PP&D 4 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Gentrification, Christian Symbolism, Bastion
27 Apr 2018
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WEEK 9 reading responses
Foreword- Peter Marcuse
● Confronts many young urbanites wanting to improve their housing conditions by seeking
affordable place to live for themselves and their families
○ They are concerned with the effect that their actions have on their new
community and neighbors
● Focus on older, challenged neighborhoods of low-income residents which are becoming
more desirable to high-income movers and are becoming more expensive places to live
○ This forces the existing low-income families to have to move out because they
can no longer afford to live there
● Gentrification, on one hand, is seen as an evil urban development promoted by real
estate agents seeking for maximum profit while exploiting vulnerable poor residents
● On the other hand it can be seen as inevitable and a desirable process of urban
upgrading by the market, capturing the true value of the location run down by changing
economies
● Authors are not afraid to stake out their own views and come to their own with policy
conclusions
● Is improving physically low-quality housing for poor residents more important than
preventing their segregation by income or race?
● What role should the government play in the process granting that it is not only market
driven?
● This book is basically optimistic, focuses on what can and should be done and presens a
variety of options for action.
Chapter One- Tools
● “It isn’t the mere act of moving into a neighborhood that makes you a gentrifier; it’s what
you do once you get there”- Dannette Lambert
● Residents express worry that the city is going to become a bastion of elitism or a generic
suburb stripped of diversity
● The concept of gentrification is a complex mixture of migration, transformation, and
reinvestment; forced migration and displacement; class, racial, and ethnic
transformation; and investments for new residents to the exclusion of older residents.
● Gentrification happens when it is not only ten middle-class people moving into a
low-income neighborhoods but rather when there are enough middle class movers to
prompt social, cultural, political and economic changes.
○ Once this process starts it is hard to move away from the label of “gentrified”
● Marc, grew up in a typical economically poor and socially dense area of North
Philadelphia
○ Their roots in the Jim Crow poverty and racism prompted them to remain in
nearly all-Black neighborhoods
Document Summary
Confronts many young urbanites wanting to improve their housing conditions by seeking affordable place to live for themselves and their families. They are concerned with the effect that their actions have on their new community and neighbors. Focus on older, challenged neighborhoods of low-income residents which are becoming more desirable to high-income movers and are becoming more expensive places to live. This forces the existing low-income families to have to move out because they can no longer afford to live there. Gentrification, on one hand, is seen as an evil urban development promoted by real estate agents seeking for maximum profit while exploiting vulnerable poor residents. On the other hand it can be seen as inevitable and a desirable process of urban upgrading by the market, capturing the true value of the location run down by changing economies. Authors are not afraid to stake out their own views and come to their own with policy conclusions.
