by Alain Jehlen in Housing
Posted on March 20, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Last Modified on April 6, 2008 at 9:55 pm
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Gentrification—when wealthy people push less wealthy people out of a neighborhood. It’s about to get worse when the Green Line arrives. Here’s a provocative film about it.
It’s by Maxwell Roche, Stephen McLaughlin, and Justin Suied.
What do you think? What can our community do to keep people from being priced out of their homes?
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I think it’s better for a community to have higher priced homes instead of run down dirty three families and noisy student digs. People who own more expensive housing can afford to keep them in good repair. They fund better schools through increased revenue from property taxes. Stylish shops move in and old grungy dumps move out or close. In fact look at what Davis was before the T went in. It’s a no brainer.
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Well, I suppose that since property tax just gets passed on to tenants, broadening our city revenue base might be a good start. But how do you do that without making obnoxious investments that do far worse to folks elsewhere than just kick them out of their homes? Are there municipal bonds or something that individuals can invest in?
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“Brabus,” a richer community may be nice for those who move in, but it doesn’t help the people who are forced out by rising rents. They often wind up in worse apartments, far from their roots, through no fault of their own. I think that’s the point of the film.
If we can help people stay in their homes, we should. The property tax breaks available to homeowners, seniors, and other people, can help although they’re not enough. (See A Guide to Tax Breaks posted on Somerville Voices April 2).
Does anyone know of other ways?
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Alain – “should” is only meaningful to some people. I totally agree with you, but how do we translate it into self-interest? How do we make it clear to our new neighbors that we’re people that they want to share a neighborhood with? It’s all well and good to require the fortunate to pitch in to keep working folks from being driven out; but they have far more resources to fight such efforts than we do to uphold them. We need to find a way to break down that communication barrier, to make it clear that we’re considerate, friendly, honest working people, not dangerous scofflaws or noisy transients. It’s a hearts and minds issue, because, in the long run, the cards are all in the newcomers’ hands. We need to reach out to people who don’t necessarily want to reach out to us – got any brainy ideas?
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Columbine: I generally agree with your comment, but there is one problem with your thinking that comes out in the way you categorize the two groups. It’s not just you, but many of the “old timers” seem to have the same thinking. Referring to newcomers as “the fortunate” and the old timers as “working folks” portrays the wrong image. The majority of the newcomers are working folks too. They might have higher paying jobs, but that doesn’t make them any less hard working. Sure, they’re fortunate to have such jobs, but much of that fortune was achieved by their own hard work… and that shouldn’t be belittled.
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Yeah, I was using “working” as a demographic adjective rather than a verb. So what’s a better way of delineating wage-earners who work hard producing value, but don’t earn enough to have the kind of choices that the newcomers have; and professionals who work hard using the value produced by wage-earners and have a cushion, some wiggle room, the ability to squeeze out the OTHER hard workers if it suits their desires?
It doesn’t make sense to say there’s no difference, but there’s no Politically Correct way to address the very real discrepancy. But if we don’t, we have no chance of finding common ground. Wage-earners and professionals both play crucial parts in making Somerville a great place to live, but there’s a huge stumbling block in that we’re not supposed to talk about social class.
Professionals pay higher taxes (when they can’t find loopholes). But wage-earners are the source of economic value, and without them professionals wouldn’t have the advantages they have. That’s just capitalism, and I’m fine with that. But what Somerville’s looking at right now is skyrocketing property values (yay income! boo foreclosures!) and the pending outmigration of working families (demographic again, because it’s the politest term for the dray-horses of our economy).
So – we have profitable but defensive managers squeezing out wage-earners because their own priorities supersede the preservation of an economically diverse community, because they’re most likely reaping the value produced by a globally scattered set of wage-earners and won’t feel the difference when the wage-earners get shoved off the MBTA network or into unsafe neighborhoods. There, I said it, it’s out. So – now, what do we do about it?
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Columbine’s comment implies that newcomers to the city are quietly plotting to banish those who preceded them. This makes no sense, they have no motivation to do this. What you have to worry about is current residents selling their houses at inflated rates. This is an uphill battle. It’s a very unusual homeowner who, having decided to leave, is not going to want to get as much for his or her house as the market allows. That holds no matter how long the homeowner has lived here.
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“Quietly plotting to banish those who preceded them?” That’s imaginative!
The newcomers have no active interest in maintaining economic diversity here – but benefit from it in ways that we need to figure out how to elucidate. What I’m looking for is a way to express those benefits in a way that the managerial class can understand. Common ground, expressed in a common language.
I need – we ALL need – to know how to express economic diversity as a universal good, in terms that will appeal to the newcomers. Stuff like ArtBeat and HONK! are a start, but won’t be appreciated as products of economic diversity until they’re driven out by a universally Wall Street lifestyle. We need to figure out how to communicate the value of economic diversity now, while we’ve still got it.
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Columbine, in what ways do we, as a city, benefit from economic diversity. I’m not challenging you. I just want to understand your argument.
In my opinion, you don’t have to be political correct to be polite. I don’t see anything wrong be labelling demographics by their income level. Low-income, middle-income, high income. You can even break up the middle income category into two: lower-middle income and upper-middle income.
