Meh, that’s me. I don’t so much protest gentrification as much as I want to work to ensure my neighbors can continue to live here and reap the benefits themselves as the neighborhood improves. You can’t convince me that the people who have lived here for decades want to live in neglected, under-developed, under-supported, neighborhoods. They just don’t want to be forced out as change happens.
Indeed, I agree with you fully. My observation was that the people complaining about the gentrification overlap heavily with the early waves of gentrifiers.
That’s the third or fourth step.
But this is definitely like the famous guy in the well comic. Is it wrong for people to protest a system that controls them? If you are rich enough to live in an already white/rich zip code are you allowed to protest gentrification and capitalism or does that make you a limousine liberal?
My intent was a quite light hearted observation that I’ve made over the years when a hip crowd takes a liking to a previously neglected area and very rapidly claim to be hashtag-first and whine about gentrification with stickers and chatter in the cafes of which none of its kind has been there before.
I think you could learn a bit about intersectionality?
So step one, is a group with political and economic power moves/redlines/ghettoizes a group of socially and economically.
Step two is to devalue that area. Through property tax funded schools. Through eminent domain. Under investment. Racial discrimination. Over policing.
Step three? People with no economic sway eventually move there because housing is cheaper and capitalism is relentless. Often newer immigrants, sexual minorities.
Step four, the artists follow suit, because yeah it’s the only place they can afford to live, with all the economic pressures.
Step five, it’s “safe” and sanitized for the trust funders and yuppies to move in.
All the while, during the later stages it gets too expensive for the people who had originally lived there to continue to do so.
And at what point are people allowed or not allowed to notice the cycle that perpetuates poverty, especially race based/zip code based poverty?
Dude. Chill.
limousine liberal is a term I’ve never heard before. I like it.
There is, of course, a Canadian alt-country novelty song about this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP6nod0cmbc
Folks like your mom and dad are just
Shock troops of gentrification.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=cP6nod0cmbc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
