While writing about my property taxes last week, there’s a related topic that’s been simmering about in my head for quite some time and I wanted to approach it.  The question is – Is gentrification a bad thing?  One might think that with my left-leaning tendencies, I might be totally opposed to the concept but in fact I am completely for it.  It’s the age-old quandary of whether or not poor people are being forced out of areas to make way for much richer housing.  The flip side of this is that most American cities suffered a huge decline in population over the past 3 or 4 decades when the suburbs were all the rage and they are now being revitalized and bursting with life again.

With gas prices the way they are and the hellish commutes that the suburbs and even-further-out exurbs bring to their residents, intown living has become more desirable the past 10 years in almost every major city.  What once were slums and industrial areas or abandoned buildings are now vibrant communities with new or renovated housing and the teeming life that comes with it.  Some places cater to single urbanites; others entice families to move back in town.  The promise of a larger yard way out in the hinterlands is no longer an incentive to lots of people, me included.

So, are the poor being forced out of these revived neighborhoods?  Probably, and who knows where they’re forced to move?  Chances are they’re displaced to an area where they’re also not welcome.  This is where I feel conflicted, but as someone who rose from dirt poor beginnings to where I am now, my sympathy only runs so deep.  What if my family had been kicked out under the government’s new “eminent domain” powers?  Of course, dreaming about getting out of those dirt poor surroundings provided me with all the motivation I needed to rise from that social stratus.  I might seem somewhat snobby now in regards to certain aspects of living, but those who know the conditions I grew up in understand what I went through to get to where I am now.

What about others who are slightly better off, like my next door neighbor when I lived in Chicago whose house’s value went from 46K to 500K in less than 10 years?  When a solid middle-to-upper-middle class guy like him complains of property tax hikes, the flip side is that someone like him is sitting on a gold mine.  I understand not wanting to move from where you are but if you get priced out of your neighborhood, chances are your next house will be paid for and still have hundreds of thousands left over in profit by selling your home.  Yes, this is an oversimplification of how to handle the situation, but most people who do complain about the people who move into their neighborhoods at ridiculously higher prices than what they initially paid generally don’t like those folks who move in.  If you can’t stop the surge, why bunker down in your abode and become a miserable hermit?

I’ll use 2 great examples of urban renewal that I’ve witnessed in the past decade – one in Atlanta and the other in Chicago.  While on a trip back to Chicago a few years ago, I noticed that the neighborhoods that bordered the Orange Line el tracks that had formerly been a rundown part of Chinatown had been completely rebuilt.  I can’t imagine the total costs but entire neighborhoods went from being sketchy to being what appeared to be a relatively safe place still teeming with Chinese families.  Score one for the city of Chicago and the urban planners of that part of Chinatown.

An even better example of urban renewal happened down here in Atlanta, just north of the Georgia Tech campus.   What was previously a “brownfield”, hundreds of acres of an abandoned steel mill, is now a thriving live/work community with single family homes, townhomes, condos, apartments, office towers, and an outdoor mall and movie complex.  Yes it’s somewhat pricey to live there, but is a completely renovated area filled with a mixture of middle to upper middle class priced homes a bad thing?  The city of Atlanta deserves credit for allowing a project like this to happen, and while it would be nice to see some stores that are non-national chains, the fact remains this is now a vital live/work/shop area that was a huge abandoned dirt pile 5 years ago.  So how is this bad for the city and its residents?  How is the developer “evil” for driving out a sketchy element that hung around the area?

Let’s not misinterpret this screed as “pro-development”.  For every Atlantic Station project in Atlanta, there are 30 new subdivsions in the metro area that clearcut the entire subdivision and don’t help the local infrastructure catch up (schools, sewers, roads…).  But when it comes to reclaiming former blighted parts of a city or suburb, I fail to side with the people who would rather keep a seedy building or neighborhood over a new one that is pleasant to look at and safer to drive/walk through/by.