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JP - Let's get our gentrification story straight

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JP - Let's get our gentrification story straight

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The author argues that much rage against change that makes neighbourhoods more posh is contradictory and misses the point

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Are we quite sure we're against gentrification, the urban phenomenon routinely blamed for everything held to be destroying London's soul, from high housing costs, to corporatised shopping streets, to the pricing out of artists and other creative folk, to the alleged "social cleansing" of the poor? Do we absolutely know that gentrification is to blame for such bad things? Do we really know what we mean by the word?

Its most popular deployment is familiar: it disparages the effects of an influx into neighbourhoods "with potential" of newcomers who are wealthier than those already there. At its most pejorative it characterises economic and demographic change in London - especially Inner London - as the colonisation by wealthy people of working class areas with high percentages of ethnic minority residents who are "pushed out" as a result.

This story has become firmly entrenched among the metropolitan left and beyond. Resistance has been declared. Hostility is aimed at estate agents, property developers and local councils deemed too friendly with them. Campaigners vow to defend "the community" and what they say are its wishes against the ravenous encroachments of "the rich".

The value of all this is that it highlights genuine anxieties about change and the current rapid pace of it, many of them easy to sympathise with. But that value is limited. The analysis that drives it may not be quite as solid or as righteous as it thinks.

Gentrification in London is not new. It has been going on for decades, beginning in the 1960s when bits of the dirty old post-war city began to swing and adventurous young architects started doing up dirt cheap Georgian squares. By the early-1980s, Alexei Sayle had a joke about entire streets in Stoke Newington falling down because all the middle-class people who'd bought terraced houses there chose the same weekend to knock their front and back rooms into one.

Thirty years on, that same joke might be made about Leyton, Peckham, Deptford or Plaistow. There is comedy too in the dislike gentrification inspires. Some of its fiercest opponents are its instigators: the media types and liberal young professionals of every kind who settle the wild and "edgy" urban frontiers, not necessarily to the delight of people already there, and in so doing quite literally prepare the ground for the value "uplift" to come. The funny part is that this truth escapes them.

There is, though, a broader and a deeper irony. It is that these forces of change accused of ruining London are products of its revitalisation. People forget that for four decades the city was bombed out, smogged up and in decline. The population of Inner London still hasn't recovered to its levels of 1939. Today, people bewail a "hollowing out" attributed to rich foreigners who allegedly "buy to leave" in large numbers. It's worth remembering that ordinary people have migrated from the centre of London to the suburbs and beyond for many, many years, often eagerly. Skilled manual workers who headed for the New Towns in the 1950s were searching for the promised land.

By the start of the present century, the whole dynamic had changed. London had become a wellspring of economic growth, gushing money from its turbo-charged Square Mile. Where there is profit, there are opportunities. Where there are opportunities, there are people eager to take them - in London's case, more and more people, from near and far, many of them needing somewhere to set up shop, all of them needing somewhere to live.

Demand for space is the seed of gentrification. Its growth stems from a failure to meet that demand. Squeezed by rising prices, those too affluent to qualify for social housing but not affluent enough to buy in newly-expensive areas - sometimes the very areas where they were born - look further afield. Opposition to gentrification sometimes sounds like the way a particular section of the London middle-class complains about not being able to get a mortgage.

When we look at London's unacceptable poverty, especially its child poverty, should gentrification be held responsible or is doing so a distraction from the job of addressing the issue properly? Assertions that it is "pushing out" the poor in London look less persuasive in light of the very high levels of social housing that still exist in the classic gentrified boroughs of north London. In Camden, 35% of all housing is for social rent, in Islington it's 42% and in Hackney, 44%. Although poverty rates have fallen in those boroughs, the absolute numbers of poor people living in them remain high.

There are good arguments that gentrified areas meet poor people's needs less well, as shops become posher and more niche. But there are also good ones for saying that they benefit from middle-class pressure for better schools and public spaces. Some studies in the United States, focussing on the changing ethnic compositions of urban areas, have found that black people actually moved out of those that had gentrified less than they departed those that hadn't.

It's time to get our gentrification story straight. Edward Clarke of the UK thinktank Centre for Cities writes that the debate should not be reduced to "a simple battle between plucky communities and greedy gentrifiers", stressing that this "fails to recognise that the roles and functions of urban neighbourhoods have always changed over time and within a city" or to acknowledge that gentrifying "new work" businesses can create new jobs and improve wages across the board.

He adds that "the myth that creative incomers are to blame" for rising housing costs and commercial rents works against addressing the true root of the problem, which he sums up as "poor city management". To improve this, Clarke argues for better skills training for local people, more planning and tax-raising powers to be devolved to local politicians and more land, including a small portion of green belt, being made available for building.

The thing we call gentrification raises large issues for London - and all the UK's growing cities - and opposing it like trying to hold back the sea. Dealing with it requires a constructive, practical, flexible political response that helps to shape this force of urban change to best and most equitable effect. The politics of protest aren't up to it.

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Let's get our gentrification story straight

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Much rage against change that makes neighbourhoods more posh is contradictory and misses the point

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JP - China's passion for foreign property

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JP - China's passion for foreign property

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"China is so big," marvels Victor Li, using his fingers to count all the cities he has flown to over the last 12 months to meet with cash-rich Chinese buyers interested in buying into a real-life game of London Monopoly.

Li, a director of international project marketing for the US real estate giant CBRE, is predicting a surge of eastern investment in British homes over the next decade, as increasingly affluent Chinese investors acquire a taste for international property.

"I think it is just beginning," says Li, of the amount of money pouring into property around the world from mainland China. "You do the figures: China has a population of 1.4 billion. If you target only 1% of China's population, that's 14 million people - so it's already almost two Londons."

Sitting in his office overlooking Hong Kong's skyscraper-dotted Victoria Harbour, Li estimates that just 3% of potential Chinese investors in overseas property have so far been found - meaning a virtually untapped goldmine lies over the border in mainland China. "China is a big market, you know?" he says. "They are getting wealthier and wealthier."

Rich Hong Kong investors have been ploughing money into British bricks and mortar for decades, snapping up off-plan apartments at weekly property fairs that can then be rented, flipped, held as investments or used as second homes.

"I have one [London property] in Canary Wharf, one in City Island, one in Wembley Park, one in Elephant and Castle," said one investor matter-of-factly at a recent expo in Hong Kong's chic Mandarin Oriental Hotel, as he eyed a new development near the Thames Barrier in E16.

But many real-estate agents and property experts in east Asia believe a new wave of investment is just getting under way, as mainland investors develop a taste for international real estate, including postcodes up and down the UK.

"Our thesis - and this is supported by quite a lot of evidence - is that in many ways the international Chinese investment journey is probably just starting," says Charles Pittar, chief executive of Juwai.com, a website that aims to pair mainland buyers with property developers in places such as Australia, the US and the UK.

Pittar's company, which lists 2.5 million properties and calls itself China's largest international real-estate website, estimates that in 2014, Chinese outbound investment into residential and commercial property was more than $50bn (£38bn).

"I guess the key is: what is it going to become?" Pittar says. "Our view is that ... it could be growing to somewhere around $200bn [annually] over the next 10 years."

And Britain, despite its decision to leave the EU, is expected to be one of the key focuses, he adds. "The UK market, particularly post-Brexit, is really picking up."

Pittar traces mainland China's hunger for overseas property back to the turn of the century, just before China's entry into the World Trade Organisation signalled the latest phase of its integration into the global economy. But the outflow of money has gathered pace over the past decade, and is set to grow further as middle-class investors from second- and third-tier cities get in on the game.

"It's a big market now, but it is likely to be anywhere from two to four times the size in 10 years' time," Pittar says. "The exciting thing about China is that there are 168 cities with more than a million people. So this is just such a huge market."

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A poster for the new Royal Wharf development in London from a recent property show in Hong Kong. Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian

Li, who specialises in London properties worth up to £4m, concurs with the notion that Brexit is helping to accelerate the boom in interest in the UK: "Some of my clients at the beginning of the year, they said: 'OK Victor, let's wait, wait, wait.' And then, after they found out about Brexit and [the] sterling came down more than 10%, I got more calls - they want to go back into the market. It's lots of saving," he says with a grin.

According to Pittar, Chinese who buy property overseas have four main motivations: investment, lifestyle, emigration and education. Many are looking for a foothold in the UK, where they hope their children will go on to study.

"Some people are buying for their family to use it," says Li, "some are buying to diversify, some are buying because they want to own a property for investment - and some people are buying for prestige, to say: 'I own a piece of property in London.'"

Crucially, he says, London is also seen as a secure place to store money that investors want to move out of China, to guard against the devaluation of the Chinese currency, the yuan. "People in mainland China, they want to get their money out ... They believe that money out of China is safe money. And London is a safe-haven to park that money."

The 50-year-old property salesman made his first foray into mainland China in 2001, pitching a slice of Lambeth's St George Wharf to would-be investors at a five-star hotel on Shanghai's answer to Oxford Street.

People in mainland Chin​​a, they want to get their money out. London is a safe-haven

Over the past year alone, Li has made almost 20 such trips, jetting out from his base in Hong Kong to cities including Guangzhou, Chongqing and Chengdu to meet with cash-flush Chinese buyers.

"This one is Macau ... This one is Shanghai," he says, flicking through photographs on his smartphone of recent seminars where he advertised luxury London developments such as Clipper Wharf in E1 and Carrara Tower on City Road.

Li says some mainland investors agree to buy apartments on the spot. "If they are interested, they reserve the unit - they just use a credit card. They have Union Pay, Mastercard or Visa: £5,000."

Many of his mainland investors are real-estate tycoons who have made a fortune from their country's economic boom, and now "just want to take the profits, cash out and move some of their wealth overseas".

But Pittar believes the story of ordinary, middle-class investors is more significant than that of China's globe-trotting, Ferrari-driving elite. "What we read in the newspapers is always about the very wealthy Chinese who come and buy a £5m, £10m, £15m property. But the middle class is key. How big is the middle class? It could be 120 million. We tend to think it's probably closer to 150 million.

"Once they've got somewhere to live in China, the reality is that the domestic market is quite expensive, so that's why they are looking more for international opportunities. Like anyone who wants to preserve their wealth, diversification is important."

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London's Nine Elms redevelopment: property in the UK capital is seen as both prestigious and secure in China. Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris for the Guardian

Predictions that a new wave of investment from mainland China is on the horizon will stir further debate over the measures British politicians might use to protect local home buyers.

The anticipated influx of money from mainland China into the UK is set to affect not only London - historically the focus for much east Asian investment - but cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham, to which more of the investment is now heading.

"Those seem to be the hotspots," says Neil Jensen, the Hong Kong-based regional director for London estate agent Fraser & Co, who promotes developments in the capital to Asian investors.

A particular spotlight has been shining on Manchester since last October, when Chinese president Xi Jinping toured the city to lend his support to George Osborne's "northern powerhouse" project during his first state visit to Britain.

Jensen says Fraser & Co, founded in 1995, has traditionally specialised in London properties which it markets internationally through offices in Dubai and Hong Kong. Now, however, he is preparing to offer his clients their first major investment opportunity outside the capital, in a project specifically designed to attract Chinese money.

Called "New Chinatown" - or Xinhua Bu (New China Wharf) in Mandarin - the £200m venture in Liverpool describes itself as "one of the most important and exciting developments in the UK today" and promises to be "one of the UK's most luxurious and desirable residential destinations".

You can't just put up a block of flats in Liverpool and expect people to buy it - there has to be a story

Neil Jensen

The development's website boasts: "It is the burgeoning energy and dynamism of modern China transplanted into the heart of an historic World Heritage City." Adding: "This is an historic moment ... This is a unique investment opportunity.

"Underpinning the whole masterplan is the idea and motif of the awakening dragon - a powerful symbol of China's resurgence and status as a new global power."

Jensen says improving transport infrastructure in the northwest and relatively low prices meant New Chinatown - where two-bedroom duplex penthouses are on offer for up to £546,427 and ordinary one-bedroom flats from £119,211 - would be a hit with Chinese investors.

"You can't just put up a block of flats in Liverpool and expect people to buy it ... If you want foreign buyers there has to be a story," he says, adding: "They'll probably go quite quickly."

The fringes of London have also come onto the radar of Chinese investors, thanks to Crossrail, a £14.8bn, 73-mile metrolink cutting west to east across the capital, which is set to open in 2018.

"Most of your investors 20 or 30 years ago would have been going more towards the bullseye in dartboard terms," Jensen says, referring to the centre of London. But improved transport links are now drawing foreign investors to places such as Slough, Ilford and Canning Town.

"The commuter area - anything within a 20-30 minute travel time [of central London] is hot," says Jonathan Gordon, a director at IP Global, a Hong Kong property investment firm that is promoting projects in Ilford and Croydon and has previously invested in Slough.

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Mercury House, a new development in Slough being marketed in Hong Kong. Illustration: Fraser & Co

"Slough has got Crossrail going through it so you can get to Bond Street in no time," he says. "It is those sorts of stories we are interested in as opposed to buying in Bond Street itself."

Crossrail is not the only reason foreign investors are now looking to the outskirts of the capital, though. Investors and industry insiders say stamp duty increases targeting wealthy foreign investors have pushed up the cost of buying more expensive properties in prime locations.

That has led many foreign investors to buy a larger number of cheaper properties in more peripheral, suburban areas, says Gordon, where "transaction costs are lower."

One veteran Hong Kong investor, with a portfolio that includes properties in London, Manchester and Liverpool, explains: "You buy a large number of properties, but lower-priced ones ... You pay something like £200,000 or £250,000, rather than £1m for zone one in Mayfair, places like that."

This new wave of Chinese investors includes people such as Jody Ye, a 30-year-old from Chongqing, a metropolis in south-west China. In July, Ye paid £200,000 for a flat in Bristol, where she went to university and now lives. She is planning to buy her second UK property.

"Buying property back home is too expensive," she says. "Investing in the UK is much more cost-efficient." Bristol is not only "a great place", but, she adds: "British people think Bristol is posh."

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The Hong Kong headquarters of Juwai.com

Fan Feifei, 34, from Xi'an, is another Chinese buy-to-let investor. She is preparing to purchase her third property in Birmingham. "I bought it purely for investment," she says of her second purchase, a £135,000 home in B29, which she rents to overseas students.

"Since 2014, Chinese people have been rushing to buy houses in the UK," adds Fan, pointing to high rental yields and stable property prices as key driving factors. "All of the Chinese people around me are buying houses or have already bought several houses in the UK. I'm the one who has bought the least, with only two."

Song Dongzhe, a third mainland investor, from the north-eastern city of Dalian, bought his first British property - a three-bedroomed house in Selly Oak, south-west Birmingham - in 2012 for £125,000. Earlier this year he bought two more.

Song says the UK is "very attractive to Chinese property investors", largely because it does not have the high duties that have been introduced in Canada and Australia targeting foreign buyers.

High prices in London make it "too risky" to buy there, he adds. But "as the UK's second biggest city, I thought Birmingham was a choice that made sense".

A fourth mainland investor, who declines to be named, says President Xi's tour of the UK convinced him Britain was the right place to invest his family's fortune. Property in major Chinese cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen is now too expensive, the Shanghai investor says, and China's stock market is "extremely unstable - so I think it's a good time to invest in [the] UK."

As well as London, he says he is now looking at opportunities in cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh.

Underlying discontent

Speaking in his Hong Kong office, property promoter Gordon predicts that, as has happened elsewhere in the world, concern over foreign investment in British property will eventually lead to the introduction of measures to protect local buyers. "There is that underlying discontent in some camps to say: 'Well, it's not on, it's not fair - releasing and selling all this property overseas.'

"I wouldn't be surprised if, going forward, there is some legislation that says a certain percentage of properties have to be sold or marketed locally for a period of time, and then it is fair game overseas [after that]."

Australia, currently the second biggest destination for Chinese property investment after the United States, has been cracking down on foreign buyers since last year, after complaints that China's voracious appetite for property in cities such as Sydney and Melbourne was pricing local buyers out of the market.

Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous city that returned to Chinese control in 1997, has also been fighting to quell a huge wave of often speculative mainland investment in residential property. In a bid to rein in sky-high prices, authorities in the former colony have rolled out a series of cooling measures in recent years, including tighter lending rules and higher stamp duties.

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'This is just the start': China's passion for foreign property

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"China is so big," marvels Victor Li, using his fingers to count all the cities he has flown to over the last 12 months to meet with cash-rich Chinese buyers interested in buying into a real-life game of London Monopoly.

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JP - Can filling vacant spaces with "creatives" ease London's gentrification woes?

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JP - Can filling vacant spaces with "creatives" ease London's gentrification woes?

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Entering The Platform - a community space in Loughborough Junction in south London filled with plants, homemade beauty products and crafts, and home to a host of workshops and cultural events - it is hard to imagine its former incarnation as a public toilet. But it is usually the first thing locals remark on when they stop by, says Kenyasue Smart, who has been managing the space since May.

Smart came to The Platform through Meanwhile Space, a social enterprise that finds temporary uses for disused spaces. The Platform is leased from Lambeth council for free and enables people to test retail ideas. "It's what you make of it," says Smart, whose background is in research and management. "We're trying to develop that aspect of community involvement so the people here can have a voice in what is going to happen in the future," she says.

Meanwhile Space works as an interim landlord, helping people who might be excluded from renting commercial property get their business idea off the ground. "What I hope we offer people is the chance to fail," says Eddie Bridgeman, director and co-founder of the organisation. "If it doesn't work out then they haven't committed themselves to a long lease and something that's going to financially cripple them for the next five to 10 years."

Bridgeman and director Emily Berwin co-founded Meanwhile Space in 2009. Back then, as the recession bit, the former communities secretary Hazel Blears promoted short term use of vacant retail spaces to help revive town centres.

With funding, Meanwhile Project (as it was known then) offered practical and financial support for a range of temporary uses of space across the country. When the fuding ended three years ago, it became a community interest company, making money by charging tenants rent at cheap rates.

In recent years, commercial property rents have rocketed, making it hard to find affordable space in London. Rent increased 70% between 2010 and 2015 to an average of £55 per square foot, according to recent research by EY.

Bridgeman says at first they were concerned that Meanwhile Space would just be a recession business. "But if anything when property is booming landlords are more willing to sit on stuff so the vacant opportunities come along a bit more regularly," he says.

Once a location is scouted - usually after a bit of door knocking and calls to the Land Registry - Meanwhile Space negotiates a flexible lease and does minimal renovations before renting it out for the lowest cost possible. An archway in Loughborough Junction, for example, is about £350 a month.

The organisation tends to find clusters of properties in deprived town centres. It has occupied over 40 across the country and has about 25 spaces in use at the moment, including premises in Wembley, Walthamstow and Hastings, for a range of businesses such as food, florists, party supplies and kids clothing. From its inception to 2015, it claims to have supported 511 people and created 170 jobs. "If you've got a proposal and need the space then we will try and find you the space," says Bridgeman.

The tenants - about 80% of whom are underemployed or unemployed according to Meanwhile Space - are found through word of mouth, ties to local recruitment agencies and community events, such as the recent drumming workshop hosted at The Platform. People submit a loose business plan to get a space, with each application judged on its viability to generate income.

In the archway next to Meanwhile Space's offices is the workspace of Jamie Hoyle, a furniture designer and maker. His business, Koda Studio, would have been a "non-starter" if he had not found the affordable space via Meanwhile Space, he says. "When space comes at such a premium in London, it's a shame when you walk around spaces and they are just derelict or boarded up and unusable," he says.

While short-term leases can help people get businesses off the ground, it also means a level of insecurity. Hoyle says he would like to start teaching furniture making in the space, but with a 12-month lease and uncertainty over Network Rail's plans for the archways, he does not want to risk expanding, only to have to move.

In neighbouring Brixton, redevelopment proposals for the railway arches have sparked controversy, with concerns that the existing independent traders will be pushed out by rent increases.

Across London gentrification has been driving up prices and displacing communities. In reviving vacant spaces by filling them with entrepreneurs and creatives, does Meanwhile Space risk accelerating these economic forces? Bridgeman says not. "We provide little havens of affordability in areas where prices are going up - gentrification is a wider force than anything that we do," he says. "What we try and do is get what we can out of gentrification for local people."

Getting the right balance of locals with ties to the community and tenants from outside who can provide stimulation, is key to the success of such place-making schemes, says Graeme Evans, professor in design cultures at the University of Middlesex. "The claims that creative industries' growth directly benefits local economies will only be true over time if local residents, businesses and those not normally entering or getting access to this sector, are able to access this provision," he says.

