This week has been another one of those, ‘I’m glad it is over’ weeks. After what seems like days upon days of reading, I have come to the conclusion that I had really no idea about Gentrification. Needless to say I knew even less about how important gentrification was to urban policy. I thought of this concept as simply rich/wealthy moving into a low income area and pushing the local residence out. Man, was I wrong. There is much more to it then that.
The areas of the reading that resonated with me the most are the affect that gentrification has on the central city areas, the types of people responsible for the movement, and the impacts that it has on the value of property. Three kinds of developers are responsible for revitalizing neighborhoods: professional developers that resale property, occupiers that reside in the residences and landlords that place property for rent (Neil Smith pg82). All of these are need to ensure that the efforts placed into renovating an area with low equity and be sustained for future years. It is not enough to simply have home ownership, rentals and investors are needed to keep the drive of improvement moving forward. I feel that if you insulate an area of revitalization with only one demographic, the area will continue in the aging cycle and the attractiveness of the area will fade. As homeowners age many factor will being to plague the area; owners physically unable to perform maintenance or vacant properties due to death of placement in living facilities.
Gentrification transitioned downtown development, by increasing private sector involvement and decreasing public sector presents. Also, construction changed from large scale buildings to small renovations (Sharon Zukin pg38). I feel like that perfect example of this is the initiative that the City Of Phoenix has been pushing to entice small business owners to utilize existing building in the course urban are for the purpose of there business. Phoenix has even put a catchy name on it ‘adaptive reuse’. Exceptions to building codes and zoning regulations are given to these properties to make them more desirable from a cost perspective. I feel that these types of policies will motivate residence to move into these areas of low equity. Downtown Manhattan was revitalized on the triumph of an artist’s and historic preservationist’s coalition (Sharon Zukin pg39). This seems to be taken from a page directly out of the First Friday’s book. If you ever have a chance to go to First Friday’s, you should definitely go. It is a true illustration of what can be accomplished with a coalition of that nature.
Well, I’m out of here. I have a ton of more reading to do, and I would like to actually be able to drink a beer and watch football next weekend.
Great insights on gentrification. I really liked your point on the importance that diversity of the age of the residents within a neighborhood plays in the sustainability of the area. I had never considered that factor. What I find most interesting about gentrification is that the gentrifiers are willing to live in conditions (often unsafe, blighted neighborhoods) that they normally would not live in just for the possibility of future profiting from sale of the property.
ReplyDeleteI was unaware of the Phoenix's "adaptive reuse" policy, but I couldn't agree more that this is the direct we need to be heading. Reusing buildings helps save on cost of demolition and materials but also preserves the character of the area while bringing the older buildings up to date. I love what Tempe has done with its downtown district to preserve the older buildings, when looking at pictures from the early 1900's, the buildings on Mill look almost identical to present day and still functioning well.
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