It’s time to retire the term gentrification altogether. Fourteen years ago, Maureen Kennedy and Paul Leonard of the Brookings Institution wrote that gentrification “is a politically loaded concept that generally has not been useful in resolving growth and community change debates because its meaning is unclear.” That’s even truer today. Some U.S. cities do have serious affordability problems, but they’re not the problems critics of gentrification think they are. — slate.com
What's your take on John Buntin's Slate piece?
7 Comments
Bullshit.
Why? Buntin spells it out in his own article. I'm surprised he even mentioned this:
Whereas in 1970, 1,100 census tracts within 10 miles of central business districts had poverty rates of 30 percent or higher, by 2010, the number of poor census tracts had jumped to 3,100. In other words, the number of high-poverty areas close to central business districts had nearly tripled. To make matters worse, the number of people living in extreme poverty in those areas had doubled. The residents of these neighborhoods are disproportionately black.
On the other hand the continuing decline of society could be a byproduct of the same economics that create gentrification rather than the direct result of gentrification itself.
big time bullshit.
what the author fails to mention is what I call the Panem paradigm...where the urban core is becoming like the wealthy capital surrounded by dispersed suburban poverty. This is the main problem...of course overall gentrification is rare because overall urban cores only comprise a realativly small percentage of residential areas. hipsters are not moving into poor suburban areas like oakland or poor rural areas they are taking over the cores and creating homogenous urban centers. the city should imo serve as a melting pot. the troubling thing is that suburban poverty is much more difficult to deal with because of the lack of resources, transit, etc.
miles, what do you think the collapse of civilization will look like?
there are nuts here who buy guns because they think they will be in a grocery store trying to get a can of beans and in some scenario shooting other people will be involved in the competition for that can of beans. there are other people who have bug-out bags because they believe there will be some sort of scenario where not being in your house is better than being in your house. i'm pretty sure those are not realistic expectations, though i do kind of think learning to hunt might someday be a more cost effective means of getting meat compared to going to the grocery store.
i'm pretty sure a couple civilizations have essentially collapsed in my lifetime. a few more if you go back to the start of the 20th century. people lived through the collapse of their civilizations, but i suppose somewhere there is a line between where a civilization is considered collapsed or not, or perhaps we have to consider the whole species collapsing rather than just certain areas.
apologies for go off-topic
Words that describe multiple complex phenomena are usually broken down every which way.
I usually argue that the words themselves are usually the problem...brutalism, modernism, feminism mean different things to different people.
jla-x actually, hipsters ARE moving to Oakland...
curt, just more of the same at an ever accelerating pace. What's going on at the Davos summit is a demonstration of the level of greed, idiocy and utter incompetence we have ruling the planet.
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