The Look of Gentrification
&gt; The thing I can&#x27;t understand (maybe you could explain) - it seems to me these original inhabitants don&#x27;t have to lose their homes and if anything they are the winners of this change.<p>This is starting to move a little bit past my pay grade, I am not an economic expert on stuff like house valuation. But there are a couple of factors I would bring up:<p>- We want to keep renters in mind in this situation; a lot of the people impacted by gentrification don&#x27;t own their own homes. Rent control can be a mitigating factor here, but if you basically get stuck in the same apartment because you can&#x27;t afford to move anywhere else... it&#x27;s still not a great situation. Gentrification is something that affects owners to a degree (more on that below), but most of the time I see it talked about, renters are a big part of it.<p>- Access to local services can be a big deal, so original inhabitants might be able to sell for more but they are still going to be pressured into selling. I think SF is a really good example of this honestly. Yes, your house is worth more, and that&#x27;s great, but if your income isn&#x27;t enough to handle normal living, eventually you&#x27;ll sell and move move, and even if you&#x27;re individually better off, the community migration will still happen and you&#x27;ll still end up moving to a poorer neighborhood and leaving behind the opportunity that attracted people to your original neighborhood.<p>- The article brings up, a lot of gentrification happens before houses spike up in value or early on in the spike. So yes, a low-income inhabitant might recognize that gentrification is happening and try to stick it out to get the best deal, but particularly if they&#x27;re losing access to local services or getting priced out of normal cost-of-living, they&#x27;ll be tempted to sell early.<p>- All of that put together, gentrification also isn&#x27;t only about the small number of people who live in a community, it&#x27;s about the transformation of the community overall. Maybe some members of that community do manage to get ahead, but the people renting, the smaller families that are looking to move into larger housing as they grow, the people trying to come back to a hometown, they get left behind. I think that focusing on the small number of homeowners or longtime residents that manage to wait out the process and see benefit from it somewhat misses those stories.<p>- Also, always kind of important to bring up, we haven&#x27;t necessarily abandoned racism in home valuation, there are stories that often pop up about home valuations changing depending on the race of the person applying. This kind of stuff is naturally illegal, but it still happens, and we all know it doesn&#x27;t immediately fix a problem just to make it illegal :)<p>----<p>&gt; This is a socioeconomic issue not a racial one and trying to make it racial helps absolutely nothing.<p>This could also be a really large conversation, and again it isn&#x27;t necessarily one I&#x27;m qualified to have, but I think it&#x27;s really hard to disentangle socioeconomics from race, both because race impacts socioeconomic status and also because discrimination around socioeconomic status has historically often been used as a proxy for race.<p>I think it&#x27;s important to distinguish between them in the sense that socioeconomic issues do not only affect people based on race -- there are communities that are predominantly white that get hit with issues surrounding gentrification. But (again, potentially much larger conversation) part of the insidious nature of racism is that it can put processes into motion that become entirely self-sustaining, and it can kind of tangle separate issues together and complicate them and correlate them in ways that are hard to then separate after the fact.<p>It&#x27;s hard to have a conversation about socioeconomic issues without both acknowledging that:<p>- economics affects everyone regardless of race, gender, religion, or orientation, and that these systems are not dependent on any kind of racist intention and are not only restricted to affecting minority groups. But also,<p>- that America still has attitudes about what a &quot;good&quot; neighborhood is that play into racist stereotypes and that occasionally break out even into mainstream political discussions about housing policies, and that part of the history of racial oppression was the deliberate movement through mechanisms like redlining and housing laws of minority groups into a lower socioeconomic status.<p>I think back to some of the conversations that were being had around me about urbanization during the last few election cycles; it&#x27;s just really hard for me to think of them as purely economic in nature. But even if that wasn&#x27;t happening, it&#x27;s still hard for me to forget that there are a large number of socioeconomic trends and differences between communities that aren&#x27;t accidental -- they were historically very deliberate and purposeful. So for me to now say that they&#x27;re purely economic issues and that the history is irrelevant would require me to treat the issues as if they were equally or randomly distributed among the population, when I don&#x27;t personally think that they are.<p>Like if I find someone who&#x27;s been mugged, and they&#x27;re bleeding out, it&#x27;s not <i>wrong</i> to say that the bleeding is the real problem and that specifically the bleeding should be addressed, but it&#x27;s also very hard to ignore that (in this specific case) the mugging was the primary cause of that bleeding and talking about the mugging is somewhat relevant to the overall conversation.