WNYC is doing an 8 pt series on gentrification
It's worth a listen:
The first 5 minutes are kind of soundbites, but the real meat starts after that.
Comments
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https://www.wnyc.org/radio/#/ondemand/583298Part two is up, they're in East NYI guess this is a better link: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/neighborhood/
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the caller at the end of the second episode definitely speaks of a group of people no one wants to talk about in these sorts of conversations. The non-white middle-to-low income early-wave gentrifier.
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When I heard that part of the second episode, I immediately recalled this piece from 2011: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/40564/confessions-of-a-black-dc-gentrifier/
Over the years, there has been a couple of articles in this vein but you're absolutely right -- people really don't tend to talk about that group too often. When their voices do manage to peak through though, I find their stories really compelling.
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Absolutely. Especially since so many of those early wavers are people without money or great jobs or family connections. Their wealthier friends from college end up displacing them soon enough.
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I hope that they go beyond the 'rich vs poor' or 'black vs white' aspects of gentrification here and really look at what the changes mean for neighborhoods and start asking serious questions.Years ago Spike Lee ranted and raved about how Bedstuy was changing, and while I disagreed with most of what he said, he did bring up some really interesting points like (going off of memory): Why was the trash only picked up once a week but now it's picked up 3 times a week? Why is money finally being allocated to these schools? Why are clean up crews starting to show up? Why are social services that exist in Park slope and Brooklyn Heights and cobble hill finally being adapted?There is of course the other side of the coin, that is for everyone being kicked out (like in episode 1), there is a family that is catching a pretty serious windfall. This is also making a lot of people very wealthy. I can't help but think of one of my old neighbors in Ft. Greene that told me he bought 3 brownstones in 1980's for 10k each because nobody wanted to live in "a warzone". It's not just people moving in, it's also people cashing out.
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Truth. I can't tell you how many people I have met who have a relative who sold their house or apartment and gone to live with their kids elsewhere or moved down South the a gated retirement community.doublen00b said:It's not just people moving in, it's also people cashing out. -
Thanks for the link. I'm going to give this a listen tomorrow. I am really struggling with trying to understand where I fit into this pie. It seems like I have to sacrifice so much to get a house that fits my needs in this city (and that I can afford). Every few months I feel like I'm on the verge of leaving, but that feels like defeat.You're a winner if you can keep your head above water, here. Right? That's better than an easy life in a cultural wasteland like Florida with no good food or good people. Or is it?
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You are a winner if you are in a place where you are happy, regardless of where that might be.
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@SlamHarris....I didn't realize that there were no good people in Florida so either you've never been there or you have an incredible ego.
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before i lived in new york, i grew up in florida during my formative years and can attest first hand that, compared to New York, there is a serious lack of good food and a reasonable lack of good interesting people. that's why i left and never looked back!but of course that's all relative. a lot of people i know who vacation where i grew up consider latin food to be the pinnacle of good cuisine (...from the comfort of their south beach hotels). having grown up with it, i'd be happy to never lay eyes on a greasy plantain again.but i digress. i think ultimately the whole G word reveals the biggest problem of wealth inequality in this country. to view it as just an issue of race is ignoring giant swaths of the population that come into play. it's more an issue of privilege, and more importantly, an issue of how disparate the haves and have nots can be in a single community. ....but of course that doesn't make it any less complicated and you can't talk about one cause without talking about all of them
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that;s a fantastic article. it's a lot to think about. i know plenty of gentrifiers who are from the midwest of course, but i also know plenty who aren't white and are from other large cities around the country like myself. i moved to a big city because i'd always lived in cities. gentrification is definitely happening in the places i used to live.psyker390 said:When I heard that part of the second episode, I immediately recalled this piece from 2011: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/40564/confessions-of-a-black-dc-gentrifier/
Over the years, there has been a couple of articles in this vein but you're absolutely right -- people really don't tend to talk about that group too often. When their voices do manage to peak through though, I find their stories really compelling. -
Urbanization of high skill, high paying jobs is happening throughout the world.
...except in cities where it is not, of course.
