Some of my upper-middle-class to upper-class YIMBY friends have said that they don’t understand at all why anyone would be upset by gentrification. This is an analogy I use which I think helps them understand.
—
Imagine your neighborhood is an actually functional community. You know your neighbors; you say “hi” to people when they walk down the street; you know people who will watch your cat when you’re on vacation, or tell you about jobs they’ve heard that you’d be perfect for, or play with your kid when you’ve had a really hard day and you need a break, or help you move, or give you casseroles when someone you love has died. (For some people, this is going to be a really difficult part of the thought experiment; you might want to imagine living near all your closest Internet friends.)
Now imagine that a bunch of billionaires have decided to move into your community.
It’s not all bad at first. Billionaires have a lot of political power, so they can advocate for incredibly nice roads and public parks. The billionaires create a lot of jobs: they’re willing to pay very well for nannies and chefs.
But businesses that cater to people like you close. The taco places and Targets are replaced with yacht clubs and restaurants that serve thousand-dollar gold-plated steak. The grocery stores are full of food you’ve never heard of and can’t afford anyway, and you have a hard time buying basic staples like rice and beans.
Billionaires don’t really like having people of lower social classes loitering around, and they have much more power with the police than you do. If you throw a party that’s a bit noisy, or spend some time talking outside of a billionaire’s house, you may find yourself talked to by a police officer who tells you to stop bothering the billionaires.
Landlords realize they can sell the land to billionaires and make way more money than they can get catering to the middle-class. Some of your friends have their rent hiked up to the point that it’s unaffordable. Others of your friends are evicted, often in dubiously legal ways. Still others are unable to find a new place in the same neighborhood if they want to move because their family has grown or shrunk.
If you move away, you no longer live near your friends. It’s more-or-less impossible to coordinate dozens of people to move to the same place, so you and your friends wind up scattered to a dozen different neighborhoods. It’s not just the suckiness of living in a bunch of different neighborhoods: friendship has actual material benefits. Now you have to pay pet sitters, move by yourself, and skip Date Night when you can’t afford a sitter, and you don’t get to hear about that job that’s perfect for you.
Your new place is also far away both from your old job and all those new jobs the billionaires have created. Either you commute for an hour each way, or you stay home where there are few jobs at all.
Maybe you stay. You might have bought a house and you don’t want to give up the equity. But you can’t afford anything in any of the stores around you. All your friends are gone. You can try to befriend the billionaires, but they look at you with pity when you say you can’t afford the thousand-dollar restaurant meal and you can’t understand all their hilarious jokes about their stockbrokers. In fact, some of them notice that you’re not a billionaire and flinch away from you in the street or clutch their wallets like you’re going to steal them. Just because you’re not a billionaire doesn’t mean you’re a thief!
This isn’t a perfect analogy– as one of many flaws, I’ll point out that upper-middle-class and upper-class people can afford to, say, replace friends babysitting with nannies and daycare, which poor people often can’t afford to do– but I hope it helps people understand why many poor people would consider gentrification a harm.
Thing of Things 
Reblogged this on Left Conservative.
LikeLike
I don’t think the problem is lack of understanding of how the economics and transitions work, but rather how to stop it or whether it should be stopped.
I mean, yeah, it sounds bad, but shit happens. Communities change, people have to move, etc., whether it’s because of gentrification, jobs drying up, a smelly factory opening up nearby, flooding, etc. And yes, being forced to move and having a community broken up is a negative cost, but artificially preventing that from happening ALSO comes at a cost, which brings me to the other issue.
I have yet to see anyone propose a feasible way of preventing gentrification, especially when the majority of people in the area are renters, and thus have far less legal right to stay? Restricting the rate of rent increase or requiring that landlords renew people will result in legal quagmires, landlords using unethical methods to get people to move, landlords selling to slumlords, outright arson, etc. Restricting who can move into an area is even worse, both legally and ethically. Property tax law might nibble at the edges of the problem, but not enough to really change it.
Finally, I’ve gotta say, this sounds a bit too 1950’s idyllic to be real. I’ve certainly never encountered a neighborhood like that. How much is “Real community” versus just “being used to things this way and afraid of change”?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think it may be a little bit like the more general issue of externalities.
Someone who actually owns their house in a gentrified neighborhood at least gains some benefit from the gentrification in the form of property price rise.
Renters only bear costs/downsides.
Gentrification is, on net, almost certainly a good thing but you’ve got a whole group of people who are negatively affected who get nothing out of the deal.
Similar to a smelly factory: it may benefit the town as a whole, it may be on net a great thing for people nearby in general… but if you’re the unlucky sod next door who doesn’t work in the same industry you only get costs as your home suddenly becomes unsalable.
