[roughly]

There's always a funny tension on the city trying to draw in artists to make a downtown area more palatable, too, in that good artists and good art is often intended as a challenge to the status quo - the goal is to make people uncomfortable.

I say this as a Berkeley-living lefty: the left often seems to espouse policies whose practical outcomes far exceed their actual appetite for discomfort or willingness to engage with real diversity.

(Standard HN disclaimer: if the above doesn't apply to you, it doesn't apply to you - but look me in the eye and tell me you don't know what I'm talking about.)

[noirbot]

This does strike me as an innate tension to all of this. I grew up in a really diverse neighborhood, and at this point, as a decently successful person, if I moved back into that neighborhood, folks at the orgs I used to volunteer with would probably decry me as gentrifying the area. I've seen this with my own family, who have lived in the neighborhood for decades, but because it's now a majority minority neighborhood, they're seen with skepticism, even by people who moved there recently and are often more well-off than them.

I'm unsure at this point if I'm supposed to want to live in a diverse area, or if doing so would mean I'm ruining the area and driving out the diversity. What is the amount I'm supposed to want to engage in another culture without imposing on an "authentic" space for that community or appropriating it. It's a really tight line to walk.

Is it reasonable to try to have a community of people who make 100k+, and people who think it's generally unhealthy for anyone to make that much money?

[mulmen]

I suspect the art itself is a red herring. When a city planner says "artist" what do they mean?

[noirbot]

Isn't the classic example of this something like NYC's Hells Kitchen or East Village or Meatpacking District that was, at some point, the cheap neighborhood that artists and musicians could live in on their irregular low salaries, but then when some of them inevitably get famous, that mystique turns it from the bad/cheap part of town into the hip part of town that rich people go to for underground clubs and wild art shows, and in 10 years none of those people that made the area cool still live there because it's now the most expensive place in the city.

I think city marketers see "artist" in the same way that a nightclub sees women, but with less power or follow through on giving them anything free that would attract or keep them there to attract the other people.

Everyone wants to live in a city with good live music _and_ listen to Spotify all day in their 1k/month apartment.