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@Supple....the point you make about privilege is right on the mark. There are quite a few college kids on the block where my office is who have no more money than the people they displaced and can't afford the rents (which is why they have roommates) but I'm sure they consider themselves the gentrifiers because, well I have no idea why but privilege surely ranks up there as one of the reasons.
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The phenomenon of people "cashing out" is complex.Many times you are talking about the elderly. People who have raised their families in houses for 30 or even 50 years.While it's true that the houses are selling at record prices, it's not as simple as somebody walking away with $2m in cash, living happily ever after. A lot of people have second mortgages out. Often this is a family which shared the expense of buying the house to begin with between brothers and sisters.This is their retirement. If you are 75 and you sell, you might live another 20 years. If you sunk all your money into your house, whatever money you get out of it when you sell becomes all the money you have to live off of for the next few decades. $1m/20 is only $50k a year. You're going to have health issues, etc. How much is health care for an 85 year old, who needs a live-in nurse, in 2026?A lot of people view the house as money that is going to their entire family. Maybe they have 4 kids and each of those kids has a family. You're talking about distributing this money over a lot of people. The house is the inheritance for all these grown kids and all their grandkids.Remember that people don't necessarily have pensions, retirement accounts, or IRAs and all that. The house stands in for that.There's also the chance that the house continues to increase in value, and that they aren't getting the best deal. It can be a race against the clock: which will happen first, the value of my house reaches $1m? or my hip gives out and needs to be replaced?I looked at a lot of houses and saw a lot of elderly people and heard stories about moving to Florida, moving to the South, buying a condo. But the fact is the math isn't as great as some people make out.
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Rudolf cashing out is only complex if you make it complex.I'm sure everyone has issues and financial snafus that pop up in their lives. However, in my neighborhood people are getting between 1-1.5m for houses now. I would say about half have been in the neighborhood forever the other half since the 90's. The couple I bought from owned the house since 1955. He told me when he sold it to me that he bought it for 43k. They were selling because they were having difficulties getting up and downstairs to use the bathroom.I talked to him about living in the neighborhood, while he didn't have a pension or retirement, he did have houses. Yes houses. How many? 14. That's right. He told me he made a little bit of money here and there and would always save up for another house and then the houses started to make him money. He had been retired since he was 50. Him and his wife were well into their 80's.My point is everyone's story is different. This guy was wearing the same clothes he wore at his retirement party when we went to the closing since "it was the last suit I bought". Looked like a bum but probably worth about 14-20 million.The plans for him and his wife were to move to South Carolina in a custom built single story house and sell off the rest of their properties. His kids had their own jobs and they knew they weren't getting a dime until the couple passed. As for healthcare, I asked him about it since that was the reason they were moving, he said 'we're not rich people when it is our time it is our time.'I do think too many people jump on the bandwagon of healthcare and then act really surprised when the bills start coming. Maybe the old guy I bought from had things figured out...
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I would have to side more with Rudolf, the Limestone I bought in Flatbush 3 yrs ago was from a man who had bought it back in the 70s. It housed 3 generations, one on each floor. In order to survive the recession, they rented out rooms as well as did refi-cashouts.Halfway through the process of buying my building it was disclosed that it would go to short sale due to second mortgages,etc. Fortunately for me it all worked out within 2 months. Not so much for the kind gentleman's family who sold it to me. They were hoping to get something out of the sale to finance his assisted living. When you go to short sale you get zero dollars. The sad thing is he passed away 3 weeks after moving out of his house of 40yrs...so in my opinion most of my neighbors are not raking in the dough when selling their family home, and like most minorities are not able to disperse any sort of generational wealth.
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1- I'm just pointing out that there are people that are making out well, not every story is a heartbreaking.2- There are people that area also hurt by gentrification. Much of the focus is on them, but they aren't the whole story.3- The financial decisions that one chooses to make are up to them. I know people that worked in the same office with wildly different results despite making similar salaries. And it's the junior atty that owns a house in bedstuy not the guy set to make partner because he blows his paychecks eating out all the time and hitting up trendy bars and expensive clothes, ubers everywhere.A lot of people make poor financial decisions especially big ones. I've never been able to fully understand that, not saving for retirement or medical expenses. Buying 4 or 5 dollar coffees EVERYDAY, eating out EVERY NIGHT. Never exercising ( long term healthcare costs), poor hygiene (not brushing/flossing). Buying brand new cars instead of modestly used ones. The name of the game if you want to get rich is buy low sell high and live modestly. I don't know a single person that got wealthy because they drove a mercedes instead of a honda, or because they got starbucks instead of making coffee at home. But those decisions compound one another and lead you down an unsustainable financial path. Making small mistakes makes it easier to make big mistakes.