But by the nature of temporary workspace, there are no guarantees on how sustainable such as scheme will be for the community in the long term. "Short licences are great for startups and for project based work, but most want to stay for longer so what happens then?" says Evans. "You need some kind of hierarchy of space and lease terms to prevent blocking up of space but also to sustain artists and SMEs as they grow, but where they can't afford full commercial rents."

Having recently bought and renovated a five-storey building in Hastings, Bridgeman sees Meanwhile Space's future in buying and turning more property into affordable live and work spaces. "If you can own stuff, you can control the rent and if you have a long-term vision on that, you don't need to necessarily scrape all the profit from it," he says.
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Can filling derelict spaces with creatives ease London's gentrification woes?

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Entering The Platform - a community space in Loughborough Junction in south London filled with plants, homemade beauty products and crafts, and home to a host of workshops and cultural events - it is hard to imagine its former incarnation as a public toilet.

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JP - Gentrification is a global issue ... 

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JP - Gentrification is a global issue ... 

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First article in a Guardian series on gentrification in global perspective.

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irst come the artists, then the cranes. As the kamikaze pilots of urban renewal, wherever the creatives go, developers will follow, rents will rise, the artists will move on, and the pre-existing community will be kicked out with them.

Such is the accepted narrative of gentrification, a term first coined more than 50 years ago by the German-born British sociologist Ruth Glass to describe changes she observed in north London - but it is a phenomenon that has been at the heart of how cities evolve for centuries.

Gentrification is a slippery and divisive word, vilified by many for the displacement of the poor, the influx of speculative investors, the proliferation of chain stores, the destruction of neighbourhood authenticity; praised by others for the improvement in school standards and public safety, the fall in crime rates, and the arrival of bike lanes, street markets and better parks.

Your opinion might depend on which side of the property-owning chasm you are on, and the respective consequences: an uplift in the value of your assets, or an increase in the rent you must pay to stay. In all cases, the winners are the landowners, who profit handsomely from the unearned income of neighbourhood improvement.

For years, gentrification boosters such as Richard Florida have argued it is the surefire formula for urban regeneration, proselytising their magic recipe to rapt mayors around the world. Blighted neighbourhoods could be miraculously transformed by incentivising the arrival of the "creative class" of artists, gay couples and brave bohemians: those frontline pioneers who would take on rundown buildings and seed the pop-up micro-breweries, artisanal bakeries and farmers' markets that would encourage the more timid middle classes to follow. Houses are done up, community gardens appear, and investors flock to reap the rewards.

The "urban renaissance" of the past two decades, masterminded in the UK by Richard Rogers in the form of New Labour's urban taskforce, set out to revitalise decaying inner city cores, breathe fresh life into post-industrial "brownfield" land, and make cities happier, healthier, safer places to live and work. Rather than escaping to the suburbs, successful young professionals would be lured back into the city, bringing an upwardly mobile, cappuccino-supping class to activate a whole new generation of urban public spaces.

There have been many upsides. But the consequences of the rate and scale of change, the displacement of poor by rich, the loss of workspace and the hollowing out of neighbourhoods by buy-to-leave investors, is now frightening even the most ardent promoters of trickle-down regeneration.

Brownfield developments have too often resulted in lifeless dormitory blocks: clone-town apartments built without the social infrastructure of the corner shops, doctors' surgeries, pubs and primary schools needed to make viable places to live. Projects that were planned as mixed-tenure neighbourhoods have seen their "affordable" housing quotas relentlessly squeezed out, thanks to the clever accounting of viability consultants and well-paid planning lawyers.

Jason Burke will be reporting on the tensions of gentrification in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photograph: James Oatway/The Guardian

Starting today, this Guardian Cities series will examine the consequences of gentrification around the world, and interrogate what is being done to tackle it. From Vancouver's pioneering gentrification tax to the efforts of a tenants' cooperative in Brooklyn, from housing evictions in Johannesburg to the impact of Airbnb in Amsterdam, we will hear from groups on both sides of the regeneration machine about the impacts, challenges and tactics being deployed on this ever-shifting battleground.

My own view is that the best solution to mitigate the impact of the almost inevitable tide of urban gentrification is a tax on the value of land, which would capture the value of improvements for the local community, rather than lining the pockets of investors.

This is an idea that has enjoyed the support of economists throughout the ages, from Adam Smith (who said "nothing could be more reasonable") to Milton Friedman (who called it "the least bad tax"), but it is most closely associated with Henry George, whose 1879 book Progress and Poverty argued that land-value levies should replace all other taxes, leaving labour and capital to flourish freely, thus ending poverty, unemployment, inflation and inequality.

At present, when gentrification increases the value of an area, the windfall is to the landowners. The community group that gets together to revive a street market or establish an urban garden, or the penniless artists who turn a leaky warehouse into a gallery, are indirectly responsible for catalysing the very forces they are usually determined to prevent.

Such amenities increase the "locational value" of properties in the area, attracting buy-to-let investors, land speculators and estate agents who feature these very community assets in their glossy brochures. The arrival of the allotment and the " makerspace " puts into motion a sequence of events that will ultimately drive them out: the cast-iron rule of gentrification is that the things that make an area attractive will be displaced or destroyed.

A land value tax shifts this dynamic. Rather than taxing property, it taxes the value of the land itself - determined by its location, not what is built on it. The rise in value that results from neighbourhood improvements is therefore captured and returned to the community, to be reinvested in the area.

Such a tax also penalises those who hoard vacant plots of land with no intention to build, while driving inflated land values down by taking into account the value of future levies that will be applied.

In short, it would mean the next time you see a bearded hipster wheeling his sourdough trolley to the local festival of sustainable street art, you could take solace in the fact that the perceived value he is creating will not be siphoned off by a developer, or lead to an increase in your rent, but ultimately generate more revenue to make your neighbourhood a better place to live.
Are you experiencing or resisting gentrification in your city? Share your stories in the comments below, through our Producing in-depth, thoughtful, well-reported journalism is difficult and expensive - but supporting us isn't. If you value the the Guardian's coverage of the global housing crisis, please help to fund our journalism by becoming a supporter dedicated callout, or on Twitter using #GlobalGentrification.

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Gentrification is a global problem. It's time we found a better solution

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irst come the artists, then the cranes. As the kamikaze pilots of urban renewal, wherever the creatives go, developers will follow, rents will rise, the artists will move on, and the pre-existing community will be kicked out with them.

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JP - Sadiq Khan launches inquiry into foreign property ownership in London

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JP - Sadiq Khan launches inquiry into foreign property ownership in London

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London mayor launches unprecedented inquiry into foreign property ownership

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Exclusive Sadiq Khan tells the Guardian he will carry out 'the most thorough research on this matter ever undertaken' amid widespread concern over rising housing costs and gentrification

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Imran Ashraf - South Park takes on Gentrification, "So Do So Pa"

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Imran Ashraf - South Park takes on Gentrification, "So Do So Pa"

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South Park - The City Part of Town - “The Lofts at SoDoSoPa”

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A sleek commercial for the new residences at SoDoSoPa... Welcome home. Watch the full episode for free here: http://cart.mn/sp-SODOSOPA

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Imran Ashraf - We’ve reached peak gentrification: they’re making fortunes out of thin air 

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Imran Ashraf - We’ve reached peak gentrification: they’re making fortunes out of thin air 

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For anyone without substantial investments, reading about the property market in the capital has become a kind of torture porn, in which every new detail horrifies more than the last. At the top of the market there are record-breaking deals such as the £140m closing price for an apartment overlooking Hyde Park; and then there are record-breaking deals such as the tiny studio, albeit in Mayfair, that was let out within 40 minutes of being advertised. These things never fail to depress, and yet one can't quite drag one's eyes away.

I had cause this week to call one of Britain's biggest housing developers, and out of interest asked the rep about the health of its new development in Tottenham. Of all the London neighbourhoods, Tottenham has proved among the most steadfastly resistant to gentrification, despite estate agents' best efforts to market "Old Tottenham" and "NoTo" to the north, and "SoTo" to the south. But Tottenham is beginning to turn: not only have all the apartments been sold, said the agent, but during the course of the selling season they went up by £50,000.

In this market that is only to be expected. What threw me was the information that, with the final blocks in the complex still under construction, people are already starting to flip their properties.

"You mean, people are re-selling properties that don't exist?" I said. Even the agent had to admit it was a little nuts. It was also throwing up logistical confusion, with surveyors representing the original buyers and the secondary buyers lining up to inspect the as yet unbuilt apartments. How many layers of this can be supported before the entire system collapses? Wasn't this how the trouble started last time? Unless you have a strong stomach or unlimited resources, look away now.
Sweet but sour
In hard times one takes consolation in the smallest advantage, which is why sales of coffee and lipstick are recession-proof, and why retailers try to extend the concept of luxury to the little things. The US cereal Lucky Charms, for example, ran a promotion recently in which its usual recipe of wholegrain loops studded with marshmallows was replaced with 100% marshmallows - the equivalent of a cake consisting only of icing. It was a Halloween gimmick, but one that espoused a general trend in retail for misunderstanding the nature of a good thing.

Fruit Mentos have gone the same way, with a product in which the unpopular flavours are removed and the whole packet made up of only lime and strawberry sweets. I bought a packet the other day, cheered by the absence of the oranges and yellows, but after scoffing the lot I felt downcast. Nothing's a treat if everything is.
Sorry, professor
I owe someone an apology. Last week I wrote about a poetry professor opening his class with the words "What hurt you into poetry?", which struck me as thoroughly ridiculous. So much for that: I'm informed it's derived from a line in Auden's In Memory of WB Yeats, quoted here as an antidote to the other stuff.
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. Topics

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Gentrification in Tottenham? It's a real property horror story | Emma Brockes

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For anyone without substantial investments, reading about the property market in the capital has become a kind of torture porn, in which every new detail horrifies more than the last.

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Imran Ashraf - "Is Gentrification All Bad?"

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Imran Ashraf - "Is Gentrification All Bad?"

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Gentrification: New Yorkers can sense it immediately. It plumes out of Darling Coffee, on Broadway and 207th Street, and mingles with the live jazz coming from the Garden Café next door. Down the block, at Dichter Pharmacy, it's visible on the shelf of Melissa & Doug toys. An algae bloom of affluence is spreading across the city, invading the turf of artists and ironworkers, forming new habitats for wealthy vegans.

It's an ugly word, a term of outrage. Public Advocate Letitia James sounded the bugle against it in her inauguration speech on New Year's Day: "We live in a gilded age of inequality where decrepit homeless shelters and housing developments stand in the neglected shadow of gleaming multimillion-dollar condos," she cried, making it clear that she would love to fix up the first two and slam the brakes on the third. In this moral universe, gentrification is the social equivalent of secondhand smoke, drifting across class lines.

Yet gentrification can be either a toxin or a balm. There's the fast-moving, invasive variety nourished by ever-rising prices per square foot; then there's a more natural, humane kind that takes decades to mature and lives on a diet of optimism and local pride. It can be difficult to tell the two apart. "The things that low-income people think are nice are the same as what wealthy people want," says Nancy Biberman, who runs the Women's Housing and Economic Development Corporation in the Bronx. Communities fight for basic upgrades in quality of life, and when they're successful, their food options and well-kept streets attract neighbors (and developers). It also works the other way: Richer, more entitled parents can lift up weak schools, says Biberman. "They're more aggressive, and they empower other parents."

Gentrification doesn't need to be something that one group inflicts on another; often it's the result of aspirations everybody shares. All over the city, a small army of the earnest toils away, patiently trying to sluice some of the elitist taint off neighborhoods as they grow richer. When you're trying to make a poor neighborhood into a nicer place to live, the prospect of turning it into a racially and economically mixed area with thriving stores is not a threat but a fantasy. As the cost of basic city life keeps rising, it's more important than ever to reclaim a form of urban improvement from its malignant offshoots. A nice neighborhood should be not a luxury but an urban right.

Somewhere, a mournful bugle sounds for every old shoe-repair place that shutters to make way for a gleaming cookie boutique. And yet some old-school businesses, if they're flexible enough, can do more than survive: They can help nudge a neighborhood into the right kind of change.

"I'm a corner druggist," says Manny Ramirez, the stocky, genial owner of Dichter Pharmacy. You can feel the pleasure he gets from pronouncing the phrase-the same retro jolt he gets from saying stickball, soda shop, and candy store. But he is hardly living in the past. He's a canny businessman, Inwood-born and bilingual in English and Spanish, who has known some of his customers from his own childhood and keeps his antennae tuned to the tastes of those he hasn't even met. Keenly conscious of his low-income neighborhood, he undersells the chain stores on basics like Tylenol and keeps the prices of most items at his lunch counter below $5. But he also stocks expensive lotions, organic moisturizers, and those Melissa & Doug toys. "Now we have people who will buy that stuff," he says, sounding a little amused. "The idea of a new group of people with disposable income is excellent."

The drugstore doubles as an ad hoc performance center, where Ramirez hosts chamber-music concerts, "Shakespeare Saturdays," and poetry slams. "I'm big on social media, and I read the comments," he says. "Among the people who have migrated here, there's a large vegetarian and vegan group, so we have veggie chili on Wednesdays and Sundays. If you're listening, however the neighborhood changes, that's how you stay in business."

Ramirez's optimistic realism contrasts with a common perception of neighborhoods that remain unchanged for generations-at least until the gentrifiers roar in. A few areas where the change is that stark do exist, but far more typical are enclaves that each dominant ethnic group cedes to the next. Of course Inwood is changing; it always was. Right now, it's a neighborhood of immigrants. Nearly half of its residents were born abroad, most in the Dominican Republic. Yet that "old Inwood" isn't the one Ramirez grew up in. The year he was born, 1968, a TV station in Ireland aired a documentary, Goodbye to Glocamorra, which chronicled a neighborhood that could have passed for a city in County Mayo. "Five years ago, these apartment buildings were Irish to the last man, woman, and child," the narrator says mournfully. "Today, their defenses have begun to crumble. The first Puerto Ricans have moved in. The first Negroes have moved in. And more will certainly follow."

Ramirez was one of those Puerto Ricans, and he grew up acutely conscious of his bifurcated world. "I was too Spanish for the white community and too white for the Spanish community," he recalls. When he was 10, his family moved from the mostly Hispanic east side of Broadway to the still whitish west side. In the early nineties, he moved to a New Jersey suburb. But Ramirez kept roots in the neighborhood, commuting to work for the district Rite Aid office and attending Good Shepherd. One day, he heard the checkout girls at a Dominican bakery grumbling in Spanish about how the neighborhood was changing. "I remembered when I was a kid and the white people were talking about the neighborhood changing-only they were speaking English." Same complaint, different language.

Ramirez detected an opening. "I saw that there was an antiques store now, and a Moroccan restaurant, and I thought, This is something I need to jump on. " He bought the 100-year-old Dichter Pharmacy, where he had worked as a teenager. At times, it looked like a bad call. The recession hit the neighborhood hard. The Moroccan restaurant and the antiques store closed. In 2012, a fire destroyed the block. But Ramirez moved the business a few dozen yards up the street. Soon, the Badger Balm and apple-crumb muffins started to sell, and his poetry slams built a following-mostly from the west side of Broadway, though he's trying to recruit some Dominican bards too.

With strong feelings about the past and an eye on the future, Ramirez is a one-man neighborhood-improvement center. He knows that the change he's helping to nurture could one day turn on him, though he draws comfort from the fact that his lease won't expire (so his rent can't soar) for another twenty years. He keeps a fatherly eye on local kids and notes the low-margin stores that close and the new bars that force up rents. It pains him to see how few Latinos from the east side of Broadway welcome the new stores, and he knows that goodwill extends only so far. "If they're a low-income family and they're walking up the hill, past three or four other pharmacies, to buy Tylenol from me, are they going to go next door to Darling for a $4 cup of coffee? Probably not." That doesn't stop Ramirez from steering occasional customers there-until the day when he can feed their soy-latte cravings himself.

Nothing symbolizes the abyss between plenty and deprivation more than their physical proximity. The rapid gilding of Brooklyn has, in places, produced a grotesque companionship of vintage-clothing boutiques and Goodwill stores. Even as Bedford-Stuyvesant real estate approaches Manhattan prices, nearly a third of its residents-47 percent of its children-live below the poverty line. The neighborhood remains a bastion of unemployment, public assistance, and crime, moated by great ramparts of public housing. The old inner-city anxieties-that poor people who know only other poor people are more likely to remain that way-have not disappeared. Only now, instead of being stranded in sprawling ghettos, the poor are confined to islands of deprivation, encircled by oceans of prosperity.

Yet those Dickensian juxtapositions are actually a sign of a city that is doing something right. Subsidized housing helps preserve neighborhoods from a uniform wash of affluence. Chelsea and the Upper West Side-two of the wealthiest districts in the nation-still make room for low-income residents in nycha projects. "Those are neighborhoods where gentrification has been meaningfully tempered," says Brooklyn city councilman Brad Lander, a staunchly progressive ally of Bill de Blasio's. And all over the city, developers reap tax benefits by erecting luxury buildings and earmarking 20 percent of the apartments for renters who pay far less than their neighbors. A group of visiting developers from Mumbai was thunderstruck by that custom: They couldn't imagine why well-off New Yorkers would voluntarily share their enclaves with the poor.

The fact that single-family townhouses and public housing often share the same few blocks gives community organizers a versatile set of tools. Colvin Grannum, the president of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, arrives at his offices the morning after the city has announced a $50,000 grant to help restore a small ice rink that's been sitting idle for years near the corner of Fulton and Marcy Streets. He had been hoping for a more robust infusion; now he has to raise nine times as much as he's getting. A staffer greets him with a shot of ambivalence: "Congratulations, I guess."

Robert F. Kennedy's children went skating on the Bed-Stuy rink in the seventies, when the area was an encyclopedia of urban decline. "It looked like a war zone," Grannum says-"a desolate and blighted community." In the summer of 1964, riots flared at the corner of Fulton Street and Nostrand Avenue, and mounted police shot at looters. Three years later, RFK and Senator Jacob Javits founded Restoration, the country's first comprehensive community-development organization. Kennedy envisioned a fusion of public funds and private investment that would nurture local, self-reliant businesses: "What is given or granted can be taken away," he said. "What you do for yourselves and for your children can never be taken away ... We must combine the best of community action with the best of the private-enterprise system."

That principle forms the foundation of nonprofit community-building groups all over the country and motivates private do-gooder developers like Jonathan Rose. "Can you create models of gentrification in which the benefits are spread out through the community?" Rose asks. The key, he says, is to make sure that residents and shopkeepers in low-income neighborhoods have equity and a political voice-before a real-estate surge. African-American residents of Bed-Stuy who managed to cling to their brownstones through the misery of the sixties, the heroin and crack years, and the devastating epidemic of foreclosures can finally reap the benefit that any longtime homeowner takes for granted: selling the house for a profit. "Development can be a positive force," Rose says.

Today, Grannum has inherited the dream of healing through business. "I see our job as trying to create a healthy commercial corridor and capture as many retail dollars as we can," he says. It's not as if he's got his eye on Tiffany and Per Se, but he would like the dollar stores and pawnbrokers to be joined by some slightly more genteel options. He mentions Island Salad, a Caribbean-themed place just across Fulton Street from his office, where $6.99 will buy an Asian Rasta (romaine, roasted teriyaki chicken, mandarin oranges, cucumbers, sliced almonds, crispy chow mein noodles, and "island sesame ginger"). It's the sort of place a couple of young Park Slopers in search of an extra bedroom might wander into and think: Yes! I could live here.

Grannum is unapologetic about trying to bring a better life to Bed-Stuy's poor by attracting the very outsiders who are supposedly making things worse. "We need affluent and middle-income people," he insists. "We need a healthy community, and we need services that are first-rate. I just came from a meeting, and someone said, 'Go to Seventh Avenue in Park Slope and recruit some of those stores!' And I tell them: Businesses don't bring affluence; they follow affluence."

To the residents of East Harlem, a neighborhood ribbed with nycha towers and dotted with new condos, almost any change seems ominous. Andrew Padilla's 2012 documentary El Barrio Tours: Gentrification in East Harlem ends with a group of conga players on a patch of sidewalk at Lexington Avenue and East 108th Street, with a tenement building on one corner and the DeWitt Clinton Houses on the other. Padilla's film traces the creep of generic luxury and residents' tenacious desire to hang on. The conga players' impromptu jam session encapsulates both the history and the fragility of East Harlem's identity: All it takes for it to vaporize is for the musicians to pick up their drums and walk away. And they have. According to the Center for Urban Research, Hispanics made up 52.9 percent of southeastern Harlem's population in 2000; a decade later, that figure had fallen to 47.5. Whites took their place (11.5 percent before, 17.5 percent after).

