Yeah, exactly. The difference in my communities is that it’s less of a racial divide, and more of a class one - rent etc is cheap so you have young graduates, queers, hipsters etc move into an area, start art collectives, begin small businesses like cafes and bars, and then people start travelling to the area because…

I think that sometimes poor white people (artists, the gays, what have you) move to a neighborhood because it’s all they can afford, and then once the neighborhood is whiter, developers feel like it’s safe enough to start investing in. Then all the poor people, including the white ones, get priced out. I feel like…

Yeah, sometimes objections are just about not wanting change, and sometimes it’s more insidious.

I suppose - I guess where I live, the difference is that the artists are usually just as disgusted at high rise development and overpopulation in the area, and want to preserve the community and the quirky things they liked when they moved in.

Artists may be the first wave of gentrification, but they’re also inevitably pushed out when the condo developers and chain stores arrive (see: Williamsburg). Rather than recognising the olive branch being handed to them by Owens and other artist spaces, and recognising that these artists could be good allies for the…

I mean, that’s the reason she’s being targeted. It’s because she’s a soft target who has a history of working with other activist organizations in Los Angeles. She’s one of the founders of REACHLA. Of course she’s more receptive than a shitty developer, but you can’t load all of these problems on to one person,…

Artists are a weird target, except from the perspective of receptiveness. You don’t imagine a developer would care about the ethics of changing a neighborhood, whereas perhaps a wealthy artist actually might?

In Australia we have a program (I forget if it’s a federal or state level program) that subsidises the rent of health care workers, teachers, emergency services etc in high cost areas.

I think sometimes the targets of gentrification protests are aimed really weirdly. In a neighborhood I used to live in (working class/lower income, pretty racially diverse, not coastal), I remember there being a huge uproar when they wanted to open a Walgreens on the edge of the neighborhood where a building was being…

“This knee-jerk “Fuck the rich” attitude bores the shit out of me. It’s useless.”

IKR. Look at me being a gentrification apologist.

Nope, NYC got the way it is because the city didn’t create additional housing and created an artificial shortage driving up prices. If there was another 20,000 apartments, things would be cheaper.

I was just listening to a podcast about gentrification in the Los Angeles area (it’s called “There Goes the Neighborhood.”) and they cited Santa Monica as an example of what you just mentioned, where the average rent was some exorbitant amount like $3,600 a month for a one-bedroom (and I thought Honolulu was too…

As someone who grew up in some shitty neighborhoods, I don’t see gentrification as some sort of evil monster. I’d much rather have a legit grocery store in the neighborhood than be stuck with corner stores with jacked up prices. I’d much rather have occupied houses than living next to vacant properties. Where we live…

Excellent comment. There are good and bad in every business. There are crooks and ethical people in all walks of life. The people who rent my houses love me as a landlord and I love them as tenants. When something breaks, it gets fixed that day. All they have to do is call me and I send somebody over immediately. And…

This area of Boyle Heights is, and has been, zoned light industrial for many years. Look at a satellite map. The 356 Mission space, like everything in its immediate vicinity, is a warehouse, and its previous function was to store pianos. (All that’s not to say that the arrival of white-run art spaces doesn’t…

This is happening all over LA and it trickles down. When I first moved here, Culver City was still considered a not-so-nice place to live. I could have imaged that, eventually, I might be able to afford a place there.

She offered it an art gallery. And I’m sorry, but no. Either the focus is on housing policy or the focus is on individuals. If the lack of massive affordable housing projects and the proliferation of big corporations in neighborhoods are the problem then Laura Owens isn’t. Nor is someone who wants to flip houses…

I’m of two minds. A) people should never be priced out of their own neighborhoods, and so many of these “revitalized” communities do so through the same twee combination of art gallery, local bakery, coffee shop, and overpriced artisianal soap maker.

So because I’m savvy at investing and improving the value of things, I’m a bad person? I need to put food on the table for my kids just like everybody else.