The existing residents (artists) made money by selling their appreciated houses. Those who could afford to remain were now in areas with less crime and poverty.
The new residents spent a ton of money to live in a place they themselves culturally diminished.
We should re-evaluate the winners and losers here.
Win/win, right?
It looks like - it might not be what you mean, but it looks like - you're saying 'good housing' is housing that has "artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives", as opposed to poor working people.
But yes, I think there is a sense in which people who are driven to create have some kind of ineffable, cultural capital that people without this drive do not have. So a neighborhood that is full of artists is more interesting, and therefore more valuable to spend time in, than one that isn't.
https://www.austinmonthly.com/in-photos-what-gentrification-...
I don't think many home owners got a price for their land that allowed them to buy a similar house elsewhere.
The world is far from an ideal model where what you get is what you deserve.
Note the history of the East Side power plant, which depressed property prices. Ditto, I-35 construction plans. The article says the plant will become a park now. After the new developers locked in purchases.
Nothing will fix it until some case goes up to the supreme court and results in some sort of "they were there first the .gov can piss off" doctrine.
What happened was that good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives began gentrifying, driving up property values, which drove up property taxes, which became unaffordable to the existing residents (who had owned their homes for a long time). Many (actually, most) of these artists had to sell and leave.
They often left for other cities. But hey at least the good houses everyone liked all got torn down to be replaced by McMansions for the influx of techbros.
Austin still has that slogan, "Keep Austin Weird." It failed. Austin isn't weird anymore. The University of Texas still is responsible for a lot of great stuff about Austin, but huge chunks of the city are just boring these days. There's certainly much less interesting culture happening. It's been airbnbified.