On May 9, 2007, at 1:02 PM, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> I can assure you from my Baltimore experience that
> most people who are "displaced" by gentrification love it, because
> it gives
> them economic opportunities that they did not have before.
If you're displaced, you're gone. So how do these people "love it"? This looks like another one of your feelings.
I moved into the Upper West Side in 1979, as the transition from fiscal crisis to boomtown was taking hold in NYC. What I saw was people being literally driven from their homes. Poor old folks would go out to buy groceries and find their doors nailed shut on their return. Landlords would rent apartments out as crack dens to drive tenants away. Guys with guns would terrorize tenants to get them out, to allow for richer replacements. For a while, the displaced wandered the streets - until Rudy came in and essentially criminalized homelessness. They went god knows where - probably a lot of them died. (I interviewed people who ran soup kitchens who told me that.) I didn't get a chance to ask them how they were enjoying their new lives, sorry to say.
Doug