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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Not idiotic at all if you understand gentrification.  A local example is Columbia Heights.  Many older AA and Hispanic people who bought there when it was undesirable were priced out of the new market.  These were folks who invested in the neighborhood when yuppies would not have been caught dead there.  Their tax bills and overall COL went through the roof and many of them (low SES and people on fixed income) had to pack up and leave. Sure, many of them cleaned up in selling their houses, but many of them did not want to move.

As PP said, it is a tricky thing.  And most urban areas are dealing with this problem.   [/quote]
I work in urban planning and this way oversimplified.  Homeowners were not displaced.  Especially not seniors.  DC has the lowest propert taxes in the region and cap on the increase.  So even if your assessment quadrupled your tax increase is always capped. Further more seniors have even greater deductions.  Every homeowner gets the 64k taken right off the bat of the assessed value.  Due to repurposing vacant lots, Columbia Heights has a net gain of over 300 affordable units.  As someone who bought there before Target moved in, please don't romanticize it.  There was so much violence, trash, vacant buildings, no retail, no plaza, drug houses etc. It sucked.  But you got one thing right, I did make a ton of money when I sold :-)[/quote]

+1. So true and obvious it is painful to see the posts romantizing a broken past.[/quote]Gee, what's broken about a family where the parents are a janitor and a Safeway cashier? Or a couple where one is a DPW crew leader and the other works in telecommunications for the Defense Department?  Or the guy who is a security guard?  That's what people need to understand.  It's people who have jobs and are successful in their lives who can't afford the houses in their own neighborhoods.  Stop talking about these people as if they are broken just because they don't have college degrees and work in high-paying jobs. [/quote]

See, that's a romantic and biased view. You somehow forgot the insecurity, drugs, crime, lack of economic opportunities, that often hold neighborhoods down until they are gentrified. You also forgot one obvious element, which is that gentrified properties are worth more, so people can make money simply by selling their property, an option they didn't have before.[/quote]I'm not romanticizing any of that.  Nice how you jumped from my defense of working class people to assuming that I romanticize all the other crap.  Not a particularly nuanced view you hold there.  Sure those people, if they own their homes (and the one couple didn't) can sell their homes and buy somewhere else.  But as has been mentioned by another pp, it will be way out in Gaithersburg nowhere near a metro or near their jobs. And I'm watching as my security guard neighbor who has a condo payment (and probably not much equity) which is half his salary works seven days a week just to pay his expenses.  But of course, you're not sympathetic to these folks at all.  You just want to sweep them into a category labeled "broken and dysfunctional."  As I've been saying, the problem with these arguments is that you're not seeing *all* the people who live in these neighborhoods and are affected by the changes in the neighborhoods.  There are good things and bad things that come along with gentrification.  It's not romanticizing anything to argue that it would be desirable to find a way to help good, honest, hard-working people stay in their neighborhoods and enjoy the benefits of gentrification.  But the fact that you can't see that there are such people in these neighborhoods -- well, that's your loss and evidence that your understanding of the situation is severely distorted.[/quote]

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