But trend lines are not destiny. Who does the gentrifying, how, and how quickly-these variables separate an organically evolving neighborhood from one that is ruthlessly replaced. A trickle of impecunious artists hungry for space and light is one thing; a flood of lawyers with a hankering to renovate is quite another. The difference may be just a matter of time-but when it comes to gentrification, time is all.

Gus Rosado, a deceptively mild-mannered activist with a brush cut and a graying Clark Gable mustache, runs El Barrio's Operation Fightback, which rehabs vacant buildings for affordable housing, and his latest undertaking is a huge gothic hulk at the far end of East 99th Street. Surrounded by public housing and the Metropolitan Hospital, it used to be P.S. 109, closed by the Department of Education in 1995 and badly decayed since then. After years of scrounging for some way to convert the school into living space, Rosado teamed up with the nationwide organization Artspace for a $52 million overhaul that will yield PS109 Artspace, 90 affordable live-work studios, half of them set aside for artists who live nearby. "The only way we were able to get this done was because of the arts," Rosado recently said. "Suddenly, there was a whole other set of funding sources."

Leveraging the moneyed art world to provide low-cost housing in a creative community seems like the perfect revitalization project. It promotes stability, fosters local culture, recycles unused real estate, and brings in philanthropic dollars rather than predatory investors. Artspace's website makes the link between creativity and urban improvements plain: "Artists are good for communities. The arts create jobs and draw tourists and visitors. Arts activities make neighborhoods livelier, safer, and more attractive."

At the same time, Rosado's P.S. 109 project triggers a spray of explosive hypotheticals. Who should get preference: a white filmmaker from Yale who moved to East Harlem a few years ago and therefore qualifies as a resident, or a Dominican-born muralist who grew up in El Barrio but has since left for cheaper quarters in the South Bronx? Or: If East Harlem's new Artspace incubates a nascent gallery scene, will its cash and snobbery help the neighborhood or ruin it? Will the Lexington Avenue conga players find a place in the neighborhood's new arts hub?

Artists are like most people: They think gentrification is fine so long as it stops with them. They are pioneers, all-accepting enthusiasts, and they wish to change nothing about their new home turf (although a halfway decent tapas place would be nice). The next arrivals, though, will be numerous and crass. Interlopers will ruin everything. As artists migrate across the boroughs, from the East Village to Williamsburg, Red Hook, Bushwick, and Mott Haven, surfing a wave of rising rents, they are simultaneously victims and perpetrators of gentrification.

Rosado understands these dynamics well, but he believes that a little local involvement can go a long way toward shaping the subtleties of neighborhood change. "You can't stop development and growth, but we'd like to have a say in how that transition takes place." Lurking in that plain statement is the belief that gentrification happens not because a few developers or politicians foist it on an unwilling city but because it's a medicine most people want to take. The trick is to minimize the harmful side effects.

In the popular imagination, gentrification and displacement are virtually synonymous, the input and output of a zero-sum game. One professional couple's $2 million brownstone renovation in Bedford-Stuyvesant equals three families drifting toward Bayonne in search of barely adequate shelter. And so a sense of grievance and shame permeates virtually all discussions of neighborhood change. Even gentrifiers themselves are convinced they are doing something terrible. Young professionals whose moving trucks keep pulling up to curbs in Bushwick and Astoria carry with them trunkfuls of guilt.

The link between a neighborhood's economic fortunes and the number of people being forced to move away, while anecdotally obvious, is difficult to document. Everyone's heard stories of brutally coercive landlords forcing low-income tenants out of rent-controlled apartments in order to renovate them and triple the rent. But it's difficult to know how often that takes place. Between 2009 and 2011, about 7 percent of New York households-around 200,000 of them-moved within the city in each year. Others left town altogether. Yet we know little about where they went, or why, or whether their decisions were made under duress.

Among experts, a furor continues to swirl over whether gentrification and displacement are conjoined. What qualifies as displacement, anyway? Forcible eviction by a rapacious landlord, obviously, but what about a rent that creeps up while a household's income doesn't? How about the intangible, dispiriting feeling of being out of place, or a young person's knowledge that leaving the family home means living in another borough? Or the dislocation that comes when an industry flees, taking its jobs along? These pressures can affect investment bankers and nurses, as well as busboys and the unemployed, and it's not always easy to distinguish coerced departure from a fresh opportunity, or gentrifiers from the displaced.

In 2005, Lance Freeman, a professor of urban planning at Columbia, examined national housing statistics to see whether low-income residents move more often once their neighborhoods start to gentrify. His conclusion was that they don't. Mobility, he suggested, is a fact of American life, and he could find no evidence to suggest that gentrification intensifies it. Instead, it appears that many low-income renters stay put even as their rents go up. "It may be that households are choosing to stay in these neighborhoods because quality of life is improving: They're more satisfied, but they're dedicating a larger slice of their income to housing," says Ingrid Gould Ellen, co-director of NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. There is an exception: Poor homeowners who see the value of their properties skyrocket often do cash out. Freeman garnished his findings with caveats and qualifications, but his charged conclusion fueled an outbreak of headlines that have dogged him ever since.

Eight years after he lit the gentrification-is-good-for-everyone match, Freeman sits in his office at Columbia, more resigned than rah-rah about the implications of his work. He doesn't doubt that displacement occurs, but he describes it as an inevitable consequence of capitalism. "If we are going to allow housing to be a market commodity, then we have to live with the downsides, even though we can blunt the negative effects to some extent. It's pretty hard to get around that."

That infuriates the British scholar Tom Slater, who sees Freeman's data studies as largely irrelevant because, he has written, they "cannot capture the struggles low-income and working-class people endure to remain where they are. " Freeman waves away the binary rhetoric. "You can't boil gentrification down to good-guy-versus-bad-guy. That makes a good morality play, but life is a lot messier than that." In the days when RFK was helping to launch Restoration, an ideological split divided those who wrote cities off as unlivable relics from those who believed they must be saved. Today, a similar gulf separates those who fear an excess of prosperity from those who worry about the return of blight. Economic flows can be reversed with stunning speed: Gentrification can nudge a neighborhood up the slope; decline can roll it off a cliff. Somewhere along that trajectory of change is a sweet spot, a mixed and humming street that is not quite settled or sanitized, where Old Guard and new arrivals coexist in equilibrium. The game is to make it last.

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Is Gentrification All Bad? -- New York Magazine - Nymag

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Gentrification: New Yorkers can sense it immediately. It plumes out of Darling Coffee, on Broadway and 207th Street, and mingles with the live jazz coming from the Garden Café next door. Down the block, at Dichter Pharmacy, it's visible on the [...]

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Gill Mooney - Kirkstall Forge, Leeds. New build housing on old industrial land.

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Gill Mooney - Kirkstall Forge, Leeds. New build housing on old industrial land.

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Kirkstall Forge - An Entirely New Neighbourhood in Leeds

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Cool modernist homes and state-of-the-art offices designed by the very best British architects, set within 57 acres of beautiful woodland.

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Jess Hudson - Gentrification: Not ousting the poor?

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Jess Hudson - Gentrification: Not ousting the poor?

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This is an article that gives a more nuanced picture of gentrification than exists in the popular imagination. But the authors acknowledge that it leaves plenty of unanswered questions, such as why certain demographic groups are more likely to stay in — or move to — gentrifying neighborhoods, and why certain groups, such as blacks without high school degrees, don't see the same income gains as others.

"This study shows us a lot more about gentrification," says Walsh, "but there's still a lot we don't know."

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Chris Hondros / Getty

People tend to think gentrification goes like this: rich, educated white people move into a low-income minority neighborhood and drive out its original residents, who can no longer afford to live there. As it turns out, that's not typically true.

A new study by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Pittsburgh and Duke University, examined Census data from more than 15,000 neighborhoods across the U.S. in 1990 and 2000, and found that low-income non-white households did not disproportionately leave gentrifying areas. In fact, researchers found that at least one group of residents, high school–educated blacks, were actually more likely to remain in gentrifying neighborhoods than in similar neighborhoods that didn't gentrify — even increasing as a fraction of the neighborhood population, and seeing larger-than-expected gains in income.

Those findings may seem counterintuitive, given that the term "gentrification," particularly in cities like New York and San Francisco, has become synonymous with soaring rents, wealthier neighbors and the dislocation of low-income residents. But overall, the new study suggests, the popular notion of the yuppie invasion is exaggerated. "We're not saying there aren't communities where displacement isn't happening," says Randall Walsh, an associate professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the study's authors. "But in general, across all neighborhoods in the urbanized parts of the U.S., it looks like gentrification is a pretty good thing."

The researchers found, for example, that income gains in gentrifying neighborhoods — usually defined as low-income urban areas that undergo rises in income and housing prices — were more widely dispersed than one might expect. Though college-educated whites accounted for 20% of the total income gain in gentrifying neighborhoods, black householders with high school degrees contributed even more: 33% of the neighborhood's total rise. In other words, a broad demographic of people in the neighborhood benefited financially. According to the study's findings, only one group — black residents who never finished high school — saw their income grow at a slower rate than predicted. But the study also suggests that these residents weren't moving out of their neighborhoods at a disproportionately higher rate than from similar neighborhoods that didn't gentrify.

This study isn't the first to come to that conclusion. A 2005 paper published in Urban Affairs Review by Lance Freeman, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University, looked at a nationwide sample of neighborhoods between 1986 and 1989 and found that low-income residents tended to move out of gentrifying areas at essentially the same frequency they left other neighborhoods. The real force behind the changing face of a gentrifying community, Freeman concluded, isn't displacement but succession. When people move away as part of normal neighborhood turnover, the people who move in are generally more affluent. Community advocates may argue that succession is just another form of exclusion — if low-income people can't afford to move in — but, still, it doesn't exactly fit the popular perception of individuals being forced from their homes.

The new study found that while gentrification did not necessarily push out original residents, it did create neighborhoods that middle-class minorities moved to. The addition of white college graduates, especially those under 40 without children, was a hallmark of gentrifying neighborhoods — that much fit the conventional wisdom — but so was the influx of college-educated blacks and Hispanics, who moved to gentrifying neighborhoods more often than they to did similar, more static areas. Two other groups tended to move more often into upwardly mobile neighborhoods as well: 40-to-60-year-old Hispanics without a high-school degree, and similarly uneducated Hispanics aged 20 to 40 with children — a counterpoint to the common conception of gentrification, if there ever was one. The only group that was less likely to move to a gentrifying area was high school–educated whites aged 20 to 40 with kids.

The study is under review for publication, but is being circulated early by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The findings, while unexpected, are notable for the depth of data on which they're based. Walsh and his colleagues, Terra McKinnish, an associate professor of economics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Kirk White, an economist at Duke University's Triangle Census Research Data Center, compared confidential Census figures from 1990 and 2000 from 15,040 neighborhoods, with an average of about 4,000 residents each, in 64 metropolitan areas, such as Phoenix, Boston, Ft. Lauderdale, Columbus, New York, Atlanta and San Diego. The researchers identified gentrifying neighborhoods as those in which the average family earned less than $30,079 in 1990 — the poorest one-fifth of the country — and at least $10,000 more 10 years later. Taken all together, the study paints a more nuanced picture of gentrification than exists in the popular imagination. But the authors acknowledge that it leaves plenty of unanswered questions, such as why certain demographic groups are more likely to stay in — or move to — gentrifying neighborhoods, and why certain groups, such as blacks without high school degrees, don't see the same income gains as others.

Then there is that most fundamental of questions: does gentrification lead to greater wealth for people in a neighborhood, or are the people who choose to live in such a place otherwise predisposed to make more money? "This study shows us a lot more about gentrification," says Walsh, "but there's still a lot we don't know."

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Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews - TIME.com

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People tend to think gentrification goes like this: rich, educated white people move into a low-income minority neighborhood and drive out its original residents, who can no longer afford to live there. As it turns out, that's not typically true.

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Ruth Patrick - Kirsteen Paton talking about gentrification on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed 

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Ruth Patrick - Kirsteen Paton talking about gentrification on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed 

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division of domestic labour - gentrification and working-class residents

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Division of Domestic Labour - Gentrification and Working-Class Residents, Thinking Allowed - BBC Radio 4

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The impact of gentrification on working-class people. Plus the division of domestic labour

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When I moved to Stockwell 16 years ago, friends warned me about being 'south of the River'.

Stockwell was seen as the bleak, depressing overspill from Brixton, which was still in many people's eyes a no-go area of riots and rampant crime.

But houses were as cheap as the proverbial chips and my partner and I picked up a three-bedroom cottage for a shade over £100,000.

The area was rough and ready but we loved the community spirit and the crumbling buildings, that though they had seen better times, were loved by the local community.

An old hospital on Jeffrey's Road was an artist's collective, its wild gardens full of flowers and paintings. A photographer's studio at the end of Landor Road, which had been there 30 years, had faded photographs in the windows that showed the diversity of the local residents - from new arrivals from the Caribbean in the 1960s to the settlers who arrived here from Madeira and the Azores in the 1980s and 1990s.

Now the hospital has been turned into luxury flats and the photographer's studio is long gone too, bulldozed and replaced by apartments for those who have £500,000 or more to spare.

That house we bought for £100,000 is fast approaching £1,000,000 in value and I suppose I should be happy.

But actually, I'm profoundly depressed.

Gentrification is changing my neighbourhood beyond all recognition, and the last straw came when I heard the news about the beautiful Georgian church on Stockwell Green.

St Andrew's church was built in 1767, and is the oldest working church in Lambeth. As such you'd think it might be protected, however later extensions by the Victorians mean it has been refused listed building status.

And now the Church of England has woken up to how much property is worth in the area, they're planning to knock down this much-loved and historic building and replace it with a block of 19 flats and a futuristic new church based on the BFI IMAX (which looks like it belongs next to a highway in Florida or attached to an out-of-town retail park).

Many of us in the area love the old building and believe with a little imagination, some TLC and of course some cash (which the Church of England certainly isn't short of as they currently have an investment portfolio of over £800 million), this unique piece of local history can be saved.

Gentrification and ridiculously inflated property prices are causing the Church of England to seriously contemplate this act of cultural vandalism, and sadly St Andrew's church won't be the last victim.

This disregard for London's rich history and existing communities is indicative of what's happening in many parts of the city right now (especially in nearby Brixton), and if we don't make a stand now, soon it'll be too late.
If you'd like to help make a difference, you can sign the petition to save St. Andrew's Church here.

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Gentrification is knocking the heart out of my South London neighbourhood

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When I moved to Stockwell 16 years ago, friends warned me about being 'south of the River'. Stockwell was seen as the bleak, depressing overspill from Brixton, which was still in many people's eyes a no-go area of riots and rampant crime.

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Militsa Payne - "Bring on the Hipsters" Gentrification is good for the poor?

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Militsa Payne - "Bring on the Hipsters" Gentrification is good for the poor?

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IN AN old bar on U Street in Washington, DC-a place that was once a centre of black life and is now an inferno of hipsterdom-Jay, the bartender, is talking about how the area has changed over the past decade or so. "They ain't got barmen any more," he says, with a grin. "They got mixologists." What happens in Washington, he explains, is that young white professionals move in, bars open, "and then you know that all the bodegas and liquor stores on every corner, they ain't got long either."

Such gentrification obsesses the bien-pensants. In November the New York Times instructed its journalists to stop comparing everywhere to gentrified Brooklyn. A Saturday Night Live sketch showed a young man in a tough neighbourhood talking about his "bitches"-only to reveal that he runs a dog-walking business, and even knits matching sweaters for his bitches. In Philadelphia and San Francisco, presumed gentrifiers have been the target of protests and attacks. Elsewhere, the term is used as an insult ("I would hate to be a gentrifier," says one young professional in Detroit). Yet the evidence suggests that gentrification is both rare and, on balance, a good thing.
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The case against it is simple. Newcomers with more money supposedly crowd out older residents. In Washington, according to a study by Governing magazine, 52% of census tracts that were poor in 2000 have since gentrified-more than in any other city bar Portland, Oregon. Young, mostly white singletons have crowded into a district once built for families. Over the same period, housing in Washington has become vastly more expensive. And many black residents have left: between 1990 and 2010, the number of African-Americans in the District declined by almost 100,000, falling from 66% of the population to 51%.

In New York and San Francisco, which both have rent-control rules, soaring property prices create an incentive for property owners to get rid of their tenants. Stories abound of unscrupulous developers buying up rent-controlled properties and then using legal loopholes or trickery to force residents to leave. Letting a building deteriorate so much that it can be knocked down is one tactic; bribing building inspectors to evict tenants illegally is another.

Yet there is little evidence that gentrification is responsible for displacing the poor or minorities. Black people were moving out of Washington in the 1980s, long before most parts of the city began gentrifying. In cities like Detroit, where gentrifiers are few and far between and housing costs almost nothing, they are still leaving. One 2008 study of census data found "no evidence of displacement of low-income non-white households in gentrifying neighbourhoods". They did find, however, that the average income of black people with high- school diplomas in gentrifying areas soared.

Gentrifiers can make life better for locals in plenty of ways, argues Stuart Butler of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. When professionals move to an area, "they know how to get things done". They put pressure on schools, the police and the city to improve. As property prices increase, rents go up-but that also generates more property-tax revenue, helping to improve local services. In many cities, zoning laws force developers to build subsidised housing for the poor as well as pricey pads for well-off newcomers, which means that rising house prices can help to create more subsidised housing, not less.

The bigger problem for most American cities, says Mr Butler, is not gentrification but the opposite: the concentration of poverty. Of neighbourhoods that were more than 30% poor in 1970, just 9% are now less poor than the national average (see chart), according to the City Observatory, a think-tank. In Chicago, yuppies can easily buy coffee and vinyl records in northern neighbourhoods such as Wicker Park. But the South Side, where racist housing policies created a ghetto in the 1950s and 1960s, remains violent, poor and almost entirely black. In Brooklyn the most famously gentrified district, Williamsburg, was never all that poor or black in the first place.

However annoying they may be, hipsters help the poor. Their vintage shops and craft-beer bars generate jobs and taxes. So if you see a bearded intruder on a fixed-gear bike in your neighbourhood, welcome him.

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IN AN old bar on U Street in Washington, DC-a place that was once a centre of black life and is now an inferno of hipsterdom-Jay, the bartender, is talking about how the area has changed over the past decade or so. "They ain't got barmen any more," he says, with a grin.

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Isabel Suchy - The Gentrification of Brixton

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Isabel Suchy - The Gentrification of Brixton

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Alex Wheatle on the gentrification of Brixton

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Alex Wheatle on the gentrification of Brixton Subscribe to the Guardian HERE: http://bitly.com/UvkFpD Novelist Alex Wheatle describes how his native Brixton has changed from being an area where many outsiders feared to tread to somewhere where south London's young professionals can now go for an £8 burrito.

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Hannah Sutton - East London Residents Talk About Gentrification 

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Hannah Sutton - East London Residents Talk About Gentrification 

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All photos by Carl Wilson

As you approach them from the Wanstead Flats, the Fred Wigg and John Walsh Towers in Leytonstone jut into the skyline like the last two teeth in a gummy mouth. The towers have provided affordable council housing for local residents since the 1960s. But under new development plans from Waltham Forest Council, one of the two tower blocks will be sold off and become private housing to fund a refurbishment. 74 council houses are expected to be lost in a borough with a waiting list as high as 20,000.

Everybody agrees the flats are in need of repair and maintenance; the outside paintwork is discoloured, the two stairwells are cold and damp, and the kitchens and bathrooms are a bit of a state. But the council's plans seem to use that desire for refurbishment as a stick with which to poke residents out of the door. "We know that residents on the estate want to see their estate improved and that is why we will be investing in the area," they say. "Investing" here includes getting rid of much needed council stock. Residents feel poorly consulted and disenfranchised.

It's a story replicated across London as the housing crisis continues, and the only homes that get built seem to be ones that the city's poorer residents can't afford. Here, three women living in the towers explain what they think of the redevelopment in their own words.

Patricia Dunnall

I've been here for the last 29 years and I've got a family that live around Waltham Forest. We're a good community and we look out for each other. Now the council have come along and they're trying to make one block private to make money. They want to decant some people and find them properties. But as we know Waltham Forest doesn't have any council homes - it's all housing association and going to be very expensive.

I will fight as much as I can because I hate the way they have treated us.

They've run these two blocks down into the ground. Why? I don't know. Maybe they just don't care about Leytonstone. In 2011 we were treated badly after a fire. In 2012 during the Olympics the council went ahead and put missiles on the top of our roof, then published it and told everybody in the world where they would be. They made a target out of us because they don't care about the people.

