Posted Mar 18, 2020, 8:57 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
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Exploring the Architecture of Gentrification
Exploring the Architecture of Gentrification
March 5, 2020
By Allyn West
Read More: https://www.texasobserver.org/gentri...-architecture/
Quote:
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The rules and systems that have produced this standardized architecture financial ones, largely determined by banks and property appraisers, as well as political ones create a kind of socioeconomic standardization, determining who can afford to live in the neighborhoods experiencing rapid gentrification. That, too, is a complicated word. Cities can’t be expected to preserve older neighborhoods forever unchanged. But they seem baffled about how and even whether to balance the encouragement of new development with the engagement and enrichment of the longtime residents of those neighborhoods.
- Though the size of the average American house has doubled since the 1960s, surging toward 2,600 square feet, the size of these neighborhoods just minutes from everywhere, as real estate agents and commercial builders like to say, close to jobs and downtowns has not. — That space comes at a premium, and people for whom “affordable housing” is something other people worry about are willing and able to pay it. They want to be able to walk to the coffee shop even if the baristas who pull their shots of espresso can’t. — Ignored for years, redlined by the federal government, and systematically denied the loans that would have allowed the families who lived there to build generational wealth, these “hot,” “new” neighborhoods are being “discovered.”
- For someone to move in, someone else has to move out. So, in East Austin, in Houston’s Freedmen’s Town and Third Ward and Montrose, in Dallas’ Bishop Arts and Oak Cliff, among other gentrifying and -fied neighborhoods, the architectural language (what architects call “vernacular”) has become inseparable from the vocabulary of policy, where other complicated words, like “displacement,” “segregation,” “inequity,” and “NIMBYism,” are warring furiously. — Maybe the saddest part is how few new Texas houses have porches, one of the features of older residential architecture that served as a gesture of welcome. — Should the market make all the decisions? Is there value in promoting diversity, rather than actively subsidizing homogeneity?”
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Is this Houston? Dallas? Austin? San Antonio? That it is impossible to tell is telling. (Second Ward, Houston)
You might have trouble telling which one of these is yours after a few cocktails at the hip new bar down the street. (Midtown, Houston)
Hollywood/Santa Monica, Dallas
Cars first (East Austin)
Second Ward, Houston
Practical, but ugly (Second Ward, Houston)
Midtown, Houston
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ASDFGHJK
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