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by anaximander
4043 days ago
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Luxury condominiums, organic ice cream stores, cafes that serve soy lattes and chocolate shops that offer samples from Ecuador and Madagascar are rapidly replacing 99-cent stores, bodegas and rent-controlled apartments in the Mission District It's a minor tragedy to set up the conflict this way. "Largely useless and hedonistic shops replacing stores that actually matter! How long can the city tolerate these too-wealthy, dandy scum?!" Certainly, if the stores are being replaced, that's a function of property-owners' decisions to change tenants, is it not? Why are we blaming financially-successful technologists for actions taken by greedy land-owners? Don't you think these "gentrifiers" would be happy to pay the same amount that the "natives" have been paying for so long? The property-owners are extracting as much from the world as they can, because they have a monopoly on the land/property and nobody except maybe the government can argue with them. They were taking as much as they could from you before, and now they're taking as much as they can from the wealthier people moving in. This is capitalism: they've earned their right to set the price for their property by buying it/building it/inheriting it before you did. What options do we have, if we want this to change? Let's not pit the victims against each other. |
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it's funny, because we conflate two sides of gentrification that are actually separate: 1) the harsh reality we impose on oppressed communities of people living in poverty, and 2) the loss of artistic culture-creators from a neighborhood that they are living in because society doesn't know how to reward those who create culture.
Both the marginalized and creative artistic class share a problem, and so have reason for solidarity, but they're not necessarily tightly coupled in all possible societies.