Really notable externalities that continue unchecked tend to be the kind that our legal and financial systems don’t deal with or recognise. You can’t prove that the CO2 from that particular factory or power plant was why your crops failed this year because there’s thousands of other plants and you can’t sue them all for a tiny fraction each… so you have no way to make yourself whole even if you were wronged.
With gentrification there’s not even any way to recognize that you’ve had a cost inflicted on you. Loss of community isn’t the kind of thing you can go to court with and we have no particular principle of people having any right to protection from market disruptions caused by the fickle fashion’s of people with more resources and power.
I mean there is an externality there. But they’re mostly of a type which our systems aren’t set up to account or compensate for.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The described community is actually not far from my experience of the Berkeley rationalist community!
You’re right that this post is mostly directed at the people who don’t know why anyone would care about gentrification at all; there’s a totally consistent position of “gentrification is a harm, but all attempts to prevent gentrification are worse harms”. IMO, YIMBYism is actually our best hope of reducing the harm from gentrification in the Bay Area. If there’s lots of techie housing in places techies want to live, they’re far less likely to invade other neighborhoods and displace the residents. (Of course, in this proposal, current residents of the Mission are just screwed, but they’re pretty much screwed regardless.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
The real estate market in the Bay Area is sane. NYC isn’t that much cheaper but the local NIMBYs are much politically weaker. Since the entire city and the suburban countries are already near entirely built up without that much protected green space beyond city parks, you really can’t generate the level of pseudo-hippie NIMBYism that exists in the Bay Area. My brother and his girlfriend were attending an event at winery in the East Bay and so an anti-development protest. People might have grumbled about gentrification and building in New York but you didn’t have older white wealthy property owners pretending to be radical anti-development hippies trying to prevent it. You didn’t have ten year law suits that occurred every time somebody tried to build a condo.
LikeLike
It is maybe a bit idyllic, since real communities have their downsides, and especially lower-income communities. But community connections are still the only way a lot of people can access things like childcare, employment, any kind of social life, and so on. Stripping that away from people destroys lives. It is a really reasonable thing for people to be afraid of.
Besides that, I can *kind* of see where you’re coming from, when you talk about the lack of ways to “feasibly” fight gentrification. I honestly don’t think you can really prevent it or even seriously curb it as long as big landlords exist. But I don’t think this is just the natural state of affairs, or that opposing gentrification is “artificial” and thus wrong, which seems to be what you’re implying. IME, a lot of gentrification is itself artificial – it happens because the city gives a tax break to a rich corporation, or designs property taxes in a way that burden poorer owners, or in a push for “urban renewal.” And even if gentrification itself is unavoidable, why can’t we then try to mitigate its negative effects?
LikeLiked by 2 people
@Cerastes
In my country, a lot of rentals are social housing rented out by a semi-governmental landlord, who doesn’t have the same incentives as commercial renters.
As for the tight communities that only existed in the 50’s, Ozy does seem to describe a rather extreme variant, but less extreme versions of that exist and they can be destroyed.
LikeLike
These good communities came into existence at least once, probably several times. While that identical community may not exist again, good communities can exist where they currently do not.
LikeLike
Sure, but bad communities exist too and the median community is probably mediocre. When a good community is broken up, one can assume that regression to the mean is the most likely outcome.
I would also argue that community-building tends to take time, so quality of the community is probably inversely correlated with age. So the more often communities get broken up, the worse they are probably going to be.
LikeLike
I originally heard the comparison reversed, comparing taking over of social/cultural groups to gentrification… but if you’re trying to get the idea of gentrification across to people who don’t really experience it at all but who have seen social groups taken over….
Lets say you have a social group originally defined by being made up mainly of the people who nobody else wants, the geeks, freaks and weird people without much social capital.
Lets say you develop some shared hobbies, interests etc, games, traditions, shared spaces etc.
But meanwhile that (cultural) real estate you’re sitting on starts to become valuable. The cool kids notice that video games are fun. Big companies notice that your subculture has gradually filtered for some pretty good IP materials that have been refined until they have good general appeal.
But the normies still don’t really want to be around you. They don’t like the social norms you’ve developed, they want to keep their own.
So pretty soon they’re moving in and pushing the freaks out. And there’s more of them, they have more social capital and you and your friends were strange people anyway so most people side with the rich/popular/pretty people.
And even if you do manage to coordinate and manage to cluster around the same new things with your old crowd… it’ll just happen again once you’ve settled on something new.
Lather rinse repeat.
LikeLiked by 2 people
From a period roughly dating between the Truman administration and the Clinton administration, cities were where the misfits and people on the margins of American society lived. The very wealthy also stayed in the cities. Most of what we could refer to as normal, middle-class Americans lived in the suburbs. Cities provided not so safe but cheap living accommodations for many people during this time.
