Riverdale Rink Rat
Senior Member
I repeat...
shoo.
shoo.
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I am influenced to some degree by the processes going on here. Chicago is actually the playground, the backyard where so many of these processes occurred. Now look, while America is not Canada nor England, the fact remains that Gentrification emerged in the Big Anglophone cities. Toronto was one of the early ones actually. Now hey, classical gentrification has mutated in certain places, as there is for example... oh... tourism gentrification - french quarter of New Orleans. We are not dealing with these detailed things here. We are dealing with the general process which seems to be going on in most major cities.
This is not american cultural baggage that I bring. These are serious issues that happen not just in the US. It is, I would say, I common process that evolved from the Anglo-phone world, a process in which Toronto was at the forefront.
Hold it. Stop right there. Most people who are getting displaced are renters, not owners.
I am influenced to some degree by the processes going on here. Chicago is actually the playground, the backyard where so many of these processes occurred. Now look, while America is not Canada nor England, the fact remains that Gentrification emerged in the Big Anglophone cities. Toronto was one of the early ones actually. Now hey, classical gentrification has mutated in certain places, as there is for example... oh... tourism gentrification - french quarter of New Orleans. We are not dealing with these detailed things here. We are dealing with the general process which seems to be going on in most major cities.
This is not american cultural baggage that I bring. These are serious issues that happen not just in the US. It is, I would say, I common process that evolved from the Anglo-phone world, a process in which Toronto was at the forefront.
Ohh, the humanity. How dare people want to remedy failed urban experiments like Cabrini Green. Filthy capitalists. This may surprise you but poor people don't like being segregated into homogeneous ghettos. In Toronto at least, experiments with mixed market housing have exclusively been preferred to homogeneous income communities by both market residents and low income residents. In Regent Park rundown units are being replaced and new retail being introduced thanks to abandoning the idea that poor places should stay poor.They do not guide them at all. They just flush them out. In Chicago there has been much work on tearing up former public housing and replacing it with mixed income communities. Oh and guess what, the former residents get allocated oh say between 25 and 50 percent of the new low income in the mixed thing. And then that slowly is reduced by the time of finishing to about 5 percent. Nobody gives a damn what happens to the former residents. Nobody. The local government only cares to help the rich class, the developers.
Who woulda thought, gay couples and espresso bars don't make for lively neighborhoods, heavy industry does. I will go out on a limb and assume that you have never actually lived near a manufacturing plant. I went to school next to a toilet factory, let me say I would have loved it to be replaced by lofts.Change has been for the most part the removel/obliteration of manufacturing from both country and city. This is the change that has damned cities and communities.
No, arson and intimidation are not "very common." That is simply false. In Toronto, there has been no major cases of coffee bar owners breaking the legs of the porn shops they are trying to replace. No vegan IT consultants "intimidating" the drug dealers out.Arsons, intimidation and such things are very common in this. So that's why I said literally.
Its not involuntary. I can't afford to live on 5th Avenue, it doesn't mean there is something less than fair going on.Involuntary movement is not voluntary. People move because they can not afford it, not because they really want to move.
Huh? That doesn't even make sense. What you said was that gentrification is bad because it doesn't produce jobs for locals. The reality of life is that almost nobody in any income bracket lives near to their job. If jobs are created thanks to gentrification which otherwise wouldn't have, then the economic benefits are clear. And what is it with people who don't take economics behaving as though production and consumption are somehow separate? You can't have one without the other. For something to be consumed it has to be produced, first.Oh I am very well aware of consumption explanations of gentrification. But it is big ignorance to avoid the production explanations.
My god, you sound more and more pompous with each word. The only person you are "beating into the ground" is yourself with your bombastic rhetoric and poor grasp of the issues and outright lies.Oh yeah? Looks like we have a wise guy here. We know what we do to them - beat them down into the ground by showing how wrong they are. Prepare to be shamed.
No, my point was clearly not that. My point was that you have to be a total idiot to issue some banal statement like "very few people say that the old communities like or benefit from gentification.[sic]" Its simply not true. You only arrive at this ridiculous "consensus" by limiting your research to urban geography and sociology, ignoring the more pertinent field of economics and commerce. Not to mention then going on to slag well respected scholars like Lance Freeman with prosaic arguments such as "nobody agrees with him" because he doesn't fit your hackneyed stereotypes of consensus.1) Your point here assumes that scholars are never opposed to gentrification. Have you ever looked into the actual literature of gentrification? You clearly have not. Most of the known scholars in this field are against gentrification. They are mainly geographers and sociologists.
