The Benefits Of Gentrification

Gentrification is the process of turning a working class neighborhood into a middle or upper class neighborhood by renovating old buildings then selling them to more affluent buyers. This has been pushing minorities, mainly African Americans, out of their homes and into less fortunate neighborhoods that they can afford. This happens all over the country but has been more common in the last 16 years, as cities population percentages grow the percentage of minorities seem to decrease. Housing in cities have dramatically increased for some reason other than there not being enough room for everyone moving into cities or are they trying to push certain people out such as african americans?

Portland, Oregon, is known to be not only the hippest major city in America but the whitest. Although Portland has a reputation for being a place that is open and accepting of anything, it has also become one of the country's worst examples of Black displacement and gentrification. Portland officials say they value class and racial diversity and are making efforts to address the larger city crisis.

The world is always changing whether it is technology or medicine. Within these changes there are mixed views and controversy. This happens especially when the topic is about gentrification. According to the definition from Merriam-Webster, gentrification is “the process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the influx of middle class into deteriorating area that often displaces poorer residents”. Now the concept itself is like a mathematical equation economic increase plus a safer neighborhood equals a positive reputation. Still there are those who believe the idea of gentrification is bad for the community, causing family oriented shops to go out of business and a loss of culture within the city. There are cons to gentrification, but, one

Avid supporters of gentrification believe that it brings safety and increased revenue to the cities, making them more attractive to outsiders and bringing in more residents as a result. Unfortunately, gentrification does not have that desired effect on neighborhoods. According to Source C, a data review examined 114 examples of gentrification over a five year period, studying several signs of a city’s growth.

Gentrification is the term used for the process of renewal and rebuilding of an existing urban district, accompanied by the arrival of wealthier people, an increase in rents and property values, and the transformation of an urban district's character and culture. It is a term often used negatively because of it's suggested displacement of poorer communities by affluent outsiders. It is also seen by proponents as an urban planning strategy because it is meant to minimize the growth of urban slums and revitalize crime-ridden, poorer communities. This is not always the case when gentrification harms the low-income populations by exacerbating affordable housing problems, destroying long-standing social ties, and re-segregating the urban housing

Currently, policymakers are mostly concerned with the economic impacts a policy will have. While economic factors are important when evaluating and analyzing policies, there needs to be more of an emphasis on the social impacts policies have, especially when it comes to community development policies. Although it is not the only issue with currently popular community development policies, gentrification is one of the most problematic and enlightening conflicts of our time. The core issue with gentrification is it does not benefit the people who are most marginalized in the city. One can argue it improves neighborhoods by bringing business development, improving housing, and increasing median incomes, but these benefits do nothing to help the

Gentrification is considered a cleansing, since cities and districts that have a large quantity of crime, go through many changes. Gentrification is also considered to decrease crime rate, provided that old buildings or shops are replaced with new stores and apartments for more wealthy people. However this change could also make things worse. Families are forced out of their homes with no place to go, and now that everything is overpriced. They become a another statistic to the homeless population. For example, Colin Blaney was a career criminal living in Central Salford, who better to ask about gentrification than one of the criminals themselves? Colin explained how when gentrification kicked in the crime rate wasn’t all that improved, but

Human Geographer David Ley defines Gentrification as “the transition of inner-city neighborhoods from a status of relative property and limited property investment to a state of commodification and reinvestment.” (Ley Artists 1) In the past 50 years gentrification has swept over cities across the globe and has completely reshaped the way people think about why people live in certain neighborhoods. British sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification in 1964 to describe what was happening in the London borough of Islington, where Indian immigrants were being forced out in favor of creative young professionals. (Thomson). The term comes from the old english word gentry, which generally means wellborn well-bred and upper class people. For the most part of the last five decades gentrification has made large cities and downtown urban areas safer, more desirable for commercialization, more affluent, greener and more eco-friendly and has played a role in the vast change of demographics of many neighborhoods. This ‘urban renewal’ has been subject to many political debates, academic studies and research to figure out its positive and negative impacts on the socioeconomic nature of the cities it takes place in. Here on the eastern seaboard of the US we see gentrification in every city from Center City Philadelphia, to Chelsea, to Columbia Heights in DC. However this movement to gentrify is not reserved for the