Sometime in the early aughts this started to change. People of my generation, late Gen Xers and early millennials, started to get more interested in urban living. To some extent this started in a lesser degree during the time Baby Boomers became adults because they were first wave gentrifiers but it really took off during the early aughts. Many of the non-hypocritical NIMBYs are the former misfits or people on the margins.
LikeLike
I would be interested in a post where someone tries to propose a mechanism to increase an area’s living quality/average income, without displacing the existing residents. That is, to make the residents living there more wealthy while also making the housing quality increase, etc.
LikeLike
Progressive income tax.
People who save, buy a house and pay it off are insulated from increasing property values. Decreasing incomes will not affect their ability to own their home (though if their incomes were eliminated altogether it would obviously affect their ability to feed themselves).
Of course, there would be fits thrown by people complaining that oldies were taking up valuable real estate that could be put to more “productive” use (by themselves, ‘natch)
LikeLike
Some more gentrification points:
1) It increases property values – if you rent, that means it is going to increase rents over time. If you own and want to stay, it means you pay more taxes for the same house.
2) There’s some understandable jealousy. The owners of the nicest house in our neighborhood periodically email everyone to remind us that our kids shouldn’t sled on their property both for liability reasons and because their kids want to sled on the fresh snow, etc., which is totally reasonable but understandably does not make them many friends no matter how they try to put it.
Voluntary economic changes usually (a) are net beneficial relative to the alternatives; and (b) still leave some people worse off in ways that are hard to compensate for.
LikeLike
Unfortunately not in California because of prop 13.
LikeLike
1) It increases property values – if you rent, that means it is going to increase rents over time. If you own and want to stay, it means you pay more taxes for the same house.
Which is why property taxes are evil. If they were eliminated, you could stay in your house indefinitely, regardless of what development was happening around you. With property taxes, the government is always forcing you into an “up or out” situation.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Philosophically I get your point…. but in terms of practicality making it cost *something* to do nothing with a limited resource makes complete sense and in part helps reduce people using scarce housing as nothing but a store of value.
it serves a similar purpose to inflation.
If there’s no cost to (figuratively) stuffing something under the mattress then, if it’s deflationary, the incentives can easily line up such that it’s best to sit upon it rather than let it be used in any useful way which is all kinds of bad for the economy.
LikeLike
All resources are scarce. With housing there is still some financial burden involved in upkeep, utilities etc that will need to be met to keep the property — and those will be affected by inflation.
As to whether or not is being used in a “useful” way… I’d say letting someone be able to afford living in their home even though they are retired and their neighborhood has gentrified is an extremely good use. That is if I thought that third parties had any business deciding how someone else’s property is used by them.
LikeLiked by 1 person
All resources are scarce but some matter more than others.
If people use some random rare metal as a store of value and inflate the price as a result it’s not a huge deal unless it’s got some ultra important use.
If people start using, say, water as a store of value in a country where people are dying of thirst, massively increasing the price while they park tankers of the stuff where nobody can use it… that’s a problem.
Most people aren’t libertarians, the majority have the power to tell your philosophy to go suck eggs and in practice if you’re doing something that’s harmful to the society around you then it doesn’t matter if that thing is allowed within a libertarian framework.
Land is exceptionally important to human welfare and is so scarce that in many places even a tiny parcel of it is worth the equivalent of many years of skilled labor.
Since it’s naturally deflationary due to utterly limited supply people start using it as a store of value. Keeping a utility line to an empty house is exceptionally cheap, so much so that it’s meaningless.
If you want to protect elderly people, the fraction of the population with the highest average wealth, from property taxes then just give them an exemption or reduction on property taxes on their primary residence. Problem solved.
LikeLike
Most people aren’t libertarians, the majority have the power to tell your philosophy to go suck eggs and in practice if you’re doing something that’s harmful to the society around you then it doesn’t matter if that thing is allowed within a libertarian framework.
And the minority have the power to tell you… anything they want as long as they are sufficiently better armed, so what’s you point outside of “might makes right?”
Saying something is “harmful to society” has the same truth value as saying something is “repugnant to God.” And your “practical” arguments just aren’t real. Beyond the fact that an unoccupied residence begins decaying immediately to the point where it will be uninhabitable in just a few years (depending on the local climate) the idea that people would use empty houses as a store of value, but not rent them as an income stream is just not borne out (caveat: maybe it is happening outside of the US and Canada, idk).
