New York City politician Adriano Espaillat has proposed that the federal government create “anti-gentrification” zones “where vulnerable tenants could form cooperatives to purchase their apartment buildings away from predatory landlords [and a] ruthless market.” As a rule of thumb, any time a politician proposes a new government program to save people from the “ruthless market,” it is worth looking to see what other government programs are really causing the problem.
First of all, gentrification is a local problem, so why should the federal government get involved? Espaillat’s answer is “the federal level . . . is really where the money is.” The real answer is that Espaillat is running for Congress, so he has to propose a federal solution to get people to vote for him. Considering that the federal government is nearly $20 trillion in debt, the Antiplanner suggests that people should be skeptical of politicians who think the federal government is made of money.
Second, a lot of gentrification is driven by the “build up, not out” crowd, often using government subsidies to promote their visions. In New York City, for example, Mayor de Blasio wants to rezone low-income neighborhoods so that the city can tear down people’s mid-rise apartments and replace them with high-rise “affordable” housing. Too bad there isn’t some architectural critic to challenge this plan. Maybe they could write a book about it.
The anti-gentrification movement is supposedly an example of “participatory democracy,” which is another term for socialism. What else would you call it when people presume to tell other people what they can and cannot do with their property? And if the other people don’t listen, just vandalize their property.
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Most gentrification issues have to do with racial minorities who feel pushed out of their homes by big money. Ironically, gentrification of minority neighborhoods reduces residential segregation, which is what the federal government says it wants. So Espaillat should be careful of what he wishes for, as federal involvement might actually lead to more gentrification, not less.
In San Francisco real estate prices have gotten so high that even white, middle-class residents are protesting gentrification. Whether it is San Francisco or New York City, however, the real problem isn’t the wealthy landlords but government interference in the real estate market, either through regulation or subsidies aimed at denser development.
Gentrification is even an issue in Houston, though it isn’t as serious as in the coastal cities. To the extent that it is a problem, the source of that problem is, once again, government, either through tax-increment financing or through the voracious expansion of the University of Houston and similar state-run institutions.
Gentrification is a symptom, not the real problem. In most cases, including this one, treating the symptom and not the cause is a prescription for failure. Before politicians create new programs to solve problems, they should check and see what existing programs are causing the problems in the first place.
>Mayor de Blasio wants to rezone low-income neighborhoods so that the city can tear down people’s mid-rise apartments and replace them with high-rise “affordable” housing. Too bad there isn’t some architectural critic to challenge this plan. Maybe they could write a book about it.
Do you not see a difference between removing restrictions from property owners that prevent denser construction and a government agency bulldozing a neighborhood and replacing it with highways or government run housing?
>What else would you call it when people presume to tell other people what they can and cannot do with their property?
Does that extend to permitting denser development where it’s prohibited? So neighborhoods where the government only permits single family housing could allow skinny houses, row houses, low rise apartments, high rise towers etc…neighborhoods of low and mid rise buildings could permit high rises, in addition to the single family housing on what is now farms or wilderness that you advocate for.
Okay, I really don’t get it. Gentrification is good right? That’s why DC built a “Trolley to No Where” to encourage gentrification. Gentrification is what everyone wants to happen to their city.
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I see how low income renters would suffer, but seems like everyone else would welcome it. Especially the low income property owners!
The attempts by the urban planning profession to house the poor has gone thru several generations. First generation was they put them in high rise housing projects. But in less than 15 years it turned into graffiti covered, crime infested ghettos. Then the next generation, thinking they’ve learned their lesson, the urban planners came up with a new approach. Instead of building high rises they built mid rises (less than 10 stories high) and incorporated more plazas and park/play grounds but it too turned into a slum. So then they tired low rises (no more than 5 stories), more trees and landscaping and it still turned into a ghetto. Because crime and apathy don’t follow poverty per se, they follow dense concentrations of poverty. So the next plan is essentially, no more apartments, but simply subsidize or build conventional housing stock and incorporate it into market rate neighborhoods because the assumption is breaking up their ability to congregate together, you eliminate the communication and supply chain structure they wont commit illicit acts in view of their suburban neighbors. But the typical suburbanite in this day and age is too absent or absent minded or apathetic to care about the daily functions of their neighborhood. And I outta now, It’s in my neighborhood. They put aside a row of housing for section 8 and below market rate. So in a matter of a few years drug arrests skyrocketed, police showing up, police calls rose 300%. Vandalism went up.