I'd like to see those that want to move - those that are overcrowded - be allowed to. But those that want to stay should be able to stay. If they can give me and my son a two bedroom council house in Leytonstone then maybe I will take it. But for now, I'm staying where I am. I will fight as much as I can because I hate the way they have treated us.

Saima Hussain

I've been here almost 18 years. I moved in with my first child in 1998 when I was pregnant with my second. At the time I wanted to be in a flat rather than a home because of personal circumstances. When I moved in here I felt safe and secure. I brought up five children in this flat. For me it's been my home. Over the years there isn't a face that I'd say I wouldn't recognise. Everybody is like a family.

Out of three options presented by the council, I said all I wanted was a new kitchen and bathroom. But Ascham Homes and Waltham Forest Council feel that they don't have to consult us on anything. We pay our rent, do up our homes, but we feel like we have no rights.

Boris Johnson is pushing people out of London because of the prices. I'm an estate agent so I know what the housing market is like. I get phone calls every week from people saying they were thrown out of their home and sent into Birmingham and asking whether I have any properties in London. The council has got no homes to offer. So far I've been offered Billericay, which is too far. I want the comfort of knowing my own area, the shops, and knowing my kids can go outside without having to worry.

At the moment, we're united and saying we're not moving.

Sonia McKenzie

I moved in here in 1992 and have been here for the past 23 years. I believe that they are using our homes as a cash cow. When you sell off one block and lose 70 council homes, you're not solving the problem, you're adding to it.

When it comes to these two blocks, you have to fight, scream and shout to get Waltham Forest Council to help. When I first moved in the kitchen and bathroom were very old fashioned. But it wasn't until 2002 that they came in and changed it. There's a rich part and a poor part of Leytonstone and this is the poor part. As you can see we don't get any money pumped into here.

I won't accept them telling me I have to pack up 27 years, remove my son, break away from the community and my family and turn my life upside down because they want to make money out of the two blocks.

In September 2013 the council put on an event and said we should come down and tell them what our ideas for the blocks were. They came with architects and told us we could choose the design and even the colours. But as time went on, we started to hear less and less about the community and what we want.

I'm not moving. If I have to move it'll be my own choice. I won't accept them telling me I have to pack up 27 years, remove my son, break away from the community and my family and turn my life upside down because they want to make money out of the two blocks.

The residents were speaking to Philip Kleinfeld

More on the housing crisis:

London Housing Activists Gave Cops the Run Around On the Building Site of Some Luxury Flats

Here's Why a Rent Cap Could Make You Even Poorer

The Corny Videos That London's Property Development Sharks Don't Want You to See

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East London Residents Talk About Gentrification

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All photos by Carl Wilson As you approach them from the Wanstead Flats, the Fred Wigg and John Walsh Towers in Leytonstone jut into the skyline like the last two teeth in a gummy mouth. The towers have provided affordable council housing for local residents since the 1960s.

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Jack Palmer  - Bristol enclave and spiritual home of Banksy threatened by 'yuppie flats' plan

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Jack Palmer  - Bristol enclave and spiritual home of Banksy threatened by 'yuppie flats' plan

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Bristol enclave and spiritual home of Banksy threatened by 'yuppie flats' plan

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It is the spiritual home of Banksy, a bohemian (and sometimes a little seedy) hangout of artists, hippies, eco-activists and dreamers. But there is growing concern among many residents of Stokes Croft in Bristol that the very soul of this vibrant enclave could be at risk if planners allow a landmark building at the centre of the neighbourhood to be turned into "yuppie flats" within a gated community.

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Jack Palmer - Hipsters: Gentrifiers or Regenerators?

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Jack Palmer - Hipsters: Gentrifiers or Regenerators?

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Cereal Killer is a café on Brick Lane in east London that serves breakfast cereal. It opened last December to a fusillade of indignant fury. What kind of fool would pay £3 for a bowl of something when they could go to a supermarket and buy two boxes for the same price? A reporter for Channel 4 asked the café's owners, bearded Irish twins Gary and Alan Keely, whether it was sensitive to open such a ridiculous restaurant in Tower Hamlets, one of the poorest boroughs in the country.

More than anything else, however, the new café was seen as the latest high-water mark of hipsterism, a sign that the specialisation of leisure pursuits in east London had gone too far. Twenty-first-century hipsterism can be hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Beards, plaid, tattoos, thick glasses, fixed-gear bicycles, artisanal breads (artisanal anything, really), Apple products, cold-pressed juices... these are some of the outward signs. But a new book by the economist Douglas McWilliams, The Flat White Economy, suggests that hipsters, and the ecosystem surrounding them, represent the future of British prosperity. Not only are they greener and more ethical than the rest of us, but the industries in which they work are driving our economy. We mock them at our peril.

At the last census 150,000 people in London were reported to be working in the flat white economy

Perhaps fittingly the book has had a choppier passage to publication than your average pop-economics number. The chairman of the Centre for Economic and Business Research ( Cebr), and a free-market conservative who has advised George Osborne, McWilliams was in the news last week when he announced that he was taking a sabbatical in the wake of allegations that he smoked crack cocaine at a house in Hornsey. It was unfortunate timing, a fortnight before the book's release.

Named after the favourite drink of the fixed-gear generation, the flat white economy is a portmanteau phrase for an "amazing phenomenon that has surreptitiously changed the whole nature of London - and to some extent the UK economy". From Cebr's offices in Old Street, McWilliams had a front-row view of the changes during the past decade. What was once a hub for artists and bohemians has become the European centre for a creative, internet-driven new wing of the economy. With the reputation of the financial services in tatters and more traditional industries continuing their decline, this new source of growth has appeared just when the country needed it. To walk from Old Street roundabout to Shoreditch High Street is to see an extraordinary mix of open-plan offices and galleries, Asian restaurants with fat queues outside and cafés that will mend your bicycle, sprinkled with shark-eyed estate agents and a few resilient kebab shops. It breeds resentment and satire - none more prescient than Charlie Brooker's Nathan Barley, a decade old this year - precisely because it is dynamic and interesting.

The flat white economy is driven by online retail and marketing but it comprises many different businesses: McWilliams argues that it is mainly defined by the types of people it employs. At the consumer end this leads to cafés and niche shops, such as the shipping-container Boxpark in Shoreditch. The new trendsetters don't have as much money as their "loadsamoney" forebears from the financial services in the 80s and 90s, and as a consequence their spending patterns are driven by novelty rather than cost. "They can't price their styles out of the market, so to keep ahead their styles have to keep changing," McWilliams told me, when I spoke to him before last week's allegations. "They also drink an awful lot of coffee." (The stats bear him out. Since 2007, coffee sales have risen by 50% while sales of champagne have fallen by a quarter.)

Neither do they have much space. "They share flats and often share bedrooms," he said. "They don't have space for cups and saucers and dining rooms, so it makes more sense to head out to a café for breakfast. They save on ownership and travel light. They wear skinny jeans instead of suits. They have one or two expensive electronic products, but on the whole they are less materialistic than their parents' generation. They buy bicycles rather than Porsches."

Britain's online fashion businesses are worth more than $10bn. New York and California don't come close

Chris Morton, Lyst

And they work, most likely, in a job powered by the internet. In the two years to March 2014, 32,000 businesses were created in a single Old Street postcode - EC1V. It is an extraordinary figure, even if some of them are just lone wolves with a MacBook. At the last census 150,000 people in London were reported to be working in the flat white economy, although McWilliams thinks that this may be closer to 200,000 now. The majority work in a tiny area around the Old Street roundabout. At its peak, the City of London employed 390,000. McWilliams's book says that in 2012 the flat white economy contributed 7.6% of the UK's GDP. By 2025, he estimates, it will be 15.8% and will be the largest single business sector in the UK.

"It's said that Britain has not been good at creating technology: the Facebooks, the Googles, the Amazons," McWilliams tells me. "But what people don't realise is that Britain has been very good at using the technology. In online retail and marketing, this country leads the rest of the world. These are areas where creativity yields real value. I wonder if part of the reason British companies don't become Facebook is because British people are too polite to become billionaires.

"You'd have thought that America, which is where catalogue shopping took off and population density is much lower, would be a good place for this kind of business, but it hasn't happened. I don't really have a good theory for why that is - perhaps in Britain we are trusting. One of the reasons people are apprehensive about shopping online is a fear that their card details will be stolen, but we have quite a low level of fraud."

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The future is hip: Chris Morton, internet entrepreneur and founder of Lyst.

Entrepreneur Chris Morton, 32, has a different explanation. With a neat Tom Ford beard and a smooth mid-Atlantic burr (he was born in Oxford, but spent some of his childhood on the east coast of America), he would make a good poster boy for British entrepreneurs. After reading natural sciences at Cambridge he worked in venture capital before founding Lyst in 2010. The site offers a personalised shopping experience, using data to help users generate their own digital shopfronts from the possible millions of items on the market. In a world where more or less everything is a click away, Lyst aims to help shoppers sift the chaff.

"In Britain the department stores were slow to catch on to the internet, much slower than their American equivalents," he told me. "That void created space for new companies, like Asos and the Net a Porter group, to spring up. People don't realise it, but Britain's online fashion businesses have been worth more than $10bn. New York and the Bay Area in California don't come close to that." Lyst has expanded quickly, from 20 employees to 80 in the past year alone, and occupied four different spaces.

"East London is the best place in the world to start a business like ours. All of our offices have been within a two-minute walk of each other. We started in Hoxton Street and then moved to a place off Curtain Road, and then to opposite Shoreditch High Street. Finally, last year, we moved to the White Cube gallery in Hoxton Square."

Between 2000 and 2012, White Cube was a focal point of the Young British Artists movement - where the Damien Hirsts and Tracey Emins would meet and exhibit. It feels appropriate that the space has now become a home for the new iteration of Shoreditch, where the medium is pixels rather than paint.

"When we first came there were few other companies here," Morton added. "It was cheap - the rent was just £3 per square foot - but it was also fun. There were bars to hang out in and whenever you left the office you would bump into somebody else starting a different business, but with similar problems. You could share tips about what kind of cloud computing to use or whatever. Those ad hoc meetings are incredibly important in this industry. Since we arrived an ecosystem has grown up that acquires its own momentum."

There are problems with the speed of growth. Rent in new offices is now £60 per square foot. No wonder the artists have gone elsewhere to starve in their garrets. Given the difficulty of getting funding and income in the early years of a tech start-up, and the possibilities the internet allows for working remotely, you might think that the industry would be more dispersed. But Morton said the opposite is happening. It is more important than ever to have everyone in the same space.

"Many of our employees live in Bethnal Green and Dalston and Islington, so it's easy for them to cycle in. Developers and data scientists might be working for banks in the City. They can look down from their tower offices and see Shoreditch and think, 'Why am I up here being part of the corporate machine, when I could be down there helping to change the world?' To start a business you also need access to venture capital and almost all of those guys have moved here now from Mayfair."

He added that the lure of working in this part of east London helps him draw talent from far and wide. "We have an incredibly diverse workforce. There are people from all over Europe, from every different walk of life. It's very gratifying."

According to McWilliams, the capital's talent pool, continually refreshed by immigration, is what sets it apart. "People do seem to be more creative in London," he told me. "The mix of races, genders and backgrounds seems to generate a flow of ideas. Other parts of the economy might move out of London, but anything that depends on creativity will remain London-based." While other jobs are increasingly replaced by machines, those that demand a constant stream of creative thinking will endure.

It can be tempting to see the world that has been created in this part of east London over the past five years as a model for modern cities. A highly skilled, creative international workforce, commuting by bicycle, thinking hard about where their meat comes from, buying second-hand clothes and selling complicated things to buyers around the world. If you close your eyes and try hard to put aside any prejudices about men with waxed moustaches riding penny-farthings, Shoreditch can appear like a kind of idealised cross between Stockholm and Silicon Valley. Plenty of people hate hipsters, but if more of us lived like them, the world could be greener, more left-wing and less preoccupied by greed.

"I think there has been something of a philosophical change," said McWilliams. "People are becoming less materially driven and more about experiences. Although the economics have made it convenient: it is expensive to store things, while cheap flights have made it easy to pop over to Berlin for the weekend."

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The Boxpark pop-up shopping mall in Shoreditch, London Photograph: Alamy

Critics argue that what has happened in east London is unsustainable and brings plenty of its own problems. According to the 2011 census, the percentage of people working in the creative, media or sports industries in Hackney rose more than 65% in the decade after 2001, and by nearly 50% in Tower Hamlets. Including the past four years the figure would be even higher. According to Rightmove, a property website, the average residential property in EC1V was £469,000 in June 2009 - in June 2014 it was £914,000 (although it has levelled off in the past few months). Families who have lived in this part of London for generations are selling up.

The rise of the flat white economy is only part of the explanation: improving schools and decreasing levels of pollution and crime are also helping to draw wealthy people back to the centre of the cities. There is a chicken and egg argument about some of the causes and effects. In an impassioned speech last year against gentrification in Brooklyn, New York's version of east London, the filmmaker Spike Lee implied that there might be a racial element to the allocation of resources: "Why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers for the facilities to get better?"

Another problem is rolling out the model beyond London. The flat white economy is driving fast growth in one small area, but is it replicable elsewhere? In some respects, America has been here already. Portland and Boston are two cities that experienced a version of the flat white economy before London did. In the wake of the dotcom boom of the early noughties, the writer and urban theorist Richard Florida wrote a book called The Rise of the Creative Class, in which he advocated a kind of proto-flat white economy, arguing that the American cities could insulate themselves from the changing shape of the economy by becoming attractive to creative young people. But as has become clear in a number of cities, the consumer end of a creative class - independent bookshops and zany tapas joints - tends to benefit only the creative class. Having these things without the driving force of real industries is risky.

McWilliams's book focuses on online marketing and retail, which are expanding and profitable, although it sounds a cautionary note about the potential limits of these industries. He argues that the government needs to remove possible barriers to growth, which in London means building more houses and offices and making sure the trains run properly. This is beginning to happen: although you might not think it to read the headlines about first-time buyers, London's housebuilding starts are at six times their historic average. McWilliams identifies 10 other British areas, including Leeds and Slough, where this kind of economy might take off, but warns that the capital will continue to dominate.

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Cafe owner Nik Williamson at the 'Porridge Cafe' in Shoreditch Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Back on Brick Lane, certainly, there was no sign of any slowdown. Three months after it opened, business at Cereal Killer is thriving. The cheerful staff, clad in black T-shirts, might have come from hipster central casting, but there was no doubting the sincerity of the joy being Instagrammed out by happy munchers. "At first it was nuts," said Campbell, who has worked in the café since it opened. "There are still queues around the block at the weekend and we get some tourists, but there are also plenty of locals and even one or two regulars." For £3 he poured me a "cocktail" called "Don't Have a Cinna, Mon," comprising Golden Grahams, Cinnamon Crunch and Apple Zings. It was tasty, although I felt about eight years old. "Finally, it is starting to feel like a normal business."

Cereal Killer will not be the last hipster outlet to aggravate the general public. As this went to press, a Scandinavia-inspired porridge café opened less than half a mile away, offering 25 varieties priced at up to £7 a bowl. The hipsters may have the last laugh, and it could be good news for all of us.
After this article went to press it emerged that Douglas McWilliams is also facing trial for allegedly assaulting a prostitute on New Year's Eve. Follow the Observer Magazine on Twitter @ObsMagazine Topics

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Cereal Killer is a café on Brick Lane in east London that serves breakfast cereal. It opened last December to a fusillade of indignant fury. What kind of fool would pay £3 for a bowl of something when they could go to a supermarket and buy two boxes for the same price?

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Urban Graffiti

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In the spring of 2008, the Tate Modern opened the world's first major public museum display of graffiti and street art, inviting six international artists to decorate its facade with enormous, eye-catching murals.

Meanwhile, just down the riverbank at Southwark crown court, eight members of London's well-known DPM crew were tried for an estimated £1m in graffiti-related damages across the country, and sentenced to a total of 11 years in prison - the biggest prosecution for graffiti that the UK has ever seen.

The Anti Social Behaviour Act of 2003 defines graffiti as "painting, writing, soiling, marking or other defacing by whatever means". Anything from a quickly executed " tag" to a detailed mural could be deemed illegal, and the artist subject to a £5,000 fine or prosecution. But despite this clear-cut definition, there are double standards in the way graffiti is perceived, and the law creates pockets of permission for some artists while penalising others.

In December 2013, for instance, a magistrate glowingly used the phrase "the next Banksy" to describe a Manchester graffiti artist who ultimately avoided jail. But when sentencing London tagger Daniel "Tox" Halpin to a 27-month jail sentence in 2011, the prosecutor told the jury: "He is no Banksy. He doesn't have the artistic skills." (A commemorative Tox mural by Banksy appeared in Camden soon after, and was quickly protected by Perspex casing.) But this authoritative distinction between "good" and "bad" graffiti does not have a place in the rulebooks.

Since its contemporary birth in 1960s Philadelphia, city leaders have tended to condemn graffiti as mindless vandalism. Policing later began leaning towards the "broken window" theory, which argues that if petty crime like graffiti is visibly ignored, suggesting general neglect, it could inspire more serious offences. The UK spends £1bn on graffiti removal each year.

But as cities seek to " clean up", could graffiti's ephemeral role within the urban environment actually be good for cities?

For Ben Eine, a graffiti artist whose work was gifted to Barack Obama by David Cameron, graffiti leads not to drug deals and robberies, as the broken windows theory suggests, but to something very different. "If they [councils] stopped painting over them, they would get tagged and then they'd do silver stuff over it. And then eventually, people would do nice paintings over it ... The natural evolution of graffiti is that it will just turn out looking nice," he told the recent Graffiti Sessions academic conference.

Adam Cooper, cultural strategy officer for the Mayor of London, thinks graffiti is a positive force in its own right. He questions whether graffiti artists are vandals or "pioneers of a new kind of visual arts", and suggests that the mayor's office could provide more spaces for graffiti, as they do for buskers. Citing the success of the recent Long Live Southbank campaign to preserve the skate park, as backed by Boris Johnson, Cooper says graffiti adds "social communal value" to the Undercroft space - though he is quick to point out that the mayor's office are in no rush to change the law.

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A skater uses the South Bank skatepark in London. Plans to replace the Undercroft space with new arts venues and retail outlets were scuttled after public outcry. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty

While Boris might not be seen wielding a spray can anytime soon, in Bogotá, mayor Gustavo Petro was forced to change the laws after public outrage over the police shooting of 16-year-old graffiti artist Diego Felipe Becerra. Seeing the tension between artists and city police, Petro opted to promote urban art as a form of cultural expression, and decriminalised graffiti. Certain surfaces like monuments and public buildings are off-limits, but otherwise artists in Bogotá now have the freedom to colour the city without fear of prosecution.

Embracing graffiti's cultural value can do wonders for a city's tourism industry, too. In Bristol, the 2012 See No Evil festival saw 50,000 people flock to the streets; in Stavanger, Norway, the city walls are transformed into a canvas for the highly successful annual NuArt festival. Even without a dedicated event, for every painted wall in a city there is most likely a tour to go with it. A three-hour graffiti walk around the streets of Shoreditch could set you back £20, and in colourful Buenos Aires a tour of the decorated walls can cost $25 (£16).

Buenos Aires is a particularly fascinating example of a city where the walls talk, telling tales of a turbulent past. Here, graffiti has been continuously harnessed as a tool of political communication, resistance and activism by citizens caught up in a cycle of military dictatorship, restored democracy and economic collapse. Although there are laws prohibiting graffiti, the city has gained worldwide recognition for its urban art. Now a new bill proposes to assign a registry of graffiti artists to designated spots in Buenos Aires, with the aim of decreasing undesirable markings elsewhere.

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A woman walks past a message reading "No to the debt payment" in Buenos Aires. Photograph: Marcos Brindicci/Reuters

A similar approach has been adopted in Toronto, where a Graffiti Management Plan sees that "graffiti vandalism" is removed by city staff, while "graffiti art and other street art that adds vibrancy" may remain if commissioned by the building's owner. Toronto council has even assigned an official panel of specialists to judge the value of graffiti, deciding whose markings are artistically worthy to grace the city's bricks.

Transport for London workers had no such critical pretensions when removing a Banksy piece from a wall near Old Street Station in 2007. "Our graffiti removal teams are staffed by professional cleaners, not professional art critics," said a TfL spokesperson. Still, Toronto's specialist panel could help avoid the embarrassing mistakes made by other cities that have sometimes been overzealous. In Melbourne, a builder accidentally drilled through a Banksy stencil thought to be worth more than A$50,000 (£26,500), and in London, Hackney Council requested that a mural created by the Belgian artist ROA be removed from the facade of a recording studio, despite being commissioned by the building's owner. A petition signed by more than 2,000 people spurred the council to back off.