While exempting a primary residence might help shield owners from gentrification, it does nothing to help renters. There may actually be greedy mustachio-twirling landlords out there who will raise their rents every chance they get, but gentrification + property taxes means that all landlords will be forced to raise them, regardless of greed. Of course, then you could exempt all residential property, but that means the corner grocery gets priced out of the neighborhood. So you can exempt residential and commercial… but isn’t it more honest to just use taxes as a punitive device at this point?
LikeLiked by 1 person
“And the minority have the power to tell you… anything they want as long as they are sufficiently better armed”
Unfortunately they’re also not better armed. So that falls flat as well.
With a quick check for cali, doubling the price of a 200,000 property would add $132 per month… but there’s a 2 percent cap per year so the actual increase in property taxes due is $2.66 per month.
Oh and they didn’t need to exempt everyone, there was no need to destroy the entire tax system as part of some kind of reducto-ad-absurdum exercise.
It’s mildly unfair to new buyers vs old people who’ve held a property for a long time but still fairer than your alternative.
LikeLike
still fairer than your alternative.
I imagine your definition of “fairer” is non-generalizable.
LikeLike
Excellent analogy. I guess the only problem is that it’s not even really an analogy: the billionaires moving in is the climax stage of gentrification, currently happening in Manhattan while the conventional version happens out in Brooklyn. I’m a little concerned for your friends who are so locked into their own perspective that they would only be able to understand gentrification when the exact version that might effect them is presented, rather than the slightly different version going on around them.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah, I thought that was odd too. That’s like perspective taking 101. ‘Don’t understand how gentrification might suck? Imagine how it would feel if it happened to you!’
LikeLiked by 2 people
There’s cultural issues.
Something that looks like horror to one person looks more like “ya, so?” to someone else.
I’ll give a more concrete example. Economic migration.
I grew up basically with the assumption that when I was an adult I would have to move somewhere else in the world to find a decent job. It wasn’t that my parents sat down and had a big tearful “you’re gonna have to move around the world!” thing, no, it was just the reality of everyone around me. Every sibling had had to move abroad, most of my aunts and uncles, my parents ended up far from any of their families.
It’s just normal. You expect it. It’s not horror. It’s rational responses to economic reality.
And it’s not one family, it’s most families in most towns where I grew up. If there’s no work you move to somewhere where there is work. Simple. Obvious. Normal.
It’s not trauma because it’s what you always expected and what everyone else had to do.
But that’s a cultural view.
For contrast some of my friends grew up in a Spanish village where very few people move away and mostly if they do they mostly move back when they start a family.
They grew up with a massive extended family all within a few minutes walk of their home. The normal for them is families staying together and the friends you had when you were 8 still being part of your circle of friends when you’re 48 and mostly still living in the same place.
During the economic crash a few years ago they were horrified at the idea that a large fraction of the young people from their home town would have to move abroad to find work when youth unemployment went skyward. It was exceptional. Breaking up families! Breaking up communities! People who had expected to always be able to stay close to their home now couldn’t! Friends ending up on different sides of the globe!
OH NO!
If you grew up in the former culture then the latter simply sounds whiny. Like, “no shit, you’ll have to do what everyone has to do. You’ll have to do what I did, my parents did, my friends did and expected to have to do our whole lives. Poor you”
Most people who are pro-gentrification have had to live a mobile life anyway. They’re watching people whine about losing things that were never even on the table for them.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Is there anyone talking about efforts to price in the economic costs of gentrification (ie the friction created by something as disruptive as a move, especially one that cannot be easily planned for)? For example, have there been efforts to add some sort of severance term to leases, or to do a sort of pseudo-rent-control where the renter has a rent controlled contract that the landlord can buy out of?
Obviously there are still issues with power imbalances, and such a system could probably still be cheated, but it naively seems to me that the cheating would at least have to be more blatant than it is now.
LikeLike
Pingback: Rational Feed – deluks917
Part of the resentment is the well-meaning outsiders treating the locals as quaint native colour. The locals aren’t there to put on displays of “Hello nice visitor, observe us interacting in our native habitat with our colourful traditions”, they live there and do these things as part of their everyday lives. It annoys me to read people gushing about immigration is great because they can walk down the street and there are fifteen different ethnic restaurants: yeah, great, but people don’t emigrate so they can provide a backdrop of multicultural experience for your benefit, all conveniently located in walking distance of your doorstep, mister!
LikeLike
Thanks so much for the post!
My family’s neighborhood is in the process of being gentrified. There’s currently only one place left in the neighborhood that sells ja choy and it’s now 5 blocks away (my mother-in-law is 68 and has never driven a car in her life). All my middle class friends are like, “The solution is the folks moving in should start buying ja choy, create more demand for it. Also what’s ja choy? Oh, wait. Never mind.”
LikeLiked by 1 person