Quotes About Gentrification

To fight gentrification is to fight American thinking.

Gentrification brings money, new people, and renovated real estate to cities, but it also kills them. It takes away the affordability and diversity that are required for unique and challenging culture. It sanitizes. And because it is obvious to most that this is happening (even hypergentrifiers in New York and New Orleans mourn the loss of culture in those cities), no one wants to be seen as a gentrifier. Who would want to be held accountable for helping kill a city?

But the city began spending on different things, turning away from social programs that help the poor and toward ones that help the rich—namely, subsidizing redevelopment. The near-bankruptcy made New York the first US city to employ gentrification as governance.

The bad news in our most cosmopolitan and vibrant cities is that many middle-class people can no longer afford to live in 'middle-class' school districts.

I love San Francisco more than any other city outside of Seattle, but I've seen it go from a vibrant, creative community to a playground for tech bros.

Grandpa has presided over the neighborhood as it went from low-income haven for immigrant families to yuppie enclave.

I just feel like, especially after 'Crazy Rich Asians,' gentrification isn't affecting art. I am actually more inspired by art now than ever.

There's an enormous amount of obliviousness: a desire among young gentrifiers to see only the city they want to see.

You know, Greenwich Village was the traditional bohemia of New York. I wish I could say that was entirely true now. It's, uh... changed. It's now got, God help us, investment bankers and journalists, but it's still a very beautiful part of New York.

I think there are some very evil things about gentrification.

When a city begins to grow and spread outward, from the edges, the center which was once its glory is in a sense abandoned to time. Then the buildings grow dark and a kind of decay sets in; poorer people move in as the rents fall, and small fringe businesses take the place of once flowering establishments. The district is still too good to tear down and too outmoded to be desirable.

Having decided there was little point in denying my status as a gentrifier, I joined the neighborhood security association, a network of mostly middle- and upper-middle-class homeowners that employed a small stable of private patrol officers to cruise the neighborhood and scare any potential marauders, most of which amounted to kids loitering near the park.

How you mean, 'doughnut hole'?" Ti-Jeanne had asked. "That's what they call it when an inner city collapses and people run to the suburbs," he'd answered.

the South Brooklyn seaside neighborhood was now showing signs of finally succumbing to the real estate developers. As the taxi wound through funky little side streets, I spotted a billboard advertising the IKEA warehouse located just off the Gowanus Expressway. Wine bars and condos wouldn't be far behind.

We find a place on the lower [sic] East Side," confesses one suburban couple in the genteel pages of the New Yorker: Ludlow Street. No one we know would think of living here. No one we know has ever heard of Ludlow Street.

We have torn down the worst slums. The natural meeting-points for the lumpenproletariat have been eliminated, converted into pleasant, dull, clean blocks for dull, clean, adapted families. In the absence of ghettos for the losers, they gather around the centres of pride. If Harlem and its equivalents did not exist, they would gather outside the Rockefeller Center.

In many ways, racial segregation in America has worsened since King's death. National progress has been stalled, indeed reversed, by local, state, and federal policies—from gentrification and zoning laws to tax codes