Quotes About Gentrification

When we were doing shows in the mid-'90s, the audiences were 95% black. What's happened now is the gentrification of hip-hop. A lot of cities passed ordinances that made it hard for black audiences to gather in large groups. Clubs are more open to hip-hop now 'cause it's the same crowd that goes to rock shows.

In the mid-1980s, on a spring Sunday morning, a Volvo stationwagon parked in Brunswick Street. A young couple got out. She was trim, blonded, tanned. He was already broadening in the midsection, sockless, short and hairy legs ending in boatshoes. From a restraining chair in the back seat, he unloaded a child, complaining, flailing. They took it into a cafe. They were going to have brunch. The old Brunswick Street was dead, Brunchwick Street born. There was no turning back.

I sound, convincingly, twice my age whenever I visit New York City neighborhoods I frequented in my 20s and grumble about how much they have changed.

I am used to experiencing so much trauma, that when I see it, I have to speak out. I don't think rappers have a responsibility, but if you don't say something or be silent or avoid it, I believe it shows your true real character to the world. It's like, if no one wants to rap about gentrification then I am going to fill that void!

Just no gentrified drum and bass music anymore, please! It's not good for your health.

Part of being in New York is being able to brag about what used to be there.

It is sad that the more 'successful' a neighborhood becomes, the more it gradually takes on a recognizable, common look, as the same banks, drugstore chains and national brands move in.

The Santa Barbara Plaza, also known as Marlton Square, played a vital role in the Black community. Thriving in the 1940s and 1950s, businesses in this twenty-two-acre shopping center met the needs of thousands of consumers across South Los Angeles. From the Broadway and May Company department stores to Woolworth's and J.J. Newberry's, the plaza has transformed from a vibrant shopping hub to a now nearly abandoned plot of land. Last

What is happening here eats out the heart of the city from the inside: the infrastructure is for the most part being added to rather than torn down, but the life within it is being drained away, a siphoning off of diversity, cultural life, memory, complexity. What remains will look like the city that was—or like a brighter, shinier, tidier version of it—but what it contained will be gone. It will be a hollow city.

Once a utopia in the eyes of many, San Francisco became the nerve center of a new dystopia.

London changes because of money. It's real estate. If they can build some offices or expensive apartments they will, it's money that changes everything in a city.

Chances are that there are white people who brag about being the first to move out of a suburb that has been intruded by blacks.

This thing is such a ripple, the way lives are affected by gentrification. On one hand, yes, you're cleaning up this area, you're making it more livable for people. But you're not saying anything about the people that live there.

There's a lot of concern that London is changing and artists are being forced to move to new areas.

There's a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest.

Gentrification is key to understanding what happened to our cities at the turn of the millennium. But it is only half of the story. It is only the visible side of the larger problem: resegregation.

By itself, gentrification can't explain the new geography of race that has emerged since the turn of the millennium... Gentrification is key to understanding what happened to our cities at the turn of the millennium. But it is only half of the story. It is only the visible side of the larger problem: resegregation.

Gentrification is a problem of poor planning.

We all got driven out of Manhattan. It was a very conducive place for artists when I was growing up, and now it's definitely not. The city has been completely taken over by the rich.

I think it's our responsibility as artists to not only fight for our art but fight for the communities that are the reason we're able to continue making art, especially since, in Brooklyn's case, we as artists somehow made it 'cool' enough for the bigger money-making industries to start taking over.

In addition to public housing, South Williamsburg is home to shabby artists' lofts like mine, apartments of Hasidic Jews, and one extremely tall, high-priced condo.

Sometimes, I feel that Manhattan in particular has gotten really tame and gentrified or something.

Rosewood Courts, Austin's Eastside project for African Americans, was built on land obtained by condemning Emancipation Park, the site of an annual festival to commemorate the abolition of slavery. The park had been privately owned by a neighborhood association the Travis County Emancipation Organization, and residents protested the condemnation of this community institution in which they took great pride. But their objects had no effect, despite the availability of other vacant land.

Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean. (When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don't characterize those whites as inner city families.)