Most of us equate a city's progress directly with its ability to build and remodel the communities into fun, exciting, and vibrant centers of life. We typically consider someone moving into a dilapidated, buying distressed property, and then rehabbing the properties to be a great step forward for that particular area. After several business owners, investors, homeowners, and renters begin to re-enter an area we consider it "gentrified" and everyone involved is praised as being visionary in their efforts. While I'll always applaud the rebuilding and rehabbing of local communities, I want to make light of a different angle.
We often hear people describe the gentrification process as "running all the undesirables" out of an area. Neighborhoods prone to this process often struggle with crime, poverty, and other tragic problems. Before these communities are gentrified certain conditions often exist: low rent and high commercial vacancy rates. What happens after a community is "turned around?" Rents are increased, commercial interest builds, and home ownership increases. Suddenly an entire community is revived. We often hear politicians and developers use particular developments such as Casinos and shopping centers to accelerate the process. So far, this all sounds pretty good, but what happens to the people that lived there to begin with?
As the rent rates increase, local residents can no longer afford the area they once called home. They are forced out of their area, and the plights of the community such as crime and poverty are just shuffled to the nearest affordable area. All our efforts to "fix up" the community can really be explained as a giant game of musical chairs between neighborhoods. Desirable areas expand and less desirable areas absorb, but the net gain is 0.
City planners, developers, and charitable organizations must begin working together to truly change communities. Gentrify neighborhoods from within. Offer assistance to the poverty stricken, offer hope, and create pride. Most cities have several areas regarded as desirable and an equal number of distressed areas. Instead of watching a historical revolving door as we have in most cities, we can change our cities for the better. Our common approach of slowly forcing out residents in neighborhoods is eerily similar to what we did to American Indians as we "gentrified" their neighborhoods.
The bottom line:
For a city to flourish we must invest in developing people as much as we invest in developing buildings.
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