British law is clear that an artist's work may be removed by the council if deemed a blight on the environment, even if it has been given the go-ahead by the property owner. Instead, many councils designate " legal spots" for artists to paint. But the quarantined nature of these spaces embodies the very essence of what many graffiti artists seek to challenge. Does this legitimacy ruin their fun?

"Legal painting? It's just not the same feeling," says Glynn Judd, a former train writer who now only paints in legal spots since his "NOIR" tag had him thrown into prison. "Graffiti is always about being slightly naughty ... It's a different mindset from painting legally."

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Art work in Nelson Street as part of the See No Evil Art festival in Bristol in 2012. Photograph: Alamy

Legal walls may fail to excite some artists - "It's the tiger in a cage v the tiger running free through the jungle," says one - but they do offer a space for social intervention, where artists can act as mentors, using graffiti as a force for community cohesion and a potential route out of crime for inner-city kids. Since leaving prison, Judd is now regularly invited by local councils to run workshops, engaging and inspiring kids to "realise their potential", both artistically and socially. "It's about ownership and respect, it gives them an identity," he says. "It's a channel of energy to get rid of emotion."

Legal or not, as graffiti seeps into the fabric of neighbourhoods, it becomes a natural fact of everyday life in the city, a cultural practice appreciated and legitimised by young urban dwellers. Simultaneously, it is harnessed by local authorities and property owners as a method of cultural branding, to create the sort of "poor but sexy" neighbourhoods that work so well for cities like Berlin. Active curation of street art really got into full swing in pre-Olympic London when the work of a local crew was scrubbed from the walls of the River Lea Navigation to make way for street art by several international artists, specially commissioned by the Olympic legacy's public art body.

This "gentrification graffiti" is representative of the cycle of transformation in cities across the world, whereby artists are caught up in contributing to their own displacement. Speaking of his early days as an illegal artist, Eine says he "probably started the gentrification process" with his relentless painting in Shoreditch and Hackney.

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New York's graffiti spot 5Pointz stands defaced with white paint in November 2013. The renowned haven for urban graffiti artists was demolished to make way for luxury apartments. Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty

So do councils truly care about nurturing the creativity of graffiti artists, or is their work seen as means to a gentrified end? Writer Feargus O'Sullivan thinks of the presence of artists and creative workers as adding a "cursory sheen to a place's transformation", describing the process as " artwashing". Places infused with creative production are marked as "ripe for investment and remarketing to a new kind of customer", thus contributing to an artist's own demise in the name of improving - or rather financially gaining from - the city.

From its roots as a means of visual communication for disenfranchised youth to both hide and be seen, graffiti has developed into a bona fide art form, a legitimate force for economic, cultural and social good - and, as we continue to shift towards increasingly sanitised urban environments, one of the few remaining ways we have to respond to our surroundings in an expressive, public way. "Good" v "bad" graffiti might continue to be disputed between fervid councillors, but Eine says the public have moved on. "The whole world is covered in graffiti. No one cares. It's just part of urban noise."

Click atch presentations from the Graffiti Sessions conference, organised by UCL Urban Laboratory and the Graffiti Dialogues Network.
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Is urban graffiti a force for good or evil?

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Ban it, legalise it, put it behind glass ... no matter what city councils do, graffiti remains the scapegoat for all manner of urban ills, from burglary to gentrification. But it may have another effect on cities entirely, reports Athlyn Cathcart-Keays

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Gentrification is a natural evolution | Philip Ball

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Philip Ball: By regarding cities as natural organisms, we can see what drives gentrification - and perhaps predict the next Brixton or Battersea

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distribution of wealth per capita in the top cities in the UK excluding London

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WealthInsight, specialists in data on high net worth individuals, have released the latest figures on UK multimillionaires - defined as having net assets of more than US$30m - broken down by where they live. There are now more than 10,000 multimillionaires in the UK, with a combined wealth of over one trillion US dollars. 4,220 live in London - more than can be found in the whole of France. Aberdeen; however, has the highest rate of multimillionaires per 100,000 people, beating London into second place. Use our interactive graphic to explore the UK counties (excluding London) and cities with the highest numbers of multimillionaires.

* Download the data
* Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian

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UK multi-millionaires mapped: where do the wealthy live?

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WealthInsight, specialists in data on high net worth individuals, have released the latest figures on UK multimillionaires - defined as having net assets of more than US$30m - broken down by where they live. There are now more than 10,000 multimillionaires in the UK, with a combined wealth of over one trillion US dollars.

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Over 100,000 Detroiters are at risk of losing their homes as the city sells off its stock of tax foreclosures. Young gentrifiers are buying the properties

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"Having to kick people out takes all the fun out of owning a house."

Oren Goldenberg, a 31-year-old filmmaker based in Detroit, could have bought a $500 house at the Wayne County tax auction this fall-- but having to evict a homeowner turned him off.

Goldenberg had been burned before. He had made a previous purchase in the yearly tax foreclosure auction. His coup turned less appealing as he was confronted with the reality of removing the owner and then-occupant from her home. Goldenberg sold the house back to its occupant for the bargain price of $7,000 - twice what he had paid for it, but half what she had owed in property taxes.

Now Goldenberg won't consider an already-occupied house. "It goes into this long-term narrative of Detroit is vacant and empty and there's no one here. So when you look at it and you think oh my god, we're going to develop this area, no one thinks that you might be pushing people out."

Goldenberg is facing the same dilemma that many young, educated - and mostly white -- gentrifiers are facing as well.

This coming year, 62,000 Detroit properties will be heading to the tax foreclosure auction if their owners fail to come up with money before April 1. The catch? Over half of these properties have someone living them -- usually the previous owner, who paid off the mortgage and whose family may have lived in the house for years.

The result: Young, predominantly white, college educated professionals and creatives may be moving into Detroit lured by tax breaks and incentives, participating in its "renewal" - but tens of thousands of mainly black Detroiters, struggling with bills, are simultaneously - and silently - being shown out the back door.

It's a dynamic affecting a significant portion of Detroit's small, poor population. This fall, the Wayne County treasurer is handing out tax foreclosure notices to 62,000 Detroit properties at least three years behind on paying their property taxes. All told, that's over $709m in overdue taxes and penalties -- a heavy burden for a city in which 38% of residents are living below the poverty line.

Of those properties, 37,000 are classified as occupied. With an average of 2.74 people per household, this means around 100,000 Detroiters are at risk of losing the current roof over their head. That is 1 in 7 Detroit residents, this coming season alone.

The end is predictable - and swift. If owners fail to work out payment plans or pay their entire tax burden within five months, their homes end up at auctions. The first one comes in September where properties are sold at a starting bid of the total amount of taxes and liens owed. The houses no one buys end up in the second round at a starting bid of $500.

After over a decade of this system, Detroit has completed 125,000 tax foreclosures, according to the city's own report.

It's a different kind of housing crisis. Jerry Goldberg, an attorney with Moratorium NOW!, credits Detroit losing one quarter of its population between 2000 and 2010 as a direct result of both tax and mortgage foreclosures.

Marilyn Mullane, the executive director of Michigan Legal Services, which has been working with Detroiters undergoing foreclosure, says the tax and subprime-foreclosure crises in the city are intimately linked.

One of the things linking them: lack of information. Low-income homeowners are eligible for tax exemptions. While many residents would meet the requirements, they must file requests before their taxes are due, neither of which are readily known pieces of information, Mullane says. Owners can buy their homes back with debts cleared at auction for $500 as a solution of last resort.

The payment plans are unrealistic for many Detroiters already desperately behind on their bills.

"It is very disturbing because most homeowners want to keep their homes. If only the treasurer were willing to take whatever they could pay," Mullane says.

The changing face of Detroit

The flow of information is unequal - asymmetric, in Wall Street terms -- between the often wealthy buyers and the low-income residents who suffer foreclosures. Detroit's real estate challenges are remaking the city and favoring outsiders.

Last month, 32-year-old Trevor Epps, the chief of staff to a Michigan state representative, opened the door of her home in northwest Detroit to find a tax foreclosure notice.

It was a "frustrating" development, said Epps. Ever since the University of Michigan graduate took over home finances from her 82-year-old grandmother a few years ago, she has been playing catch-up.

When Epps' grandmother, Leila Timmons, first arrived in Detroit in the 1960s, her family was the only black one on the block. As the city changed over the decades, its population decreasing by a million, its demographics shifting from majority white to majority black, Timmons stayed put. She helped found a block club, participating in weekly meetings to help build a sense of community. She took care of her family, nursing her own parents, her disabled son and raising her two grandchildren after her daughter died.

By the time Epps came to help, there were renovations to be done, expenses to be cut and debts to be paid. Epps says she started making payments towards the owed property taxes, but fell short.

Epps says she is looking into payment plans to address her household debt and avoid foreclosure, but she is also considering throwing the towel in, putting her grandmother in a home and getting herself an apartment - outside of the city.

Epps' story is also a window into Detroit's shifting demographics.

The block used to be "vibrant", Timmons says. Now it is quiet -- two thirds of it is empty. Those houses that are still occupied are owned by families like hers, who have been around for decades, with younger and older generations overlapping. Grandfather homes, they are sometimes called in Detroit.

The people buying those homes, however, are not the distinguished Detroit grandfathers. Anecdotally, they are well-funded and relatively young.

Darin McLeskey, a 24-year-old civil and environmental engineer, has been buying properties in Detroit through the tax auction since he was 19. At the time, he thought it might be quite cool to own a city block and wanted a stake in the city's future. Today he owns five structures, one of which he lives in, and almost forty lots. Some of the lots have had trees planted on them already, he says.

Over the years, he has found that the best properties to buy are those that are still occupied. Two of the structures he owns have been purchased from Detroit residents two years behind on taxes, one year short of tumbling into tax foreclosure.

In the case of one such couple in their sixties who owed $3,000 in taxes and $1,000 in utilities, an offer of $8,000 on their house meant they could pay off their debts and walk away with $4,000, McLeskey says.

These are residents who were planning on moving from the city anyway, McLeskey says.

At the same time, McLeskey says in the last few years, six of his contemporaries who were housemates of his at one point in one of his Detroit properties have now gone on to buy houses of their own around the city.

Land contracts and the 'punch in the stomach'

So far, the city and the Wayne county treasurer's office have been largely unsympathetic to the plight of homeowners struggling to pay their taxes.

David Szymanski, Wayne County's assistant treasurer, says the hardest part of his job is having to foreclose on people who have not paid their bills. Those who cannot afford property taxes should consider renting, he says.

But residents who are not full homeowners are not shielded from the tax foreclosure crisis in the city either. Land contracts - or renting to own - are popular compromises in Detroit, where banks were almost entirely absent for decades.

With land contracts, property owners replace banks and become the effective lender towards whom monthly increments are paid. At the end of a land contract, a property is, in theory, passed from one owner and former landlord to a new owner and former tenant.

Cornelius Washington, a 46-year-old lifelong Detroiter, a single father of four and carpet-layer of 27 years, found out three months ago that the house he had been living in under a land contract had been foreclosed on unbeknownst to him and was about to go up for auction.

Washington suffers from arthritis in both knees and has carpal-tunnel syndrome in his hands as a result of a long career in physical labor. He can only manage to work three days a week, but does not qualify for disability benefits. He keeps three dogs at his house for safety - "the best protection I can get without having to shoot someone."

Washington signed a land contract two years ago. He agreed to put $2,000 down and pay $400 a month for four years, at the end of which he would become the outright owner of the house. Half way in, Washington had already contributed $12,000 towards the contract, with an additional $10,000 he put towards renovating the house, which was completely gutted - "just a shell" - when he first moved in.

Washington tried to bid and buy his current home in the tax auction last month after all its taxes and liens were cleared in the second round - something few Detroiters are aware they can do - but he was outbid. His budget was $1,400 and his house's final price tag was $3,000.

When I visit Cornelius Washington in his home, a few days after first speaking to him on the phone, he has received news his house may have been bought by the same man with whom he signed his land contract.

"I feel like I have been punched in the stomach," Washington says.

The carpet layer says all he has left is prayer and hope. Specifically, he is hoping he can put the $1,400 he had used to bid in the auction to fully buy his house back from its current new owner.

"What else can I do? I know who did this but I am not going to do anything bad. I am not going to go to prison for this. I am not a criminal. The only thing I can do is move forward."

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Detroit's young gentrifiers face a daunting task in buying $500 homes: evicting poor residents

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"Having to kick people out takes all the fun out of owning a house." Oren Goldenberg, a 31-year-old filmmaker based in Detroit, could have bought a $500 house at the Wayne County tax auction this fall-- but having to evict a homeowner turned him off. Goldenberg had been burned before.

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#ThingsGentrifiersDo is trending on Twitter

- #ThingsGentrifiersDo come to a neighborhood "for the culture." Call the police on the culture.

- #ThingsGentrifiersDo Insult locals by asking us whether our family neighborhood is a "safe" place for the unwanted store they just opened.

- #thingsgentrifiersdo say that they were in the area "first" (before other gentrifiers) completely ignoring the face that WE were there.

- Send their children to private schools rather than support local schools. #thingsgentrifiersdo

- Create a special shuttle because the 20 minute train ride has too many black folks #thingsgentrifiersdo

- Ask the black guy who has lived in the building longer than them, if he actually lives there #thingsgentrifiersdo

http://jazminsthoughts.tumblr.com/post/107265133677/thoughts

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Nneka Mmeh --  7 Reasons Why Gentrification Hurts Communities of Color

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Nneka Mmeh --  7 Reasons Why Gentrification Hurts Communities of Color

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When I was growing up in East New York, Brooklyn in the early 90s, most residents were Black or Latinx. Today, the demographics are still about the same, and very little has changed about the neighborhood.

I distinctly remember noticing that there were no white people that lived near me and that the neighborhoods that had a large percentage of white residents were simply better: They had better schools, nicer streets, more businesses, less crime, and no visible drug use.

It was everything I wanted my neighborhood to be.

As ashamed as I am to admit this now, I assumed that the only way neighborhoods could be bettered is by having white residents, so I hoped that my neighborhood would become like Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At the time, Williamsburg was rapidly changing, and what used to be dirty streets and run-down businesses were now tree-lined blocks and shiny Starbucks.
What I failed to understand then was that the gentrification of neighborhoods might make the space look better, but my family would never be able to afford the price of living there.
Although my childhood neighborhood is still far from gentrification due to its distance from New York City and history of gang violence, drug use, and poverty, things seem to be changing, as this real estate listing demonstrates by calling East New York "the new frontier."
Gentrification is new-wave colonialism, and it has economic, societal, and public health repercussions for poor communities of color.
Many times when wealthy people move into a low-income neighborhood, they truly want to help. Oftentimes, they even start community programs and become leaders in the community, often through beautification projects. And while I get why this seems to be good at first glance, it really isn't.

When neighborhoods are gentrified, those moving in are looking for cheap rent and the ability to make a better life for themselves.

And while wealthier people may feel entitled to buy or rent wherever they wish (as is indeed their right), they must also understand the consequences of their actions.

As our neighborhoods become "up-and-coming areas" that "evoke images of burned-out buildings, riots, and poverty," the people that lived there through the poverty and disrepair deserve to stay in their homes and have a community that supports their needs.

We need to understand that gentrification isn't about beautifying neighborhoods and making them safer. It is the systematic displacement of people of color from their homes.

Gentrification hurts communities of color, and these are some of the ways how.

1. As wealthier people move into poor neighborhoods, landlords raise their rents to cash in from the wealth of the new influx of residents.

As this study states, the median rent prices in New York City rose 75% since 2001. This same trend can be seen in other neighborhoods that have currently become gentrified, like Oakland, California.
It's common to see landlords bully low-income tenants into moving out by not maintaining apartments or not renewing their lease, forcing residents to move out.
I've seen this happen to many of my relatives that moved to New York City in the early 70s and settled in the Lower East Side and Soho neighborhoods of lower Manhattan.

While these areas are now the first choice of home for celebrities and ritzy events like the TriBeCa Film Festival, they were previously filled with tenement buildings and low-income housing.

One of my aunts who still lives in what is now the very trendy Soho pays for all repairs and upgrades in her apartment, as the building owners refuse to do so in an effort to bully her into leaving and renting her apartment at a much higher cost.

Yes, it's illegal, but they know she could never afford a lawyer.

None of her neighbors remain, and none of the local businesses she frequented are still the same. Even her local church no longer offer services in her language.

I ask her often why does she remain, although I know the answer: That's her home!

Poor people of color living in gentrified neighborhoods find themselves between a rock and a hard place. They are often unable to move because they could never afford housing elsewhere, but are constantly pushed to the limit by landlords looking to rent at higher prices.

It's illegal, but that doesn't help a person who does not understand the law or hire someone to help them navigate the legal system.

Many of these communities are comprised of immigrants that have lived in the United States for decades, yet have no resources left in their communities. They face language, cultural, and societal barriers that set them at a disadvantage next to real estate companies and developers.

2. Local businesses suffer as large competitors start opening shops in what were previously undesired locales.

If wealthier residents are moving into a low-income neighborhood, it follows that they will spend more on local businesses and generate more profit for them. Yet, unfortunately, this is rarely the case.
Businesses have a hard time catering to two different types of clientele, though they often try to do so.
It's common to see grocery stores start selling a wider variety of products to attract new residents, but few actually see the increase in profits they thought they would because new residents often shop in places they feel more comfortable in.

Likewise, new businesses that open up specifically to cater to the new residents bring new competition to the old ones, further straining the local community.

New businesses open to cater to the wealthier residents of the neighborhood and existing shops are forced to either a) change their practices to appeal to new residents and survive or b) stick with their old clientele and likely lose their business.

Additionally, rent increases affect businesses as much as they do low-income residents.

The only businesses that can thrive under these circumstances are large corporations like Whole Foods.

Whole Foods, unlike other local supermarkets, attract a new set of people and completely changes a neighborhood. This is evident in the way Whole Foods changed the neighborhood of Jamaica Plain in Boston. While Jamaica Plain already had a large and affordable supermarket called Hi-Lo, open since 1964 and known for selling Latin American products, it couldn't compete with Whole Foods.

Needless to say, Hi-Lo had to close because it could not keep up with Whole Foods, and just like that, low-income residents of Jamaica Plain were left without a place to shop for groceries that were affordable and culturally relevant.

As this article states, "That's because Hi-Lo and Whole Foods aren't just stores, they're ideas that lead to similar ideas, and attract people who identify with those ideas in cyclical fashion."

3. People of color are criminalized because new people feel 'in danger.'

People of color, and especially Black people, are often perceived as dangerous and thuggish.

As the recent shooting of Mike Brown - an unarmed young Black man in Ferguson, Missouri - further proves, the stereotyping of racial minorities has dangerous consequences.

Black and Latino men are disproportionately arrested, especially for marijuana use and distribution, while white men who do the same are celebrated.

And we can't assume that justice is the same for everyone.

In this article, un-ironically titled "I Spent a Day Delivering Weed in New York City," the author repeatedly states that these are not your "normal" drug dealers, therefore, not a threat to your safety.
Our neighborhoods are often the only place where we can feel at home, but as neighborhoods get gentrified, activities such as panhandling and sleeping in public places become criminalized, too.

While not having poor people live on your streets might be a priority for wealthier residents, the response should be to help them, not arrest them.

If people of color are getting arrested for everything from drug use to being poor, I don't think it's safe to say that gentrification is improving our neighborhoods and making them safer.

The reality is that the incarceration of Black and Brown men create the illusion of safety for white residents, but it's a sense of security based on stereotypes of Black and Brown men being thugs, criminals, and dangerous.

The need to feel safe, which is an absolute human right, is a necessity, but the way we achieve that in gentrified neighborhoods is missing the mark. Crime happens because former residents of gentrified neighborhoods live in poverty and suffer from lack of resources and poor educational and health services.

4. New developments are profit-driven and not community-driven.

Gentrification is driven by the private sector.

Close-knit communities thrive on socially conscious business practices that benefit everyone. Local shops often allow families to shop on credit and use public assistance funds without shame.

Communities often get together for block parties and potlucks, and in general, there is a sense that you will be taken care of. But when newcomers see existing residents as dangerous, this feeling of community is hampered.

In my childhood neighborhood, I would often babysit and tutor younger children that lived near me. Although some parents would give me some form of payment, I did it because it was the only way to serve my community - a community that had few affordable childcare centers and no tutoring services.

It was a community, as imperfect as it may be.

Today, I live in a different neighborhood - one that is far more gentrified than the place where my family still lives, and a lot less reassuring.

I have a dog park, a Planet Fitness, a yoga studio, and a coffee shop all within reach, but I have neighbors I have never met, and I could never ask my local grocer to give me a loaf of bread on credit.

