or am I doomed to suburban hell lmao some context I am in tech
Your choices are
- pay huge rent to live around other techbros
- pay less rent in a poorer neighborhood that's close to work - in other words, gentrifying
- live in the suburbs, contributing to suburban hell sprawl
really don't think there is a good option. The framing of gentrification as a problem caused by individual, rational actors seeking cheap rent near work, vs a problem created by having housing markets with "rational actors" in the first place, has been an ideological win for the market people. If you live in the US you can't opt out of capitalism even if you hate it.
When the housing market literally forgot that poor people exist
:pika-cousin-suffering:
Already said here basically, but gentrification is like climate change: Individual choices are basically meaningless in combating it. Unless you know you're directly putting a family out on the street or something, don't lose sleep over it.
Move wherever you want. And when you get there, shop in local businesses, eat in local restaurants, join your local community organization, get to know your neighbors, and advocate for them and for your community at large.
Gentrifiers move in, ignore the community, and want everything to be Starbucks. Just be a part of your community and you aren't a gentrifier. You'll just be someone that lives in the community.
Unless you are a bank, a developer, a landlord, or a city government trying to encourage gentrification to increase its tax base, you are not responsible for gentrification.
I wonder how much of gentrification is literally just young white people who are broke as shit but not lower class - they're temporarily poor only because they just got out of high school or college. So they are literally not allowed anywhere besides poor minority areas, but within a few years they get jobs and often make a lot of money and it pushes the original residents out.
Yeah if you're fresh out of college with no savings and a lot of debt you can't pay like 3 months up front or whatever other absurd shit landlords do.
If you come in giving signals that you're willing to pay more for something, or if you're planning on "flipping" a house, or if you patronize more expensive businesses in a cheaper neighborhood, then you have something to worry about.
Otherwise, pay no mind, because it's largely a way of guilt-tripping individuals for the actions of large economic entities.
into the ground is better. stray bullets from firing into the air do kill people
There's always the areas that have already been thoroughly gentrified
gentrification is developer driven, not from renters or even buyers.
years ago I went to an open house for the local streetcar agency and almost all the attendees were real estate developers interested in where the streetcar would go next (so they can scoop up properties for speculation)
Yes, you have to move into an area and do graffiti on white people's lawns.
Decrease home values. Change your own oil in your drive way. Assassinate members of the hoa. Plant native flowers. Just whatever it takes.
Go outside once a mouth and unload some blanks in to the sky to keep property values down (don't use real bullets they will land somewhere and people are killed that way every year)
Cities has established rich white parts. They have fully gentrifed places with sky high rents, which I'm assuming you can pay cause you're in tech. And if you must, they have more affordable gentrifying neighborhoods. Just don't call the cops. Don't have friends who cheekily call the neighborhood the ghetto and if you do, they'll probably call the cops for no reason at all.
Bohemians/hipsters have always been a thing, the real issue isn’t upper middle class children, it’s deindustrialization.
