Gentrification creates a stifling homogeneity in urban areas that makes it less suited for the everyday lives of the lower class and more suited towards the leisure and tourism of those with expendable income.
An old, decrepit laundromat gets replaced by an upscale bakery? And people are mad? It’s not that the poor hate organic vegan cupcakes, it’s that most of us don’t have a way to do laundry in our own home.
Run-down corner stores replaced by hand-made designer clothing boutiques? We don’t hate your eco-fabric shawl, but I can’t eat that for dinner after work like I could have a can of beans I grabbed from that corner store when I don’t have time to take the bus to the real grocery store after work.
What gentrification brings in and of itself is not typically bad, it’s that gentrification brings institutions of leisure and pleasure and makes it so that the poor have to go farther out of their way for basic necessities. It turns low-income living spaces into local tourist attractions. It can even create food deserts by putting restaurants, grocery stores, etc. in that the majority of the lower class cannot afford.
Imagine if someone totally renovated your house and turned it into a mini theme park - they took away your sleeping space, where you prepare food, where you clean yourself and get ready for your day, and replaced it with things that will please people who are visiting, who have their own homes they can go back to, who are here not for their entire life but just as a distraction from their otherwise mundane existence. It’s not that you hate theme parks, it’s not like you’ve never been to a theme park and vow to never visit one again. It’s just that you need to live! To survive! And the leisure of those who have more than you should not invalidate your existence.
And that’s why immigration is bad.
??? immigrants aren’t the ones gentrifying neighborhoods, they’re the lower class, what are you talking about
gentrifiers:neighbourhoods::immigrants:nations
#approximations #semi-endorsed
i can’t believe i’m even entering this conversation, but you do realize that (at least in the context of the united states, canada, and western europe), most immigrants are….uh, not wealthy people who would be totally fine staying in their nations of origin and are just swapping countries for funsies, or so they won’t have to pay as much for rent, or what have you? & if there are immigrants who fit that description, they certainly aren’t the immigrants anyone on the anti-immigration side of The Discourse is scaremongering about. like, make an anti-immigration argument if you want, but comparing it to neighborhood gentrification is really odd and off-base.
i get how it could seem like a tempting analogy– you might think “well, from my perspective it sounds like these are both cases of people barging in where they don’t really belong and **~*changing the culture and environment*~** over the objections of the people who already live there– BUT WAIT!!! most leftists think gentrification is BAD and immigration is GOOD (or at least OKAY). ha ha, CHECKMATE, LEFTISTS~~”
like if you only think about it for a few seconds, it’s a pretty good rhetorical “gotcha”
unfortunately, whether you are pro- or anti- immigration, it falls apart after more than a few seconds of thought, especially when it comes in response to a post like this, which emphasizes that the main problem with gentrification isn’t some vague “people moving in where they Don’t Belong” or “neighborhoods Changing Over Time and becoming demographically/culturally different”– it is specifically that upper middle class and wealthy people, who could live almost anywhere they wanted, are displacing poor and working class people, who do not have many options as to where they can go. this particular post is saying that the rich are coming into poor neighborhoods and replacing needed, functional features and businesses that were already there with frivolous luxury and leisure businesses and features that the original residents of the neighborhood can’t even afford. they aren’t just “moving in” and “changing things” or using the resources a place already had to offer– they’re turning a neighborhood/community into a “theme park”, a “luxury” playland for tourists/hipsters.
the immigrants people are arguing about– again, at least in the context of immigration discourse where i live, in the united states– are not people who are wealthy or privileged compared to the vast majority of the country’s actual citizens, and literally no one is claiming that the problem with them is that they’re replacing necessary things with glitzy tourist-trap stuff almost no native-born citizen cares about or can afford. the power dynamic is completely different; the socio-economic implications are completely different, the things people who worry about or dislike immigration fear will happen If This Is Allowed To Continue are completely different. it just isn’t an analogy that holds up, and it makes you sound kind of like you are either embarrassingly ignorant or trolling people when you pull it out, especially without any sort of attempt at justification or extrapolation.
sorry.
but it does.
I did say it was an approximation :)
But I think it holds up better than you say, for two reasons:
1. Immigrants have, almost by definition, a lot more freedom of movement than the native-born working class. They already have some experience of international travel, there’s likely another country where they have citizenship, they rarely have obligations which tie them to a single city or region, and so on. This isn’t the same as the agency granted by huge pots of cash, but it’s more than the native poor have.
2. Immigrants become a lot better off as a result of immigration, while native workers become worse off (although the degree to which this is true is debatable, yes, and may be less important than other factors). Poor people getting richer at the expense of other poor people isn’t unfair in the same way as rich people turning the lives of poor people into theme parks, but that doesn’t automatically make it okay.
Immigrants are coming into native neighborhoods (which to them are abstract entities consisting of some number of their own people and some amount of economic advantage for them, certainly not, you know, neighborhoods, each with its own unique social context, history, set of traditions, etc.) and replacing needed, functional features and businesses that were already there with businesses targeted at immigrants, which the original residents of the neighborhood have no need for, and often can’t even make use of, because the signs aren’t in English and the employees don’t speak English. The natives these immigrants are replacing, however, are almost always working-class, which is why it’s standard for wilfully ignorant, status-signaling Brahmins – note that the person you’re arguing with here has posts about getting art commissions and rejection letters for poems – to concoct a supposedly clear-cut moral distinction between immigration and gentrification.
Tbh some chinese supermarket are kind of a nice innovation for poor people provided it doesn’t displace too much other types of supermarkets.
Yeah and from a purely economic standpoint the incentives to create businesses targeted at english speaking residents is still there in a way that isn’t true with gentrification. Immigrants and natives don’t have the same disparity in terms of ability to influence the market.
I buy a shitload of my food from immigrants’ shops, despite being whitest and nativest native who ever whited, because the immigrant shops sell better and cheaper stuff than the white people shops. And the æsthetic is less corp-y and more human too. And who cares if the employees speak Arabic, and even if they couldn’t speak Finnish (although the ones working the front-end alway can), if they speak €€€.
My favorite snack bar in the Helsinki Railway Station is an immigrant place; the last time I was there the vendor was east asian, there was a sheet of paper scotch-taped on the wall saying in Arabic that someone has a van for rent, I don’t even know what half the foods were, I suspect their compliance of regulations is best described as “creative”, and yeah it’s cheap. Not too far from it there are the corp chain cafes, the finnish equivalents of Starbucks or whatever.
That’s basically the exact inverse of gentrification. Gentrification smells like corp, immigration has the æsthetic of freedom.
3 weeks ago · 30,310 notes · source: soycrates · .permalink
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