And I will be sincerely honest: I absolutely love that every Sunday, I have a community garden where I can go shop for local and organic produce and walk one block back to my apartment. But it will never compare to the free hot dogs I ate while playing near the fire hydrant on a hot summer day in Brooklyn.

5. Children's education suffers.

Children who live in areas of concentrated poverty never fare well. They often have low graduation rates and deal with constant violence.

So it follows that gentrification should improve the lives of poor children of color.

There is no denying that diverse schools, both economically and racially, are a good learning space for all children. When children are exposed to a variety of individuals, they have a better understanding of the world.

However, what happens to neighborhoods also happens to schools.

As former residents are pushed out, so are the children attending local schools, which disturbs their learning process.

While schools do tend to improve and start providing amenities that children benefit from with the increase in capital coming in from the higher income of new residents, few minority children stick around to enjoy these perks.

With poverty rates for children at a staggering 22% in the United States, it's important to make sure that all amenities and community programs that come with gentrification are also available to poor residents.

Yet with the profit-driven model that arises as communities are gentrified, it's unlikely that any children will benefit from gentrification.

Children succeed when their parents are capable of providing for them. When parents are unable to afford their own neighborhood amenities, their children start seeing the difference along racial and social barriers and internalize it.

6. Culture shifts, and communities lose their safety net.

Vibrant communities that rely on social networking are torn apart with gentrification.

Neighbors that people once relied on move out, and services that were beneficial to the community are replaced.
For those that stay, they become outsiders in their own communities.
In a similar manner, communities that have historically banded to build a community through strife - like Black people in Harlem, New York and Latinxs in the Mission District of San Francisco - begin to see their tight-knit and flourishing communities disbanded.

This is evident in the way Vogue categorically dismissed the neighborhood of Bushwick in Brooklyn as a " disfavored neighborhood." A year later - and a lot more white and affluent residents to sell magazines to - it's the 7th coolest neighborhood, due in part to the new influx of white artists to the previously " grimy, industrial Bushwick. "

Yet Bushwick already had a thriving community of artists all along, and it's where celebrities such as Rosie Perez and Eddie Murphy hailed from.

While it's understandable that communities can (and do!) change as time passes, their histories must be protected. After all, we still associate Plymouth Rock and lower Manhattan with Dutch settlers, and that was over 500 years ago.

The truth is that new developments and fancy coffee shops will never replace the social network that helped local residents survive.

7. Public health of residents suffers.

Residents that fear being displaced and losing their social network are under a lot of stress.

Those who want to remain grapple with rising rent and food prices, while those that leave lose a lot of their hard-earned capital.
Disparities in health become acute when neighborhoods change rapidly and existing marginalized communities are pushed to the peripheries.
External problems manifest themselves in mental and physical health issues, such as anxiety and depression, or high blood pressure and heart problems.

The psychological effects of losing one's tight-knit community and deep social links can be traumatizing for some. It's important to note that gentrification doesn't just affect our views; it affects our perceptions and mentality.

Public health programs must address issues that displaced people deal with daily, from lack of access to affordable healthy food to subpar housing.

***
Poor communities of color have spent years battling disinvestment and abandonment, but redevelopment only seems to occur when white and wealthy people move into a neighborhood.
Neighborhoods are not static. They change through the years, and there is nothing wrong with an organic shift in the demographics of a neighborhood. But it shouldn't happen at the expense of poor people and people of color.
Patricia Valoy is a Contributing Writer for Everyday Feminism. She is a Civil Engineer, feminist blogger, and STEM activist living in New York City. She writes about feminist and STEM issues from the perspective of a Latina and a woman in engineering. You can read more of her writings on her blog Womanisms, or follow her on Twitter @besito86. Read her articles here and book her for speaking engagements here.
It's important to keep in mind that gentrification might make a neighborhood beautiful, but only for a select few people. If we truly believe in improving and redeveloping our neighborhoods, we must do so for everyone - regardless of social, racial, or economic status.

Filed Under: Tagged With: Articles, Class, Race & Ethnicity Posts

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7 Reasons Why Gentrification Hurts Communities of Color - Everyday Feminism

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Many times when wealthy people move into a low-income neighborhood, they truly want to help. Oftentimes, they even start community programs and become leaders in the community, often through beautification projects. And while I get why this seems to be good at first glance, it really isn't.

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"Why do people choose to move to London? And why do they choose to leave? A new project exploring these questions is currently playing out in an unlikely venue [...] Called London is Changing, the project is run through a website that invites people who are moving into, out of, or across London to share the reasons and emotions behind their migration.

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Duarte Carrilho da Graça

London billboards are sharing the stories of people moving both to and from the rapidly changing city. Some of them are quite painful to read.

Why do people choose to move to London? And why do they choose to leave? A new project exploring these questions is currently playing out in an unlikely venue-two advertising billboards in the center of the U.K.'s capital. Called London is Changing, the project is run through a website that invites people who are moving into, out of, or across London to share the reasons and emotions behind their migration. These messages are then displayed on the billboards, hopefully giving passers-by pause for thought as they walk or drive.

The project is the work of communication design lecturer Rebecca Ross, who traded for use of the electronic display units in lieu of payment for some consulting work she did for the billboard company. The results of her call for submissions make for compelling, surprisingly nuanced reading. While most of those taking part so far have been leaving rather than arriving, Ross hopes that greater publicity for the project (which runs through 2015) could help spread the word to a wider pool of people.

Even now, contributors' reactions don't fit comfortably into one camp. Some sound justifiably embittered by London's intern culture and dodgy landlords. "What creativity can there be when only money can buy you your next opportunity?" asks a freelance filmmaker relocating from West London to the Netherlands. "I have had to move four times in the last two years because of unscrupulous landlords, rent increases or nightmare housemates," protests an arts worker moving from expensive Southwest London to the cheaper Northeast.

Others seem lucky enough to have more control over their choices. "I wanted to live within walking distance of a cinema, a decent restaurant or a bookshop!" says a civil servant who moved from the edge of the London region to the inner borough of Greenwich. "By selling up I can clear my mortgage and live on my pension," declares a retired naval officer who is himself leaving Greenwich and traveling outwards. And while some who have already left the city seem delighted to be free of the place, others look back wistfully to its diversity and choices. For some, London's allure is largely in the past. "It's not the city I knew. It doesn't feel like it's for people like me anymore. It's a hell of a lot richer and duller," says a student relocating to the South Coast. A graphic designer heading for the English Midlands sounds rather more regretful. "As a gay woman, I love the anonymity of the capital-it's tolerance and diversity has made life very comfortable."

All round, the messages capture the alluring but frustrating pressure cooker atmosphere of a city going through rapid change. You can read a full transcript of all the billboard messages displayed so far on this page, or keep scrolling to view more.

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'Nobody My Age Can Afford to Stay Here Forever': London's Affordability Angst, Now on Billboards

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London billboards are sharing the stories of people moving both to and from the rapidly changing city. Some of them are quite painful to read. Why do people choose to move to London? And why do they choose to leave?

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Nneka Mmeh -  Gentrification in London (and how it affects the LGBT Community)

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Nneka Mmeh -  Gentrification in London (and how it affects the LGBT Community)

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http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/the-joiners-arms-is-closing-and-its-a-travesty

(another article about the same issue 6 same example, but at vice magazine so Warning:

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This article originally appeared on howupsetting.com on November 4th 2014 -follow the author at @how_upsetting.

"In areas like Shoreditch and its peers around the globe, the cosmetic renewal of a portion of the crumbling urban core coincides with continued - or intensified - infrastructural decline. The reactivation of dormant (or low profit sweatshop-occupied) industrial properties first as artist's spaces and later as bars, boutiques, apartments etc has made many landlords even richer, but the area's large tracts of public housing, services and transport facilities remain in a deteriorating condition and/or are sold off to the private sector. Gentrification takes from the poor and gives to the rich. Anything residually 'public' will either be reclaimed for the middle class or left to rot. Each wave of colonisers plays out the contradictions of their particular claim to space, taking sides against the next phase of gentrification in which they nevertheless conspire...The creation and rapid extinction of cultural 'incubators' - clubs, art spaces, etc. - by more lucrative investments in areas like Shoreditch at the same time intensifies bohemian settler's efforts to maintain that crucial 'edginess' which is the USP of the area's marketing."

The piece this quote was taken from (" Shoreditch and the creative destruction of the inner city") was written over a decade ago yet remains the most insightful commentary on what's happening in the East End of London (and beyond) that I've seen. I've referred to it in the past, not least when Dazed & Confused insultingly posed the question of whether East London was 'dead' because the 'creatives' were finding it a bit expensive. The writers at D&C were completely useless on gentrification, presenting it both as a new phenomenon and as something somehow removed from magazines like their own and its endless articles presenting the East End as a hub of cool, edgy creativity. Both were and are a nonsense.

No brand better sums up the "bohemian settler's efforts to maintain that crucial 'edginess '" than Vice which, like Dazed & Confused, launched in the early 90s and bought Shoreditch's Old Blue Last pub in the same year Benedict Seymour's essay was written. It's become a shorthand signifier for an edginess that is " one part actual intelligent, progressive, boundary-pushing journalism to nine parts nihilistic misogynist awfulness" and it's not irrelevant here that one of its co-founders is a reactionary dickhead. Vice was and is aimed at a young, self-consciously 'creative' reader for whom it offers a titillating taste of transgression.

Today Vice has posted an article on the impending closure of The Joiners Arms, a Hackney gay bar which it's fair to say has been an institution in London's LGBT scene. Entitled "The Joiners' Arms is Closing and It's a Travesty', the piece is fascinating in its inadvertent revelation that these people still really, really don't understand what's happening in London. As with the previous D&S piece, gentrification is presented as some nebulous external force that is encroaching on 'proper Hackney' and "pushing out those that can no longer afford to stay". Yet the article itself documents some of the logic and processes behind gentrification, even though it clearly doesn't realise it. Seymour's piece explains how the wave of 'creative gentrification' which saw Shoreditch "celebrated as the heart of London's creative and artistic scene in the '90s" led to it becoming "the apple of urban policy makers' eyes in the late '90s". As he puts it:

Shoreditch was held up as an example of how the 'inner core' of the city, allegedly abandoned after the flight of working class inhabitants to the suburbs in the '60s and '70s, could 'come back to life' if the area's 'residual' population of deadbeats were supplemented (that is, supplanted) by a lively group of dynamic and entrepreneurial cultural professionals. From the beginning this notion of new 'life' served to obfuscate whose life was being discussed - not that of the area's economically challenged majority, it would seem.

This is a narrative which Vice follows precisely. The Joiners', we're told, opened in "proper Hackney territory" which apparently means it was "surrounded by empty shop fronts and council estates". Notice that 'council estates' are clearly implied to be a bad thing here. It goes further - The Joiners' was "a haven from a traditionally homophobic part of town" and it "flew the rainbow flag proud" despite aforementioned council estates. In the space of a few sentences we're implicitly but clearly given the notion that Hackney was a declining working-class area and this is linked to homophobia. Was Hackney 'traditionally' viewed as homophobic, more so than any other area of London? Even this brief 'gay history' of the East End suggests otherwise, with this section concerning a pub literally minutes from The Joiners':

Another vital meeting place for the East End gay community was the Royal Oak in Columbia Road, Hackney. While researching local history, Columbia Road resident Linda Wilkinson learned about Lil and Maisie, a transvestite couple, who lived in Hackney throughout World War II and performed at the Royal Oak while the bombs were falling. What's remarkable about Lil and Maisie is that they were accepted by their neighbours. No stories have come to light of a similar working class gay couple anywhere else in London at this time. Lil and Maisie were still performing in drag at the Royal Oak in the 1960s.

No-one could possibly deny the certain existence of homophobia in Hackney when The Joiners' opened, just as no-one could deny it now, but to suggest that it was a refuge from the homophobic working-class hordes around it is insulting. It is, however, an easy assertion because it appeals to familiar prejudices while claiming for The Joiners' and its denizens that all-important edginess. Indeed, the article goes to pains to document The Joiners as "battling the encroaching diktat of political correctness" and offering "raucous mischief." Yet rather than offering a radical disruption of the surrounding area it's more likely that The Joiners' opened as part of, and then furthered, the gentrification which was already occurring in Shoreditch. Although we must take note of the complexities and avoid generalising, research suggests a link between gentrification and a significant influx of LGBT people - in the Vice article we're told of a writer who moved to Hackney in 2009 and "chose my flat partly because it was across the road [from The Joiners']". The flats directly opposite The Joiners' were only build in the late 00s and most certainly weren't social housing. To again return to the Seymour piece:

While Shoreditch's magic circle was in the media spotlight the most massive and significant changes in the borough of Hackney, and indeed the city as a whole, were scarcely discussed. The social cleansing of working class communities across large swaths of London's inner core, vicious cuts, privatisation, and Eastern European levels of poverty coincided with the highest number of housing privatisation ballots in the country. The latter, advanced in the name of 'regeneration' served to hasten the theft of the city from its true 'creative class', re-engineering former industrial areas as a playground for young middle-class consumers of surplus value. Although it is notoriously difficult to get precise figures, I would guess that as much as 40% of Hackney's working class population have been pushed out of the area through the combined effect of rising rents, evictions, demolition and transfer of council housing into the hands of housing associations.

This is perhaps one of the central issues with gentrification - we never think that we are part of it until we feel victimised by it. For example, the Johann Hari-led attacks on Muslims in East London a few years ago owed much to the lazy prejudice which the Vice piece appeals to and owed much to gentrification. There's no doubt that neither the owner of The Joiners' nor most of the people who went there (including me) harboured any Machiavellian scheme to 'claim' the area but the process has been clear and ongoing for anyone who deigned to look. It was gentrification rather than 'evolution' which led to The Joiners' becoming "basically...East London's hottest new late night gay club". It must be said that the article is utterly disingenuous in its failure to note that The Joiners' did its best to capitalise on this - the notorious door charge is glossed over but it and drastically increased drink prices made the venue one of the most expensive in the area within a quite short period of time. This was combined with a door staff who were quite renowned for their aggressiveness - speak to anyone who went there with any regularity and they'll at least know of a story. I found it amusing, then, that Vice repeats the familiar tropes about The Joiners' (and the East End) presenting a:

...raucous, welcoming (unlike many Soho haunts, there had rarely been a "you're not gay, you ain't coming in" door policy), messy and character-rich up-yours to the stuff going on a few miles down the road in W1

Soho has long been the bete noire of East End LGBT venues, the great bogey man which they seek to define themselves against. Yet the complaints offered - that it's too exclusive, too expensive, too homogenous - are ones which are repeated simply because they're trite rather than because they are true. As the East End has continued its gentrification the venues and nights which have sprung up, such as East Bloc and Sink The Pink, have been as expensive and homogenous as any West End venue you could mention (if not more so). East Bloc on Saturday costs £7-10 while the next Sink The Pink costs £22. G-A-Y, in contrast, is typically free or up to £5 if you can't be bothered picking up one of the many flyers. Yet the LGBT scene in the East End clings evermore to that 'crucial edginess' - despite its price Sink The Pink presents itself as a response to "recession with a Conservative government at the helm". More disturbingly, these evenings delight in an aesthetic which is frequently racist and/or misogynistic - witness the gruesome yellowface at the top of this post - a trend which itself owes much to the colonial logic of gentrification.The Joiners' Arms, then, finds itself victim of a rapacious gentrification which it once benefited from and which the East End LGBT scene has been/is complicit in. Yet we continues to ignore it beyond the most superficial level: Vice tritely complains of "an area that has been flat white-d and artisan burger-ed within an inch of its life" with zero comprehension of the processes and history behind it. The Benedict Seymour piece is an essential place to start in beginning to understand the 'creative destruction' at work here. When Pauline Pearce complained about the damage gentrification was doing to Hackney, pushing out the poor, driving up prices and eroding the area's diversity, it was met with a furious response. Yet the closure of The Joiners' is just the latest example of how this logic has no boundaries and, if left unchecked, the vast majority will suffer as the poorest in society are right now.

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The Joiners' Arms and Gentrification - The New Metropolitan

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This article originally appeared on howupsetting.com on November 4th 2014 -follow the author at @how_upsetting. "In areas like Shoreditch and its peers around the globe, the cosmetic renewal of a portion of the crumbling urban core coincides with continued - or intensified... Continue Reading →

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Nneka Mmeh - Gentrification in Johannesburg

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Nneka Mmeh - Gentrification in Johannesburg

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But now this image of downtown Johannesburg is beginning to shift, with the arrival of property developers who are creating affluent enclaves, such as Maboneng and Braamfontein. The developments have been hailed by the international press.

While the explosion of craft beer and organic vegetables has been welcomed by many, the human cost of these hipster enclaves has been less examined: increasing gentrification puts real pressure on the cost of living for Johannesburg's poorest.

The Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa advocates for tenants who are facing eviction in Johannesburg, usually because of new owners who want higher rents. The new landlords are buying buildings at auctions, and while they may not be charging exorbitant rents, it's still too much for the poor, according to Kate Tissington, a senior researcher for the institute.

"For our clients, that's a big problem," she says.

Many of the buildings are former factories or office spaces, never intended to be residences. One report estimates there are 1,300 slum buildings housing 250,000 people in Johannesburg.

The Hercules, where Khumalo, his family and about 150 others live is one of these buildings where the people are fighting eviction.
Slideshow: Life in the squatters' residences
Meanwhile, the hip and well-heeled drive into Maboneng from their comfortable suburbs for a day of shopping, maybe picking up a pair of wooden eyeglasses or a vintage leather jacket. They'll take breaks for Spanish chorizo rolls with organic rocket and designer water that claims it is "enhanced with the energies of plants."

Local radio DJ Ngwako Malakalaka thinks it's a "misconception" that Maboneng is only for the well-to-do.

"If they think it's just a playground for wealthy people, then they're judging us from the outside," he says.

"This," he says, gesturing around him, "is us saying we love our city and we're trying to make something of our city. It's changing the mindset of our peer group of what our city is about."

Slideshow: Partying in Maboneng

At the Hercules, Gugulethu is getting water from a broken tap in the building's inner courtyard. She'll take it back to her mother, walking through dark, narrow corridors until she gets to her room. Her name in Zulu means "our pride."

The rooms are not original to the Hercules. The place consists of two floors, with windows only in the front and back of the building. It appears to have been originally a small factory space that was taken over by residents.

Inside, they built small rooms for themselves, using particleboard, plywood, corrugated iron and whatever other detritus they found on the Johannesburg streets and marking off small corners for themselves that they could call home.

The residents electrified the rooms themselves, enough for lights and appliances, with a jumble of electrical wires running against the wooden walls. Walking through the narrow halls, sometimes leaning forward as though the rooms are about to burst, one feels like a rat in a maze.

The fact that the building wasn't intended as residential space means the occupants share only a single tap and two toilets. There isn't much of a bath; instead residents have a corner, mostly out of sight, where they lather and rinse themselves clean from a bucket. Last week the tap broke. Residents fixed it as best they could with a black plastic bag.

Sometime soon, a building committee made up of elected residents will meet and start a collection for repairs, as they've often done in the past.

Since fighting their eviction in 2011, the residents have paid no rent to the owner, and likewise, the owner has done no repairs or maintenance on the building. Left on their own, the residents manage it themselves.

Meetings are conducted in Zulu, Ndebele and English, and many of the residents, who hail from across Africa, don't understand the proceedings.

"We have to use simple English, simple English only," says building committee member Siyabonga Dludla. His leadership role doesn't get him any perks, such as a stipend. He makes his living as an informal trader selling skopo, sheep's head, to commuters at a public transit hub. The room he shares with his girlfriend is small, even compared with the others in the Hercules, with just enough space for a single mattress and a fridge. On the wall is written a prayer in Zulu, left over from a previous occupant.

"My Lord, please help me not to be like a chameleon. To have a single heart that is faithful. Not to have a bad heart that's filled with anger, so I can be a truthful person before you, Holy Spirit," it reads.

Language is a problem for Imran Square, who stays in a room on the second floor of the Hercules. The room is one of the bigger ones, but he shares it with eight fellow Zambians. One mattress sits on top of empty drums of hydraulic oil; another lies on the floor, matted with dirt and oil. Not all of them are working, but the ones who are share what little they have.

"Some people is working, some people is not. So we help each other," Square says.

They cook together, sharing their meals, and at night all nine men find space on the two mattresses.

The youngest is 16-year-old Hassan, who has found work touting outside a shop owned by Pakistanis in downtown Johannesburg. He makes about $35 a week. He doesn't really speak English and needs the help of Square and another Zambian to communicate.

