Gentrification shaming makes no sense to me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Huh? Because you're pushing people out of the neighborhood who possibly lived there for generations and can't afford it anymore (rent or property taxes) due to people like you.

Whether this bothers you or not is one thing but it's absolutely true that this is a real thing going on.

Right - but the question becomes - as an UMC white family - what should you do? I don't want to live surrounded by all white people. I want my kid to have a diverse friend group, racially, ethnically, and socio-economically. While yes, UMC white people moving into historically black neighborhoods pushes black people out. But the alternative is to move to a white-only area, which seems worse to me.

It seems to me that the system here is clearly racist, but that individual families moving to black neighborhoods (as primary residences) aren't doing anything wrong, and may in fact be doing the best they can to fight racism. What would you propose they do instead? Move to Arlington?

PP. The thing is, it's obviously fine and maybe even good for society when it's just one or two white families moving in and integrating the neighborhood (assuming you are decent people and use the neighborhood public schools/don't call the cops on your neighbors for noise or other petty complaints, etc.).

however, it gets to be a big problem without a good solution when it's tons of white families doing it and completely changing the cultural tenor of the area. See, for example: Brooklyn and all its myriad problems related to this issue.

You really don't get why the old families are unhappy about this? It's not just having to see white faces. It's all the restaurants and bars and stores that come in chasing their money, which they can't afford and which raise their rents. It's their schools changing and no longer servicing their community's needs.

There is a lot of literature about this issue, I shouldn't have to tell you this. None of this is a mystery.

Then they should do what other people do and move to a place they can afford.

They already live in a place they can afford: Their home in their neighborhood. The neighborhood then changes around them so they can't afford as much of the stuff around them and they aren't the target audience for it anymore. Surely you can understand how that's not the same as not being able to afford to live somewhere.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am a white gentrifier. Over last 15-20 years have bought 12 row houses, fixed them up and rent them to white professionals. When I hear BLM chanting fire fire gentrifier, at first I get a tinge of anxiety and then I start laughing. Looking forward to buying 12-15 more over next 15 -20 years.

So you don’t rent to black professionals? Lovely.

[Anonymous]

Buying a house you will love and live in - and, if you have kids sending them to the local school vs private schools - can be okay.
Scooping up properties and renting them out at higher rates gets dicey.

[Anonymous]

I think it's along the lines of: don't move in and start throwing your weight (money/education) around. Don't push the school to start changing how it does things right away. Be a good neighbor. Don't call the cops for noise complaints or "junk" in someone's yard or some other petty reason. Don't call the cops on groups of teenagers "loitering." Don't get scared by seeing a group of black teens hanging out on the corner. Don't call the cops on black people at all.

I'm not at all saying you wouldn't be a good neighbor. But let's be real, many white people have a problem with entitlement due to how they grew up. They will go into a school and start pushing for changes right away that would benefit their special snowflake over other kids who have been there longer. They have a hard time understanding that their needs/issues/concerns shouldn't always get first priority.

I am a white gentrifier in Anacostia. I have heard 3 people shot to death. I call the cops on black people shooting guns and selling hard drugs. Lol to calling for junk in the yard. Everyone on this board could learn a lot about how "great" these neighborhoods are. Its racism that allows these places to exist.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Buying a house you will love and live in - and, if you have kids sending them to the local school vs private schools - can be okay.
Scooping up properties and renting them out at higher rates gets dicey.

Why dicey? Fixing up dilapidated properties serves the neighborhood by reducing vacant properties that are unsafe and attract crime. It is hard work so why shouldn’t that work be compensated? Is a farmer selling tomatoes for a profit acting immorally?

[Anonymous]

I don't consider myself a gentrifier, but my first condo was in 2000 in a pre-gentrified Southwest DC where daytime muggings were not unknown and drug were openly sold. I'm white and I bought my condo from a black woman whose condo had been sitting on the market for a year with no takers. Sure, I "whitened" the neighborhood a tad but I also bought her condo that wouldn't sell. She got a fair price from me and that allowed her to move near her grandkids in PG County as she wanted to be closer to them. Am I an evil gentrifier? I don't think so. I bought from a black woman who wanted to leave and nobody else wanted to live in that then-crappy neighborhood (it was all I could afford at the time). But I was another white face and over time the neighborhood has gotten whiter and whiter, and now we have all the gentrifier favorites: a dog park, a wine shop, and small plates galore.

Has gentrification priced some people out? I'm sure. However, DC already has the lowest property taxes in the region and has an exceptionally generous tax break for owner-occupant senior citizens. If a person can't afford their property tax bill in DC, they'd be hard pressed to find a cheaper tax bill unless they move to Delaware. If you are over 75 and make under $130K/year, you pay a mere 0.32% which is nothing.

People also tend to forget just how bad things were in the District back in the 80s and 90s. Other than a few nice pockets the city was a total mess and the black middle class was getting out as fast as they could. The social and local government failures of the time did far more to distrust neighborhoods than white gentrifiers, IMHO, but they are a convenient scapegoat.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Buying a house you will love and live in - and, if you have kids sending them to the local school vs private schools - can be okay.
Scooping up properties and renting them out at higher rates gets dicey.