How the hell could you be studying anything "extensively" and slag something without reading it, then go on to slag others for not conforming? Let alone barbarous arguments about tearing of assholes. Here is a wild suggestion, if you stop exclusively researching authors on the basis of whether or they agree or disagree with globalization, you might not come of as such an amateur. If you are too lazy to actually read books that you may disagree with, at least go to Amazon and read the reviews for Lance Freeman's book. He is hardly the pariah you seem to think he is.2) I know Freeman very well. He wrote that book there goes the hood - and trust me, I do plan on buying it sooner or later. I am currently studying gentrification extensively, and after my current book I plan to read one by a well acclaimed Neil Smith. Smith tore Freeman and extra a$$#0|3 in his damning review of the there goes the hood book. Smith is one of the biggest experts on gentrification and is a big opponent of it. Similarly there are many scholars who are. Look into David Harvey, he might enlighten you a bit....
Freshman approach? Hah, what a fool to throw such accusations when you do not even know the literature. Freshman yourself my boy. "facepalm"
Believe it or not, in order to rent something someone has to own it.Hold it. Stop right there. Most people who are getting displaced are renters, not owners.
Sneaky capitalists. Then again, according to you poor people prefer living next to smokestacks and other poor people, so maybe you actually believe that.It's not always dumps. The media and developers sometimes portray certain places as dumps on purpose, in order to get support for their project.
Rent controls? Is this a joke? Even left wing economists like Paul Krugman have seen rent controls for the scam they are. Nothing decimates the rental stock faster than rent controls. Its clear you didn't even take high school economics, but if you limit the ability a society can invest into rental stock via price floors, what do you expect would happen to the supply?Excellent question. This is where the whole problem lies... in manufacturing leaving the city in this era of neoliberal globalization. And hey, top experts in the field share this opinion, it is not me shitting out rants.
An alternative idea is this - preventing neighborhoods from deteriorating by imposing rent control, so that former renters do not get flushed out. Furthermore, it really depends where one is. For example, in Chicago, there has been so much segregation... that is not helpful, as it often creates ghettos.
Neighborhoods have fallen apart because of people like you. Rent controls producing urban decay and blight, zoning to discourage middle and upper class residents from moving in and this idea you have that poor people don't know how to live. You even answered your own question, if you are asking why neighborhoods fell apart to allow gentrification to occur later. The logical rearrangement of that is that we (you, or your idea specifically) prompted the neighborhoods to fall apart to stop them from gentrifying.Gentrification usually deals with the displacement of the poor, not the displacement of the middle class. The questions we need to ask is why has a neighborhood been allowed to fall into the decay in order to allow gentrification to start later on.
Here, there are quite a few neighbourhoods made up of post-war high rises that dot the city. Some of these neighbourhoods have become notorious for their levels of poverty, etc. Let me be clear here: I'm not talking about government housing, but privately owned rentals. For some reason these neighbourhoods are pretty resistant to gentrification, and I think that removes some of the confrontation from gentrification here. If these people lived in structures and neighbourhoods more conducive to gentrification (i.e. more attractive to gentrifiers), the displacement of the poor argument might hold more water here, but for now these neighbourhoods remain too old to be new and too new to be old. Just a theory.
Gentrification is a very broad term, and there will be substantial differences in how it plays out for anyone of probably hundreds of reasons. You do project American assumptions about gentrification on to Toronto.
It depends. Some do like it, and some despise it.but gentrification does not mean renter displacement and does not require it. Areas with a high rates of home ownership can and do gentrify, and it usually works out pretty well financially for the displaced.
In the so called third wave of gentrification, since the 1990s, local governments have actively participated in helping gentrification boom. They did so by doing what they could to help the developers gentrify. Since the 1990s the primary force in gentrification is the big time developers themselves, not the small pioneers who go in and rehab a house in which to live in. The process since the 1990s has been going as faster than ever, and with more government support than ever. These zoning laws and whatnot... they're useless. They get adjusted on purpose so that the developer will be helped.Tenant protection laws, zoning laws, etc. all can affect gentrification making the process easier or harder on the displaced population, perhaps even limiting how many are displaced or how quickly the process happens.
