Quotes About Gentrification

Manhattan was empty except for soldiers and legions of the damned, and already gentrification had resumed.

One day, they will wake up to an extremely unbearable ocean of sameness. (re: changing San Francisco)

I think it's good if areas get upgraded and gentrified, as long as the people who always lived there can stay. But they get pushed out to some place.

It's often been said that politics in Islington, in many ways, begins and ends with housing, and it's not hard to see why. Despite the borough's image of exclusivity - the stereotype that it's all Georgian squares and cappuccino bars - the reality is much more complex.

Neither of my parents live in Oakland anymore. They both got priced out.

I've been sort of gentrification-obsessed. Right before I left Oakland in 2012, I was feeling it. Now I go back sporadically, and the change is drastic.

Gentrification had stopped dead several doors west of my spot overlooking Avenue B. You could actually see the line. That side of the line; Biafran cuisine, sparkling plastic secure window units, women called Imogen and Saffron, men called Josh and Morgan. My side of the line; crack whores, burned-out cars, bullets stuck in door frames, and men called Father-Eating Bastard. It's almost a point of honour to live near a crackhouse, like living in a pre-Rudy Zone, a piece of Old New York.

I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Sweden, which, during my teens, gentrified and is now completely middle class and even upper middle class.

I'm Hackney born and bred and find it hard to call anywhere else home despite the extreme ongoing gentrification which gets me down.

Working on the film really made me confront my opinions about change and gentrification.

This ignorance of the lives of others is what allows gentrification to happen. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts points out in her book Harlem Is Nowhere that whenever a neighborhood gentrifies, you hear white people and the media using phrases such as "People are starting to move to that neighborhood," or "No one used to go there, but that's changing." The implication is that before these places gentrified, no one lived there, or at least no one of importance.

The history of black people in Manhattan is a story of people getting pushed farther uptown as land acquires new uses and increases in value.

I grew up in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. At the time I was growing up with my father - before it was gentrified - it was a very rough neighborhood. He felt that if I got into or started embracing the rap culture, I would be one step closer to being on the streets.

I'm in East L.A., like Mount Washington, Highland Park. There's a little strip that they're gentrifying, trying to make a hip spot, but you go there, and it's just kind of barren. Nobody hangs out anywhere in L.A. There's no loitering in L.A., so I don't know what to do with myself.

Gentrification is stripping people not only of their homes but also of their dignity and their lives, and it is effectively whitening public spaces.

MFA programs are to the world of art what gentrification is to your neighborhood.

meant working-class kids like Stan no longer spent their childhoods whacking a tennis ball but hunched over tiny screens. Logan's point was: Don't you dare think I grew up rich and privileged just because this bush neighbourhood got all posh and gentrified.

High rents had priced out the very service sector whose presence at ready hand once helped to justify urban living. For all practical purposes, affluent New Yorkers resided in a crowded, cluttered version of the countryside, where you had to drive five miles for a quart of milk. Florence

In other words, New York has gone all suburban and bourgeois on us.

In Paris, where I live, the inner neighborhoods are only available to the white elite. The poor and dispossessed are shuffled out to suburbs and never seen.

Gentrification, at its deepest level, is really about reorienting the purpose of cities away from being spaces that provide for the poor and middle classes and toward being spaces that generate capital for the rich.

This is capitalism's constant urban conundrum: what makes cities profitable is inherently at odds with the needs of the poor and middle classes (who are needed for a city to function), and centrally located land has inherent value if it can be made amenable to the rich. Gentrification may be a new expression of this conflict between land value and the needs of the poor, but it's a problem as old as capitalism itself.

When we think of gentrification as some mysterious process, we accept its consequences: the displacement of countless thousands of families, the destruction of cultures, the decreased affordability of life for everyone. I hope this book is a counterweight to hopelessness abut the future of urban America that enables readers to see cities are shaped by powerful interests, and that if we identify those interests, we can begin to reshape cities in our own design.

Hipsters are fine with coffee but eye boutiques and banks with suspicion, yuppies are fine with the boutiques and banks but see landscapes radically altered by development as cultural losses, and developers such as Pres Kabacoff are fine with those landscapes as long as they don't inspire protest.