I am increasingly convinced that gentrification is an unstoppable force. If you don’t regulate aggressively, people buy up the properties and develop them, the values go up, and it pushes out the poor people and attracts more rich people. If you do regulate, the properties don’t change hands as much and don’t get all that much development, but the values still go up as the economy does, there’s not as much new development to drive costs down, and so it still pushes out the poor people and attracts more rich people. This is grossly oversimplifying, obviously, but I’m not sure what can actually be done to counter gentrification.
Using “poor” and “rich” very loosely, here, obviously, as you hardly need to be in the 1% to afford property in a gentrified neighborhood, and you don’t need to be below the poverty line to be pushed out of a gentrified neighborhood. It sure helps, though.
This can be done: when a neighborhood is having new development, give everyone currently living in it a bostadsrett to continue living there for not much more than they were originally paying. If you have 10 000 poor people, and rebuild the place to house 10 000 poor and 10 000 rich people, the original people don’t need to move away; and if they do, they’ll be compensated with a lot of money. It’s ugly and regulation-y but it’s way better than the mess we currently have.
(It also seems like it would force development to be more dense than it otherwise would be, to allow enough rich people to move in in addition to the poor people to make development profitable, which reduces sprawl and makes public transportation more workable etc.; if I had to run a city according to a regulation pulled out of my posterior in five minutes this one doesn’t sound utterly terrible)
2 months ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower · 9 notes · source: 2centjubilee · .permalink
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2centjubilee liked this- 2centjubilee reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:
This seems like a reasonable kludge, but I feel it incentivizes the poor people moving out when the cost of living rises...
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socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from 2centjubilee and added:This can be done: when a neighborhood is having new development, give everyone currently living in it a bostadsrett to...
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