Race has not played a role anywhere in the gentrification process in quite some time. The only way that race can even be an issue is if the lower class is of a certain race. Gentrification does not care who who is. Class is the only thing that matters. There are class differences.here are also huge cultural differences between cities that affect how gentrification plays out. The blacks vs. gays baggage simply does not exist in Toronto the way it does in various American cities. Race doesn't play the same role here at all.
From what I have seen, most gentrification that has occurred in Toronto has been south of the bloor-danforth line, where there are few highrise complexes. One interesting thing in Toronto is that there are many more highrises than in the US, and boy do I love them. At any rate, gentrification will probably creep up and reach those places sooner or later. Cabrini Green fell in Chicago, and that model can be used elsewhere. The difference is that the sheer size of highrises is far greater in Toronto. Plus, there has been less "disinvestment".And consider that Canadian cities and American cities developed (sometimes very) differently. Maybe it's the post-war slab that makes gentrification in Toronto different from that in Chicago. Here, there are quite a few neighbourhoods made up of post-war high rises that dot the city. Some of these neighbourhoods have become notorious for their levels of poverty, etc. Let me be clear here: I'm not talking about government housing, but privately owned rentals. For some reason these neighbourhoods are pretty resistant to gentrification, and I think that removes some of the confrontation from gentrification here. If these people lived in structures and neighbourhoods more conducive to gentrification (i.e. more attractive to gentrifiers), the displacement of the poor argument might hold more water here, but for now these neighbourhoods remain too old to be new and too new to be old. Just a theory.
Did I say that it was invented in the post 1980 realm? Don't put words into my mouth. Some things that resembled it were first recorded in the 1930s, but it actually started as a real process in the 1950s and 1960s. It was rather sporadic at first. And it did take place in the big time cities of the anglophone world first.Gentrification was not invented in the neoliberal (post-1980) Anglosphere as people often believe.
After reading your post where you were perhaps trying to sound smart, mentioning harvey and others... I beg to differ with your conclusion.In light of this, you can't really accuse Toronto of falling prey to the same forces of gentrification that swept across American cities. It was a totally different kettle of fish.
It takes time. It's a process called Super-Gentrification, where the rich displace the middle class.Very rarely will you see a new super rich neighbourhood pop up in an established city simply because the critical mass of people and land/buildings generally is not available to create another enclave of giant homes on giant lots.
Cabrini Green was once a good place in case you did not know.Ohh, the humanity. How dare people want to remedy failed urban experiments like Cabrini Green. Filthy capitalists. This may surprise you but poor people don't like being segregated into homogeneous ghettos. In Toronto at least, experiments with mixed market housing have exclusively been preferred to homogeneous income communities by both market residents and low income residents. In Regent Park rundown units are being replaced and new retail being introduced thanks to abandoning the idea that poor places should stay poor.
The service sector industry should not be the only industry. That bothers me. Why must it all be service based? Having some factories does not mean butting them right adjacent to communities out of nowhere. But nonetheless, we do need manufacturing. How many of those jobs have been sent to china and elsewhere? The rich simply do not want to pay people more here if they can get slaves to work for less in china or some other god forsaken place.Who woulda thought, gay couples and espresso bars don't make for lively neighborhoods, heavy industry does. I will go out on a limb and assume that you have never actually lived near a manufacturing plant. I went to school next to a toilet factory, let me say I would have loved it to be replaced by lofts.
In the literature it is very common for former tenants to be intimidated to move. Some of the worst intimidation has been noted in the UK. Regardless, intimidation does happen.No, arson and intimidation are not "very common." That is simply false. In Toronto, there has been no major cases of coffee bar owners breaking the legs of the porn shops they are trying to replace. No vegan IT consultants "intimidating" the drug dealers out.
Tell me about the people who got displaced from south parkdale.Its not involuntary. I can't afford to live on 5th Avenue, it doesn't mean there is something less than fair going on.
When I speak of consumption and production explanations I am talking about some gentrification terminology which you have demonstrated to have absolutely no knowledge about. Consumption explanations more or less say that it is all supply and demand, people want to move there and whatnot. Production explanations say that gentrification is produced through disinvestment, and one key thing here is the rent gap. Please don't say some nonsense like "oh we have a big rent they havea small one so what if there is a gap" - it's something totally different from this hypothetical imbecilic reply that I made up.For something to be consumed it has to be produced, first.
