The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: cities
Gentrification Is A Policy — Not A ‘Natural’ Process

Gentrification Is A Policy — Not A ‘Natural’ Process

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Gentrification is a function of power, not natural law or economic inevitability. It occurs when wealthy, politically connected interests make decisions in closed-door meetings to take over the neighborhoods of people who have little money and power and thus no effective voice or recourse in the taking. The takers usually make a pretense of negotiating with longtime property owners. But it’s a scam, for the developers hurl high-pressure, low-ball pitches at the locals, overpowering families who can’t afford lawyers to go to bat for them.

Renters are worse off, rarely even getting fair notice that a Dickensian disruption is coming at them. Even if they’ve been integral members of the neighborhood for decades, the ousted tenants’ rights to appeal are curtailed by economic and legal realities. The seriously skewed balance of power is exemplified by eviction courts, where up to 90 percent of tenants don’t even have lawyers to represent them. In one of many recent examples here in Austin, more than 200 working-class families (including 121 children) were abruptly ejected from an affordable apartment complex two years ago. Their lives were thrown into a tailspin when the megadeveloper that bought the complex summarily canceled their leases. In a backroom deal, the city had given special zoning exemptions that allowed the new corporate owner to bulldoze the long-standing family homes of these mostly Latinx residents and erect high-end luxury apartments on top of the detritus. Rents for these new, ritzy dwellings ran up to $36,000 a year — way above the total annual income of most of the displaced families. As one tenant said of the brusque eviction: “We didn’t have any way to stop them. They treated us like dirt. All they gave us was a kick in the a—.”

Millions of middle-income families previously secure in homes they owned or rented have had to move out of their neighborhoods, and even out of their cities, because gentrification has drastically raised home prices, property taxes and rents. While it’s obviously beneficial to have such essential community servants as teachers, police officers and firefighters live among the people they serve, who among them can afford it?

When one Oakland, California, school principal started teaching in 2001, the story was: Teachers are never going to afford a house. And now it’s: Teachers can’t afford an apartment. So the city’s teachers have to move clear out of the county and face long, dispiriting commutes to and from their classrooms.

In metro areas across the country, consumer demand for affordable apartments is huge and fast-growing, but that mass market goes begging because developers can make far greater profits by building upscale units for wealthy people seeking trendy neighborhoods.

And so it goes: Gentrification begets gentrification.

A survey by RENTCafe, a nationwide apartment-search website, found that 75 percent of all new apartment complexes built in the U.S. in 2015 were luxury developments! You might expect that skew toward housing for the affluent in the Northeast and California, with such super-pricy cities as New York and San Francisco, so I was surprised to see that luxury construction was most dominant in the South and Southeast, where 78 percent of all apartments were upscale, and in the Southwest and Mid-Atlantic, where the number reached an appalling 88 percent.

For poverty-income families, being gentrified out of an affordable space can mean more than a long commute. It often forces them to move into bad and dangerous housing, pay up to 70 percent of their monthly income for a place to live, face eviction (there were 2.3 million evicted in 2016, not counting the unofficial cases where landlords often simply lock tenants out), fall into deeper debt and poverty, and frequently end up homeless — living in their cars or on the street. The toll lands heavily on children since, according to Open Door Mission, they make up a third of Americans without homes — astonishingly, the average age of a homeless person is 9!

Meanwhile, here comes Team Trump heaping scorn on poor people, even as it callously slashes budgets for programs aimed at giving them a chance for decent housing. Our friends at People’s Action have taken on the housing crisis at the national level with a People’s Hearing on Housing — and they have member organizations in 26 states. Find one near you.

Populist author, public speaker, and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes The Hightower Lowdown, a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.

 

The Cure For Expensive Cities Is Moving Vans

The Cure For Expensive Cities Is Moving Vans

A funny thing didn’t happen on the way to the digital revolution. It failed to empty out the cities. If knowledge workers could communicate from anywhere, the futurists figured, why would they subject themselves to the traffic and noise of urban life? They could easily move their screens to a mountain chalet, beach house or Mediterranean cafe.

The opposite happened. Instead of spreading out, many members of the “creative class” scrunched themselves into a handful of acres in a few select cities. As a result, housing prices have exploded in London, New York and San Francisco — and are rising fast in Boston, Seattle, Denver and other centers for tech and finance. The elite apparently want to be around good restaurants, high-end shopping and other elites.

