[dionidium]

1) They clearly are urban areas today, no matter how intensely you want to ignore that reality.

2) The Valley used to be perfect for single-family houses and peach-tree orchards or whatever. And at one point in very recent history the island of Manhattan was a dense forest.

Who cares?

Neither fact has literally anything to do with the maximally beneficial housing and zoning policies we should be pursuing in those places today.

[sliverstorm]

I have ethical hangups over telling people to get out because I want to urbanize their property & neighborhood, and that they should have moved to a more rural area (it was when they moved there). Smacks of the old sins of colonialism to me. We roll in, decide it's all ours now, and the original inhabitants can take a hike if they don't like it.

I don't mind converting neighborhoods so much after the original inhabitants have moved on, but there are still countless people around who moved there & bought when it was all peaches and single-family homes were entirely reasonable. I'm not really OK with evicting them.

[dionidium]

The language of gentrification (and of housing in general) is deliberately emotionalized in this way and I think it’s a real impediment to thinking clearly on the subject.

I don’t want to evict anybody. I want people to make the totally banal and normal year-over-year decision about where to live that literally every human being has made for all of human history.

We don’t “roll in” and make them leave. We roll in and make them a market offer that they can accept or decline.

And, crucially, I’m proposing the sort of development that makes rents lower, not higher. (Incumbents always win this game, anyway. Don’t feel sorry for incumbents.)

What you don’t get to do is stop progress because of nostalgia. Short of that, I have no desire to make anybody live anywhere.