Lot’s of great stuff over at planetizen:
Gays and gentrification: "Once a force of gentrification themselves, gays and lesbians are
increasingly being displaced from once queer urban enclaves that have
become popular and upscale." The full article is here.
Artist displacement: "From Soho to the Lower East Side to Williamsburg, the story has been more or less the same – artists move in, eventually helping to cause the neighborhood to go through sweeping changes, which results in hardship for local families and businesses — as well as for the artists
themselves." More here.
And a lively debate over Joel Kotkin: "Pay no mind to Kotkin…All he is attempting to do is to bash liberal, socially-conscious planners, many of whom congregate on the coasts. By contrast, he is attempting to shine a supposed bright light on all the "hard-working" Americans who have fled those coastal urban environs for cheaper real estate in places like California’s Inland Empire and San Joaquin Valley and the Rocky Mountain states. Keep in mind, those are the very same places which are experiencing the highest rates of bankruptcy and foreclosure given the current real estate decline. … Mr. Kotkin, in his defense of suburban sprawl and decentralization of urbanized areas, is serving as nothing more than an advocate of "white flight" to intensely conservative, and racially/ethnically homogeneous places such as Salt Lake City, Phoenix, and Reno. And Kotkin intentionally does not acknowledge the political and economic forces at play which have historically segregated our cities and led to suburban flight in the first place, such as redlining, low interest FHA
mortgages, and the interstate highway system…. His is not an intelligent critique of urban spatial patterns in the United States any more than it is a reflection of his own intensely partisan and conservative think tank political ideology. " See the rest here.
November 28th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
The gays and lesbians are the
“frontiersmen” providing the
initial wave of gentrification,
only to get knocked out by the
serious money once the trees
and the natives have been displaced (or at least enough of
them, there still being nine
African-American families owning houses in Georgetown since before the 1930s gentrification wave), unless one is in someplace like Castro Street, SF, which has become upscaled by wealthy gays themselves, shipping off the sleazier joints to South of Market.