In the mid-20th century, Modernist architects were notorious for trying out social engineering theories on projects for low-income people. Many of these experiments were ended by dynamite. Every year the government blows up the very thing they touted as the solution to public housing problems.
Jane Jacobs did more for the Gentrification movement than it’s opposition. I’ve written on the focus of good architecture before. But even I recognize you need “ugly” areas for the sake of the impoverished. A sad but necessary truth. When you walk into a poor part of town, you find straight away that it is not particularly attractive. But why? Surely nobody wants to live in an ugly area, so why should it be that way? This question may seem so easy to answer that you might consider it rhetorical. A poor area is ugly because the residents do not have enough money for upkeep, so it’s subject to the decay and fall into ugliness. As simple as this sounds, so does the reply. Why does the city not help with the upkeep of neighborhoods? After all, some paint, planting trees and flowers is not that expensive. And this is where it becomes strange: they can not do it and it is not because of the money.
If the city pays for the maintenance of an area, beautifying it, the area will become attractive to gentrification. The new arrivals bring along new demands for a certain type of shop, schools and so forth. The people who used to live there will be chased out by the increasing cost of rent. So implicitly, by trying to make people’s lives more pleasant, the municipality will have chased them out of their neighborhoods.
Some kind of middle way can of course be found to balance out the possibility of housing everyone, but it does imply that a municipality has to be sparse in its brushing up of an area and embrace ugliness. A peculiar price to pay to keep the city diverse. Even though no world class city wants ghettos on their post cards.
The Antiplanner wrote:
First of all, gentrification is a local problem, so why should the federal government get involved? Espaillat’s answer is “the federal level . . . is really where the money is.” The real answer is that Espaillat is running for Congress, so he has to propose a federal solution to get people to vote for him.
There might (might) be a role for the federal government to play in regulating private property that directly adjoins an important federal asset (such as a military base and maybe some national parks and national forests). Otherwise, this is definitely not a federal problem. And gentrification is definitely not a federal issue.
Considering that the federal government is nearly $20 trillion in debt, the Antiplanner suggests that people should be skeptical of politicians who think the federal government is made of money.
The debt does not bother me as much – but the matter of gentrification is something that needs to be handled at the municipal or county or maybe state level, not federal – at least in the federal system of government of the United States.
LazyReader wrote:
In the mid-20th century, Modernist architects were notorious for trying out social engineering theories on projects for low-income people. Many of these experiments were ended by dynamite. Every year the government blows up the very thing they touted as the solution to public housing problems.
Architects are no better at social engineering than anyone else.
To the extent that we need social engineering (and I am not a fan, given its usually dismal record), such decisions need to be made by elected officials that are accountable to the citizens, not by architects, planners or engineers.
I live in a historic district and participated for a while in a Facebook group set up here. Not anymore. There was a constant whine about gentrification, and how bad it was. Imagine that! White faces moving into a neighborhood of brown and black ones. Whatever happened to “Diversity!”, anyway? Personally, I’m more than impressed at the strides taken here to improve the neighborhood. At any particular time, there are easily a dozen construction dumpsters to be found, as the older homes here are being renovated. Places that used to look like crack houses are now respectable homes. And this is a bad thing?
“Gentrification” is only a “problem” for people who don’t profit from it. The renters don’t want to lock in the rents for the long term in case the rent could go down, but they want to hold on if the market rent might increase. So they use their political power to rent-seek. Basic economic, bad government, theory.
The USA as a whole benefits greatly, but indigenous poor suffer, from a constant flow of poor immigrants to whom 10-15 people in a 2,000 sq ft house is paradise, but the USA indigenous poor want their rents to not go up.
Sandy. What?