>
> [WS:] And what is exactly wrong with "regeneration"
> or "gentrification?" It creates economic growth,
> it improves living conditions, it creates jobs -
> what is wrong with that.
If WS had seen downtown St. Petersburg, Florida over the last couple years he wouldn't have had to ask that question. There's been a lot of gentrification going on there: some 25-story residential buildings close by the waterfront, and a couple blocks back a bunch of very nice three to five story condos I couldn't afford if I had two jobs. It's a pretty small area, maybe only a couple thousand people found themselves with no place they could afford to rent; I can't imagine what it's like when gentrification displaces lower-income renters in twenty-thousand lots.
There's this one block in St. Pete I see every day that used to have maybe thirty or forty old, old wood-frame houses subdivided into real cheap apartments. Last year it got plowed flat, the plan being to put about seventy condos ($400k and up) on it. The plan's on hold due to the slowdown in real estate speculation, so it's just weeds now but those cheap apartment houses are gone. So the low-income people who used to work day labor and rent those rooms at $75/week ended up sleeping on the Interstate right-of-way. For a couple weeks, until the cops came and cut up their tents ("a fire hazard," they were smoking cigarettes in them!) and up until a couple of those low-lifes ended up murdered in a nearby alley.
All the day laborers, they're out of sight now. I don't know where they ended up.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at gmail.net