I have been following Michelle Tandler on Twitter. She tweeted a neat thread on “gentrification” I use quotes around “gentrification” not to sneer, or warn, but because up until recently I had no clue what gentrification was.
As I understand it, gentrification is when rich people buy slum properties, fix them up, increasing their value. Michelle writes about it and I have quoted her entire Twitter thread*.
In the past year six people have lectured me on the harms of gentrification. All of them were white progressives living in homes in historically more diverse neighborhoods, paid for by family money.
My response has been to ask if they feel they are contributing to the gentrification. A lot of squirms, followed by explanations of how they engage in the neighborhood. I'm not sure how engaging in the neighborhood makes it less gentrifying to buy expensive homes there.
I've asked how, if home ownership is supposed to be an avenue to wealth, black homeowners can grow their net worth if certain races don't enter their market. This has been a difficult question to answer. Usually followed by suggesting "government regulation".
Government regulation how so? One suggestion was to cap the property tax increases. Oh, like we have in California...? I thought that's what's making housing unaffordable for immigrants and leading to poor performance of schools...
My favorite example is the couple who got a *huge* payout to leave their rent controlled unit in New York, and then came to buy in Oakland. So the down payment was not only family money, but also out of state other rich people's taxpayer money.
Also found curious the couple who had just sold a family farm to Chinese investors. Cash spun into rental properties and a big home in an "up and coming" part of Oakland . They lectured me big time on gentrification. I just nodded along...
Once I was at dinner with three of these couples and the topic turned to, of course, gentrification. They spoke of how black people in Oakland were being forced to sell their homes. And consequently, it was impossible for them to build intergenerational wealth.
I asked a few questions: 1) How were they forced? 2) If they made $1M selling, isn't that contributing to building intergenerational wealth? The replies were quite something. To the first one they replied "well how can you turn down $1M?"
To question 2 they said, "well they sell the house for cash, then they use the money to pay off bills and buy things like a car, next thing you know it's gone. They don't know how to turn it into a rental property. Fix it up, etc."
I think I felt my blood almost boil. The logic was incoherent. On the one hand, they were talking about people being "forced" to sell their homes - as if the police are showing up with white buyers to drag them out. But then the following response - pure bigotry.
What was the implication? That black people couldn't figure out how to invest $1M effectively? Or run a rental? And the best way to address this would be to shame white people out of buying in traditionally black neighborhoods? Unless they are, of course, progressives?
I think this was a turning point. Did I swallow "a red pill" in this moment? No. But did everything all of a sudden look different? Yes. After that dinner, I couldn't unsee it. The soft bigotry of low expectations. It's real.
There are a lot of tradeoffs in real estate. You can't have minority homeowners profit off their investments, but also keep out new people. You can't improve a troubled neighborhood, while also keeping everything the same. We expect the government to do the impossible.
Here in SF we have a petri dish for seeing what happens when government severely regulates housing. We have a progressive-majority board of supervisors that is turning down building after building b/c they don't offer enough affordable housing. Almost nothing gets built...
When our Mayor was speaking at her inauguration she said that San Francisco should be a place where everybody can live. Everybody? How so? I have heard these words repeated again and again. It frustrates me b/c it's impossible.
For as progressive as SF is - we may be the most regressive in terms of building to accommodate newcomers. We talk ad nauseam about gentrification and how housing is a human right. And then we fight the homeowners who want to turn their homes into duplexes.
A lot of progressives like to say that Republicans talk a big game and don't actually do anything to help others. This letter from Senator Warren yesterday was pretty scathing.
(As a side note - this might be a nice time to remind everybody that Republicans both give more to charity than Democrats and give more blood). But I'd like to use the Senator Warren wording and ask wealthy coastal progressives a question:
If you believe housing is a human right... and you believe that gentrification is problematic... Are you going to do something - anything - to improve the lives of aspiring homeowners tomorrow? (end)
The problem appears to be that when these neighborhoods are improved, businesses move in, the quality of life improves, and the poor people who used to be able to afford to live there can no longer do so.
The left also complains about “white flight” which as I understand it is the exact opposite problem and is also bad. This is when those who can afford to move out, take their tax dollars with them and move out of the slums to a nicer area, usually in the suburbs with better schools, higher property values and better neighborhoods. This causes the slums they moved out of to even further decline.
The Biden administration has a great idea. Force low income housing to be built in the suburbs. If you try and escape the squalor, we’ll simply bring the squalor to you!
But I have “performed” “white flight”. I’m white, and when our neighborhood started to go to shit, and it was time for the kids to leave private school, we moved to the suburbs into a really nice neighborhood with trees and grass and a stellar school system. The house we left was turned into a rental that started out with 7 immigrants living there with 2 bedrooms and one bath.
I think what they’re trying to do is give the poor the benefit of nice neighborhoods with nice neighbors who simply don’t want to live there.
Here’s an idea. Crack down on the crime. Enforce quality of life ordinances and see what happens.
__ * So you can go to Twitter and make sure that I didn’t leave anything out.
