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Originally Posted by sopas ej
I don't know if this is LA specific, but I thought it was kind of funny---because it's true!
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I had a much less positive reaction to this article. I thought it was just a festival of cliches about the evils of gentrification. There are no doubt serious discussions to be had about the problems associated with gentrification, but this article did not address any of them.
I don't have access to the neighborhood-level census data for LA. I just wonder how much gentrification has actually taken place in the neighborhoods that the LA Times cites as ground zero for that phenomenon. Have Highland Park, Atwater Village and Echo Park actually gotten significantly wealthier in the last 20 years? And since the author implies that gentrification means whites replacing non-whites, have these areas gotten noticeably less non-white? Maybe they have, but a new cutesy coffee or cupcake shop is not proof that that is happening. In any case, gentrification often entails wealthier non-white people moving into a neighborhood, which is a detail that the LA Times rarely highlights. Given that non-Hispanic whites are an ever smaller proportion of LA's population, I wouldn't be surprised if most gentrifiers do tend to be non-white.
The black and white paint scheme that the real estate columnist obsesses over in this piece is not a mark of gentrification. It is just a mark of new infill construction more generally. The house flippers and small contractors that put up these houses are not cutting edge architects or urban designers. They are just following the current trend that favors the black and white color scheme. When they build or remodel a house in Highland Park they tend to use those colors because that's what's trendy now. Many of the new McMansions currently replacing more modest post war housing in places like Manhattan Beach or Redondo Beach are using the same colors. These are not gentrifying neighborhoods. They are already solidly upper middle class. Same point about horizontal front yard fences, which the author appears to envision as a bigger threat to social justice than the Koch Brothers. Will the columnist be unsatisfied until every horizontal slat wood fence is replaced by a ratty looking cyclone fence?
I would just conclude by saying that gentrification is not the biggest problem facing LA.