'It has slowly eroded the place away': your stories of gentrification – from London to LA
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Version 0 of 1. Around the world, we are seeing cities become more exclusive. A result of policy and the manic property market, there is one very visible and contentious manifestation of this process: gentrification. The issue is hugely divisive. Some celebrate it as urban improvement, others see it as social cleansing. Many blame developers, some even blame artists – others simply keep quiet and feel guilty. Recent stories focusing on gentrification in two very different contexts – east London and LA’s Skid Row – attracted extensive debate from our readers about the impact these social changes are having on cities. We’ve highlighted some of the responses below. Has your neighbourhood been affected by gentrification? Wherever you live in the world, share your experiences and thoughts about it in the comments at the end. London East London is well known for being affected by gentrification, but in an apparent tale of hipsters v everyone else – who’s really to blame? Gentrification has been happening here the whole time. It has slowly eroded away the Hackney that I spent most of my life living in to the point that it really is not the same. The bohemian vibe has gone, the pubs have changed, there is an air of snobbery. - highburynation I was born in Whitechapel in 1974, to a family based in Shoreditch since the 1700s and the stories and people, the spirit of that 1/4 square mile. Where historically class lines merged, cultures crossed, the rich brushed shoulders with Jack London. The hipsters have my approval for saving the architecture of the area, although I lay that more in the hands of the late 80s British art wave. But it’s not the East End: inclusive, classless, tough, oozing character and fear in equal measure, pleasure and peril greeted every turn, never a yard from poverty or riches, sickness or health, life or death. The current occupants have no verve or spirit, the survival with a smile has gone. It has always been driven by its association with the docks, the clay pits, the silk weavers; a hot bed of immigration and integration. But it no longer has a fraction of the character ... only the scenery remains for us Londoners to easier imagine the feeling of being on the edge of something dangerous or amazing at every turn. Takes a bit more then a beard for that. - EddieDay This debate of whether hipsters are good or bad misses the bigger question of whether it’s right for local authorities to aggressively masterplan and socially engineer areas, as they are doing in Dalston. Hackney Council have manipulated the property market and transformed the area with a series of enormous, context-insensitive, ugly and homogenous high density developments bearing no relation to the areas in which they are built. These bland developments are mostly for an equally bland monoculture of new residents, which aggressively transforms the area’s cultural mix and forces out embedded communities, who can no longer afford the inflated rental/purchase prices. - agathapereira A lot of the anger is being directed at the symptom rather than the cause. Artists move into an area, with “hipsters” following shortly after, because rents go up wherever they were living before and so they need places with cheap rents. Eventually, the hipsters will be priced out again and will move to another cheaper neighbourhood. It’s not like there are gatherings of “young creatives” who come up with a strategy to take over an area and drive the locals out. While there are no rent controls, and while housing benefit gets slashed, then this is just going to keep happening as first the working class, and then the “creative” young middle class will get priced out and soon it will be city boys et al moving in. - ID2250637 I’m getting the impression that the “them and us” mentality is coming from both sides. I live in Hackney with flatmates. None of us are born-and-bred Londoners, but have been here for some 3-8 years. They are British. I’m just a foreigner here for a while. None of us is a “hipster” either ... I live in East London because I like the diversity. Not sure where else I’d live, because whenever I go west, it seems so white and it’s all coffee chains. - emme It's going to slow down now that squatting has been made illegal as there will be nowhere that the alternative ...but poor crowd can gang together. Gentrification always goes - 1. Squatters2. Short life co-op.3. Gritty lovers.4. Middle class Labour acolytes 5. PR companies and IT startups7. The fashion scene.8. The developers. the problem is what comes after the hipsters. during the hipster stage a neighbourhood still works, but when the investors start focusing on a "vibrant" area...there goes the neighbourhood. the renovations and new builds get more and more up scale and unaffordable, and the flats and houses get bought as pure investment, hardly anybody living in there any more. These people are spot on - the 'them and us' mentality even though they live in the same block, the overpriced shops and cafes that most locals can't use are replacing cheaper and more useful shops. Our kids don't even play together, not for the want of trying neither. I once invited my daughters classmates to her birthday tea, the kids of the 'hipsters' were noticeable by their absence. The super rich, the only beneficiaries of neo-liberal free market economics live in all the nicest places insulated by their wealth. Their 'hipster' children who have only ever lived through the era of neo-con politics find these environments stultifying and conventional and long for something more edgy, urban and cool-'authentic' places where poor folk live, that make them feel daring and adventurous. They have been enculturated in capitalist thinking and set up their own nursery businesses, usually playing shop, selling expensive arty stuff to like-minded hipster friends but they will never know what its like to struggle financially and they mistakenly think their good fortune is entirely down to their own imagination and enterprise rather than the advantages they were born into. I've lived in various parts of Hackney since the early 1980s. It's not changed as much as people think - there were a lot of professionals around 30 years ago. Of course there are now more in the Victorian houses and we have lots of new restaurants, but many of these are budget Turkish and Vietnamese, while Dalston still has Ridley Road market and lots of pound shops. Hackney Council has actually done a good job of improving the environment and by and large the borough is a fairly good place to live and not nearly as overrun with snotty upper-middle class twits as other gentrified boroughs. Los Angeles Skid rows are synonymous with homelessness in the US – and LA’s famous example is no exception. But have the efforts to alleviate poverty in the area simply welcomed gentrifiers? Skid Row has existed in that area for over 100 years. Even back then & throughout LA history, Skid Row was a place of extreme poverty, but around that was an area of low-cost housing in the form of old hotels turned into residential hotels. That’s been whittled away by gentrification & many of those people had nowhere else to go, but the streets of Skid Row. - Scholastica8 In other words “gentrification” is actually ethnic cleansing. I live in LA and much prefer the way it was with fantastic ethnic neighborhoods! It was a people’s community. Now it’s turning corporate and expensive with artificial food and environments. This was all done so the developers, who bought land and buildings for a song could cash in once the area was gentrified. It’s a story played over and over till eventually these fantastic human habitats become playgrounds, for the rich, corporate, fair complexioned and boring! You can then have the exact same experience in any gentrified US city devoid of character and much more like a contrived Disneyland. - Normin Skid row advocates do not want homeless people on the streets of skid row any more than big time developers do. They want everyone to have a home! - Laurie Martin Perlowin Avocado Hip artists and troubled addicts are not the only people there. The neighborhood is filled with prosaic everyday businesses and prosaic everyday employees. - phillygdr ‘Skid Row’ is a slum! One can only hope for gentrification! - K Hungus Eliminating Skid Row would only make it worse. Many of them could be helped, with some sort of active effort, but kicking them out won’t do that. - rmstallman Share your stories of the impact of gentrification on your city or neighbourhood in the comments below |