Extract
(form the above reference, with permission)

My third suggestion concerns gentrification of low-cost neighbourhoods to which time has not been kind but which have valuable assets. Typically, the first outsiders to notice those assets are artists and artisans. They are joined by young professionals or other middle-class people whose eyes have been opened by the artists’ discoveries. For a time, gentrification brings heartening renovations and other physical improvements into a neighbourhood that needs improvements, along with new people whose connections, life-skills and spending money can be socially useful to the neighbourhood’s existing inhabitants, and often are. As long as gentrification proceeds gently, with moderation, it tends to continue to be beneficial, and diversifying.

But nowadays especially, a neighbourhood’s period of what might be called its golden age of gentrification can be surprisingly short. Suddenly, so many, many new people want in on a place now generally perceived as interesting and fashionable that gentrification turns socially and economically vicious. It explodes into a feeding frenzy of real-estate speculation and evictions. Former inhabitants are evicted wholesale, priced out by what Chester Hartman, urban planner and author, aptly calls “the financial bulldozer.” Even the artists, who began the process, are priced out. The eventual ironic result is that even the rich, the people being priced in, are cheated by this turn of events. They were attracted by what they perceived as a lively, interesting, diverse and urbane city neighbourhood – in short, by the results of gentle and moderate gentrification. This kind of urbanity is killed as the place becomes an exclusive preserve for high-income people.

Time is not kind to high-income preserves in cities, unless they are small and cheek-by-jowl with livelier and more diverse neighbourhoods. One need only notice that many a poor and dilapidated neighbourhood contains once-beautiful, proud and ambitious dwellings, to see evidence that exclusive preserves of the rich do not necessarily hold up well in cities. The rich it seems, grow bored with undiverse, dull city neighbourhoods, or their children or heirs do. This is not surprising because such places are boring. When gentrification turns vicious and excessive, it tells us, first, that demand for moderately gentrified neighbourhoods has outrun supply. By now, experience has revealed the basic attributes of such places – attributes artists discover: the streets have human scale, buildings are various and interesting, streets are safe for pedestrian use and many ordinary conveniences are within pedestrian reach and neighbours are tolerant of differing life-styles. It is pitiful that so many city neighbourhoods with these excellent basic attributes have been destroyed for highway construction, slum clearance, urban renewal and housing projects. Nevertheless, some currently bypassed civic treasures do remain, and where they do, moderate gentrification – I emphasize moderate – could be deliberately encouraged to help take the heat off other places being excessively gentrified.

Another way of adding to supply could be by encouraging judicious infilling of housing in neighbourhoods with human scale but not excessive compactness or density.

However, more than increased supply of desirable city neighbourhoods is needed to combat socially vicious evictions of existing inhabitants.

Artscape, a Toronto organization concerned specifically with protecting and promoting the interests of artists, has come to the conclusion that the only sure way of preventing artists from being priced out of their quarters is ownership – in this case, ownership by nonprofit organizations. The same is probably true for many other existing inhabitants – ownership by cooperatives, community development corporations, land trusts, nonprofit organizations – whatever ingenuities can be directed to the aim of retaining neighbourhood diversity of population.