Gentrification

10 Pages 2397 Words

t they can’t totally prevent what amounts to the largest makeover of urban America in decades. For instance, San Francisco, long a refuge for all kinds of huddled masses, has lately become one of the least welcoming cities in America for neo-Bohemians and immigrant families. It has become almost completely gentrified, with only a few pockets of the city available to the poor and lower-income. A recent ranking found it to have the highest housing costs in the country.
Gentrification has a long history. In the mid and late 1800s, powerbrokers in many European cities tried their hands at urban planning. In Paris, Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann, a court crony of Napoleon III's, gutted the residential areas where poor people lived throughout central Paris and installed the city’s famous grand boulevards. Thousands of poor Parisians were displaced to make room for the sweeping tree-lined boulevards which show-cased the city’s famous monuments. Strict guidelines applied to new building along the boulevards, and the residences there became the most exclusive in the city.

The process became part of the American public consciousness in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s in the U.S., when artists and bohemians started moving into inner city buildings which had previously been warehouses and factories. But, says Larry Bennett, a political science professor at DePaul University, it was still a stretch and it took a concerted marketing effort to sell these areas to yuppies.
"Lofts are great for artists because they have all this room to put up canvases and paint ‘til they’re black and blue," he said. "But back then the average person didn’t want to live next to a factory or in a factory. To sell a loft to someone who wanted to put in vases and a quality kitchen was a bigger job." This early gentrification didn’t actually displace people, but it opened the way for the inner city to be viewed as a desirable place to live. It wouldnâ...