How gentrification really changes a neighborhood
So back in the day, &quot;Anna&quot; and a bunch of black people moved in and &#x27;displaced&#x27; locals: <i>“Due to the circumstances of the section going colored, we have sold our house. The school is surrounded.” One anonymous landlord was perhaps the most blunt: “We own about five houses in that section, and we wish to sell all of them, if even one negro moves in.” Given these attitudes, it’s not surprising that some 40,000 homes, in Kirkwood and beyond, were sold by whites to blacks—for as little as $10,000—in just a few months in 1961, as Newsweek’s Atlanta bureau reported later that decade.</i><p>I wonder if people like Anna moving in also felt the same guilt that the author of this piece does?<p><i>Still, it’s hard not to feel like an interloper after you’ve moved into a historically black (well, after it was historically white) neighborhood...The guilt intensifies when you realize that your [house] belonged to the family next door for longer than you’ve been alive.</i><p>I&#x27;m curious if these feelings of guilt are common when moving into a demographically different neighborhood? Maybe they are just a convenient way for (culturally, if not financially) upper class whites to signal virtue to each other?<p>Would the author feel less guilt if he instead stuck to a lily-white enclave full of &quot;blonde wi[ves] and ...Nordic-looking cherubs&quot;? What must a mixed race couple do to avoid feeling guilt, given that at least one of them is probably displacing a demographically different person?<p>(Yes, I&#x27;m obviously mocking the author of this silly article a bit.)