Is Gentrification Good Or Bad Or Neither (Or Both)?

I just saw a link to an article about the evils of gentrification. I’m guessing that’s what it was about, cos when I clicked the page it didn’t load and now I’m back at work and I can’t be bothered to go back and find it. It sounded like it was along those lines, something about £5 coffee and it had the word ‘hipsters’ in it. Anyway it really got me thinking.

This is my thinking face

I grew up in South East London, near either Peckham or East Dulwich depending on who I’m trying to impress. I recently moved back here after a lengthy stint living in God’s Own Country and found that there is precisely one non-gastro pub in my neighbourhood – that one being a community co-op selling locally brewed craft beers. I think it does food too. To be fair, this was not a revelation. East Dulwich had the shit gentrified out of it decades ago, Peckham started getting arty maybe ten years ago and the surrounding neighbourhoods have been sprouting delis and coffee shops ever since.

This is what people call ‘gentrification’, the process of relatively well-off people moving to formerly impoverished areas and a bunch of shops and bars and stuff opening up to cater to them. Generally, in my experience at least, when people talk about gentrification they do so in pretty negative terms. Gentrification tends to be cast as A Bad Thing, and to be fair the criticisms levelled at it are initially attractive. But you know, I like delis and nice little cafes and pubs where I can get some delicious chicken wings and not feel like everyone in there thinks I’m a bastard.

Inviting

So is gentrification such a bad thing? Isn’t niceifying busted up old parts of town actually kinda good? I dunno man, let’s have a ponder.

PS – I found that article again and it is actually a pretty interesting perspective. But it aint got as many jokes as mine so don’t rush off just yet.

What’s The Beef?

The thrust of the ‘gentrification is bad’ argument is that none of the benefits brought by the influx of money and people in the gentrified area reach the people who were already living there. In fact the new arrivals destroy and displace the existing businesses and communities. Rising property prices and rents means locals cannot afford to live there any more and must move on. As more and more businesses get taken over by the richer newcomers, less and less cater to the poorer natives. Soon there is nothing left for the locals in the area they grew up in, just a bunch of bastards drinking expensive coffee and laughing, laughing.

Like the bastards they are

Straight off the bat, as a general ethos I have very little truck with opposition to change for the sake of preserving the past. I’m not saying we should tear down historic buildings and stuff, but I’m very much of the mind that we should embrace the new and not get too worried about losing the old. I know that some old stuff is good and some new stuff is bad, but I’m just into shit changing. If they shut down the old pie shop and open a sashimi shop, then whatever man. If you liked the pie shop so much you should have bought more pies and kept it open. The old pie shop was new once, maybe in 60 years the sashimi shop will be an institution itself. Shit fucking changes man, deal with it. This callous futurism is something I feel quite strongly but can’t justify very well. It’s really just a prejudice on my part cos I want to live in a nightmarish futuristic dystopia.

Sign me the fuck up

Anyway, with that in mind it strikes me that the real problem here isn’t that all these new shops open and houses get done up and stuff, it’s that the locals don’t have access to any of it. In other words, the problem isn’t gentrification per se, it’s social inequality and lack of social mobility. Basically, poor people have to live in comparatively rubbish places and are at significantly greater risk of being uprooted against their will. So when a formerly undesirable area becomes desirable, the powerful people get to dive in while the powerless get driven on. What I’m suggesting is that rather than decry the diving and the driving, we should point the finger at the underlying power relations and the reasons for them.

Despite our pretensions at meritocracy, the children of poor people are statistically likely to receive less education, worse education and ultimately earn less than the children of rich people. Furthermore, the children of poor people are also more likely to face discrimination on the basis of class and ethnicity than their richer counterparts. (I don’t have a source for either of those assertions, but I’m pretty sure they’re true, right?) If the children of the people who grew up in the gentrified areas were able to afford houses there and had enough disposable income to blow on delicious olives and craft beers, there’d be no problem.

Gentrification throws the fundamental unfairness of our society into stark relief and causes all kinds of hassle for the losing side of the equation. But gentrification is a symptom, not the root of the problem.

This Is The End Now

I might try keeping these short for a bit. Or I might stop leaving them til the last minute. Which do you reckon is more likely?

Also I didn’t put many jokes in this one, but that’s mainly cos my brain is full of howler monkeys at the moment.

“Say some more stuff about Israel!”

See you next week when something something something.