving a building permit. You can also set up something like a Tax Allocation District with some kind of grandfathering mechanism to protect areas from growing too fast and displacing residents. Both of these methods can be challenged in court. There's really no way though to specifically target certain groups or classes of people with varying tax rates, and it requires a large amount of political will to function. The main problem is that cities are usually pretty small, so if you impose higher taxes you can very well chase growth out to a neighboring jurisdiction that's only a few miles away. One reason suburbs spread so quickly in a heavily fragmented environment is that all these small, weak jurisdictions will trip over themselves being the friendliest to developers so as to maximize their share of the growth wave as it happens. So you end up with a lot of cheaply constructed, falling apart homes in badly designed neighborhoods because whoever was the local planning/permitting agency only cared about boosting growth rates rather than actually ensuring that homes were constructed properly and such.
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Mar 1, 2015 21:01
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