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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Sorry, your  position demands a lot of things happening for the people pushed out by gentrification that  are not likely to happen unless there is a strong coordinated effort to make them happen - low income housing, funds and good programs shifting to the right schools at the right time.  With all the money already spent on reform, there has not been success in these areas. Instead, schools in the poor wards are still doing terribly (and ward 3 still thrives).

As real estate becomes more expensive in the gentrifying areas, the poor people already living there will need cheaper alternatives.  That's a no-brainer.

The whole "they'll be better off" rationale is just that - a rationalization.

[b]I'm not against gentrification, but let's get real -- the benefit goes to the gentrifiers.  Rationalizing that you're helping the indigents may help you sleep better at night, but it doesn't guarantee that their situation will be improved once they cede the neighborhood to the gentrifiers.[/b]

For poor kids to get the educational benefit of gentrification, the socio-economic balance in the schools needs to be reversed.  This requires a huge population shift and shuffle.  When the high SES people move in, low SES people need to disperse widely, to get the benefit of majority middle-class kids in their classes. So where do they go?  
[/quote]

This is actually demonstrably untrue.

[quote]A new study by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Pittsburgh and Duke University, examined Census data from more than 15,000 neighborhoods across the U.S. in 1990 and 2000, and found that low-income non-white households did not disproportionately leave gentrifying areas. In fact, researchers found that at least one group of residents, high school–educated blacks, were actually more likely to remain in gentrifying neighborhoods than in similar neighborhoods that didn't gentrify — even increasing as a fraction of the neighborhood population, and seeing larger-than-expected gains in income.[/quote]

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1818255,00.html

There are very strong protections in place for tenants in DC, from rent-control, to first-purchase laws, to tenants-rights laws. One of the PPs mentioned three poor families in a gentrifying neighborhood who were "displaced", but the examples strained the definition of gentrification-fueled displacement. In one case, the landlord sold the building.  In the other two, economic circumstances led to them not being able to pay their (controlled) rent.  But this happened all the time before gentrification--we just didn't ascribe it to "evil gentrifiers". In fact, contra popular myth, poor neighborhoods have always had a large amount of turnover. It's just that very poor people were replaced by other very poor people. Now more wealthy people are added into the mix. In places like Capitol Hill, that's allowed the majority of long-term (mostly older) residents to cash-out, take large bundles of cash, and move to places they'd rather be.

Obviously, the very poor who were renting don't have that option, but we're largely conflating the stable base of long-term working-class residents on the one hand, and the transient short-term poor residents on the other.

[quote]The researchers found, for example, that income gains in gentrifying neighborhoods — usually defined as low-income urban areas that undergo rises in income and housing prices — were more widely dispersed than one might expect. Though college-educated whites accounted for 20% of the total income gain in gentrifying neighborhoods, black householders with high school degrees contributed even more: 33% of the neighborhood's total rise. In other words, a broad demographic of people in the neighborhood benefited financially. According to the study's findings, only one group — black residents who never finished high school — saw their income grow at a slower rate than predicted. But the study also suggests that these residents weren't moving out of their neighborhoods at a disproportionately higher rate than from similar neighborhoods that didn't gentrify.[/quote]

The reason the "displacement" narrative is so attractive is that it justifies the resentment many folks feel as they see old neighborhoods change. Of course, most of that demographic shift has come as long-term homeowners age; their children grow up, get jobs, and move to large, cheaper houses in the suburbs; and finally the elderly residents sell to younger (often white) newcomers. Obviously the poor who have long relied upon a cheap (and dangerous) housing stock to live in resent that shift, and the children of long-time residents who come back to visit their elderly relations (or to go to church) resent the cultural changes that have taken place.  But frankly, that's no different than someone who grew up in Aspen Hill going back and seeing a bunch of Hispanics and thinking, "there goes the neighborhood."

The bottom line is, much of what we think of as "displacement" is voluntary, and the involuntary displacement has been going on for as long as there have been people struggling to make their rent. Of course, US stinginess towards housing subsidies is a national problem, and not something unique to DC. But the good thing about adding more and more middle-class residents to DC's population is that it funds DC's already generous (compared to MD and VA) social safety net. As someone pointed out up-thread, DC's population is 600k, and nowhere near its historic highs. If you want to help DC's poor, you should be fighting as hard as you can to enable new market-rate housing construction in DC.[/quote]

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