[llamaorama]

If gentrification doesn't exist, why can't I afford to live in New York or San Francisco?

I guess what's being measured by this study is displacement of existing residents? That this study found no link between gentrification and displacement must be explained somehow since it is impossible for someone whose total income from all sources is $2,000 a month to pay $2,100 a month in rent.

Is it because gentrification in fact occurs more slowly than the natural turnover of renters? Also if this research is done in cities that typically have things like rent control and public housing, it means that the kind of people most susceptible to being displaced aren't. Also because they are looking at East Coast cities at concentrated low income ghettos its not a surprise that when low income people do move out, they end up better off, because anywhere is better than some housing project in the Bronx.

However, what about the working or lower middle class, which is distinct from the indigent minority class? The people not protected by a myriad of various public programs that keep them in subsidized or rent controlled housing. My beef with gentrification isn't so much neighborhood change. It's the fact that entire metro areas have become essentially off limits to people making the median household income now. Yes, technically a household making 40k a year could live in the Bay Area, but it's a rotten existence for a family with kids to live in a one bedroom apartment in an San Leandro dingbat while saving $0 a month. Yet these metro areas are hoarding jobs and wealth extracted from the rest of the country. The author says some negative things about people who want to YIMBY their way out of affordability, too. It seems like what the author wants to do is defend a status quo - the one where it is a bureaucratic pain in the ass to build anything, but where money still gets its way so things for the rich are built after a lot of pointless politicking. This would be the favored scenario for some elitist, no surprise right?