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Originally Posted by Barbarossa
The problem I have with gentrification is not the gentrification itself, but the fact that a city that needs gentrification has underlying problems in the first place. For example, great dense cities like Paris, Moscow, Istanbul, Cairo, etc. do not need gentification because they have always been great, big, dense cities with good architecture.
Gentrification can never replace the solid robust urbanization that built these cities in the first place. Real urban growth would be a high density version of the sprawling high growth suburbs of Houston rather than a handfull some luxury infill buildings downtown.
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What do you think "solid robust urbanization" results from? Do you really just think Istanbul, Paris, et. al. have just existed for time immemorial? No, all great urban areas are the result of centuries if not millenia of gentrification cycles. In the past the ups and downs were usually determined by conquests, natural phenomena, or the fortunes of whatever empire governed the city. Today they are largely economic waves like the one that broke on America's rust belt over the last few decades.
But that's the point, these ups and downs are normal. Not only are they normal, but they are
essential to the development of healthy, robust, cities. Do you think Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood which was built by Czech immigrants in the 1800's would be nearly as interesting as it is today if it hadn't fallen into disrepair, been picked up out of the gutter by the Mexican immigrant population, and well cared for until today when a new wave of intense development is sweeping the area updating buildings and filling in vacant lots? No, it's these changes over time that allow cities to accumulate varied and interesting quirks and details.
Quote:
Originally Posted by emathias
What does this even mean? I'm less versed in the other cities you named, but various Paris neighborhoods have gentrified multiple times in the history of Paris, and that's also true of Istanbul. Given that you appear to be wrong about those two cities I am going to guess you're wrong about the others, too. There haven't really been recent gentrifications in Cairo because it's been on a relative downswing since the British left so there was nothing to drive gentrification, which requires at least some sectors to be growing robustly to drive the economics of gentrification. If all sectors are in decline, it just can't happen.
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Well that's just it, there are little ups and downs like most gentrification complaints arise from, then there are the ups and downs of empire. Most of the historical "great cities" have seen centuries of global ups and downs. How many times has Paris, for example, been on top of the world only to be surrounded and beseiged a few years later? In just the past 300 years it must have happened close to a dozen times. American cities have never had to deal with that. Many great cities were leveled in WWII, American cities were untouched. Yet we got the bright idea to deal with their "problems" (which were really just the effects of a synched depreciation cycle as I'll describe further below) by visiting destruction on our inner cities as much or more than war had wrought on our counterparts cities overseas.
The post-war destruction of inner city Chicago (for example, many American cities were hit the same way, Chicago is just such a prime case study of this) was very much on the scale of one of these global ups and downs. I think urban renewal, blight, and freeway projects probably destroyed more acres of urban fabric here than the Chicago Fire of 1871 did. Neighborhoods were less completely leveled, but the destruction was over a much much larger area.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ant131531
Gentrifcation hurts legacy cities more than newer cities IMO. One that has established ethnic neighborhoods with unique, ethnic shops and restaurants that make the area interesting in the first place so NYC, SF, Chicago, Philly, and Boston. It's not going to hurt a sunbelt city that isn't very built up in the first place since gentrifcation brings new things and newly built density to a neighborhood that it never had in the first place.
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Ah, but there is no need for gentrification in a young, sunbelt city. There will be decades down the road, but if a city is that new, so are the buildings. This gets at the real driver of "gentrification". Gentrification is really just a term for "the upwards leg of the depreciation cycle". All improvements to real estate depreciate over time, they just do, they wear out. The thing that caused American cities to be so devastated after WWII was that they were young cities (much like the Sun Belt is today). Midwestern American cities in particular were industrial boomtowns. Chicago, for example, built entire neighborhoods in less than a decade. That sounds great right?
Well the issue is when you build an entire neighborhood of two flats in a decade then they are all synced in the depreciation cycle. The roofs all go bad at the same time, the windows all get drafty, the building systems are all the same age and therefore go obsolete at the same time. A neighborhood that was impressively constructed and brand new in 1910 is all great up until about 1960 or so when all the buildings are now 50 years old and in need of major capital upgrades. That's not healthy, especially not when you have complete economic collapse of the industrial sector which employed all the people who these homes were built for.
So it's no wonder these "old" by American standards inner cities collapsed, they haven't had time to decouple the depreciation cycles of areas where everything was basically deteriorating in lockstep. That process takes time and it REQURIES gentrification. When an area begins to gentrify, more and more units are upgraded and their depreciation cycle is renewed. Instead of having 100% of buildings on a block basically in varying states of 1910 original condition, you suddenly have 20% in 2017 brand new condition. Maybe there's a few lots where buildings were torn down. Now you have maybe 10-20% more that are in 2017 new construction condition. Then there's a recession like 2008, 30% of the houses in the area go into foreclosure and are sold at firesale prices, investors snap them up and gut them. Now all of the sudden you have 20% of buildings on any block renovated between 2000 and 2008, 10-20% of buildings new construction, 30% of buildings renovated between 2010 and 2017, etc. You even have some older buildings that haven't been gutted since they were built holding out. Suddenly the depreciation mix of the area looks a lot healthier.
THAT is the process that, over 100's of years, creates healthy, MATURE, urban cores like Paris or London or Istanbul. In those cities you have 10, 100, 200, and 500 year old buildings that are in all sorts of different states of repair. As such they all have different users and rent levels and create a diverse and interesting urban environment.
The issue you have in a city like Chicago is that Chicago is brand spanking new as cities go and only a handful of neighborhoods have gone through more than one development cycle. Neighborhoods like Logan Square are just now completing their first gentrification cycle as buildings that have basically been untouched for 100 years have been being gutted en masse since 2000. this is necessary and ultimately helpful for Chicago as a whole. The more neighborhoods we stabilize in this manner, the more we can whittle away and neighborhoods with much more dismal prospects in the future.
I mean one of the things that fascinates me most about Chicago is what once was, the beautiful landmarks or even relatively plain jane housing stock we've just thrown in the trash heap. But what fascinates me even more is what once wasn't. I.e. huge vacant lots you see that make you go "damn, there must have been something awesome and huge there". Then you look it up and it was a 10,000 SF single story shitty warehouse with a massive loading yard or look it up and see it's always been vacant, no one ever bothered to build anything there. That's exactly my point, most American cities, even some of the most urban of American cities, are not at all mature. Chicago is not "done" yet. We have these sprawling industrial sites pock marking the entire city that, in any centuries old European city, would have been filled in centuries ago.
That's beautiful though, we have an opportunity here in Chicago to grow intelligently. We have more than enough room to accommodate everything that comes with growth and hopefully we can fill in those holes in the urban fabric over the next few generations. I often feel like one of those Chicago newsmen on a train to NYC the day after the fire, telling people "you will never again have such an opportunity for profit in your life as you have in the rebuilding of Chicago". And it's really true because Chicago's long late 20th century decay was really the second great fire, a prairie fire making room for new shoots the next spring.
This applies to many American cities and I think it is becoming more and more accepted by the day. The booms we are seeing in central US cities are as intense as the booms that built them in the first place. And that is unequivocally good.
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