Why dicey? Fixing up dilapidated properties serves the neighborhood by reducing vacant properties that are unsafe and attract crime. It is hard work so why shouldn’t that work be compensated? Is a farmer selling tomatoes for a profit acting immorally?

You're centering the house as an investment transaction and not focusing on its inhabitants as members of the community. The point of focus matters. Everyone enjoys looking at well-maintained houses, but when someone is more focused on the ways they can use their resources to make more money through gentrification than the ways in which they can use them to strengthen and support the community, it suggests that they don't really care about their fellow neighbors all that much. Not to mention, many gentrifying neighborhoods are full of long-time residents with deep roots, and certain types of flipping (like condo splits) really undercut that by attracting residents who are less likely to set those same roots themselves.

I'm a white gentrifier. I don't feel guilt at being in this position; segregation has never been the answer to our country's problems with race, and cheap rowhouses near downtown were a historical anomaly that was never sustainable. But I recognize that being higher-income and white means that I have some extra responsibility to be a good neighbor and help lift up the community that already exists. I don't just try to mold it to be more like me. It's not so hard to understand.

[Anonymous]

I don’t enjoy well maintained houses or McMansions or good schools when I was a renter. I looked in them on horror as distraction of my neighborhood.

I rented in Manhattan in the Dinkens hey day of Crime. We had a $7 dollar haircut place, cheap Irish bars with $5 large pictures and even Nickle beer nights and coffee and a buttered. Bagel one dollar off the cart. My rent was $747 on a one bedroom. Sure I had hookers out front, drug dealers on the corner but I loved it.

My block got gentrified, haircuts $20 dollars, beers, six bucks, Starbucks replaced cart where for $7 I got same thing I got for one buck. A new landlord who installed cameras and spied on tenants to try to force us out of our rent controlled units.

My bodegas, diners, shoemakers, Irish pubs all forced out. My apartment I gave up as I bought a house in 1999 as Manhattan was ruined. No more artists, musicians,firemen, cops, teachers, middle class, blue collar we were all forced out. My mom was a waitress in the 1950s and when single lived in Manhattan. My friends was 23 and living in cheap walk ups in seedy parts of nyc they could afford.

I don’t see folks coming to Bethesda, McLean or Chevy Chase forcing folks out onto streets.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Anyway this is what it means to really do the work of understanding the biases and racism within our country.

Yes you were able to buy a home in a neighborhood you desired that is now desirable.

However, for decades when working class black families lived in those neighborhoods they were not desirable. Resources were not provided, retailers would not service there, schools were allowed to decline and city services were not provided. Home values naturally plummeted devaluing the worth of those homes.

Decades later some plucky and entreprenuerial white people decided "hey I don't want to live in the burbs. i want to live in the hood."

They convince Sally and Mike to move there. They buy homes for dirt cheap from the original owners whose home values were depressed, bc in general black neighborhood home vales are in America.

More white ppl buy cheap homes. More companies start to take notice. They move in. Home values skyrocket! The original homeowners now cannot afford to live where they did due to rising taxes, maybe unscrupulous developers etc. Bc of course there are very few safety nets in our country.

Sally and Mike eventually sell their home and make a 400% profit and move to the lily white [and a sprinkle of Asian] enclave of "North" Arlington.

----I know many people who have done this.

Everything you describe is about money, not race.

If affluent black people moved in, the service providers would chase their money just the same.

I had to move out from my Dupont rental when rent went up too much. It is what it is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Huh? Because you're pushing people out of the neighborhood who possibly lived there for generations and can't afford it anymore (rent or property taxes) due to people like you.

Whether this bothers you or not is one thing but it's absolutely true that this is a real thing going on.

Right - but the question becomes - as an UMC white family - what should you do? I don't want to live surrounded by all white people. I want my kid to have a diverse friend group, racially, ethnically, and socio-economically. While yes, UMC white people moving into historically black neighborhoods pushes black people out. But the alternative is to move to a white-only area, which seems worse to me.

It seems to me that the system here is clearly racist, but that individual families moving to black neighborhoods (as primary residences) aren't doing anything wrong, and may in fact be doing the best they can to fight racism. What would you propose they do instead? Move to Arlington?

PP. The thing is, it's obviously fine and maybe even good for society when it's just one or two white families moving in and integrating the neighborhood (assuming you are decent people and use the neighborhood public schools/don't call the cops on your neighbors for noise or other petty complaints, etc.).

however, it gets to be a big problem without a good solution when it's tons of white families doing it and completely changing the cultural tenor of the area. See, for example: Brooklyn and all its myriad problems related to this issue.

You really don't get why the old families are unhappy about this? It's not just having to see white faces. It's all the restaurants and bars and stores that come in chasing their money, which they can't afford and which raise their rents. It's their schools changing and no longer servicing their community's needs.

There is a lot of literature about this issue, I shouldn't have to tell you this. None of this is a mystery.