And so what happens to the longtime residents of modest means and new arrivals serving the gentry’s needs? When an influx of genius coders pushes small-apartment rents into the thousands, working families of four get pushed out.

The solution to the high cost of shelter is to increase the supply, say some economists, real estate interests and politicians owned by the real estate interests. In cities bounded by water, that means increasing population density.

That can be part of the answer. Some decaying industrial areas may be ripe for new development. But here’s the problem:

Many of the most desirable urban neighborhoods are desirable precisely for their quirky small houses and low-slung apartment buildings. Local shops and restaurants line their main streets. Replace these structures with a forest of sterile towers and you destroy what made these areas valuable in the first place.

Zeroing in on London, The Economist blames “faulty land-use regulation” for the city’s high cost of housing. It prescribes building on the “green belt,” which was created to preserve open space around the central city — and scoffs at rules protecting views of the iconic St. Paul’s Cathedral. (Guess only the penthouses would have the views.)

Like much of the “build, baby, build” crowd, the magazine parades its agenda behind the banner of diversity and fighting income inequality. Well, let’s ask. Would turning our old cities into soulless Singapores make these places more affordable?

The Economist complains that population density in central London is only half that of New York. Thing is, the rent for a centrally located one-bedroom apartment is 22 percent higher in New York than in London. In hot real estate markets, increasing supply can also hike demand.

For example, building booms in Williamsburg and other gentrifying parts of Brooklyn have attracted more moneyed people while leveling the tenements where poorer folk used to live.

There are remedies for the high cost of housing. One is to move elsewhere. It could be to a lesser neighborhood or nearby town served by public transportation. (Clamor against high rents tends to focus on upscale districts.)

And don’t forget the other great metropolises in this vast land of ours. Columbus, Omaha, Nashville, Baton Rouge and Spokane, to name a few, cost a lot less. They have great bars, hip districts and housing to die for.

As for the lower-income residents who remain in expensive cities, one fix is to pay them commensurate with the cost of living. A $15-an-hour minimum wage in the pricier locales makes total sense.

In sum, the notion that only a handful of ZIP codes can quench 21st-century ambitions is strange. The technology that lets Cleveland make video calls to Honolulu ought to be used. As for mingling, there’s now a Starbucks everywhere.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Photo: A man pauses in a park along the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey April 7, 2016, as the skyline of New York’s Mid Town Manhattan and the Empire State Building is pictured during sunset. Picture taken April 7, 2016. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis

High Tech, High Rises: More Is Not Merrier In Our Congested Cities

High Tech, High Rises: More Is Not Merrier In Our Congested Cities

New York and San Francisco are expensive places to live. That’s a big problem for the nation because these cities are centers for the booming knowledge economy. High housing costs discourage this growth.

So sayeth The Economist, its trademark voice of reason spiked with charges of greed against those who would resist the god of gross domestic product. The venerable British magazine has a prescription, unfortunately: Make housing cheaper by building higher and denser and degrading the local zoning laws.

Plopped where a bungalow used to be is a skyscraper of conclusions built on a plywood foundation. Let us dismantle the top hundred floors.

Because of building restrictions, The Economist says, “American GDP in 2009 was as much as 13.5 percent lower than it otherwise could have been.”

New Yorkers trying to squeeze into Grand Central Terminal at 4:30 on a working afternoon are not so much worried about GDP as finding a free square foot on the crowded sidewalk; not that their opinions matter. The questionable assumption is that there’s no level of discomfort they won’t put up with.

In reference to San Francisco, The Economist writes, “Many workers will take lower-paying jobs elsewhere because the income left over after paying for cheaper housing is more attractive.”

What’s wrong with that? The American heartland is home to superb cities with far lower costs of living, to name four, Omaha, Columbus, Nashville, and Kansas City. Texas has built much of its urban growth on low housing prices. And the tech powerhouses of Seattle and Denver, though hardly cheap to live in, are still easier to swing than San Francisco.

The Economist seems shocked that residents of Mountain View, in rapidly populating Silicon Valley, have been resisting Google’s plan to build housing on its campus there. “The population density is just over 2,300 per square kilometre, three times lower than in none-too-densely populated San Francisco,” it notes as though that were an argument.

Houston is about half as dense as Mountain View. Its economy has been doing just fine.

And Frisco is “none-too-densely populated”? Who sez? Not the scientists noting that the San Andreas fault runs right through its geologically unstable heart.

