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.
....
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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