100% of the discourse surrounding gentrification is unproductive. Gentrification is simply the racialized term for the multifaceted housing crisis.

Upwardly mobile twenty-somethings of white, Indian, or Asian descent want to live in the city. They ALSO cannot afford 1.5 million dollar single family homes. The neighborhood that is claimed to be gentrified is actually simply affordable. People have to live somewhere, and the upwardly mobile twenty-somethings have to live somewhere too. If there were more apartments available, more city centers in each city, and less development regulations, then this wouldn’t be a problem.

It’s a shame when people think they have to work their own neighborhood WORSE so that people won’t want to come there. The issue is that this doesn’t deter them from moving in anyway. And when they move in, they’ll want bike lanes, and not to have to deal with indiscriminate acts of vandalism and harassment from homeless drug addicts who hang around outside their buildings.

It is a class issue. The average 40yo lifelong neighborhood resident who doesn’t want white people moving in actually has FAR more in common with the “gentrifiers” than they do with any other group.

People that use the word gentrification unironically are either maliciously lying or just plain dumb. Especially in neighborhoods like Navy Yard in DC, or O4W in Atlanta, both of which were literally weed-filled parking lots and cratered asphalt outside of abandoned factories collecting wind-strewn litter for years, occupying half a dozen square miles of wasted space. When they were “gentrified”, maybe 40 homes were able to secure a massive bag selling to developers, and then multiple thousands of people were able to live there. Anyone arguing against this is literally malicious and hostile to their own neighbors.

They fantasize that it is a situation similar to Disney’s “Up”, but it’s not. People need to have a place to live.

It’s happening now in Chinatown. They are arguing against the completion of the Philly Rail Park, which is in a completely wasted section of the city, currently utilized for almost nothing, on the other side of Vine, and they fight against it because it will make people want to live in a neighborhood that’s closer to them.

Atlanta’s Belt Line, which is a thematically and philosophically identical project, has spurred double digit billions of dollars of infrastructure and housing investment. There are now communities for active 55+yos, housing for thousands of people, exercise, outdoor yoga, hundreds of stores and restaurants that didn’t exist before. Not to mentioned the explosion in tax base.

And they want to block this for Philadelphia because it would make their own neighborhood nicer. Even though it starts ABOVE (not in) Chinatown, and continues all the way to the art museum. And CT/Philly nimbys get to ruin it for everyone because having a software developer live within a half mile of their outermost store is simply an insurmountable offense. It’s plainly disgusting.

The entirety of it right now is abandoned rail segment surrounded by empty surface level parking lots and abandoned buildings. It could be the new center of Philly and contain housing for literally tens of thousands of people. Easily. But it can’t be done, because it would allow upwardly mobile middle class people a place to live.

Philly has many problems, but having too many jobs isn’t one of them. I’m amazed how some people apparently hold both of the contradictory opinions that their neighborhood has seen too much disinvestment and that gentrification is ruining their community.

Cities full of NIMBY’s

It's not politically incorrect to say. Gentrification is good. I've seen it work in Baltimore in the early naughts and I've seen it work here in Philly.

The problems we're dealing with go back 40-50 years. White flight took the rug out from many neighborhoods by removing the tax base and leaving behind only the people who could not afford to move. Of course the problems from that accumulated and showed up as decaying neighborhoods, failing schools, and all kinds of problems.

Gentrification, in a way, REPLACES the people who left during white flight. It's very much a way to restore economic balance to a community. Can it go too far? Yes, but we're a long way from reaching NYC levels of gentrification. We need more educated people, more wealth, and less dysfunction.

That's also what all these candidates are saying. The usage of the word gentrification is often ambiguous because some people sometimes use it to refer to the process of economic growth and other people sometimes use it to refer to the process by which low-income residents are priced out of their own neighborhoods.

Everybody* thinks that gentrification in the first sense is good, and most people think gentrification in the displacement sense is bad. But a lot of people think you can't have the growth without displacement.

*some extreme activists are literally against growth, but that's a very vocal minority without any institutional pull

Basically we need to clean up our city. There is nothing politically incorrect about that.

>... Those things will improve our city and set it up for the future.

Emphasis mine.

What do you mean by our city? It's easy to say we got to improve our city and set up our city for the future, when our city means the city of Philadelphia.

But what if our city means, the people living in Philadelphia?

We want to see economic progress and we want to quality of life to improve for everyone. So do we do that by importing a new tax base or do we do that by lifting people out of poverty?

Because I think it's morally unambiguous, as a society we should be people first.