“Home ownership is not especially egalitarian,” The Economist states, adding, “It is no coincidence that the home-ownership rate in the metropolitan area of downtrodden Detroit, at 71 percent, is well above the 55 percent in booming San Francisco.”

Perhaps the young tech workers piling into Frisco are more mobile than the struggling folks of Detroit and don’t seek to own homes. Lots of good Americans rent.

So, what can you do if the people like their land use laws? The Economist has an answer: Policymakers “should ensure that city-planning decisions are made from the top down. When decisions are taken at the local level, land-use rules tend to be stricter.”

The lower-downers seem to be under the impression that voters get to determine their community’s future development. Back on the hamster wheel, you peasants! Your quality of life pales in importance next to the higher value of economic growth.

The mother of all lousy assumptions could be encapsulated in this line: “As the return to knowledge-intensive activities exploded, so did the economic fortunes of idea-producing places.”

Of course, places don’t produce ideas. The places that attract the idea people tend to be urban scapes offering cafes, culture, and the hipster vibe found in old, low-lying neighborhoods. Level the tenements, raze those vintage warehouses, and erect forests of glass towers in their place and bye-bye, creative class.

No one can move more easily than these people. As noted, many are renting.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: New housing highrises on the waterfront, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (Juha Uitto/Flickr)

Why Millennials Don’t Drive So Much

Why Millennials Don’t Drive So Much

Young Americans are just not into driving the way their elders are or did at their age. They are less likely to own cars or use cars. The drives they do are shorter. Meanwhile, the bus is looking good to them.

A new report confirms this trend and offers reasons that millennials — we’re talking 14- to 31-year-olds — seem less drawn to the automobile thing. They’re sure not singing car songs as the Baby Boomers did. No “Little Deuce Coupe,” no “G.T.O.,” no “Hot Rod Lincoln.”

But the report, by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and the Frontier Group, misses what I see as the biggest factor. Driving is no longer a coast down the great American open road. It’s become a pain and a drag — drag as in “a boring or tiresome thing.”

From 2001 to 2009, the average number of miles driven by 16- to 34-year-olds fell by an astounding 23 percent. There are economic reasons, for sure. The Great Recession whacked millennials especially hard in the job area. They are therefore shorter of cash — and less likely to get married, have kids and pursue other activities conducive to car ownership than previous generations at their age.

They’ve also shown a greater passion for living in urban or otherwise walkable communities. These are neighborhoods where automobiles are not the only way to get around and at least remnants of a public transportation system survive.

Our gadgets make it all easier. Millennials lead in using apps to car share (Zipcar) or summon a ride (Uber, Lyft, Sidecar) with minimum hassle. Other apps quickly display public transit options, connections and schedules. And time not spent behind the wheel of a car is time freed for texting, emailing, tweeting and whatever.

What really killed the American love affair with the car? The hell of American driving.

Oh, there still exist some heavenly road experiences in this country: drives at dawn through West Coast wine country, two-lane dreamscapes in rural regions sprawl has yet to wreck.

But the typical car experience takes place in the exhaust of suburban congestion. What younger adults recall as children is being strapped in the back seat as Mom lurched the vehicle through a soulless crudscape of drab chain retailing. They’ve done the six lanes of stop-and-go — bored out of their skulls and worried about Mom’s frazzled nerves.

They don’t want to do this anymore. And if it means sharing a 700-square-foot apartment downtown, so be it. The more young people — or any people — establish their nests downtown the faster America’s long-suffering town centers will mend.

So yay millennials.

Something in the report did evoke a smile. We’re in think-tank land, which means the most elemental activities take on tech-speak labels. In this case, it’s the reference to walking as another “mode” of transportation.

Since the caveman, walking’s been the default — with every other way of getting around being the instead-of.

But perhaps the authors are right. Perhaps locomotory momentum has become just another option on the multiple choice: “Do I put on shoes today or strap on the jet pack?”

At least they didn’t refer to sidewalks as the “pedestrian interface.”

The mission going forward is to build up the public transportation system to serve Americans’ changing needs. Conservatives of yore framed public transit as a devious plot to force Americans from their five-bedroom spreads to apartment houses along bus lines.

But a bus-and-rail boom was not the big thing accelerating multifamily home construction during the Great Recession and beyond. It was market forces, guys. And the Americans leading that market are the millennials, yearning to hang up the car keys.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: drpavloff via Flickr