The problem, as you say, is the cracks that people can fall through. Nobody should be sleeping rough and hungry in the richest country on earth. Solve that with a social safety net, not by banning new construction.
A market and property based approach that locks people out, allocates resources according to ability to pay or some other social status, and sees signs of inability to pay, poverty, and hardship including death, as merely personal moral failings, and the market consequences as some amoral natural system, that's gentrification. Maybe some think that's "the right way to do it" but it's also a really efficient slum creation engine.
We're set for 1/4th the world to be squatters by 2030, that's not sensationalistic, it's the reasonable expectation.
Historically this phenomena is found in immigrant or religious minority communities because they are thought to be less deserving. It's reinforcing because then they can be pointed at, in squalor, and say "see, I told you they were filthy". Racist policies lead to outcomes that differ on racial lines, duh...it was set up that way.
It's all foolish illogical nonsense that should have been tossed in the garbage in the 1700s with the other discarded superstitious rubbish. We can do better.
> A market and property based approach that locks people out, allocates resources according to ability to pay or some other social status, and sees signs of inability to pay, poverty, and hardship including death, as merely personal moral failings, and the market consequences as some amoral natural system, that's gentrification.
Yeah this is a disagreement about terminology. It sounds like you've just described a grab-bag of local social & political systems you don't like and you're attaching the word 'gentrification' to it all. We use the word 'gentrification' to describe things which happens in other places too, to mean different things, often in a non-perjorative way. Reusing that word to mean something similar but different is pretty confusing.
The thing you are complaining about Are The Consequences of gentrification. They are the output of the process. The system you advocate for produces that which you are complaining about.
It's not going to be "cleaned up". This is what that process yields. Gentrification creates more "cracks to fall through" and so more people "fall through the cracks" through the financial consequences. These issues are the consequence of it - that's why it happens everywhere things are gentrifying.
These stratifications produce slums, favelas, cantegrils, gecekondus, barrios, karton siti, paraggoupoli, zopadpatti, baraccopoli, putri, perkampungan kumuh... there's words in almost every language for this phenomena. Policies are machines. They produce things.
This is the outcome of the process, globally, for centuries. You can not possibly get to your goal through that method. It does not work.
I know how alluring the logic is, but like counterintuitive math and science, the obvious solution does not work and we need to stop pretending otherwise. Reality doesn't give a damn about personal belief and stubbornness in systems that don't work. You can't will a wrong answer into being right.
It's the material reality.