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doublen00b, I should add that I didn't mean to point a picture that was entirely one-sided about how housing equity has affected people's lives.I agree that it's not all heartbreak.The owners of our house used it as equity of the years. Because we are in Flatbush, and not Prospect Heights or Crown Heights or any of the other trendier locales, it's not worth $1m. But it still managed a huge increase in value over the last decades.Most of the people on our block bought in the 60s and 70s. Prices tended to be around $20,000 - 40,000 for a 2 family house. Now these are worth $750,000 in any condition.Many people took out home equity loans or second mortgages, often several times, up to about $650,000. You can find all this info on ACRIS, the city database.That's a tremendous amount of money by any standard, even if it is dwarfed by the rest of gentrifying Brooklyn. That money was used for home repairs, (no grand upscale kitchen reno's here!) or simply to help families with whatever expenses they had.So even these modest Brooklyn houses were tremendous economic generators. This is not to diminish my point before, which is that selling is not necessarily a windfall.
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Episode 3 was excellent. Lots to think about.There are a lot of parallels with Flatbush/E Flatbush in terms of the changeover in the ethnic makeup of the neighborhood from the 60s to the 70s.Does anyone know if redlining and blockbusting was common everywhere in Brooklyn, or was it just in particular neighborhoods?
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I'm pretty sure it was a pretty common occurrence.
Brownstoner has an excellent primer on it that was posted today: -
The Bank of New York (it was located in the building I then worked in, and I did all my banking there) rejected my mortgage application for a coop apt in 1976. When I asked why, they told me that they did not lend "in that area." Whether that meant Park Slope or all of Brooklyn I do not know. That was clearly redlining by Bank of New York.
Five years later, Citibank rejected my mortgage application for a brownstone in Park Slope. The mortgage VP literally laughed at me. I needed intervention by the CFO of the very large conglomerate I worked for to persuade Citibank to change their mind. Even then, they charged me 17.25% interest. I suspect that was redlining also.
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Unfortunately redlining is still a common occurrence. I tried to insure a few of my client's houses in Clinton Hill with an insurance company I deal with and they were both canceled for undisclosed underwriting reasons. I gave them to another company and I had no problems. I called the VP out on it when I saw him at a dinner and he denied it but we both knew they did. Back in the 70s blockbusting was also something that happened but you know, the people that lived on those blocks were afraid of the unknown I suspect. Neighborhoods such as Park Slope have always been integrated and everyone seemed to get along. I could never understand that whole "white flight" thing. Because if the people buying those houses could afford them they were in the same income level or higher as the people that were already living there.
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This documentary is one of the best I've seen on the topic of white flight:
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Also a great chance to see some vintage '70s CG. Starting at 1:08 running through 1:27. Ooh la la!
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In some instances "the whites" weren't afraid of (aka racist against...) the specific black families who were moving in, but those who they believed would follow.
...but, as the film shows, the whites pre-emptively stuck against the middle class black families who arrived first.
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They most certainly were. As I've said in a previous post when I went to sell my house in Canarsie back in the 80s the house was being shown to quite a few black families. My wonderful neighbors came by and threatened to firebomb me if I sold to them. For some reasons Asians were always ok and no one had a problem when I sold to them.
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I suspect that Asians are considered ok -in part- because they are (demographically speaking) wealthier than blacks or Hispanics.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gaps-great-recession/
...they also may have fewer negative stereotypes associated with them in "US Culture".
Needless to say, lots of factors lead dominant/privileged/wealthy groups and individuals to want to live with each other, and exclude others.
For those who are less fortunate, fewer choices exist.
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I just found this today too:It's a multi part report on East NY, I haven't had the time to get to it. But since episode 2 of the WNYC broadcast was on East NY I thought it was topical.
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