Gentrification
Gentrification, gentrification, gentrification… that’s all I hear about nowadays. My friend calls it “whitefication”, but I refer to it as “richwhitefication”.
For all the reasons anyone has ever mentioned on this blog or any other, g-tion sucks. We all know it. Poor people get displaced, neighborhoods lose their charm, and snootiness is welcomed home.
The biggest reason I hate gentrification is because it apparently ruined NYC for me before I even moved in. Now even SNL pokes fun of the New York that was. The way I see it is, most cities and neighborhoods pass through a series of stages. First, it’s a sparsely settled part of town, then poor people and/or people who don’t like being around people move in, then the artists move in, and then when it gets hip- the rich people move in. Once the rich people have moved in, the neighborhood is no longer cool. Once upon a time, they tell me, Soho and Greenwich Village were cool. Now they’re “cool”.
The LES had its chance, but it failed. Starving artists can’t afford $1700+/month rent, so they don’t move there. Only rich kids who want to act like starving artists move there, and so, the neighborhood is gone before it could even begin. I still like the LES and Brooklyn a lot, I just kind of wish I had experienced New York a decade or more ago.
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I hear where you are coming from, but as someone from the NYC area my whole life, I can honestly say that the pre-gentrified city has many down sides. The LES and East Village are perfect examples. While they certainly had lots of “character,” they also had lots of muggings, rapes, murders, and robberies. They also had a lot of crack whores, and vandalism. It seems as if the right time to live in an area is the very early stages of gentrification, when prices are not terrible, but there is a conscious effort to better the police coverage and public services. Plus, that gives a person the right to complain “man, this place used to be so great before the big tall apartment buildings came.”