Quote:
Originally Posted by whatnext
Has Vancouver reached the second wave of gentrificaton?
The Rash of Restaurant Closures Shows Seattle Has Reached the Second and Terminal Stage of Gentrification
by Charles Mudede • Jan 15, 2020 at 3:54 pm
...there is more to the story of gentrification, and it's only now becoming more apparent—and thanks to that Stanford professor, we can give it a name: second-wave gentrification. It is the other side of the sinister mirror that reflects what the Specials described in 1980 as a "Ghost Town." It is a city that is no longer for people or even for businesses, but just for money, which is mostly invisible. Those empty stores in Vancouver BC and San Francisco are not alone. They are accompanied by an increase of empty homes and luxury condos. The work of urban planner and professor Andrew Yan has revealed the large number of empty residences in Vancouver's value-heated housing market. Yan's findings match those mentioned in the Guardian article, when Daub, during a digression, offers another reason why the stores are empty in San Francisco: "no one is living in the condos at all." He writes: "[A] recent report found there are roughly 38,000 empty homes in San Francisco – three to five times the city’s number of homeless people."
Ruth Glass described the processes that lead to gentrification (a dramatic reduction of the government regulations in the housing market, little to no public or social housing, and the removal of all meaningful capital and price controls). But she did not describe the moment when gentrification transitions from its entrepreneurial stage (a rise in business investments, fancy restaurants, expensive supermarkets, and what have you) to the stage when the housing and commercial real estate values are thoroughly captured by speculators. This class of capitalists leads a city directly to second-wave gentrification, which is when the economic realities of the spatial city are completely separated from the global schemes and capital flows of speculators. Small businesses become ghosts, and not even souls occupy the luxury apartments...
...Speculators will use their political power to press for the next step, which I call billionaire urbanism. This is when a city has no middle, no professionals, no culture, no public spaces, nor even the standard amenities of first-wave gentrification. It is money purified by architecture. And because so much wealth is more and more concentrated at a top that's only diminishing from view, billionaire urbanism can actually survive with complete indifference to market forces, with the competition of entrepreneurs, with the laws of supply and demand. All the value generated by those at the bottom melts into the sky-reflecting glass of empty skyscrapers.
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/202...gentrification |
The other aspect of this is also the corporatism that is swallowing Vancouver.
Only large sized corporations with massive pockets are able to take risks when even simple projects extend into millions.
By the time permits, planning, build out, lease costs, etc are considered a million dollars is easy to spend.
This doesn't attract creative entrepreneurs, this attracts status quo that is only interested in numbers.
I do find the future of a few cities very curious. If I'm around I want to know what happens to the tech hubs in 20 years.
For all the preaching of sustainability and green washing, I think the West Coast is primed for dramatic collapse, on a long term scale.
The ideologies in Cascadia are leading to some really twisted interpretations of what is best and I think every trend is accelerating, while governments double down on failing ideas.
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