![]() ![]() Without the building owners following through, i.e. ![]() Baked into these agreements often is the notion that tenants and apartment buyers will soon be paying much more than they do now. Bankers and landlords speculate on low-cost neighborhoods with the assumption that they’re going to be able to raise the rent and in order to make that work, they then have to," she says.īanks make loans to developers, and investors fund the purchase of buildings, with the agreement that the loans will be repaid at certain rates, or that they'll get a certain return on investment. "When capital flows into a neighborhood, people are displaced. Department of State/Wikimedia The role of public policy and private investmentĬelia Weaver, research director at the activist group New York Communities for Change, says gentrification has roots in public policy. A combination of whites-only home ownership support programs and highway building propelled white flight and the suburbanization of the U.S. ![]() Looking west along the Grand Central Parkway from Kew Gardens in 1946. I think both and neither are true-it’s all part of the story.” Moses Gates, director of community planning and design at the Regional Plan Association, says that when it comes to gentrification, “The general argument that you run into is over whether city policies drive demand through upzoning," that is, allowing the construction of taller buildings, "or if they are reacting to demand and, without new development, the situation would be worse. In a 2015 study on gentrification and displacement, UCLA and Berkeley researchers write that there are three factors driving neighborhood change: "movement of people, public policies and investments, and flows of private capital." They continue, "These influences are by no means mutually exclusive-in fact they are very much mutually dependent." The roots of the phenomenon reach way back through history and public policy, Moss and other close observers of New York’s transformation say, and the transplants who arrive in a working-class neighborhood selling $15 cocktails are just one step in a lengthy process. No doubt Brennan's approach was tone deaf, but rather than being a sower of gentrification, she is more like a symptom of it. At an ensuing protest of the bar, a man was photographed carrying a sign that read, "THIS IS WHAT GENTRIFICATION LOOKS LIKE!" Its owner, Becca Brennan, hawked 40-ounce bottles of rose and promoted the business's “bullet hole-ridden wall” as a funny reminder of the neighborhood's violent recent history. Take the recent controversy over a "boozy sandwich shop" opened recently by a Canadian transplant in Crown Heights. Sometimes the blame falls on individuals, and not even developers-we're talking about the hipsters, the yuppies, the "creatives," arriving in neighborhoods with no awareness of local history or concern for how their arrival might be linked to people being priced out. The changes are easy to see, but it’s not always obvious where they originated. Longtime New Yorkers have seen innumerable neighbors displaced and independent businesses shuttered, and watched as the ranks of the city's homeless swelled to over 60,000. Jeremiah Moss writes in his new book Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul that when he first arrived in New York City in 1993, the city was "at the beginning of its end." Moss attributes what he sees as New York’s untimely death to hyper-gentrification, the same "unstoppable virus" besieging other cities, from San Francisco to Shanghai. ![]()
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