Quote:
Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
It's not something you say in polite society because it's widely understood that people who aren't classist or racists etc. don't consider other people to "be problems" ie to lack fundamental worth as humans. There's been a long history of people willing to deny the fundamental humanity of others and seeing whole groups of people are problems needing to be dealt with, the most famous being Jews, Native Americans, and Blacks, and if we've learned anything from history it's that if such thinking is allowed to persist unchallenged, things don't end well.
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It's also not always applicable even if you were to consider the poor, minorities, or especially poor minorities to be a problem. There's the idea that gentrification is always the process of taking a poor area and turning it into a rich one. Sometimes, gentrification is simply the process of taking a stable, safe area, and making it unaffordable for all but the richest. I've seen it in Asheville: Asheville isn't a city where house-flippers have a lot to do because there aren't many houses left that need a rehab. In-town neighborhoods have never been more popular, and Asheville has never had a larger population. However, what's happening -- it was in process for a while, and the pandemic sent it into hyperdrive -- is that people from outside, who don't have to work in Asheville for crappy $10/hour Asheville wages, come in, bring their money, and think nothing of dropping half a million on a small, crummy bungalow. They're pouring in, driving up housing prices, which drives up property taxes, and either the current residents get to where they can't afford the taxes or can't afford a new house if they've outgrown the old one. They leave, and someone else moves in from Seattle, DC, or New York, and goes wild over the bargain they've found for a mere $600,000, for nearly a thousand square feet! Never mind that same house would have cost $450,000 five years ago, and would have come in at less than $200,000 ten years ago.
Asheville wasn't poor when all of this started. Most of the poor people who weren't in the public housing had already been pushed out. What's going on there is that gentrification is occurring by inflating the property values, and it's pushing out the middle class. And considering that most of Asheville's minorities had already been pushed out by the constant influx of rich old white people, gentrification in Asheville -- much to the confusion of folks like jtown and jmeck, I would imagine -- is largely affecting...
white... people.