Pierce Boston (née The Point )| Boylston St/Brookline Av | Fenway

Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

On the subject of Jane Jacobs and rents:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112422/gentrifications-real-problem-monotony#

The Real Problem with Gentrification A phenomenon that revived cities can also make them monotonous

BY INGA SAFFRON


A funny thing happened in the half century since Jane Jacobs published her classic treatise excoriating the planning establishment for clear-cutting American cities and replacing eclectic neighborhoods with sterile housing towers: Her vision of urban change won the day. From Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill to Philadelphia’s Society Hill, the neighborhoods that have revived according to Jacobs’ principles became not merely livable, but immensely desirable.

The trouble is, that vision is also giving us a new kind of sterility.

Jacobs, whose The Death and Life of Great American Cities serves as the bible for city-lovers and modern planners, believed that blighted neighborhoods would regenerate organically if left to their own devices. Existing residents would fix up their homes as their economic circumstances improved over time. Drawn by the charms of these diverse, lived-in neighborhoods, newcomers would migrate in gradually to refresh the mix. The rundown districts would, in Jacobs’s lovely phrase, naturally “unslum.”



....

But Jacobs’s predictions of multi-generational, multi-race, mixed-income kumbaya hasn’t turned out quite as she hoped. “Unslumming,” she wrote back in 1961, “hinges on the retention of a very considerable part of the slum population within a slum.” Unfortunately, that rarely happens. Today we know the process she described by another name entirely: It’s not unslumming. It’s gentrification, a word that doesn’t sound nearly as quaint or benign. It’s worth noting that the term didn’t come into use until a full three years after the publication of Death and Life, when it was coined by the British sociologist Ruth Glass. Appealing as it sounds in theory, Jacobs’s picture of hard-working locals hammering and spackling their way to an unslummed paradise has proved more romanticized than real.

When I recently asked a half-dozen urban planners to name places revived by indigenous residents alone, they were hard-pressed to come with examples. One reason is that our inner cities are no longer very good at creating, and then retaining, a middle class. Instead, they’ve had to import one. The new, middle-class city-dwellers—in-movers in planning lingo—have excelled at following Jacobs’s prescription to preserve the physical diversity in urban neighborhoods.

The other kinds of diversity? Not so much.

....
 
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Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

shmessy, your altruistic solution is buried in the past.

An article from last summer on Amazon destroying local retail.

http://www.slate.com/articles/busin...ommerce_giant_will_destroy_local_retail_.html

From last December

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/b...rs-to-take-on-risks-of-same-day-shipping.html

Scrool down the list below until you come to Tracy and Patterson in CA. Those are being built as same day fulfillment centers.

http://www.mwpvl.com/html/amazon_com.html

And all those Amazon software engineers in Kendall Square are working on what? Certainly not something to improve the lot of the local small business owner.
 
Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

shmessy, your altruistic solution is buried in the past.

An article from last summer on Amazon destroying local retail.

http://www.slate.com/articles/busin...ommerce_giant_will_destroy_local_retail_.html

From last December

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/b...rs-to-take-on-risks-of-same-day-shipping.html

Scrool down the list below until you come to Tracy and Patterson in CA. Those are being built as same day fulfillment centers.

http://www.mwpvl.com/html/amazon_com.html

And all those Amazon software engineers in Kendall Square are working on what? Certainly not something to improve the lot of the local small business owner.

Stellar, I'm not talking about shops that can (and are being) replaced by the Amazons and EBays. I'm talking about restaurants, shoe repair, art galleries barbershops, bowling alleys, dry cleaners, coffee shops, museums (yes, why spend all that failed effort trying to carve out a piece of the Greenway for the Hort, Boston Museum, Jewish Museum etc. when Menino could just "linkage them" to ground floors of new high rises). Are they "economically efficient" for the developer? Of course not. Much in the same way that setting aside a percentage of units to be low-income/affordable units isn't.

And yes, all those Amazon engineers newly in Kendall Square have been the REASON why Kendall Square is evolving and putting in more ground floor/ pedestrian friendly/ urban livable spaces. They have to eat and live too. They cannot "distribute" a haircut, massage, restaurant meal, tooth extraction, karate lesson or accupuncture.

Cambridge (and state traffic planners) wants those Amazon engineers living there, not in Marblehead. Maintaining sidewalks is far less expensive and far more efficient than maintaining roads and bridges.
 
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Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

I would like to offer a counterpoint to that interesting article on gentrification (ps, isn't it generally bad form to quote an article whole cloth like that?). For all intents and purposes, these newly gentrified neighborhoods are pretty much 'new' neighborhoods. As such, I would think a certain level of demographic homogeneity is to be expected. I'm sure the various Levittowns were very homogenous when they were first built, though I would be surprised if that is the case nowadays.

