Gentrification Without Displacement?
Can gentrification bring economic prosperity into a neighborhood while not displacing low-income residents? Salon.com’s Will Doig looks into whether gentrification can work for everyone by examining changes in D.C. neighborhoods. He writes, “Some displacement will always occur, and that’s upsetting,” but people in low-income neighborhoods had been “forced out” for decades by crime, drugs and “other conditions that made those places unlivable.”
- Source: Salon
“It’s possibly the most charged word in the built environment right now,” says Christopher Leinberger, the well-known urbanist and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The image of mustachioed, trust-fund hipsters displacing poor people of color will do that.
And that’s a shame, because gentrification has some undeniable upsides: reduced crime, better services and a more diverse array of businesses — and not just coffee shops. “As a Detroit native who has seen this place rot from the inside-out, I’d kill for a little gentrification,” Detroit Free Press editor Stephen Henderson recently tweeted.
Reconciling the two edges of that sword — improvement versus displacement — is becoming a more urgent issue with each passing year as cities continue to rapidly transform. Rather than being seen as an injustice, can gentrification correct an injustice by returning prosperity to a long-neglected neighborhood? A good place to start looking for answers to these questions is Washington, D.C.
Read more at: www.salon.com