Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury
KentXie -- Gentrification is just double speak worthy of 1984 -- Change happens -- you either have Detroit type decay or you have South Boston Seaport type growth -- and unfortunately in our kind of society --growth results in [as the military would say] Collateral Damage.
and For all you -- "preserve at all costs" the temporarily dominant culture -- that temporarily dominant culture -- in most cases is a self imposed economic ghetto -- self imposed by the recent immigrants to the community who want something which is comfortable to them.
We should neither "Knock them all down" Nor keep every tenement and trash-filled vacant lot -- government force [i.e. Central Planning] should be as limited as possible to allow the market forces of growth and development to occur naturally
PS: Can one get a Schvitz in Roxbury? the formally dominant Central / Eastern European Jewish culture seems to have not energized the cultural preservationists
Point by point:
The term "double speak" (the colloquially accepted spelling is actually "doublespeak") doesn't appear in
1984. Perhaps you meant "doublethink," which in the novel is a type of "Newspeak."
"Change happens" is a meaningless cliche.
There are options for growth besides Detroit and the Seaport.
People have a moral right to find "Collateral Damage" unacceptable, and they have a legal right to pressure their political representatives to prevent or mitigate it.
No one's arguing for "preserve at all costs." The costs of preservation (by which i mean not pushing most of the current residents out) are high, but not prohibitive. And they're worth it, because it's the right thing to do, and because the segregation in Boston's neighborhoods is largely
not self-imposed. For one thing, only a quarter of Roxbury's population was born in another country. But more importantly, you need to bone up on some history: for instance, redlining, school redistricting, and the uneven application of the benefits of the New Deal and the G.I. Bill, key factors in allowing older (and largely white) generations of Americans to accumulate wealth. (Try
Family Properties by Beryl Satter and Kathleen Frydl's
G.I. Bill. J. Anthony Lukas'
Common Ground is great narrative history about school districts in Boston.)
No one's arguing for keeping lots vacant, and your precious market forces are inadequate to the needs of the people who already live there.
As others have pointed out, it's Schlitz.
And for goodness sake, if you're going to argue for heartless Social Darwinism,
in 2016, at least do it grammatically.
