People can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent.
"fourfteen percent of all people know that."
If anyone has read this USA Today article on gentrification from 6 weeks ago and cares to comment -- particularly if you've read the scholarly article in Urban Affairs Review -- please do so. Basically, Lawrence Freeman, a Columbia urban planning professor, claims people aren't displaced any more by gentrification than there is normal turnover in a poor neighborhood.
It reads like bull to me. Freeman acknowledges "succession," where the rich move in after the the poor move out, but doesn't acknowledge that the normal inflow of poor is blocked by rising home values. That's gentrification, too. Why such a narrow interpretation of the word could catch on -- or would be allowed to stand -- is beyond me. I've got to check the UAR article tomorrow.
If anyone has read this USA Today article on gentrification from 6 weeks ago and cares to comment -- particularly if you've read the scholarly article in Urban Affairs Review -- please do so. Basically, Lawrence Freeman, a Columbia urban planning professor, claims people aren't displaced any more by gentrification than there is normal turnover in a poor neighborhood.
It reads like bull to me. Freeman acknowledges "succession," where the rich move in after the the poor move out, but doesn't acknowledge that the normal inflow of poor is blocked by rising home values. That's gentrification, too. Why such a narrow interpretation of the word could catch on -- or would be allowed to stand -- is beyond me. I've got to check the UAR article tomorrow.
1 Comments:
This is not to say that gentrification is always bad, mind you. Certainly the phenomena of mixed income developments, blocks, and cities demonstrates wide benefits over poverty concentrated in dirt-cheap dwellings (see David Rusk's Cities without Suburbs). But the idea that there are no serious consequences for the existing community -- that the community continues on more or less as it would for anyone who wants to keep living there -- is ridiculous.
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