gentrification

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

At 11:43 AM 8/13/99 -0400, Doug Henwood wrote:
>Sam Pawlett wrote:
>
>>Recently spent a couple of days in Seattle and Portland and was
>>surprised at how gentrified the downtown areas have become
>
>Sam, I visited Vancouver - that's where you are, right? - for the 
>first time last fall. I was staying at 56 E. 5th Ave, which has been 
>a pretty funky working class/light industrial neighborhood, but my 
>host told me it was being filled with folks like him - artists, 
>writers, bohemians, the avant garde of gentrification. And downtown 
>was truly a gentrifier's paradise, with warehouses being turned into 
>condos, Planet Hollywoodish theme joints everywhere, movie sets 
>everywhere, etc. (I saw one warehouse-to-condo conversion that had a 
>sign in the window advertising the contractor as "rebuilding downtown 
>Denver" - an actual transformation was doing double duty representing 
>one in a TV movie!) Of course, downtown east side still looks like 
>the poorest neighborhood in Canada I was told it was, but otherwise 
>the city seems to be going this way too. Is my impression correct? Is 
>there anyplace in North America this isn't happening? Seems like in 
>addition to the old model of suburbanization we've got a 
>transformation of older city cores going on at the same time - a mix 
>of concentration and dispersal that it's hard to describe in a single 
>phrase.
>

I do not understand what you have against yuppies in this context.
Personally, they are a quite uninteresting crowd, to be sure, but their
main value lies not in their dubious personal charms but in their
neighborhood effect.  Their presence has a positive effect on city taxes,
services, and quality of life in general.

You do not have to befriend them - just take advantage of the externalities
they create.

Again, between gentrified downtowns and suburban sprawl - the choice is
clear, at least for me.

wojtek