Re:‘One Property at a Time’: Newark Tries to Revive Without ...
by imtringued on Monday February 08, 2021 @09:48AM
(#26065171)
The article conflates gentrification and displacement. Gentrification is basically a booming city fueled by migration. Why do people hate on economic success? Because they absolutely botched their response to gentrification in the most selfish way possible.
You can have displacement without gentrification and you can have gentrification without displacement.
The primary causes of displacement are lack of jobs (the most common cause of displacement by far) and the lack of housing (primarily in geographically constrained locations).
Lack of housing purely is a psychological problem. The tried and true method of incremental change has been abandoned and cities are now built in a "finished state" meaning people expect their city to be perfect the moment they are there and that it should never change throughout their entire life. With this mindset you have created the perfect environment for conflict between existing residents and new arrivals. Your city will fail despite the financial success.
"One Property at a Time" is the right attitude. You don't change your city over night. You have to small steps every single day.
However, it looks like they are committing one grave mistake that pretty much every American city is suffering from.
>But in the last five years, more than 3,500 units of affordable housing have also been built or are underway, much of it outside downtown, city records show.
Sprawl is a funding nightmare. Each plot needs a lot of infrastructure but the amount of property taxes that the property brings in does not cover the cost of maintenance. This is something that is not sustainable in the long run (30 years+). However, it will definitively provide more housing and thus reduce displacement in the short term.
If you want a sustainable city you have to take care of it's most valuable assets and those are not in the outskirts. You'll have to invest into your existing "cash cows" in the downtown core to pay for the sprawl in the future.
It's entirely possible that they made a calculated bet and did this with the idea that down town residents do not have to leave their existing apartments and wait for new construction in the down town core and thus any new "gentrifying" residents will be buffered into the outskirts but I'm not convinced that this is a sure fire plan. You can easily spend yourself into financial ruin as a city.
The modern style of development is extremely inflexible. Big box stores with huge parking lots can only be occupied by another big box store that needs huge parking lots. There is zero flexibility there. It will automatically turn into blight once the business has moved on.
>The dilapidated Krueger-Scott Mansion will become a co-working residential and retail space known as a “makerhood.” Artisans will pay $1,800 a month for an apartment and shop.
Mixed use (aka residential and commercial property) zoning is absolutely fantastic. Exclusively residential and commercial zoning causes a "Von Neumann Bottleneck" (the separation of memory and compute). It means a lot of time has to be spent traveling between zones. It also reduces the need to own a car and it also makes public transport viable.
Putting commercial real estate in the first floor of a residential building also massively increases the flexibility of that real estate. Business can come and go without having to tear the building down. The added benefit is that you can also have a lot of shops next to each other. It's surprising how much property tax you can generate with half a dozen small shops directly next to each other vs building one giant building with a bunch of parking lots. Even in dilapidated areas those tiny shops can actually turn out to be big winners for the city.
>The pace of housing development, they say, is too slow to bring about radical change or to stave off wide-scale gentrification.
When things have to happen quickly you're prone to making mistakes and duplicating them multiple times. You might have a grand vision what the city will look like in the future and that grand vision might never become true and all you are left with is a bunch of abandoned tax liabilities. This also creates the false mindset of solving the problem once and for all when the reality is that change will happen no matter what you do and you should always be prepared to adapt.
Displacement is a tractable problem, you just need the right mindset in both the people and the government and the rest will happen automatically. Meanwhile the other problem, economic decline, is unsolvable. It's not the responsibility of the government to support economically unsustainable cities but it can definitively make a growing city accessible for everyone.
You can have displacement without gentrification and you can have gentrification without displacement.
The primary causes of displacement are lack of jobs (the most common cause of displacement by far) and the lack of housing (primarily in geographically constrained locations).
Lack of housing purely is a psychological problem. The tried and true method of incremental change has been abandoned and cities are now built in a "finished state" meaning people expect their city to be perfect the moment they are there and that it should never change throughout their entire life. With this mindset you have created the perfect environment for conflict between existing residents and new arrivals. Your city will fail despite the financial success.
"One Property at a Time" is the right attitude. You don't change your city over night. You have to small steps every single day.
However, it looks like they are committing one grave mistake that pretty much every American city is suffering from.
>But in the last five years, more than 3,500 units of affordable housing have also been built or are underway, much of it outside downtown, city records show.
Sprawl is a funding nightmare. Each plot needs a lot of infrastructure but the amount of property taxes that the property brings in does not cover the cost of maintenance. This is something that is not sustainable in the long run (30 years+). However, it will definitively provide more housing and thus reduce displacement in the short term.
If you want a sustainable city you have to take care of it's most valuable assets and those are not in the outskirts. You'll have to invest into your existing "cash cows" in the downtown core to pay for the sprawl in the future.
It's entirely possible that they made a calculated bet and did this with the idea that down town residents do not have to leave their existing apartments and wait for new construction in the down town core and thus any new "gentrifying" residents will be buffered into the outskirts but I'm not convinced that this is a sure fire plan. You can easily spend yourself into financial ruin as a city.
The modern style of development is extremely inflexible. Big box stores with huge parking lots can only be occupied by another big box store that needs huge parking lots. There is zero flexibility there. It will automatically turn into blight once the business has moved on.
>The dilapidated Krueger-Scott Mansion will become a co-working residential and retail space known as a “makerhood.” Artisans will pay $1,800 a month for an apartment and shop.
Mixed use (aka residential and commercial property) zoning is absolutely fantastic. Exclusively residential and commercial zoning causes a "Von Neumann Bottleneck" (the separation of memory and compute). It means a lot of time has to be spent traveling between zones. It also reduces the need to own a car and it also makes public transport viable.
Putting commercial real estate in the first floor of a residential building also massively increases the flexibility of that real estate. Business can come and go without having to tear the building down. The added benefit is that you can also have a lot of shops next to each other. It's surprising how much property tax you can generate with half a dozen small shops directly next to each other vs building one giant building with a bunch of parking lots. Even in dilapidated areas those tiny shops can actually turn out to be big winners for the city.
>The pace of housing development, they say, is too slow to bring about radical change or to stave off wide-scale gentrification.
When things have to happen quickly you're prone to making mistakes and duplicating them multiple times. You might have a grand vision what the city will look like in the future and that grand vision might never become true and all you are left with is a bunch of abandoned tax liabilities. This also creates the false mindset of solving the problem once and for all when the reality is that change will happen no matter what you do and you should always be prepared to adapt.
Displacement is a tractable problem, you just need the right mindset in both the people and the government and the rest will happen automatically. Meanwhile the other problem, economic decline, is unsolvable. It's not the responsibility of the government to support economically unsustainable cities but it can definitively make a growing city accessible for everyone.