Doing Something Real About Gentrification And Displacement

[M II A II R II K]

Doing Something Real About Gentrification And Displacement


May 22, 2017

By Dan Savage

Read More: http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017...d-displacement

.....

Way, way back in the '50s and '60s, people got it into their heads that they had a constitutional right to live in the suburbs and drive in or through the center of a city—to jobs, to stores, to stadiums, to hookers, to suburbs on the other side of the city—going seventy miles an hour.

- Our local politicians can't bring themselves to tell these entitled shits the truth: It's never going to be the 1960s around here again, when expressways were expressways, not parking lots. We can't build our way out of this. We can only build alternatives to cars, aka mass transit. (Preferably rapid transit, which is grade-separated transit. Without taking lanes away from cars, which we aren't going to do, BRT is not rapid transit. It's an oxymoron.)

- Complain about your commute and you'll be told to pick one: traffic (that you and your car help create) or transit (that you and your taxes help subsidize). Politicians in cities with functional (that's functional, not perfect) mass transit systems—where they still spend a lot of money maintaining roads—don't have to waste billions of dollars on bullshit tunnels supposedly designed to "preserve capacity" but really intended to assuage the irrational anger of entitled drivers whose votes they need.

- At roughly same time suburbanites got it into their heads that they're entitled to drive through the center of the city at 70 MPH, urbanites got it into their heads that the center of the city is cheapest place to live. ("Downtown, where the folks are broke!") And for a while the center of the city was the cheapest place to live. But that's no longer the case. Before we get to why downtown and inner-city neighborhoods are no longer the cheapest places to live, let's pause to reflect on what made them the cheapest place to live.

- Downtown, the city center, close-in neighborhoods—for decades residential and commercial rents were low and you could find a giant loft space where you could make art (or drink about making art) or a cheap storefront where you could start a theater or a bar or a cult. But this was an historical anomaly driven by two things lefties hate: racism and the automobile. Shitty people abandoned the city: racist whites fled the city and expressways and cars made it possible for urbanophobes to exploit everything a city had to offer.

- Throughout much of the 20th century, American households reported a preference for suburban living. Not everyone was able to afford to move to the suburbs (and many were racially excluded) but even central city residents commonly told survey researchers that they would rather be living in the suburbs. The result was that, as people sorted within regions, the people with the most economic (and racial) power chose the most desirable locations (at the edges) while the less powerful were left with the less desirable center. There has been a shift, and now a growing share of the powerful prefer the center.

- The population of a region is largely determined by the number of jobs available. When we add jobs, we create new demand for housing. If we build housing at the same rate that we create jobs, housing prices remain relatively constant. When we occasionally build more housing than we need, prices fall, and when we build too little housing, prices rise. Across the country we have been systematically building too little housing for a very long time now and high housing prices and rents are the utterly predictable result.

- Housing scarcity—exacerbated by the ridiculous amount of this city zoned for single-family housing—deserves as much blame for the displacement crisis as gentrification. More. And unlike gentrification ("a once in a lifetime tectonic shift in consumer preferences"), scarcity and single-family zoning are two things we can actually do something about. Rezone huge swaths of the city. Build more units of affordable housing, do away with parking requirements, and—yes—let developers develop.

- There actually is something we can do about gentrification and displacement. We can't stop it. Snark can't halt tectonic shifts. The thing we can do? It's the same thing we can do about about traffic: build a truly regional, truly rapid transit system. A comprehensive regional rapid transit system will make displacement—being forced to move from one neighborhood to another by economic forces beyond the control of our local elected officials—less devastating and less isolating for those who will inevitably be impacted.

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[BrownTown]

I couldn't make it through the whole article because the author is such an entitled cry baby it's impossible to take him seriously.

[dc_denizen]

FYI, the author is dan savage, the sex columnist

[mhays]

He's actually a smart guy on this stuff, a friend to urbanity in Seattle for many years.

I looked up his job title...Editorial Director a the Stranger, one of Seattle's main weekly papers. Not just the column.

[M II A II R II K]

For medium sized cities LRT and proper BRT is not enough. To move rapidly over long distance an ICTS Skytrain system with stations miles apart should be included.

Larger cities can increase integrated Commuter Rail stations and access to it to do that job.

[mhays]

We need higher-capacity rail, yes ($70 billion in funding has been voter-approved). But Seattle's version of light rail is higher-capacity than most. Much of the existing starter system and most of the planned additions are grade separated.

[M II A II R II K]

But there should be more express to cover long distances faster like Paris has as an alternative to the subway system to sit through too many stops.

[pdxtex]

were going about it completely wrong....build a second CBD, and a third and fourth. connect all the dots instead of trying to flush all the crap down ONE central drain.....we need multiple nodes of business and housing. no more doughnuts. the suburbs should ascend as places of housing and commerce, and become.....cities! but also with multi-use, small footprints in mind. there is no use trying to socially retrofit neighborhoods. let them evolve as the market dictates. but change where the market does business so the wealth and expenses are spread around. the system isnt broken, but the model is.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by BrownTown

I couldn't make it through the whole article because the author is such an entitled cry baby it's impossible to take him seriously.

The snark comes from his many years writing a gay advice to the love-lorn column (widely read when same-sex marriage was just a vision) and he's done a lot for gays and lesbians, chief among them starting the "It Gets better" effort to prevent gay teen suicide. For years he started his journalistic efforts with a standard phrase, "Hey, faggot!", meant to reclaim the well-known epithet. He's maturing now though.

As for his point, I am pretty proud to hail from one major city that halted the freeway expansion mid-expansion when it was happening in the 1950s and 1960s and has now torn down much of what managed to get put up. We still have one freeway the manages to make it all the way throught the city: I-80/US101 which comes up the peninsula from the airport and the suburbs beyond and crosses the Bay Bridge to Oakland.

But we never got this:

1948 Freeway Plan

https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2013/08/01...reeway-revolt/

and pretty much all we have now is this:


https://www.google.com/search?q=exis...4D57loIuLO91M: