I’ve always understood the sentiments behind concerns about what people call gentrification, but I have never had those feelings myself. Even worse, I’m not sure I even understand what other people mean by what they call gentrification. When I ask for a definition or look for one, there are many and they are almost never quantitative. Usually, the word is a code word: a term that we’re all supposed to intuitively understand. Daniel Hertz worries about being a gentrifier himself, and he writes in the Atlantic Cities Place Matters that

We tend to carry a lot of guilt about our living arrangements. We have a lot of conversations about whether or not it’s acceptable to live in our current neighborhood, or the one we’d like to live in. Sometimes, we reassure ourselves by discussing the obviously graver transgressions of the people who live in some other neighborhood, which has accumulated slightly more bougie coffee shops and restaurants. Sometimes we find solace in some part of the continuum of gentrification that we’re comfortable with: the very beginning, when you can kid yourself that your presence isn’t changing anything; or when the tipping point has tipped, and the damage has already been done.

Exactly. Worries over gentrification tend to be all about race, geography, and guilt. And there is almost no way around the idea that trying to stop racial and economic change in a neighborhood ends up being reverse red lining like the ridiculous assertion in a Puget Sound Sage report from a while back that said the Rainier Valley should remain “majority minority.” I responded to that idea in a Crosscut article that got me in a lot of trouble with some people.

Racism exists in our society and we should seek to end it and reverse its impacts. Poverty exists and we need to figure out how to better create economic opportunity for everyone. But locking a neighborhood into a permanent ethnic mix? That’s an extreme idea, and one that I suspect the authors of the Sage study might want to attenuate, rethink, or rephrase.

They refused to step back from that language. The truth is that neighborhoods change, they get wealthier, then poorer, then wealthier again. Buildings rise and fall, old timers fade away, and new old timers take their place. That ugly sign everyone hates, or that restaurant that everyone says is a dive, may end up being the neighborhood “character” everyone tried to save when new housing arrives.

Hertz realizes this, and in his post resolves the issue like this.

We need to recognize what’s really going on: that what we call “gentrification” these days is only one facet of the much larger issue of economic segregation. That people get priced out of the places they already live in is only half of the problem. The other half, which affects an order of magnitude more people, is that people can’t move to the neighborhoods to which they’d like to move, and are stuck in places with worse schools, more crime, and inferior access to jobs and amenities like grocery stores. That problem is easier to ignore for a variety of reasons, but it’s no less of a disaster.

And all this, in turn, is the result of a curiously dysfunctional housing system – one that’s set up to allow market forces to push up prices without regard for people who might be excluded, and to prevent market forces from building more homes and mitigating that exclusion [emphasis mine].

The answer (to the extent that there needs to be one) to gentrification is more economic opportunity for everyone and more housing choices for everyone. Hertz almost certainly wouldn’t entirely agree with me, but the guilt associated with success or with buying a new house in a “bad” neighborhood shouldn’t influence public policy. That’s an issue that should be handled by a therapist.

However, the notion that the best response to that guilt should be tightening regulations around new housing  only makes the problem worse. And advocates like Puget Sound Sage get themselves throughly confused, advocating on the one hand for racial segregation in the Rainier Valley, but then crying racism a the suggestion of putting affordable housing there. People should be able to live wherever they want, and when they can’t because of price, it’s usually because we’ve over-regulated the market to try, ironically, to lower prices. This ends up excluding people, especially poor people. Hertz is right, we should be, as a city, putting our energy into “building more homes and mitigating that exclusion.”