No one owns streets or neighborhoods. No one has a monopoly on culture. Things change. People move in and out.

[Anonymous]

There are ways for white, UMC/wealthy people to move into areas without gentrifying them. The problem is that many buy out a bunch of cheap properties as “investments” in anticipation of a property value boom and also protest against affordable housing projects and sometimes building new housing in general. They do this to limit the supply and drive up the prices. That’s what causes gentrification. Gentrification is exactly what the intentions of many folks posting on this forum is. Everyone is eyeing inner-beltway PG, Southern Arlington, Frederick, and Alexandria as the next “investments.” When they can’t afford the already completely gentrified suburbs, they go after the ones with the large percentage of vulnerable people and destroy those people’s livelihoods and communities. It’s absolutely okay to move to these places poorer burbs. But go there to live there, invest in the communities (by investing in the schools, the infrastructure, the local businesses, and the social programs). Some parts of Howard County are good examples of what integration without gentrification looks like, and those places are the best for everyone involved. It’s just crazy to me that so many people here think they can just intrude any community they want and tell the residents that they aren’t deserving of living there anymore because they want it. Gentrification is one of the main factors that solidifies generational poverty, especially among disenfranchised minority groups. God forbid someone richer than you comes to where you live and does the same thing to you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Yikes, take your lithium. DCUM is full of people talking about how 3 bedroom, two bath historic home should be knocked down so they can put up a McMansion to horde the endless piles of stuff they shop shop shop for on the regular. There is absolutely no reason "modern living" can't be accomplished is 2000 SF, particularly with the digitization of content.

Truly historic houses cannot be knocked down.

No one told Queen Elizabeth to downsize.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Yikes, take your lithium. DCUM is full of people talking about how 3 bedroom, two bath historic home should be knocked down so they can put up a McMansion to horde the endless piles of stuff they shop shop shop for on the regular. There is absolutely no reason "modern living" can't be accomplished is 2000 SF, particularly with the digitization of content.

Truly historic houses cannot be knocked down.

No one told Queen Elizabeth to downsize.

Shop shop shop, Imelda! You deserve it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don’t enjoy well maintained houses or McMansions or good schools when I was a renter. I looked in them on horror as distraction of my neighborhood.

I rented in Manhattan in the Dinkens hey day of Crime. We had a $7 dollar haircut place, cheap Irish bars with $5 large pictures and even Nickle beer nights and coffee and a buttered. Bagel one dollar off the cart. My rent was $747 on a one bedroom. Sure I had hookers out front, drug dealers on the corner but I loved it.

My block got gentrified, haircuts $20 dollars, beers, six bucks, Starbucks replaced cart where for $7 I got same thing I got for one buck. A new landlord who installed cameras and spied on tenants to try to force us out of our rent controlled units.

My bodegas, diners, shoemakers, Irish pubs all forced out. My apartment I gave up as I bought a house in 1999 as Manhattan was ruined. No more artists, musicians,firemen, cops, teachers, middle class, blue collar we were all forced out. My mom was a waitress in the 1950s and when single lived in Manhattan. My friends was 23 and living in cheap walk ups in seedy parts of nyc they could afford.

I don’t see folks coming to Bethesda, McLean or Chevy Chase forcing folks out onto streets.

I lived in NYC during the David Dinkins years. Had a friend murdered. Got mugged 20 or so times, 5 or so of which involved me getting punched or hit with something in the face/mouth (cracking all my front teeth). It sucked and it sucked for all the crime victims.

Moved to DC in early 1990s and flipped bad houses and bad neighborhoods for years. Not ONE regret.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Huh? Because you're pushing people out of the neighborhood who possibly lived there for generations and can't afford it anymore (rent or property taxes) due to people like you.

Whether this bothers you or not is one thing but it's absolutely true that this is a real thing going on.

Right - but the question becomes - as an UMC white family - what should you do? I don't want to live surrounded by all white people. I want my kid to have a diverse friend group, racially, ethnically, and socio-economically. While yes, UMC white people moving into historically black neighborhoods pushes black people out. But the alternative is to move to a white-only area, which seems worse to me.

It seems to me that the system here is clearly racist, but that individual families moving to black neighborhoods (as primary residences) aren't doing anything wrong, and may in fact be doing the best they can to fight racism. What would you propose they do instead? Move to Arlington?

PP. The thing is, it's obviously fine and maybe even good for society when it's just one or two white families moving in and integrating the neighborhood (assuming you are decent people and use the neighborhood public schools/don't call the cops on your neighbors for noise or other petty complaints, etc.).

however, it gets to be a big problem without a good solution when it's tons of white families doing it and completely changing the cultural tenor of the area. See, for example: Brooklyn and all its myriad problems related to this issue.

You really don't get why the old families are unhappy about this? It's not just having to see white faces. It's all the restaurants and bars and stores that come in chasing their money, which they can't afford and which raise their rents. It's their schools changing and no longer servicing their community's needs.

There is a lot of literature about this issue, I shouldn't have to tell you this. None of this is a mystery.

+100

Please educate yourself and read the literature in the subject