Archinect - News

'Gentrification gray' is the latest design trend sweeping San Francisco's once colorful rowhouses

2021-11-30T17:20:00-05:00

More and more, amid the pastels and the gold-leaf embellishments, you see a striking juxtaposition: 125-year-old houses painted in the tones of a cold war-era nuclear warhead or a dormant cinder cone. In neighborhoods like the Mission and the Haight, this phenomenon reads to some residents as an erasure of the Latino community or of the lingering counterculture.

Gentrification has authored a wholesale change to the city brought on by what New York’s outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio once referred to as a “crisis of desirability.”

Like the Big Apple, many highly-paid workers have begun returning to their former spendy enclaves, bucking a trend that had initially appeared to shrink the city’s tech population significantly as a result of the pandemic and leading to even further recalcitrance on the part of locals.

“I’m not moving. I’m not going anywhere. I got my roots,” one lifelong resident told The Guardian. “Working with children, teaching kids music without asking for any money. It’s about me giving back to the community. Latin rock music was created here in the Mission district, so it’s about me keeping that alive.”

Is LA losing its cool?

2019-06-20T16:20:00-04:00

It’s because I love my Los Angeles full of texture and a little untamed that I worry in these days of rapid displacement and rampant development. One of the first things I noticed as the rents in my Hollywood neighborhood went up was that the fluttering silk flags and drawings on torn cardboard and other random street art projects that often would appear overnight suddenly became more and more rare.

How does a city maintain its identity under the pressures of global brands and developers hungry for real estate? Though Los Angeles is a city known for destroying its recent past for the elusive present, there are only so many buildings and details this city can turn over before it's a different place entirely.

The Burger That Ate LA (discontinued, currently a Starbucks)

Looking at the Los Angeles of previous decades, one can see a metropolis full of quirks: consider, for instance, the now-demolished Brown Derby, the now-renovated House of Davids and the The Burger That Ate LA, a restaurant modeled after an enormous hamburger and a shrunken LA City Hall (regularly featured on the show Melrose Place), which has been aptly repurposed into a Starbucks.

Entrance to Nick Metropolis Collectibles, a vintage store on 1st and La Brea.

As these establishments are refurbished, relocated or altogether destroyed, an element of the city's eclecticism shifts from present reality to distant memory....

Is YIMBYism the proper antidote to NIMBYism? or should we throw these terms out altogether?

2017-05-11T19:06:00-04:00

Trauss's followers live by the neoliberal belief that deregulation and building more housing, even if it's only affordable to the richest of the rich, will trickle down and eventually make housing affordable for all. Her vision is Reagonomics "dressed up in a progressive sheep's costume," according to Becker. But Trauss's "fresh approach" to the dilemma of exploding housing costs has got conservative libertarians and lefty media outlets alike foaming at the mouth for more.

San Francisco, and the surrounding Bay Area, has long been the example around which issues of gentrification are discussed and cited. While it is far from being the only city to deal with an influx of wealth and the subsequent displacement of local residents, its role as the center of the tech boom has given the area one of brightest spotlights in regards to these questions. In a recent article put out by Truth-Out, the authors discuss the rise of a new (according to the authors) approach to solving housing crises—YIMBYism. YIMBYism stands for Yes-In-My-Backyard and is meant to designate a positive stance on development. It is an approach, as characterized by the authors, as being along the lines of trickle-down economics—the idea being that building more housing, even if it's only affordable to higher-income earners, will eventually make housing more affordable for all.

The article focuses on the conservatives running this movement claiming that they have become the "Alt-Right" of ...