Urban Geography do not ignore these other fields. There are benefits in some ways, but the negatives outweigh the good - the social cost is what bears the biggest burden and why this is not a good process. Gentrification does not fix the underlying problems.Its simply not true. You only arrive at this ridiculous "consensus" by limiting your research to urban geography and sociology, ignoring the more pertinent field of economics and commerce.
Look here, it is a well known fact that Freeman is not a respected source for any of this. His methodology is simply "shit" because he focuses on those who moved into neighborhoods, not those who moved out. His methodology is totally flawed. But, the ones with big money and power like what he says so he easily becomes a poster boy.Not to mention then going on to slag well respected scholars like Lance Freeman with prosaic arguments such as "nobody agrees with him" because he doesn't fit your hackneyed stereotypes of consensus.
I have talked to one professor who is reading his book "there goes the hood" and as clear as can be, it is obvious that his methodology is outright flawed. I shit on amazon.com book reviews - go to the geography journals and elsewhere. Neil Smith wrote a pretty review of his book. I do read reviews, thank you very much, but I read those that are actually published, not random idiot's jibberish on amazon. Neil Smith tore the idiot apart in his review of the book.If you are too lazy to actually read books that you may disagree with, at least go to Amazon and read the reviews for Lance Freeman's book.
We're dealing with displacement in case you have not noticed. Owners often do not even live in the nighborhood in which they are rented, and it is no secret that sometimes many like the thought of gentrifying the neighborhood in which their property is not in.Believe it or not, in order to rent something someone has to own it.
Stop putting words into my mouth. The poor like being poor is what you imply that I support. What I am saying is that the poor are often not so poor as they are portrayed. There is a good article that I read on Chicago's Pilson neighborhood. Several local scholars from schools nearby did work on this. Indeed, the rhetoric was to paint this community as an infested terrain of shit, povery, and misery. The residents rose up and fought against this slander!! Yes, media slander!!! And they managed to prevent this gentrification!! And god bless them! But who knows how long they will be able to hold out. I have been there recently and parts of the east and north are beginning to crack thanks to the developers.Then again, according to you poor people prefer living next to smokestacks and other poor people, so maybe you actually believe that.
It is no joke, and it only applies to the former residents only in the neighborhood in question. It's only one out of several things that could be done in order to help a single area and their people avoid being uprooted.Rent controls? Is this a joke?
You clearly are not even looking at what I write. Do you even know what blight is? Do you? Do you know how local authorities identified blight? In many cases blight was dirty dishes. The whole blight argument is an empty hole with nothing in it.Neighborhoods have fallen apart because of people like you. Rent controls producing urban decay and blight, zoning to discourage middle and upper class residents from moving in and this idea you have that poor people don't know how to live. You even answered your own question, if you are asking why neighborhoods fell apart to allow gentrification to occur later. The logical rearrangement of that is that we (you, or your idea specifically) prompted the neighborhoods to fall apart to stop them from gentrifying.
I view gentrification as Darwinism at work. You take some dude who smokes pot all day, hasn't finished grade 8 and lives on social assistance. He gets kicked out, his place is taken by industrious couple who contribute to neighbourhood by the simple fact of having money. Crack houses disappear, the remaining locals can find jobs in the many local establishments that pop up like mushrooms, and everyone benefits. Except the pothead, but in what sense is this not his fault? The people that replaced him spent countless hours and tens of thousands of dollars on their education, don't they deserve it more than him?
I view gentrification as Darwinism at work. You take some dude who smokes pot all day, hasn't finished grade 8 and lives on social assistance. He gets kicked out, his place is taken by industrious couple who contribute to neighbourhood by the simple fact of having money. Crack houses disappear, the remaining locals can find jobs in the many local establishments that pop up like mushrooms, and everyone benefits. Except the pothead, but in what sense is this not his fault? The people that replaced him spent countless hours and tens of thousands of dollars on their education, don't they deserve it more than him?
I was being facetious/sarcastic, mostly. I'm quite familiar with the socio-economic aspects of poverty. I simply strongly disagree that gentrification is a bad thing. Also, what's the alternative? You can't forbid home-owners to sell their property if they wish.