Somehow I missed this thread when it came out, but I'm glad I did since it gave me the chance to read 8 pages of discussion.
I take issue with the wording of the original set of questions. Seems like a "push poll" to me. But I will do my best.
1: No, I think gentrification is a symptom of larger issues. People react against "gentrification" and try to stop it but the real problem is economic inequality. Rising prices that displace low-income people from their neighborhoods (which is really what people are worried about when they express concerns about gentrification) wouldn't be an issue if we didn't have such a chasm between low and high income people.
2. No. For the most part, we're following the trend, not setting it. There are exceptions. Wynwood Walls in Miami is one example of developers actively seeking to change a neighborhood for to raise housing prices and push out residents. But those exceptions are few and far between. Generally neighborhoods that are gentrifying are doing so because they were originally great places to live that fell on hard times and now people have once again begun to recognize them as great places to live.
3. No, for the reasons stated above.
4. No, because to date I live in the community I invest in. I am grappling with how to ethically invest in communities with better ROI, but I'm not sure there is a solution for the individual small investor. If my choice is to stop investing and keep working my W2 forever or keep investing and risk playing a tiny role in a larger societal problem, I'm going with the latter. That said, I'm not interested in displacing residents, just giving people a decent place to live at a fair price and making an honest profit in the process.
5. What are the alternatives? This is where the discussion has been really lacking.
The biggest thing to realize is that our national heritage is one of wave after wave after wave of immigration and development and building and displacement and resettlement. Our entire post-colonial history is one of mobility and displacement and constant, unending change. In particular, this change really took off at the beginning of the industrial revolution/end of the American Revolution. The last 200ish years have been unrelenting in the pace and scale of change.
Why does this history matter? Because it places the changes we're going through now in context. People who have lived in a neighborhood since some date in the 60s often complain about being "pushed out," but the truth is that just one or two generations ago they were the ones doing the pushing.
My neighborhood in Roxbury, Mass (part of Boston) is a good example. Since ~1776, no two generations of people have experienced Roxbury in the same way.
I could write a book about the changes, but the important thing is to understand that they happened, they are constant, and there is a regular interval to them.
So part of the answer to question 5 is to recognize that change is constant and that it cuts both ways. The neighborhood your parents moved into when they were of child-bearing age is almost never the same by the time you are of child-bearing age. Educating people on this constant cyclical change is probably a big part of defusing some of the tensions around the gentrification discussion.
The next thing to cover is that gentrification (aka displacement caused by changing economics) is caused by supply and demand. The places where it is worst are the places where those 2 are the most out of balance. And those places tend to be the places where good liberal thinkers (I count myself in that group) have tried to control the free market - usually with the best of intentions - and placed all kinds of restrictions on building new housing. This worked out OK in the 70s and 80s when demand was low, but now that demand is high the restrictions on supply are contributing to these extreme bubble-like prices we're seeing.
But the people who would most benefit from fixing the supply-demand imbalance (the existing residents) and stabilizing prices are often the ones who fight hardest to stop new supply from coming online. For some reason, housing activists are convinced that housing is not impacted by basic economic theory. They spout gibberish about developers *causing* gentrification, and rents being *controlled* by developers. If this were true, I as an investor could go buy up a few blocks of post-industrial wasteland in any one of a hundred failing cities around the country, throw in a coffee shop and a yoga studio and some concrete counters, and just start raking in the dough while simultaneously destroying the lives of the locals. For some really top notch economic analysis of restrictive housing policies making housing less affordable, look at the work of Harvard economist Ed Glasier. There's also an excellent new study out from the Mass Smart Growth Alliance that dives deep into how skewed our development restrictions are and how they are driving housing price surges as people swarm into the area in search of jobs and a high quality of life.
The reality, of course, is that developers can do no such thing. The fundamentals of the area have to be improving before investors come in. Revitalization is a symbol that economics are improving. New housing follows the other indicators, it doesn't cause them.
So change is constant.
And our housing prices are spiking most in areas where demand is high but we have put artificial caps on housing supply.
But there's a third piece, and that gets to the real heart of the emotional response to gentrification and a lot of the clumsy conversation around race and privilege that has been happening in this thread. And that is *opportunity.*
Time after time, there is a mismatch in the skills needed for the new employers who are driving these prices up - the expanding hospitals, the tech companies, the finance firms, even the real estate agencies and developers - and the skills offered by the people who had been living here. Rising housing prices wouldn't be a big deal if the old residents were able to get these high-paying new jobs. And while this mismatch isn't always race-based, it often is. I have neither the time nor space to delve into a history of systemic discrimination in America, but it is real and it is pervasive and it is well-documented. Anyone who cares to learn more about it is only a google search away.
Bringing it back around to my comments about income inequality, this is the real driver behind all the sturm und drang about gentrification. It's not that people object to housing prices going up, it's that they object to not being given a chance to work at the jobs that would enable them to pay the new higher rents. They object to feeling like they always get the leftovers.
You can point to all the "pull yourselves up by the bootstraps" stories and "I saw a poor person who did this dumb thing" anecdotes you want, but the cold reality is that a lot of people are not participating equally in our current economic boom. And that is what is driving these very heated discussions in so many parts of the country.
So is there a solution to the "problem of gentrification?" Yes, but it has very little to do with us. It involves figuring out a way to address the rampant income inequality in this country that is creating a handful of winners and a whole lot of losers. It involves trying to grapple with a history of unending change that many people feel overwhelmed by. And it involves addressing supply and demand issues that are often caused by well-meaning, but misinformed, citizens. Those are the real underlying causes. Gentrification is just a visible symptom.