[jon boy]

there is whole bunch of talk in this city about gentrification and its effects. so do you think that its always going to happen or is it something that you would fight to stop?

[the ikara cult]

Originally Posted by jon boy

there is whole bunch of talk in this city about gentrification and its effects. so do you think that its always going to happen or is it something that you would fight to stop?

Id fight to stop 100%.

Its part of this whole thing that means the average achievers who are rich will end up right at the top and the ones who are poor will stay at the bottom.
The patriarchal society is back, in the creative sectors especially
This country is going to have a serious subculture in 10 years time

[jon boy]

i am with you there, there are so many areas here that are being turned into yuppie nightmares and pushing the poor to the edges.

[demonrail666]

The government's policy on public housing - mixed with the ongoing impact of Thatcher's 'right to buy' scheme - means gentrification in most UK cities looks increasingly inevitable. Council homes have traditionally blunted any drives to totally gentrify an area, given the fact that whereever you live, and however expensive the property, you're likely never that far away from a council estate - leading to most urban areas having a healthy (if not always completely comfortable) social mix. As council properties become more scarce it's inevitable that many major cities across England will become increasingly out of bounds to anyone unable (or unwilling) to pay the ridiculous prices set by the private sector.

The answer (obviously) is to buy a big fat gypsy caravan.

[hevusa]

fighting it is useless (and stupid).

[jonathan]

For me, I think the processes of gentrification are intimately linked with Capitalism and profit making. There is really no way to just outwardly stop gentrification within a capitalist context; that is to say that the processes of gentrification are systemic. If you are so passionate about ending gentrification that you want to stop the systemic profit making practices of capitalism, then I'd say more power to you. Ultimately though, gentrification has been happening in cities since the onset of industrial capitalism. It's a pretty easy way to make a quick profit: buy up a bunch of cheap property, redevelop it, and then sell it or rent it out. There is some really fantastic literature on this if you're interested in traveling down the rabbit hole a little further. I'd look into Neil Smith's articles on gentrification as well as some of David Harvey's stuff on rent. The name of the article escapes me at the moment, but there is an article by Smith that talks about the gentrification of New York and London that I really enjoyed. If you're curious, I can find the title for you.

[Glice]

A few points, local examples

- improving the prosperity of an area is by no means a bad thing. Anyone who remembers Bristol's St Pauls of 10-15 years ago would probably agree it's a better area now.

- Resisting 'gentrification' per se is by no means synonymous with resisting capitalism in toto. In fact, one of the things with capitalism is that it can make 'gentrification' into a generally positive things - such as the 'city farms' in Bedminster, the increased allotment spaces around St Werberghs and so on.

I have to say (before going on) that I think Bristol's 'gentrification' isn't always bad; London, particularly the areas I imagine Herr Rail's thinking of, it's generally a bit shit (especially with Cameron's voiding of most of London of working class people. The make-up of each particular urban/ outlying area is different. Liverpool's redevelopment in the last 10-15 years turned it from a place that was, frankly, shit into somewhere that's worth visiting.

So for me it very much depends on what form the gentrification takes. In south Bristol, the gentrified part of Bedminster became 'Southville' and a load of utter cunts moved in; gone were the fantastic cafes, decent cider pubs, a lot of the city fans - all replaced by pubs without decent beer, people or music; cafes started calling sandwiches paninis and conversations are always about fucking mortgages. Bad gentrification.

Somewhere like Werberghs (and bear in mind, I hate it there too) gets it about right - there's plenty of community things going on, allotments, live music (always shit, but that's not the point). It's been gentrified from an out-of-the-way suburb into yoghurt-weavers central, but it's not just exorbitantly priced organic almonds and a Waitrose - there's a shitload of indie grocers and whatnot. Good gentrification.

And, on the other hand, i know a few people who maintain that Stapleton Road, Easton is the last bastion of non-gentrification in Bristol. Which is a well-meaning way of saying 'I live on a street where pregnant women get punched for a mobile and £3.20'. Gentrification isn't the opposite of poverty, obviously, but there's a real danger in resisting it you end up thinking that areas like Easton - where you will get mugged, soon enough - are somehow preferable to areas where coffee costs too much.

And then the other side of this is Clifton, which is the place you're most likely to get stabbed, and the place you're least likely to find someone interesting/ understands the rounds system/ not a trustfund cunt.

Basically, most people are cunts, and gentrification is only a small part of general cuntestry.

[jonathan]

Certainly some good points, but I must contest your first. To me, it seems like the points you describe illustrate my point about the systemic nature of capitalism's effects on the urban environment; I think you're conflating the idea that capitalism is bad, thus gentrification must be bad. I do hold that capitalism and gentrification are bad, but that is also my own take on the situation, based on my position in the whole scheme. The greater point, and I should have been more clear, is that gentrification is only bad depending on where you are located on the class scale. For people of middle to upper class birth, "cleaning up" an area is positive; for those that it displaces, it's a negative thing. It might be a little easier to see in the United States than in Britain. Not that there aren't whole swathes of poor people in Britain, but I think the income inequality is more glaring in the United States, and so its easy to get this image of rich people shoving poor people around: buying up their property and making them move. The idea that gentrification "cleans up" an area, even in areas where you might deem the change positive, is not really fixing the issue of crime or "cuntness" (as you would have it), but merely relocating it. I think the problem with gentrification, and I mean this specifically as an urban area which is "rejuvenated", is that it displaces the populations that were already there. Whether you deem this good or bad is ultimately up to you.

