Gentrification

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Gentrification is defined by the Random House Webster’s Dictionary as the upgrading of run down urban neighborhoods by affluent people who buy and renovate the properties, thereby displacing the resident poor.
All over the country, the cycle of gentrification is displacing lower-income residents. In most American cities, as sociologist William Julius Wilson has argued, de-industrialization and the ascendancy of the information age have inverted traditional structures of urban life. With most factory jobs shipped abroad or lost to automation, professional white-collar jobs and low-paid service jobs with few benefits are taking their place. Meanwhile, white-collar workers eager for convenience and a happening neighborhood are flocking back to the central cities.
The poor have very little political or economic defense against developers who want to buy up their crumbling apartments and rehab them into luxury condos and lofts, and city and state governments are only too pleased to ease the way for this transition. They do all they can to weaken rent-control laws, tear down public housing and subsidize higher-level developers.
Many pessimistic community activists and urban scholars see only two possible eventual outcomes to the gentrification situation: either the market will become saturated and run out of people to fill expensive housing, or all the poor and the majority of non-white people will be driven out to far-flung neighborhoods and suburbs collaring the city, out of sight and mind. But other community leaders say it is possible to redevelop and improve a neighborhood without driving existing residents away. They are determined to hold on to at least a fraction of valuable land for the less-fortunate. Through protests, lobbying, organizing, legal clinics, tenant buyouts and support from socially-conscious non-profit developers, activists have won some major victories against gentrification from New York to San Francisco.
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