Go Forth and Gentrify?

Yeah, it's a complex issue. I live on the front lines of it in Portland, OR. I am a white middle class college student and the whole time I've lived in Portland I've lived in traditionally black areas that are now being gentrified. There was an article analyzing the issue in a similar way recently in the Wilamette Week (our local free paper) that made me reflect on it. As a renter and a low-income person myself, I don't feel like I'm a gentrifier, but because I'm white and not a local, people may read me that way. I think that there are several levels to the problem, and there is a genuine problem with housing prices and rents becoming unaffordable. There is a neighborhood here (the subject of the WWeek article), the Boise-Eliot neighborhood, where a house may have cost $8000 in the eighties and now is $500,000. And I guess the neighborhood is safer than it used to be. I don't believe that racial/class segregation is a good thing, so I think in some ways these neighborhoods that are a mix of poor and rich and different ethnic groups are perhaps some of the most sociologically healthy in the country. At least they can be, if we all make an effort to be a community. The problem I see is when white homeowners and business owners come in with a "conqueror" mentality, like the neighborhood was the frontier before they created it. Reminds me of the old story about how America was this empty wilderness just waiting for the white man to come and "civilize" it (inconveniently, the Native Americans got in the way). I personally feel that if you feel you need to live behind a gate, you don't belong in the neighborhood. But Portland has a ridiculously low crime rate, so I might not apply that elsewhere. But whites need to be sensitive to their new-comer status and not act as if the possibly unfamiliar culture they are entering into is just an annoyance. Instead of expecting the neighbors to adjust to their values (a desire for privacy and quiet, perhaps?), they need to accomodate the values of the existing neighborhood (a more casual approach to noise? Saying "hi" to your new neighbors?) Especially that last part, because I've heard this a couple times now: White people don't say "hi" back when blacks say "hi" to them. Is it because we are generally stand-offish and wouldn't say hi to our white neighbors, either? Or is it worse than that? Either way, I think that saying "hi" is a bare-minimum standard of being in a community with other human beings.

The Atlanta westside neighborhood I moved into seventeen years ago, a neglected area between two interstate ramps, has now been discovered by returning suburbanites who got tired of their commutes. Now the "transients" -- as the new home-owners refer to anyone from renters to anyone dependent on public transportation -- are targets of NIMBY emails on the neighborhood association newsletter. I am increasingly engaged in website exchanges with my newer neighbors. (The most recent discussion has centered around removing all the bus-stops from homeowners' front lawns.) Change is inevitable in neighborhoods like this, but the message is clear: as the home prices go up and the latte cafes appear, new arrivals still do not want to interact with the intown, pedestrian population. They continue to use their cars to drive to the cute corner restaurant and re-create the traffic congestion they moved here to avoid. The inevitable victory of "car culture" in most gentrified neighborhoods destroys whatever charm -- or here in Berkeley Park, the urban walking scale -- they once had. Yes, my home has tripled in value, but I may face the prospect of walking a mile to the nearest bus stop (instead of the nearest corner) so my new neighbors don't have to see me on my way to work.

Euro-style gentrification has created a ring of poverty surrounding the rich people in many of the city centres. While no-one likes a low-income housing project in their inner-city neighbourhood, it's one of the few ways to keep the low-income workers near their jobs in an era of getrification.

Sounds great, especially as a retired PUBLIC school teacher--after 38 years--with experience in very racially/culturally mixed [with very little violence], as well as schools where the parents were very educationally-minded--not terribly affluent, but very intereted in education for their and all children. There is no substitute for living REAL life in a public school. Too many people run away, unlike Ms. Gnass. Our entire country was supposed to have been built on the idea of free educcation for EVERYONE, be he/she brilliant, disadvantaged, disabled, rich, poor. Unfortunately for the last 25 years, there has been a war declared on public education [ie. the middle class, that is the backbone of any POLITICALLY STABLE country]. Costa Rica, for example, thinks that it is a "3rd world country." However, their literacy rate puts ours to shame, as does their Universal Health Care!!

There will be alot of affordable housing in the next two years...alot.

You got your rich people, and you got everybody else. The wealthy, regardless of ethnic or regional stripe, have enough to move off and be separate from the rest of the herd, the 1%ers.
But, in recent times, 'rich' has come to mean 'not being buried in debt', not necessarily how big your house is, and chances are, the 'rich people' might not be all that, once you get past the painted outer layer.
We all play the money game, because we've got no choice in the matter. Only problem is, increasingly this country runs on red ink. How do we get 'back in black'? By refraining from spending. But, if everyone does that, then the economy can fold up like a cheap kite.
So we all belly up to the roulette table, for another round, badmouthing the Joneses, and trying to keep up.

Here we go again, may the larceny and the mud slinging begin...