Quote:
Originally Posted by LouisVanDerWright
This is the biggest fact that detractors ignore: poverty is already a high displacement condition.
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Exactly. The problem is that it's very counter-intuitive to think about the dynamics of how people move over time and over their life-cycle, and it's hard to properly think through the various counterfactual scenarios of
what would happen if gentrification did not occur.
In general, people tend to move a lot (all neighborhoods have a "churn" rate of say around 5%, with better neighborhoods churning less and bad neighborhoods churning more). And, in general, people tend to move to better neighborhoods over time, since they become wealthier or more skilled with age and learn about opportunities over time.
So imagine a poor family of five living in a bad neighborhood:
If the neighborhood
didn't change in quality, this family would likely end up leaving in around 10 years for normal life-cycle reasons (e.g., kids grow up and leave, parents' make enough money to leave, random job or family moves, etc.). Meaning, these kids had to spend 10 years breathing the fumes of a harmful environment.
If the neighborhood were to
get worse during this time, we would likely see the family move sooner and to a better neighborhood than the deteriorating one, but one nonetheless worse than the one they would have
otherwise ended up in--due to the lasting impact of spending time in a bad place. Worse, the kids are significantly worse off due to the time they spent in a terrible location.
If the neighborhood were to
gentrify during this time, empirically we would expect them to stay longer but eventually move to a worse neighborhood than the gentrified one--but, nonetheless, a neighborhood
better than the one they would have otherwise ended up in. Meaning, yes they eventually get "priced out" of the nice area, but they would have 1) left anyway, and 2) ended up somewhere even worse if they hadn't spent time in a gentrifying area. Plus, the kids are much better off in the long-term due to spending time in a safer and better-educated environment.
What this pattern means is that we see people leaving gentrifying areas and going to worse ones, which makes for good news stories about the harms of gentrification. But that misses the fact that they would have ended up somewhere
even worse had gentrification not occurred.
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None of this is meant to suggest we shouldn't care about the poor or alleviating poverty, or even trying to help improve their neighborhoods and make them affordable. But good intentions don't justify bad policy, and a lot of the anti-gentrification policies (namely, limiting development) likely cause more harm than good to the very people they're supposed to help. These policies preserve the "neighborhood" at the expense of the people inhabiting it.