I would say that Somerville is made up of low-income, lower-middle income, and upper-middle income. Personally, I like it that way if people could get along better.
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Armando – I can only tell you how I personally benefit from economic diversity, but I’ll do my best.
I can choose from a passel of wonderful, one-of-a-kind shops and restaurants instead of the same old mall-strip clones.
I can stop and fumble for three minutes until I find the switch for the light that someone forgot to turn off on their bike, and not get chased off or reported to the police, even though I’m wearing a rain poncho and carrying a backpack instead of wearing a London Fog raincoat and carrying a briefcase.
I can walk home on the bike path knowing that, even if someone tried to start trouble, someone ELSE would most likely phone the cops or offer direct assistance.
I can bang on my neighbor’s door, shouting at the top of my lungs, when her smoke alarm goes off in the middle of the night, and not be issued a citation or shunned as a loony thereafter.
I can say Hi to other people’s kids – their CHILDREN! – and even have little conversations with them without them being swept away from the terrifying stranger in unfashionable clothes.
I can joke around with the folks in line with me at McKinnon’s and not be mistaken for a crazy or a beggar.
I can post on the Internet, “has anyone got a bread machine they’re not using?” and be offered one.
I think what I’m describing here is the warmth born of necessity that arises among low-income folks. I can offer or request assistance among people who aren’t my family or co-workers without scaring anybody.
I’ve never actually lived in a ritzy neighborhood, but I’ve visited friends who do, and there’s a chill in such places, a warning fluttering like a little plastic flag marking a chemically treated lawn. Keep a low profile, don’t make a fuss, keep to yourself, you’re not one of us. You don’t get that in a place like Somerville, and I hope it never creeps in.
Fascinating question, by the way! I’d love to hear how other people figure they benefit from living in an economically diverse city.
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Somerville can never be a ritzy suburb–not unless someone comes in and clear out whole blocks of two- and three-family houses to replace them with mansions and spacious grounds. The old-timers and “yuppies,” for want of a better term, in our neighborhood relate to each other in precisely the way Columbine describes. We are often in and out of each other’s houses or yards. This isn’t “old” versus “new.” I think it’s much more likely to be a feature of the existing density of housing. Less dense or more dense and the character of the place would change a lot. Large apartment buildings and condo developments, etc., are much more likely to lead to the kind of Manhattan anonymity that Columbine fears than changes of ownership in the existing structures. Watch out for MaxPak! And to take as an example of mallification: the arrival of a CVS in Davis Square, lamentable as it is, has nothing to do with the economic mix of a town that lost its last independent pharmacy some years ago. It has to do with much larger economic forces in retail.
And, Columbine, may I ask the significance of your moniker? Some of your neighbors might find it threatening (sad to say).
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William – columbine is a flower, Aquilegia canadensis. That’s the New England one – columbine is also the state flower of Colorado (Aquilegia caerulea), and will hopefully be blooming in my front yard this summer, thanks to seeds that were a gift from a friend in the Rockies.
The new luxury condos on Mass. Ave and on Tannery Brook are a daily sight for me, but to be fair, so is Trolley Square. I don’t know as mansions and spacious grounds are necessary to transform a neighborhood from high-interaction to high-isolation. The condos are very much high-end, dense though they are.
Nostalgia for the American Dream aside, the folks who live in high-end housing do come from a different culture than wage-earners – more cautious, perhaps because they’re accustomed to having more to lose?
What I want is totally new. That’s why I keep fishing here. I want a way to make it clear to our new neighbors that we’re not just an unfortunate byproduct of living near the city, or an entertaining but disposable whiff of Local Color (TM). I want friends, or at least allies. I want new neighbors who’ll actively choose to use their inevitable dominance (and yes, it’s inevitable; this is a capitalist nation) to keep Somerville a collection of vital neighborhoods. I want to find out how to show them that our mom-n-pop businesses are preferable to Sharper Image; that our dogs and kids and heartful art make life better, not worse; that we’re, if not worth knowing as individuals in their eyes, at least not scary. It’s a tall order. That’s why I keep banging my tankard on the table and hollering for a refill. I know there are some geniuses out there…
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That’s a relief. I also have Aquilegia popping up all over my yard. Pseudonyms, however, can come across as scary, even when they turn out to refer to pretty native flowers. I don’t, in fact, know what effect those Cambridge condos have actually had on the quality of interaction in their neighborhoods. Do you?
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People have just started moving in. Time will tell. I do my best to be friendly but not in-yer-face, but that’s all I can come up with. Maybe that really is all I can do.
This area also sees a lot of Tufts students, who are outgoing enough, but out-going in the other sense as soon as they graduate.
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I read not that long ago that places with a greater gap between rich and poor end up being places where people of all classes get sick more often and live shorter lives. I can probably find the source, unless someone else on the list knows it already. But Columbine, you could use that argument. We really are in the same boat, no matter what deck we’re on.
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Dennis – That’s a nice sharp sword, but with two edges! You could also use it to “justify” scuttling attempts to expand affordable housing, since it’s the middle deck that’s emptying out to make way for the luxury cabins, both locally and in general. Still, it’s an interesting observation, and one I hadn’t heard yet. Right-brainer that I am, I’ll invoke Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” as a footnote!
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