Gentrification isn’t an art project. It’s people with more wealth or income-opportunity coming in and buying up cheap stuff at the prices they can afford. That a prettier coffee shop with gourmet pastries opens up, or that the restaurants have cutesy little parklets, is a second order effect.
In most cases, what makes the neighborhood “more attractive” and starts this in motion is either a growing industry within commute distance or that some other neighborhood got too pricey.
It has very little to do with the prior or new people in the neighborhood, except that the new people have access to more money than the old people and so price them out. Care for community or other forms of moral character have absolutely zero to do with it.
I may even have a proof that people mostly migrate to where they can find stability, and away from where there is uncertainty and volatility. Long term residents are the stability.
When there is an imbalance between the sides, it needs correction, and advocating for the people who actually build these desirable streets and neighbourhoods that are so attractive for others to come to seems like the braver cause these days.
That's a big, gigantic, huge, gnarly, completely unjustified assumption that is responsible in entirety for your conclusion. It's like saying "provided these people did good, they did good." Well, yeah. Duh. What if they didn't?
> This is a fundamental cognitive divide
Oh, I agree. It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary (or should I say rent / land value) depends on not understanding it.
In cities with multi-tenant buildings it's typically not so. Renters are the community, or a large part thereof.
You are ignoring that the new arrivals increase the land value of existing residents. You are ignoring that the government uses income taxes etc to invest into the community, not private land owners, effectively punishing the government and renters for good investments as their income taxes improve the value of the land which then results in them paying more rent. Doing the right thing ends up making a lot of people poorer and land owners richer. So now your government is heavily encouraged to do corrupt projects that benefit the politicians rather than the public. Lots of public transportation projects could pay for themselves through an LVT but without an LVT they drain the renter's and governments pockets.
Honestly, the idea that when a town grows from 10k to 100k that it's only the 10k original residents that create the value and those other 90k are just useless deadweights living off the hard work of older residents is ridiculous when land ownership is just about fencing off something that was already there. When you think about it, the real deadweight is someone demanding to get paid for something they didn't create. It is the community as a whole that makes land valuable, not the owners of the land.
In a world of increasing inequality and specialization, the latter scenario is going to be increasingly common. For many people, it is already here: the absentee slumlord who charges a king's ransom and can't be bothered to keep the toilets flushing is a staple of high-value locations. This person clearly isn't creating the value that drives people to put up with these circumstances, but by virtue of owning the correct deed they get to capture the value even as they do their best to unravel it.
It's a lot like founder and startup equity in a way. Is it more fair for people who arrived with money and grew something to reap more benefits, or the people with time and sweat equity who took way more relative individual risk?
Also what if he was a real asshole, rude to everyone, kicking in fences, and his dogs barking 24/7, and the neighbourhood was doing well despite him?
Renting a single place for decades is less common in north america, as homeowner friendly policies were designed to prevent the society from sliding into the serfdom that is more traditional in europe and elsewhere. If a homeowner was a problem, neighbours have police. There's a dynamic that works pretty well when there isn't a thumb on the scale.
And almost all land currently owned is the result of banditry. Pretty much every bit of habitable land has been fought over, both in the Old World and the New. It's all stolen goods.
Examples like these ignore that the reason the land around them is vaulable is by virtue of the people living there making it a better and more prosperous place. They earn the windfall for the time they spend there without making it worse. Someone who has lived in a house for 55 years didn't watch its value appreciate, their lives made the area around them appreciate. The reason neighbourhoods get gentrified is because the residents made them attracitve. The reason neighbourhoods decay is because people don't invest themselves in them long enough, or because they don't invest in them at all because they want to get out.
The ostensible justice of taking this investment from people via high taxes is dispicably cynical. Only a bandit looks at what you have and tells you it's theirs. It makes common ground impossible.