gentrification

hazel blunden sandynistar at hotmail.com
Tue Aug 17 02:07:00 PDT 1999



>
>i'd say the distinction is usually about one or two paychecks
>
gentrification brings with it a whole lot of pressures on people who have been living there for ages, used to work in the railway yard or whatever (like in the inner suburbs of Sydney like Botany (ports) Redfern (railyard) and New castle(steelworks).For those who cannot claim to be 'the old working class residents', they have little hope of being able to hang around with a roof over their heads as well.

Some people, if they are renters, just move, cos there is no rent control legislation in Australia and leases are really short (6 months in Sydney, a year in Melbourne). Others are sent to the outer suburbs in Sydney by the department of housing (in most Australian cities, the far suburbs are worse than inner cities usually, unlike the American pattern of suburbs/affluent, inner/decay).The Department of Housing is sellign a lot of its housing stock in the inner areas especially if that housing is cute little terrace housing rather than their big ugly 50s concrete high rises. they justify this by buying more public housing in the outer subs with the profits they make on the inner city housing (location, location, location...)the inner suburb deaprtment places are still way more in demand than th far removed suburbo ones even thouugh the suburbo ones are newer - people want to stay around the city.

the spatial aspects of gentrification are tied up with certain regimes of accum. which thrive on unevenness and inequality (socio-spatial inequlity). Literally, poor and rich people are livng further apart in space in the suburbs, or side by side in th inner city (and separated by all sorts of security devices, grills, cameras, etc). Whilst money does come in via gentrification and the physical infraastructure is imporved, and some small parts of these imporvments can be disributed, it is usually in new private spaces. For example, City West, an authority redeveloping a formerly industrial peninsula right near Sydney's CBD have to set aside a quota of units in every new block for 'low income and 'very low income' peopel. these people are envisaged as the service workfoce who work around the CBD (security guards, cleaners, various white collar type occupations)or as old pensioners who have lived there for 40 years. so they claim to be spreading the benefots, but the main beneficiaries are the new hight paid types who can buy the new 'aartments' (some advertised as "new York Style" lofts,called names like TriBeCa and SoHo) and enjoy the fact that other can't afford it anymore. Plus, the gentrifiers are soooo boring. all they do is live in little mock georgian terraces and wash their Mitsubishi Magna/Lexus/pajero on the weekends and jog. yawn.

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