There's little quiet in the rooms. As the Zambians talk, loud music with Zimbabwean rhythms and Congolese guitar licks can be heard. Banging comes from outside, where a large Tanzanian man in a San Diego State football jersey is breaking apart wood pallets with a wrench.

"Privacy is difficult," says Khumalo. On the wall is a collage of pictures, including one of him wearing a shirt and tie, taken in Zimbabwe in 2001 before he went to South Africa. "It was Zimbabwe that time, when things were all right," he says. He hasn't worked regularly for several years, and the building committee gives him a small stipend to keep the common areas clean.

He knows what Maboneng is, though he has never been there. "I don't know if I'm allowed there," he says. "It's a nice place. There are nice things, but how to get in, I don't know."

The party at the rooftop bar at Maboneng was in danger of being rained out, with Johannesburg's distinctively violent thunderstorms rolling off the veld that morning. But by the afternoon, the sky had cleared. As the storms moved off, revelers moved in, some driving Toyotas, others dropped off in chauffeured Mercedes.

The house music has been turned up, and young people dance while young women in black cocktail dresses sell Camel cigarettes. The entrance fee is about $20 - steep but, as most of the attendees will tell you, reasonable, considering some of the DJs have been brought in from Germany and Austria.

A blond, blue-eyed young man in a tank top that shows off his sculpted torso teaches another man his special method for taking shots of gin. It involves a lot of gargling and leaves the two of them grimacing as their eyes redden and water.

In the sky over the party, just as the sun is setting, a rainbow emerges. A rainbow for the progeny of the new South Africa, the Rainbow nation - as long as they have $20.

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Gentrification in Johannesburg isn't good news for everyone

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But now this image of downtown Johannesburg is beginning to shift, with the arrival of property developers who are creating affluent enclaves, such as Maboneng and Braamfontein. The developments have been hailed by the international press.

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Nneka Mmeh -  Portland ranked seventh cities with the fastest-rising rents (No rent control)

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Nneka Mmeh -  Portland ranked seventh cities with the fastest-rising rents (No rent control)

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Portland is a city that seems to be building apartment complexes all over town, yet the vacancy rate remains one of the lowest in the country and rents are rising faster than most other cities.

It's a combination of factors that puts a squeeze on renters with modest incomes, including those who gathered Wednesday evening for what was billed as a Rent Control Town Hall in downtown's First Congregational Church.

The situation amounts to a crisis for the working class, who are "not part of the conversation in our own city," said Melissa Vollono of Socialist Alternative, one of the organizers.

A 1985 law passed by the Oregon Legislature prohibits cities and counties from enacting rent controls.

The law, introduced to the Oregon House at the request of the Oregon Multifamily Housing Council, the Oregon State Homebuilders Association, the Oregon Association of Realtors, the Oregon Mobilehome Park Association, the Affiliated Rental Housing Association and the Oregon League of Financial Institutions, "has a racist subtext a mile wide," said Gerry Mohr, another organizer of Wednesday night's gathering.

He said the absence of ways to keep the city affordable to people of all income levels has made Portland's close-in neighborhoods the exclusive domain of the "high-earning elite."

Earlier this month, Zillow published a survey of the cities with the fastest-rising rents. Portland ranked seventh, with a year-over-year gain of 7.0 percent, more than twice the national average. The city's median rent, the real estate analytics company reported, was $1,587.

Zillow noted that, while rental increases are not always worrisome, it's troubling now that, on average, the cost burden of renting has risen to be about the same as the burden of owning.

"What's worrisome is that income growth has not kept pace with growth in rents," the company noted. "Since 2000, rents have grown at roughly twice the pace of wages, and as a result, the share of income necessary to afford typical rents in an area is rising."

For those who spoke at the Rent Control Town Hall, this is old news.

"Rent control in the right way would work," said Mohr. "This is an emergency."

"Go to the political system," urged Nick Caleb, a lawyer and former City Council candidate. "Be audacious."

-- Mike Francis

mfrancis@oregonian.com
503-412-7014
@oregonianmike

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Thirty years on, activists say it's time to undo Oregon's prohibition of rent control

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Portland is a city that seems to be building apartment complexes all over town, yet the vacancy rate remains one of the lowest in the country and rents are rising faster than most other cities.

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Nneka Mmeh - Relationship between art and gentrification

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Nneka Mmeh - Relationship between art and gentrification

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Is art to blame for gentrification?
-- The guardian

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Is art to blame for gentrification? | Matt Bolton

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Matt Bolton for openDemocracy: Change in inner-city areas such as Peckham has been fuelled by the 'cultural creatives' but it is art itself that offers hope of resistance

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Nneka Mmeh - Saturday Night Live Parody About Gentrification in Bushwick, Brooklyn

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Nneka Mmeh - Saturday Night Live Parody About Gentrification in Bushwick, Brooklyn

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Bushwick, Brooklyn (Offensive Language!)

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Three friends (Kenan Thompson, Kevin Hart, Jay Pharoah) from Bushwick, Brooklyn, hang out on a corner and discuss what they've been up to. Directed by Matt & Oz. Get more SNL on Hulu Plus: http://www.hulu.com/saturday-night-live Get more SNL: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live Full Episodes: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-liv...

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Emma McNamara - The Gentrification of Skid Row, LA. 

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Emma McNamara - The Gentrification of Skid Row, LA. 

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The gentrification of Skid Row - a story that will decide the future of Los Angeles

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LA's infamous 'homeless neighbourhood' has become a critical location in the city's attempts to transform its downtown heart. But how do the people who actually live there feel about this blighted, vibrant community?

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Jack Palmer - Leeds City Council unveil plans which will hijack Leeds Kirkgate Market and turn it into an exclusive “foodie destination” for the wealthy.

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Jack Palmer - Leeds City Council unveil plans which will hijack Leeds Kirkgate Market and turn it into an exclusive “foodie destination” for the wealthy.

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Those in my classes will know that this is a topic of interest to me! I've previously used Brixton Village and Leeds Trinity Kitchen as examples, but here's another one. Anybody whose shopped in Kirkgate market will know that it offers a much cheaper alternative to supermarkets - the struggle over redevelopment has prompted fears that it will price working class people out of the market. Not only does it reveal that markets are key strategic sites for 'regeneration' (read: gentrification) but also signals an expression of urban middle-class tastes. 'International food courts', like those in Brixton Village and Leeds Trinity, are interesting places because they allow the consumption of the 'diversity' of the city (via food consumption) in a secure space, without the presence of the 'threatening' aspects of that diversity. Rowland Atkinson, in the essay called 'padding the bunker', said that urban policies that are designed to attract and keep middle classes in cities promulgate the idea/desire of 'experience without risk'. I think this applies in this instance.

See also: http://contested-cities.net/CCleeds/traditional-retail-markets-new-gentrification-frontier/

And, on the Corn Exchange: http://www.theguardian.com/leeds/2010/sep/15/leeds-corn-exchange

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Leeds City Council unveil plans which will hijack Leeds Kirkgate Market and turn it into an exclusive "foodie destination" for the wealthy.

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Friends of Leeds Kirkgate Market response to the Market Strategy being presented at council tomorrow (Wednesday 27th) Leeds City Council unveil plans which will hijack Leeds Kirkgate Market and turn it into an exclusive "foodie destination" for the wealthy. Friends of Leeds Kirkgate Market are outraged as the council finally reveal their intentions to restructure...

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Jack Palmer - Little London PFI Scandal - How Leeds City Council Blackmailed a Community

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Jack Palmer - Little London PFI Scandal - How Leeds City Council Blackmailed a Community

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Little London PFI scandal - how Leeds City Council blackmailed a community - UK Indymedia

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Leeds City Council's announcement yesterday that nearly two-thirds of tenants have backed their proposed £35m PFI regeneration scheme in Little London is both expected and misleading. Here is the full story of how it happened.

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Jack Palmer - Some phenomenological perspectives on gentrification in Hackney

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Jack Palmer - Some phenomenological perspectives on gentrification in Hackney

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No shortage of words have been written about the changing face of east London. From blogs chronicling the dizzying number of independent coffee shops and cocktail bars to the modest internet outrage provoked by a Brick Lane cereal shop owner's remarkable tone-deafness, gentrification is a topic that's all abuzz.

Indeed, much of east London's hipster culture plays out on the internet, from the Instagram accounts and lifestyle blogs of young creative professionals to the writings of cultural critics opining online. Because of that, we tend to hear far more from the creative class gentrifiersthan those who they are gentrifying. Amid endless articles lamenting or celebrating another gelateria or gastropub, the unfiltered voices of working class east Londoners and long-time Hackney locals are notably absent.

Though they may be lacking in the blogosphere, the viewpoints at this end of the spectrum are strong and varied. Rising housing costs, a decline of blue-collar jobs, and the replacement of affordable shops and cafes with trendier versions are common concerns.

The cafe in my street is so quiet it is like a really cool, boring library

Jenny Smith*

The following interviews took place in January with service users of North London Action for the Homeless, a Hackney drop-in service that serves a hot meal twice a week to people who need it, regardless of housing or employment circumstances. Real names are used unless otherwise noted.

Joseph Cooke

This is an idea that's been going on for aeons of time; this middle class thing like, 'We're different to you and you're a lower class person so you stay on that side of void and eat at that cafe down there, and we'll sit on this side and eat at this restaurant." It's like a mould. The only thing I see that's important to [hipsters] is that they have an image and their image is different to yours. And they have this sense of, 'Even though we're living in one of the toughest boroughs in Britain, we're gonna do our stuff. We're gonna have our market on Saturday and you stay away and you do your stuff ... and we don't want to know you.' That level of class distinction is too old-fashioned and it needs to be changed.

It's not that they have more money or are more educated that's the problem - it's their attitude. They're English, so they have every right to move to any part of the country they want. It's just the attitude they carry with them is so old-fashioned. They need an injection of humour. They take themselves too seriously.

It seems like they're trying to get rid of us

Barry James Leaning

Edwin Osamor

The multicultural aspect of east London has always been there. A lot of different cultures have prominent communities within the East End - you see shops owned by Greek people, Turkish people, Caribbean people, Africans. I think now in the the East End they are pinpointing a lot of the money into new flats and new housing estates and refurbishment of areas. I go to the Haggerston pub on a Sunday, jazz night. Really good. I think that Hackney will do good for all these young people coming here. If the professionals come here and if they're working here, they'll bring a different concept to Hackney, they will improve the social structure they will allow people to sit down and say, 'Well yeah I would like to be a professional and I'm going to spend my time trying to become that.'

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Broadway Gents Hair Stylist in Broadway Market. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Grant Kingsnorth

When I first arrived 20 years ago I lived on Broadway Market and it had one fruit and veg barrow and one very nice pub. The rest of it was run-down; it was a proper working class street in Hackney. Stoke Newington Church Street has today become the model for what Jules Pipe - who's the mayor - wants for Hackney. But Hackney isn't like that. Most working class people on a budget wouldn't be able to shop for food on Church Street because it's artisan bakers and incredibly expensive fruit and veg shops.

It's not about money. I don't begrudge anybody as long as they've gone out and earned it. What I don't like is the pretense and the assumption that someway or another Hackney needs to be grateful for all these up-and-coming industries. What's wrong with a proper working class area having proper working class jobs?

The thing that Hackney people find frustrating is that they read about things in the newspaper and see stuff on the telly and they think 'That's not where we live.' Though it may be geographically, it's not their world, it's not their environment

I've been drinking in the Dove pub for years; it was on Broadway Market when I first lived there. You could say I kept it alive through its lean years. I still drink there very occasionally - I just avoid the strawberry Belgian beers.

Barry James Leaning

When I was young, growing up on Lower Clapton Road, I could've never imagined Hackney would look how it does today. The worst part is they're pushing us out, the middle class people. It seems like they're trying to get rid of us, especially poorer people like me. All these places that are opening up bars and coffee shops - if I had the money I would go in them. On the downside, you look at all the estate agents and the house prices ... I look at that and think to myself 'Jesus how can someone afford that in Hackney.'

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Bungalow's Cafe on Mare Street. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Jenny Smith*

I have been to Broadway Market several times and I think it can feel a little exclusive. Not because of the prices exactly, but because of the majority of people who go there it all seems to be hipsters and whether you like them or not, it can feel strange to be surrounded by the same person wherever you turn.

I live in a street with a cool cafe and wine shop and when there was a celebration a couple of years ago for the Queen they threw a street party. It was really obvious everybody there knew each other and no regular people where invited. None of the kids in the council flats or their families on my block went. Nobody but the hipsters who run the shops and their friends - it was a bit sad. How could you go along to what looked like a private party in the middle of your street? I was annoyed actually at the time, I thought it was very arrogant of people who had moved into a neighbourhood to do that. If another culture had done that they would be accused of not integrating, and that is exactly what it was.

However, I have only been in Hackney for four years now but all my friends and neighbours say how safe it is now compared to before. I can walk across London Fields late at night and feel safe with lots of cyclists and mild-mannered, drunk hipsters milling around. That's another thing - they drink so much coffee but still they just sit there staring at their laptops. The cafe in my street is so quiet it is like a really cool, boring library.

*This name has been changed

Rosie Spinks started the Three Course Story project in 2013, interviewing attendees at North London Action for the Homeless (NLAH), a Hackney-based charity that serves a meal twice a week to anyone who needs it - most are homeless, socially isolated, mentally ill, immigrants or those struggling with addiction.

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Long-time east Londoners on Hackney hipsters: 'They need a humour injection'

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No shortage of words have been written about the changing face of east London. From blogs chronicling the dizzying number of independent coffee shops and cocktail bars to the modest internet outrage provoked by a Brick Lane cereal shop owner's remarkable tone-deafness, gentrification is a topic that's all abuzz.

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Jack Palmer - An anti-gentrification handbook 

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Jack Palmer - An anti-gentrification handbook 

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Jack Palmer - Murder of Teenage Boy in Kings Cross Exposes City's Wealth Divide

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Jack Palmer - Murder of Teenage Boy in Kings Cross Exposes City's Wealth Divide

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There is an inescapably nightmarish quality to CCTV footage of a terrible crime, the sense of ordinary life impotently observed at the very moment tragedy intrudes. Seldom has such footage been so haunting as that which captured the killing of 15-year-old Alan Cartwright at about 7.30pm on Friday 27 February.

Released last week by the Metropolitan police, it shows the moment the schoolboy was stabbed in the chest as he cycled along the busy Caledonian Road in Islington, north London, part of a group of four friends.

It happens in a flash, in the blink of an eye. The boy continues cycling northwards, seemingly unharmed, but in fact he collapsed a couple of hundred yards up the road, outside the Cally swimming pool, where he was later pronounced dead.

It's a shocking scene, not because it's especially graphic, but because it's so quick. One second a young boy is cycling with his friends, the next his life is brought to a sickeningly premature end. What lends this film a still more unnerving quality is that around it London life continues as ever: people walk by and cars head homewards as the illuminated city readies itself for the weekend.

Although relatively rare, killings can of course occur anywhere. This is particularly the case with teenage deaths, which bear little geographical correlation to the wealth or poverty of an area. A map of London teenage killings over the last 10 years shows a fairly equal distribution of locations throughout the centre of the city.

But Caledonian Road, or the Cally, as it's known by locals, has long harboured a reputation for having a rough edge. Running from King's Cross to Holloway, it has for many years been a strange borderline of a thoroughfare. As far back as 1886, the social researcher Charles Booth called it a "depressing district". And as the authors of The Secret History of Our Streets: London put it: "The Caledonian Road has always been a firebreak: a dividing line between a fitful affluence to the east and the consistent deprivation to the west."

Last week the Times hailed King's Cross, which lies to the west of the Cally, "a symbol of London's emergence as perhaps the - not just a - world city". The newspaper noted that as recently as 1997 the area was synonymous with homelessness and prostitution.

Since then one of Europe's largest building projects has brought an abundance of shiny office blocks - including the Observer 's - and luxury penthouse apartments to what was once a desert of goods yards and empty railway land, abandoned to drug addicts and street sex workers.

Meanwhile, the affluence of Barnsbury to the east has grown much less fitful, as its Regency terraces have become solid £2m properties. Squeezed between this massive regeneration and salubrious gentrification, the Cally can feel like an embattled strip of a fast-retreating or forgotten London.

Its chequered history is constructed around the giant Victorian institutions that shaped the neighbourhood. To the south, King's Cross station, which brought in migrant workers, to the north the cattle market and abattoirs that fed the city, and in the middle the dominating presence of Pentonville prison, casting both a literal and figurative shadow over the area.

They were the kind of establishments that, while necessary, few wanted to live near. And so the Cally became home to the marginalised and the dissident, renowned in the 19th century for its Fenian population and protests.

Nowadays the radicalism has faded, but a spirit of exceptionalism lives on in the locals, who speak of the Cally with a mixture of fierce pride and headshaking frustration. Last week many residents voiced their affection for its strong sense of community while despairing at what some perceived as a growing threat of crime and violence.

In Edward Square, a small public park that was rescued from the grip of developers by a local campaign, a nurse called Sinedu Tilahun and her friend, Rezarta Rapaj, spoke of their fear of hooded youths on bikes. Tilahun said that in her job she saw a lot of stabbing victims in the trauma unit, and usually they were attacked over trivialities or for minor amounts of money. "I don't feel safe taking out my phone," she said.

Rapaj recalled that when she first moved into the area she was mugged by a youth on a bike, who grabbed her and snatched her bag. "I ran after him screaming," she said, "but afterwards everyone told me that I was mad, that I could have been stabbed."

Yet Tilahun said that she also didn't feel at ease when she walked into the "different world" of Barnsbury nearby. "I get intimidated when I go there. They look at you as if you're from another planet."

This is a common response. Most of the inhabitants of the Cally have little interaction with the alternate realities that sandwich them. They operate in a separate economic and social milieu. For while the dramatic canalside setting of Central Saint Martins College and the gastropubs of Barnsbury are just a few minutes' walk away, in terms of what they mean to many locals they might as well be on the moon.

In this respect the Cally is a microcosm of a struggle taking place out of sight in many areas of London. As the city rushes forwards, stubborn pockets of communities that don't fit into the modernising project are left behind, either to fend for themselves or succumb to the encroaching forces of development and the property market. The parade of shops in front of which Cartwright was attacked is an unremarkable collection of the practical - shoe repairs, dry cleaning, barbers, solicitors; the exotic (tattoo parlours and laser clinics); and several fast-food chicken shops and Ethiopian cafes. It has that atmosphere of established transience, as if any of the shops and cafes could close at any moment to be replaced by something very much the same.

In a solicitors' office, a lawyer who wished to remain anonymous said that on his first day at work, about 15 years ago, a man was stabbed to death outside the building. "I'm a solicitor, so I don't want to say anything against potential clients," he said, "but it's always been a tough area. I was assaulted at my desk once because I asked someone to be quiet who was making a lot of noise outside on the street."

Yet at the BTB electrical supply store, Gordon Bush said that Cartwright's killing was completely unrepresentative of daily life on the Cally. "I've been here since 1966 and there have always been problems, but this is out of the blue. You can't say this is typical," he said. He thought there had been more tension since "real" police had been taken off the street. "Those plastic coppers," he said, referring to community support officers, "can't deal with anything."

Another shopkeeper, who also refused to give his name, said that he had witnessed as many as six ambushes of young cyclists in the past couple of years. "They just rush out from behind a parked car, knock them over and they're gone. No one gets involved, and nor would I," he said, because the attacks were so quick and because he had already been the victim of a stabbing in another part of London. "I was off work for seven weeks and when I came back around a dozen of my clients told me that they had been stabbed too." Nevertheless he believed there was "a real sense of community" in the Cally. "There are no secrets."

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Granary Square in King's Cross, where a massive redevelopment project is under way right next to the Caledonian Road's often down-at-heel shops. Photograph: Alamy

Except if it's the press asking. I approached a couple of youths pushing a bike and asked them if they felt it was a safe neighbourhood. "Yeah, it's safe," answered the taller one, a young man with a bold swagger and a furtive expression. "But not for you, so why don't you fuck off before I beat you up and take your watch."

The pair of them then walked off, as if they had fulfilled their civic duty. The threat was later repeated by the same youth when I tried to interview the owner of a cafe frequented by local teenagers. The owner decided he was too busy to answer my questions.

In the wake of a traumatic event, a reluctance to speak to outsiders, especially the media, is understandable. But there was something more going on here, a marking out of turf, a projection of local resistance.

Behind Caledonian Road, on the Bemerton estate, where Cartwright lived, a menacing group of about 20 youths gathered at the entrance, as if protecting their territory. Around the corner on the main road was the makeshift shrine where Cartwright had died, filled with flowers and moving testaments to the popular cadet and Arsenal supporter. One had been written by Cartwright himself, a mini-biography he had earlier penned, perhaps as a school project.