[Glice]

I think the 'who's worse - US or UK?' is a moot point; there are statistically more people in poverty in the US, and a higher proportion of those are from classically disenfranchised backgrounds, certainly. But I'm very skeptical of eliding locally (or nationally) qualified poverty on a global scale (because we're all well off next to state x). Um... by which I mean, we have different problems to y'all; the fact that (from where I'm sitting) yours seem worse needn't stop me whinging about things.

Gentrification doesn't necessarily displace a local population; this isn't true of St Werberghs or St Pauls I mention above; it is true of Bedminster (where all the normal people moved to Hartcliffe and Divvywood). Often, in areas like Hackney (London), there's a lot of fairly poor people who bought council houses under Thatcher's right-to-buy scheme and ended up very wealthy indeed when Hackney became hip (whenever that was). In which case you suddenly had a sizeable number of the poorer people in a formerly-deprived area benefiting enormously from gentrification (and it's worth bearing in mind, much of Hackney is still rough).

I take your point that with gentrification often comes displacement, but I can only really speak for the UK when I say that this isn't always true; and my major pont is that poverty and ghettos are not good places for anyone to be. It's fair to say that rejuvenation is frequently mis-managed by self-serving cunts; it's not fair to say that rejuvenation (if that is a synonym for gentrification) should be resisted because sometimes it leads to incomprehensibly-named coffee. I don't know, I suspect we fundamentally agree, I'm just really annoyed with hearing that places which breed muggers and rapists are somehow good places to live. It's education and poverty (amongst other factors) which cause these problems, but sometimes a financial kick up the arse/ makeover can bring that change (see St Pauls in Bristol).

[knox]

Originally Posted by the ikara cult

This country is going to have a serious subculture in 10 years time

looking forward to it seriously
bias researches are getting scarier

[knox]

Originally Posted by hevusa

fighting it is useless (and stupid).

no, you are.

[hevusa]

Originally Posted by knox

no, you are.

always cute to hear coming from someone claiming to have proof that ghosts exist. so knox, how does one stop gentrification? it is like trying to stop the sun from rising; it is inevitable in all free economic systems.

(at least she is cute)

[jonathan]

My point wasn't to claim that the US was worse of off by the UK; I was just claiming that the US has a higher degree of wealth inequality, so it might be easier to see how one group is affected by the influence of the other. Regardless, it's an assertion; I've only visited the UK and never lived there.

I think we have different definitions of gentrification. By gentrification, I mean, to make of the gentry. In which case, it entails that the people living in a given place are not of gentle birth, and the people that remake the area make it so. In the case of Thatcher's right-to-buy program, I wouldn't call that a case of gentrification as much as a move toward privatization. If I am not mistaken, that program let the renters of state houses purchase the houses they lived in. Not to be dogmatic, but that is not technically gentrification, only because someone didn't purchase cheap property, redevelop it, and then sell it or rent it. I think that is more aptly titled privatization, and even the successes of these practices vary.

But yes, I can't help but agree that ghettos are bad places to live; at the same time, I don't think that gentrification is the way to fix those problems. I see it more as displacing them.

[Glice]

Yeah - agreed - I suppose I'd say that gentrification tends to be conflated with other economic processes. But I can't think of anywhere I've ever been that's been gentrified in the strictest terms. Somewhere like Knightsbridge or Chelsea have, so far as I know, always been full of cunts; further afield from urban areas, there's great slews of the UK which have long since been homes to horses/ hunting/ boarding school people. So perhaps the relative definition of gentrification is different here to in the states? I suspect for a more strict example of gentrification here I'd have to look into post-war re-building projects, which I'd suspect is already a massively different economic paradigm.

Wealth inequality is pretty bad here. I know that much. And there's less of a sense of meritocracy here; people often feel tied into their (self-assumed) class. Better or worse, I don't know, but I know a lot of non-British people find our attitudes towards class baffling and infuriating - so culture unfortunately plays quite a part in things (as it does in the relative 'definition' of gentrification).

[Keeping It Simple]

Originally Posted by the ikara cult

Id fight to stop 100%.

Its part of this whole thing that means the average achievers who are rich will end up right at the top and the ones who are poor will stay at the bottom.
The patriarchal society is back, in the creative sectors especially
This country is going to have a serious subculture in 10 years time

It already has a serious subculture. A villainous, anti-social underclass entirely dependant on benefits commonly referred to as "chavs", "pikeys" or "scrotes".

[Derek]

Hahahaha.
KIS is the best troll ever. He has an original persona.

[tesla69]

Originally Posted by Glice

Often, in areas like Hackney (London), there's a lot of fairly poor people who bought council houses under Thatcher's right-to-buy scheme and ended up very wealthy indeed when Hackney became hip (whenever that was). In which case you suddenly had a sizeable number of the poorer people in a formerly-deprived area benefiting enormously from gentrification (and it's worth bearing in mind, much of Hackney is still rough)..

or they were forced to sell and move because they couldnt pay the newly increased taxes - I assume the UK has property taxes. In the US I see farmers forced to sell because the town decides their property is now commercial and needs to be taxed accordingly, even though historically that lot may have been used once every 10 years on a rotated harvest schedule.

Not much has been written about "urban renewal" which went through the US like a bulldozer in the 60's & 70's, the plan was to gut local community cores and disperse the population out. the result is lots of small towns in the US with large strip malls in their city centers.

[Glice]

That's the other side of the coin. Some people got fucked by it, some people didn't. The people who didn't get fucked by it are probably quite happy; those who didn't probably moved to Plaistow (below the belt?)

Anyway, I can't really speak about Lahndan. Herr Rail's your man for that.

[knox]

dear syg,

please:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/stop_rupert_...6338302&v=8521