Reply to Educate me - why is gentrification bad?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=jsteele][quote=Anonymous]Gentrification only happens when long-term residents want to cash out. Why shouldn’t they be able to make more money via a home sake than they ever would working?[/quote]

This is a very myopic understanding of gentrification. In many of the neighborhoods that have undergone or are undergoing gentrification, long-term residents are renters. They are pushed out by increasing rents or when their homes are torn down or renovated. They don't make any money out of the transition.

[/quote]Also in my neighborhood, the pressures of gentrification led some families to be pressured out of their houses, when they made a mistake.  For example, one family was late in paying their real estate taxes, which from the records I saw had happened before and they just paid them up to avoid losing their childhood home.  But when the market got hot, a grifter company came in, bought up their lien and charged them thousands of dollars in penalties they couldn't afford so that they couldn't make up the extra.  They lost their childhood home.  Another neighbor didn't know that his brother had taken out a loan on their childhood home and he had to move because the brother defaulted on the loan. Again, this was during the hot real estate market before the crash in 2008 so it was easy for the brother to get the loan.  There may have been some good things that happened out of this.  The neighbor with the brother moved into public housing, which was better for him given that he was disabled and didn't have water or electricity in his home.  But he did have to move out of the home he was born in and he would have preferred to stay there. At any rate, it's complicated.  It's not like everyone made a bundle selling their homes to gentrifiers.  And some folks feel a genuine loss that is not driven by the money.[/quote]

Being chronically late on property tax payments or defaulting on a mortgage are highly costly financial mistakes. [/quote]

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