"He was a very nice boy," said Moussa Mastoukhan, a shopkeeper at the 24-hour All Time Supermarket, directly outside which Cartwright was stabbed. "We don't have trouble with kids here."

Two other teenagers from the neighbourhood have also died in recent months, one on a crashed moped during a police pursuit and the other in another moped accident. It's said that all three boys knew each other.

A clutch of hooded teenagers stood guard amid the floral tributes for Cartwright, a couple with their faces masked. For all the aggressiveness of their stance, the youths, as Mastoukhan had said, were no trouble. Nor, for all the talk of muggings, bicycle thefts and bravado threats, is the Cally afflicted by an abnormal crime spree.

There have been a spate of stabbings in Islington this year, but none of the others was near the Cally. And in general across the city, stabbings of teenagers are coming down. They peaked in 2007 and 2008, when close to 30 were killed each year. Last year that number was down to 11, although this year already five teenagers have met violent deaths.

A significant number of killings involving teenagers in recent years have been gang-related, but as the policeman leading the investigation, Detective Chief Inspector Chris Jones, said: "Alan, in my mind, was not a gang member and was purely a 15-year-old boy cycling with his friends on a Friday night at 7.30pm."

There has been talk that the local drug trade has fostered a more dangerous climate on the streets. Islington Labour councillor Paul Convery, who is responsible for community safety, attributed the recent rise in knife attacks on the borough's streets to the background role of drugs and turf wars.

Police have charged a man with Cartwright's murder and, as things stand, everything regarding the crime is speculation. But one thing is clear. The idea, widely repeated last week, that Cartwright was in the wrong place at the wrong time does a disservice to the teenager and his community. The Cally was his home and cycling along it on 7.30pm on a Friday evening was a perfectly conventional thing to do. He had no reason to expect the appalling fate that awaited him in the heart of his neighbourhood.

According to the FT 's report, life expectancy in King's Cross has climbed to 79. It didn't say what it is in the Cally, although by any reckoning it must be a great deal more than 15.

Alan Cartwright's life was cut needlessly short. The life of the resilient community in which he lived those few years has to carry on, even if it's not clear where it's heading. But then the Cally has a long history of an uncertain future and so far it's survived.

After it mourns the young victim, the Cally will survive this killing, too. The question now is how long it can hold out against the two-sided ambush of its upmarket neighbours.
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Murder of teenage boy on London street exposes city's great wealth divide

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There is an inescapably nightmarish quality to CCTV footage of a terrible crime, the sense of ordinary life impotently observed at the very moment tragedy intrudes. Seldom has such footage been so haunting as that which captured the killing of 15-year-old Alan Cartwright at about 7.30pm on Friday 27 February.

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Jack Palmer - Brixton, Gentrification, and Gated Communities

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Jack Palmer - Brixton, Gentrification, and Gated Communities

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Brixton Buzz news, features and listings for Brixton, London

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There's no denying that the issue of gentrification in Brixton is one that brings about some very polarised opinions.

Debate has been raging on Brixton's most popular forum, urban75, for years about the issue, and one of the threads about the Brixton Square development has brought forth some of the most spirited exchanges.

As well as the usual argy-bargy, there's some really interesting points being raised, and I thought this spirited essay by long term resident Jack Intrepid (reproduced below) was particularly worthy of a wider readership.
[Before and after: Cooltan 1994, Brixton Square 2013]
Jack Intrepid: "I don't like gated communities. Having a great big locked gate between your residential community, and the larger community within which you live is not the same as having a front gate between your street and the front door.

It's more like the gate at the end of the drive. It keeps outsiders out, and gives the insiders (who are often better off than the people who live outside the gates) a sense of separation. And it preserves that sense of separation, making those who venture out look and often behave like sightseers.

One of the most important things about gated communities is that they are often carved out of territory or open space that was previously considered "ours" by the local pre-existing community.

I've seen this in the States, and it makes me deeply uncomfortable to find it happening in my local area.
[Locked gates, Brixton Square, June 2013]
Here in Brixton, both the Brixton Square development and Clifton Mansions (whose gate is now firmly locked at all times) were previously places occupied and utilised by musicians, artists, squatters, idealists, the lost and the low, and a whole bunch of people who made some kind of life for themselves here and decided to stay in the area once they could afford to pay rent.

A lot of those people are now being priced out of Brixton by the recent changes.
[Anti-evictions protest, Windrush Square, July 2013]
Brixton is changing. But Brixton has always changed. Imagine the reaction when the Jews moved in, and then the Theatre luvvies with the chorus girls and the queers, and then the disquiet when the West Indians started buying up properties, and then when the punks and anarchists and squatters arrived.

Brixton has always been a place of changing populations and fortunes. It's a wonder this current round of gentrification hasn't happened a lot sooner. Our reputation as "a bit dodgy" has probably delayed it.

I have a lot of misgivings about these changes, not least the rent hikes, which have led to businesses and people being priced out of the middle of Brixton Town.

And I really have to grit my teeth sometimes when I'm going about my business in Brixton these days. I was thinking today how the high street is almost more like old Brixton now, than some parts of the Market are, because despite the chain shops, I still see Brixton people not being outnumbered by the new tribes.

I tend to stick to the less Bo-Bo parts of Brixton these days for coffee and chats, and trying to get breakfast at the weekend is a fucking chore because of the enormous rambling crowds of visitors ambling about and queuing to get a seat.
[Granville Arcade - now Brixton Village - April, 2001]
I like a lot of the changes. I like having more choices about where to eat and what to eat, gifts and cards to buy for birthdays. I like having a couple of art galleries and plenty of places to buy vintage clobber, even if the prices seem pretty steep.

I like having more cafes and bars, more reasons and places to spend time in public spaces. And I like the way these changes have made it possible - and more likely - for Brixton folk pay more attention to each other, stop and chat and visit in the street with each other.
[Rushcroft Road evictions, July 2013]
But I am worried that Brixton will become a pasteurised homogenised Sunday Supplement version of itself, all polite and shiny and no-where to buy Sari fabric or stacks of takeaway boxes or bunches of callalloo or pigs trotters or tired short-life veg at knock down money for stew for a week.

I'm prepared to be wrong. I hope - really really hope - that we're not going to see an unbridgable schism open up between us old Brixton people and the new comers; or worse, a Brixton that has no real living relationship to what it's always been, an ersatz theme-park version of what people remember it as being.

I've been in Brixton for about thirty years, first because friends and lovers all lived here, then because I rented and then bought property here.
[Champagne & Fromage, Brixton Village, October 2013]
Until this year, I have always considered myself a bit of an incomer, an upstart. But suddenly people are saying to me "Ah, you must have seen a lot of changes over the years...!" Yes, I have, and most of them have been in the last three years.

I'm not saying that you, the individual person who is you, you who have recently discovered Brixton for yourself, are someone who is ignorant or problematic.

Individually, most of the newcomers I've met (those who've not shied away or snubbed us lowly locals.... seriously it has happened...) are nice, thoughtful, interesting people. But it's as if a large group, a whole tribe of people has been airdropped in all at once.
[Granville Arcade, Feb 2003]
One of my concerns is something that I think can't be helped: you have arrived in Brixton knowing nothing much about what it was like before.

You don't know which shops are family run, or have changed hands, or are brand new.

You don't know about the specific beggars and buskers (wither The Philosopher, by the way?), that strange influx of Roma in long colourful skirts who came and went over a couple of years, the Russian lady with the outlandish make-up and the towering black nylon hair, the local kids who were kicked down the stairs by the cops, the one who refused to take sides in a heated dangerous situation, went home to his mum, and thus, possibly, averted a riot, the fact that Patrick insisted that any restaurant run on his property must be vegetarian, that the Courtesan bar used to be run by an idiot who named it BangBang the weekend after a double shooting, that the tree in Windrush Square used to have fairy lights all over it, and is now protected by law, that the Drinking School that used to hang out there is all gone entirely, that the land that was ripped up to lay Windrush Square was filled with interesting plants, some dating back to the banks of the Effra, that there is a Kenneth Martin kinetic sculpture fountain in the garden of Lambeth College, which is about to be ripped down and the land sold to yet more developers, that the old oak on Josephine Avenue apparently shaded the canoodlings of Sir Walter and Queen Bess, that there used to be a grand old squat on Porden Road that is now a car park, that the old clock in Brockwell Park used to work tick tock, doesn't now, and is being refurbished by local subscription, that the little toy Tudor houses outside the secret garden, which have recently been fixed and painted, were part of a whole village that is now somewhere in Australia, that the Tesco by the prison (did you even know you had a local prison?) used to be a great little rock and roll venue... and so on and so on and so on.

This is not to say that I am precious about all this: all knowledge passes into history, and nothing can grow without change.

But anyone who is new to an area does not know, and cannot know, what that area was like before they popped up out of the ground. When this is just a few people, a few families, well they have the chance to hear and learn and join in and find out and bring their own stuff, and on we go.

Right now, what it's like now, it's like we're being colonised.
[Coldharbour Lane, Sept 2003]
So many people all arriving at once, and all bringing with them the kind of culture that has deliberately and strongly stayed away from Brixton in the past, derided Brixton, dismissed and shunned Brixton as a place of danger and poverty and strangeness.

For many of us, one of the reasons we ended up in Brixton was exactly because we found ourselves as individuals, as the people that we are, shunned and ignored by those people who derided Brixton.

We came here, some of us, to get away from that kind of snidey judgement: outsiders, misfits, rebels, we all ended up here because here we felt comfortable.

So now we find that the new people, the incomers, are not just one or two pioneering curious interesting people, or families, but droves and packs of young white apparently affluent crowds who drift through on a weekend, getting in the way of people who are doing their weekly shop, and making ridiculous comments about how weird or lovely or quaint (yes, really) it is to have a real-life butcher opposite the vintage store - as if the butcher is the pop-up novelty - and then going home to wherever they've come from, like tourists returning from a week's holiday in Senegal claiming that they really got a sense of the local commuuuunity, such friendly people except for the strange angry ones, but who can blame them when they struggle so with the poverty and crime, bless 'em.

Or they (you) are coming here because they're finding that Brixton is borderline affordable, so they're buying up blocks of property, that were sold outside of the community, like the Brits who arrived like locusts in the South of Spain in the eighties.

We, many of us, feel alarmed and disturbed by this. We feel sidelined. We feel as if we have been marketed as one of the charming assets of the locality.

This will pass. We are in flux at the moment. It will settle down. Not for a while yet, judging by how many many developments are still being planned.
[Tribute to Cooltan Arts, formerly on the site of Brixton Square]
But while our squatted art centre, our college, our social housing are all being taken away from us, from people who have lived here decades - generations, even - and tarted up to be sold to incomers, well, we are kind of edgy and mistrustful, not least because no one asked us about any of this.

It has been done to us, to Brixton. We've lost a lot, and we're not able yet to see what has been gained.
[Brixton Square artist's render]
Brixton Square: I'm sure it will be a lovely place to live, and I'm glad that you and yours have been able to get a toehold on the property ladder. I'm glad that Barratts have been decent and helpful, and I'm very glad they've bothered to plant trees.

But every time I go past, I remember the CoolTan and the fun I had there, the things I learned there, the people I met there, and how sad it is that we no longer have the place itself; but more than that, I am sad that these days, we no longer have any option for such a place to ever exist again in Brixton.

I am trying hard not to be one of those grumpy old git oldtimers who never allow newcomers to become oldtimers. It's hard, though, when what I encounter in newcomers is a kind of worried confusion that seems to keep them always slightly on the back foot, or worse, barging arrogance.

So, yeah. In conclusion, I'm ambivalent about it all."
Let's hear your opinions!
Please post up your responses in the comment box below, or feel free to get stuck into the lively debate on urban75.
More:
Barratt Homes' 'Brixton Square' on Coldharbour Lane debate (2,000+ posts)
Brixton forum on urban75

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Changing Brixton: gentrification, gated communities, new opportunities and increasing disquiet

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There's no denying that the issue of gentrification in Brixton is one that brings about some very polarised opinions. Debate has been raging on Brixton's most popular forum, urban75, for years about the issue, and one of the threads about the Brixton Square development has brought forth some of the most spirited exchanges.

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Jack Palmer - Leeds Calling: The Effect of London on the Gentrification of Regional Cities

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Jack Palmer - Leeds Calling: The Effect of London on the Gentrification of Regional Cities

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Bold Tendencies is the art space and cocktail bar standing imperiously on top of a Peckham multi-storey car park. It is charged with so much architectural symbolism it's almost funny: a sky-high contemporary gallery in one of London's poorest districts, packed each evening with painfully well-dressed young white people supping Campari bitters, who gaze down upon the streets of pound shops, mobile phone stalls and cheap clothes stores below.

The Evening Standard loves it, naturally. A recent piece extolling 'Peckhamania' was filled with picture after picture of white 'creatives' making art or tucking into artisan street food, with Bold Tendencies held up as the 'epicentre of new Peckham'. Not one black or brown person was featured, despite Peckham being one of the most ethnically diverse areas in Britain. At last, the paper seemed to be saying, we can finally welcome Peckham into our white supremacist fantasyland of a city and we've got art to thank for it.

For those opposed to the so-called 'regeneration' of Peckham - and of London generally - Bold Tendencies has unsurprisingly turned into something of a whipping boy. And with it, the question of the relationship between art and gentrification has once more been raised. It seems that wherever artists go, rising property prices, cafés filled with seats from 1940s railway stations and low-level ethnic cleansing appears to follow: is art itself to blame? If so, can the trend be broken?

Gentrification is not a new phenomenon. The term was coined by Ruth Glass in 1964 to signal the displacement of a working-class urban population by the middle-class. Early studies of the 'return to the city' of middle-class whites suggested that it was down to changes within middle-class 'consumer preferences', with a younger generation rejecting the staid suburbanism of their parents in favour of the excitement of the city. There are echoes of this argument today. The opprobrium hurled at anyone who could be called a 'hipster' indicates a belief that it is the choices made in consumption by such reprobates: vintage clothing, expensive coffee and a questionable taste in music - that is the driving force behind the spatial transformation of cities.

This view was challenged by the Marxist geographer, Neil Smith [1]. He argued that gentrification was much more to do with capital's search for profit than anyone with an ironic moustache. Capital's incessant need for growth comes up against a barrier in the surrounding built landscape, as most buildings stand in the same place for a long time; capital turnover in architecture is by its nature a long-drawn out affair. The solution in the post-war era was suburbanisation, with swathes of new houses built on the outskirts of cities. This in turn led to a flight of capital from the city centres, apart from the business districts, because there was more money to be made in the new build towns. The land in the cities thus dropped in value.

This created what Smith calls a "rent gap" - the difference between the current ground rent, and what rent the land could potentially yield if it was put to a 'better' (more profitable) use. Gentrification takes place, therefore, once the rent gap has grown so big that developers can buy and do up property, pay interest on loans, and still sell the redeveloped property to a 'better' user for a profit. Smith does recognise that certain cultural processes, like art studios and galleries, can "smooth the flow of capital" back into these "recycled" areas. But it's capital, not culture, which is driving the process.

But why art in particular? Here we see the first indication of complicity between art and capital. The disdain that "aesthetically-minded" people have towards commodified spaces - shopping and eating in 'authentic' boutiques and cafés rather than the crass commercialisation of a Westfield - extends to living spaces too. Middle-class kids who reject the conservatism of the suburbs are drawn to urban areas with 'just the right amount of danger' for 'meaningful' experiences. And in the same way as artists ever since Duchamp and Schwitters have transformed the detritus of capitalism into art, so too do modern 'creatives' see value in areas of cities rejected by traditional bourgeois tastes. This cultural revalorisation thus chimes with capital's own drive to revalorise 'unproductive' spaces.

In the 1970s, this process took hold of New York's Lower East Side, with galleries and studios flooding into the warehouses and lofts left empty by the city's industrial decline (and what amounted to the bankruptcy of the city by its financial sector in 1975). Sharon Zukin argued that this amounted to an 'Artistic Mode of Production' [2], which forced out the last vestiges of light-industry in the city, paving the way for a post-Fordist economy of services, real estate and credit-based finance. The issues of class relations, which had underpinned the decline of New York as an industrial city, were in effect swept away by the arrival of a new 'creative' economy - an economy that was based as much on the consumption of the 'artistic lifestyle', as it was on the actual production of art.

By 2002, the construction of a 'creative economy' had become an avowed policy goal of governments across the globe, and one particular book by Richard Florida - a vaguely new-age pseudo-academic - became required reading for city planners everywhere [3]. In The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida argued that it was no longer industrial production, but "creativity" which was the source of "new technologies, new industries, new wealth and all other good economic things". The old class distinction between those who owned capital and those forced to sell their labour-power had been superseded by a new division: those blessed with creativity and those poor unfortunates without, who were doomed to "take care of [the Creatives] and do their chores". The key to a successful city economy therefore, was to build an environment as attractive to the Creative Class as possible. Florida's suggestion for a suitably creative environment sounds a lot like the new Peckham celebrated by the Evening Standard: "a teeming blend of cafés, side walk musicians, and small galleries and bistros".

You would be hard-pressed to come up with a more New Labour idea if you tried: industrial decline and class conflict solved by turning the entire country into Islington. It was, therefore, no surprise that culture-based attempts at state-sponsored gentrification popped up everywhere during the 90s and pre-crash 00s. 'Cultural Quarters', 'flagship galleries' and huge public works of art appeared everywhere from Gateshead to Margate, each replete with the promise of social inclusion, regeneration and the arrival of those economy-saving creatives.

The same argument is reflected in the recent craze for pop up galleries and shops, or the Empty Shops Network, in which recession-hit town centres are encouraged to fill their empty stores with temporary galleries. Art here is being used as an inane distraction from the real causes of. It is no coincidence that the founder of the Empty Shops Network was also behind the infamous #riotcleanup, when the white bourgeois joined together to sweep away all traces of the class antagonisms that erupted in the English Riots of 2011.

What both Florida and New Labour refused to recognise was that the 'Creative Class' was nothing but a descriptor for a loosely-connected group of workers whose mode of working is extremely well adapted to the demands of post-Fordist flexible capital accumulation. The artist, in effect, is the archetypal post-Fordist worker: never tied down for long, floating from one short-term project to the next, constantly thinking outside of the box, always on the look out for new ideas, with no discernible split between 'labour-time' and 'leisure-time'; willing to carry the risk of a 'creative' life on their own, rather than look to the state or a collective organisation for support. The line between 'the artist' and that post-Fordist ideological hero, the entrepreneur, is so slim as to be virtually invisible.

The heroic existence of the artist makes any attempt to critique the relationship between art and gentrification through art itself very difficult. How pressing an issue this actually is to most of the drinkers in Frank's Bar at Bold Tendencies is perhaps a moot point, but there are plenty of artists for whom this a painful conundrum. In the early 1980s, a New York art collective called Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D) staged a number of art events which highlighted the transformation of the Lower East Side by displaying critical art on the walls of buildings set to be gentrified. But as one member later admitted: "we recognised that the [anti-gentrification] exhibit itself furthered the process of gentrification by advancing the neighbourhood's artworldliness". Recognising this paradox perhaps, in Hamburg, thousands of artists have signed the Not In Our Name' manifesto, signalling a move from artistic statements of protest to direct anti-eviction activist struggles. Other art collectives, such as BAVO in Rotterdam, have followed suit, issuing a 'Plea for an Uncreative City'.

The temptation to conclude that art is useless a mode of critique in a post-Fordist 'creative economy' is strong, but must be resisted. While capital certainly benefits from what David Harvey calls the "monopoly rents" produced by gentrification of areas such as Peckham, it cannot completely commodify it without destroying what made it 'artworldly' and profitable in the first place [4]. Capital has to leave a space open for the next bout of apparently authentic cultural development, which may open up new opportunities for monopoly rents. It is here that artists can perhaps act as antagonistic grit, exploiting the contradictory space within which they find themselves.

Certainly, attempts at critical practice without a strong self-reflexive tendency - in which the spatial political-economics of art are inscribed within the artwork itself - are doomed to the status of 'pseudo-critique', which in many respects is worse than no critique at all. Crucially, it must be a process which spills over from symbolic artistic resistance, to material class solidarity with local political struggles. Just as the contradictions of capital must appear in the artwork and not be papered over or swept away by it, so must the post-Fordist artist appear in the material contradictions of capital. It is, in a sense, New Labour's social inclusion through culture in reverse: an art embedded in class struggle, rather than a means of erasing it.
Notes
[1] Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

[2] Sharon Zukin, Loft Living

[3] Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class

[4] David Harvey, 'The Art of Rent: Globalization, Monopoly and the Commodification of Culture'
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