When you take a neighborhood and pretty much completely repurpose it, as gentrification does, its effectively building a new community. And who are the kind of people that participate in such endeavors? People in their 20s and 30s. Now, unless a neighborhood is all rental properties, I'm inclined to think that many property owners will remain in the neighborhoods that they helped to build.

The article references a neighborhood that only recently gentrified. I'm curious if there's any information handy about those that gentrified much longer ago. Also, should not the piece have included at least a passing reference to the North End, when they were 'searching' for examples of locals building up their own neighborhood, particularly since it was Jacobs' own example?

Also, people are bemoaning Amazon's impact on retail, but I would like to suggest that it is the large big box stores (the kind that urbanists tend to despise) that are feeling its impact the most. Circuit City, Borders, and, quite likely, Best Buy, Barnes and Noble... These are the companies that are going to go out of business due to Amazon. Meanwhile, the very nature of Amazon's business model is such that it enables urban dwellers to have much of the same convenience of shopping derived from going to large shopping malls, all without vast parking lots involved.
 
Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

^ Also, Amazon's marketplace, like eBay, is actually enabling small businesses to have national or even global reach. The antique store or fashion boutique or pet supply shop that used to rely on its local market for business can now, with very little additional overhead, sell in greater volume to a broader audience.
 
Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

I can never fully grasp the arguments against gentrification. Gentrification reduces the density of poverty which is an unequivocal good thing. It adds high-income individuals to low-income neighborhoods and it takes a generational time-scale for the neighborhood to lose all off its former character. Neighborhoods change on generational time-scales anyway - but when the change is away from poverty and toward affluence it is called gentrification and is undesirable. Does that make the opposite desirable?

And where do the displaced folks go? Are there new slums popping up? Or do they move to suburban neighborhoods with lower prices/rents? Maybe to places with fewer amenities like parks and public transportation? This makes perfect economic sense - affluent people can afford highly desirable property while the poor get by on what they can afford. Sure, sure, we'd like everyone to have the same quality everything, but until we get unlimited resources to create that Utopia there are going to be some rich and some poor. The rich are always going to get their pick of the best stuff.

I also don't buy the argument that gentrification leads to homogeneity. I don't see value in a ethnically or culturally segregated society. Blacks or Italians or Gays or any group don't have to all live in the same neighborhood to be successful and preserve their heritage and culture. Living together with people of all backgrounds makes us a heterogeneous society, not a homogeneous one. The age issue is the toughest and only time will tell if the gentrifiers stay long enough grow gray hair. Maybe time will tell that dense urban living is preferred by the young and energetic and its not the gentrifiers fault that the grayhairs are gone from cities.

The one danger of gentrification I do find valid is the danger of economic homogeneity. Affordable and middle income housing is a value worth preserving precisely so that we don't endlessly push the slums out to the next neighborhood just relocate the same high poverty density. A few poor people mixed in with middle income and affluent people have access to much better public schools and social mobility than those from ethnically or economically homogeneous slums.
 
Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

Gentirfication creates boring neighborhoods where everyone is the same. Not even true neighborhoods really, more like playgrounds for 20's/30's yuppies before they marry and move to the 'burbs.
 
Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

Gentirfication creates boring neighborhoods where everyone is the same. Not even true neighborhoods really, more like playgrounds for 20's/30's yuppies before they marry and move to the 'burbs.

And do they stay that way?
 
Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

I would like to offer a counterpoint to that interesting article on gentrification (ps, isn't it generally bad form to quote an article whole cloth like that?). For all intents and purposes, these newly gentrified neighborhoods are pretty much 'new' neighborhoods. As such, I would think a certain level of demographic homogeneity is to be expected. I'm sure the various Levittowns were very homogenous when they were first built, though I would be surprised if that is the case nowadays.

Yes it is bad form, I edited, thank you. I'm racking my brain trying to remember where I read one particular article about the stages of gentrification (can't find it because a ton has been written about the stages of gentrification). I think most urban scholars agree that gentrification begins as the sort of "sweat equity" process, though it is pursued by 'pioneers' and not as much locals (often a period of population decline because of the replacement of large low-income households by smaller middle class households). When the neighborhood appears "stabilized", it becomes a site for corporate investment, which in turn can push out many of the original pioneers. The population rises, and then NIMBYism sets in, and growth stops even as prices continue to rise. So it's more complicated than I think many make it out as - gentrification is really a series of successions, and no succession completely erases the previous population, as stated above. As far as the displacement aspect of succession, it's always happened, and in my opinion isn't terribly problematic if those displaced, of any class, have opportunities similar to or better than the ones they left behind in their old neighborhood. I don't really think that's the case in a city like Boston, where to get affordability you need to trade down in terms of location and quality. Supply is so constrained in the city, and even more so in the suburbs. My guess is that the loss of domestic population in MA is mostly composed of low-income and middle class households feeling priced out.
 
Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

Displacement can actually be incredibly problematic to the people who were displaced. James Q Wilson has a good book he edited called Urban Renewal that has a couple of chapters about it. The West End gets mentioned a bunch as a worst case scenario. West Enders unfortunately ended up with a lot of documented cases of mental health issues. I think the book's been out of print for a while, but you can probably find a used copy on Amazon or similar.

Basically though, the point shouldn't be about un-slumming, gentrifying, urban pioneering, or whatever. It should be about creating stable and sustainable neighborhoods. That means residents with diverse economic backgrounds and housing supply that paces demand to keep the cost of living reasonable. Easier said than done though. Hundreds of years worth of economics and urban planning, and it's still sort of a guessing game.

Clarifying based on A630 post below:
Stable just in the sense that it's not falling apart, not that you're trying to create some Disney-fied McTown. It's the idea that, obviously, you don't want to be Detroit. But less obviously, you also don't want to be Paris where high income gentrification pushes low income residents out of the city into suburbs with concentrated poverty. And riots.
 
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Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

Well I didn't say displacement wasn't problematic (in fact I said in a city where it inevitably leads to trading down it usually is), and yes urban renewal was certainly another case of that. As far as stable neighborhoods go, sounds like an idealized end-state. I'm glad I'm not trying to achieve that - sounds impossible and personally, undesirable :)
 
Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

Gentirfication creates boring neighborhoods where everyone is the same. Not even true neighborhoods really, more like playgrounds for 20's/30's yuppies before they marry and move to the 'burbs.

As someone who actually grew up in a neighborhood of Boston which had cobbler shops, corner stores, locally owned businesses, etc. The neighborhood is a hell of a lot better with gentrification.
 
Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

That article was sloppy and poorly written and makes me wonder if Inga Saffron ever actually read Death and Life completely.

But Jacobs’s predictions of multi-generational, multi-race, mixed-income kumbaya hasn’t turned out quite as she hoped. “Unslumming,” she wrote back in 1961, “hinges on the retention of a very considerable part of the slum population within a slum.” Unfortunately, that rarely happens. Today we know the process she described by another name entirely: It’s not unslumming. It’s gentrification, a word that doesn’t sound nearly as quaint or benign.

No: "unslumming" is not the same thing as "gentrification." Jacobs already had an apt description for gentrification: "cataclysmic money" as well as "self-destruction of diversity." The catchy term "gentrification" hadn't been coined yet.

If people are being displaced then it is not "unslumming." Far from it: one of the key characteristics of a slum is a transient population.

The key lesson of D&L is that relationships matter. All the ideas described in the book are oriented towards protecting and nourishing community relationships. Density? More people. Small blocks? More likely to cross paths with others. Economic diversity? Knowing people of all classes and connections. Mixed uses? Meet people doing different things.

There are many examples of "unslummed" neighborhoods in the book. Many of them gentrified later, in the following decades. The money flowed in because people began to see worth and value in those neighborhoods that had become successful. That is one form of the cataclysmic influx of money which Jacobs warned about. There is a way out: increase the supply of good neighborhoods. Unfortunately that did not happen (I put part of the blame on bad zoning) and the result was enormous pressure on the few.
 
Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

This discussion really should be moved out of this development thread. It really is at the point of being completely unrelated to The Point.
 
Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

Gentirfication creates boring neighborhoods where everyone is the same. Not even true neighborhoods really, more like playgrounds for 20's/30's yuppies before they marry and move to the 'burbs.

It seems to me we have middle ground neighborhoods to serve as a counter example. Take a place like Roslindale or Somerville, for example. Sure, there are yuppies and hipsters, but there are also long time residents. There are swanky restaurants and trendy cafes, right next to barber shops, shoe repair, and butcheries. There are some real urban neighborhoods Boston that revived and yet didn't crowd out the people who never left.
 
Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

This discussion really should be moved out of this development thread. It really is at the point of being completely unrelated to The Point.

Hear, hear!
 
Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

This discussion really should be moved out of this development thread. It really is at the point of being completely unrelated to The Point.

got to admit though, this is the best discussion this forum has had in a long while.
 
Re: The Point (Boylston/Brookline)

Disagree. It's the same hackneyed discussion about gentrification that all of urbanism has been having since 1997. It's as boring as a gentrified neighborhood.
 

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