Many neighborhoods in America are composed of people predominately of the same social class and race. When there is an increase of middle-class or wealthier people moving into deteriorating areas, it often creates a process of renewal and rebuilding that displaces the poorer residents. This is called gentrification. When someone moves into a house and increases the curbside appeal it makes the neighborhood more desirable. In turn, it raises the overall cost of real estate within the community, which author Daniel Hertz argues it results in “people can't move to the neighborhoods to which they'd like to move, and are stuck in places with worse schools, more crime, and inferior access to jobs and amenities like grocery stores”. Hertz’s insight on gentrification is that people who are more financially secure benefits from the improvement and raised value of a neighborhood while those who are struggling are increasingly limited in the options they have to move into safer and connected neighborhoods.

In this unit, we learned about gentrification and its effects on contemporary urban areas. Gentrification is “the buying and renovation of houses and stores in deteriorated urban neighborhoods by upper- or middle income families or individuals, raising property values but often displacing low-income families and small businesses,” (dictionary.com, n.d.). People who argues for gentrification reasoned that it will help the poor neighborhoods grow financially, allows for people of different racial, ethnic, and class background to come together to intermingle. However, the dark reality of gentrification is that it destroys the neighborhood, creates further division between people, and especially, they push to marginalize the working- and

lived in communal flats, and were confused by the rich offering them a raw deal.

Stigmas have been an essential tool to navigate the complexities of the cultural world. Often, stigmas are associated with “an attribute that is deeply discrediting” towards a group of people, but stigmas are not exclusively attributed to social groups (Goffman 13). Certain words hold stigmas that warp our understanding of that word. The negative stigma associated with the word ‘gentrification’ has created many misunderstandings of what gentrificationㅡand its natureㅡis. Gentrification is the process of restoring and reconstructing deteriorating communities and can be paired with the movement of wealthy individuals from the surrounding community to the gentrified one. People attributed a stigma with gentrification because many people see gentrification as a one-sided topic. Availability biases portray gentrification as something communities should avoid. However, gentrification is a multifaceted and a controversial topic with positive, negative, neutral, and even unknown consequences. When looking beyond the stigmas associated with gentrification, there are some positive consequences that society often overlooks. Negative consequences often overshadow the positive consequences, which perpetuate the notion that gentrification is bad and is a one-sided issue. In reality, gentrification is misunderstood; gentrification is neither good nor bad because there are too many contrasting factors and consequences that can arise from gentrification. Instead of labelling gentrification as

One day I walking through downtown Santa Ana with my little sister, we didn't really have anywhere to go so I decided to take her to the carousell. It was the centerpiece of Fiesta Marketplace it was somewhere I would always go as a kid with my grandma and cousins it was somewhere I always looked forward going to every single Saturday. But as I was walking to the spot where it has always been, it wasn’t there. I made sure I was at the location, I tried walking a little more too see if they maybe just moved it but it was nowhere to be found. After I had given up looking for it I asked a little old woman with a fruit stand to see if she knew anything about the carousel. She finally told me that they had torn it down and Fiesta Market Place was being renovated.I gave her a puzzled look, the carousel was always full of people so I didn’t understand why they would want to tear it down. As I continued to look around I saw a paper with a list of businesses that were yet to come, new businesses would include a piercing shop, a retro barber and a coffee roasting shop. So the old downtown Santa Ana was being torn down and I didn’t really understand why.

Gentrification Is a problem in possibly the oddest geographical problem of our modern day society. Cities throughout history have been known to be poorer and more lower class areas. In order to cope with this life style they had created a rich history and culture unique to the city. This culture then had attracted younger more wealthy people and as this trend continued, minorities and those lower on the socio economic scale had been pushed out to make more room for these richer consumers. Thus leading to our problem, the gentrification of cities. Author, Thomas B. Edsall, takes a deeper look into this problem with his article “The Gentrification Effect”.

The term gentrification comes from the idea of the gentry, or can be used to describe people that can afford nice and luxuries properties. However the result of gentrification often displaces previous tenants and home owners. For example, in urban areas the same household can be displaced repeatedly as tenant and home owners move to less expensive neighbourhoods that they can afford because of gentrification.