My 'I Don't Get It' rant is targeted at the losers of gentrification, those priced out of their neighborhoods when the rent increases beyond their ability to pay. While I understand the inconvenience, what legitimate claim do they have to their neighborhood compared to landlords and developers? If they wanted a claim to indefinitely stay in a specific location, they should have bought property instead of taking their chances with a rental.
I'm with you on this one. To me, it's like a man dating a woman for years and years, and even though she wants to get married, he never proposes. Until one day, Man #2 swoops in, pops the question, and the new couple lives happily ever after. I'm supposed to be feel bad for Man #1?
Likewise, I'm supposed to have sympathy for the renters who were only "dating" the neighborhood, but who never popped the question? They should have put a ring on it.
*I acknowledge this isn't the best analogy in the world, but it's also not the worst. If you've got generations of a family living in a neighborhood, who "made" the neighborhood, but not one family member ever has the means or foresight to purchase? I think that's nonsense how little agency we're assigning to those people; that's completely infantilizing adults. As it happens, right now there is another thread where folks are asking the question, "Do you feel sympathy for people who are paying large student loans?" ... and folks are mostly saying, "Well, they are 18... that's life, they should have known." It's very interesting to me how little sympathy those "adults"there are getting, compared to how much sympathy the folks who are displaced because of gentrification are getting.
Well, while my white grandparents worked the farm land, they built equity on it, then purchased more farmland.
Black farmers, however, were not given farm loans, or not given as good a terms (given equal financial circumstances), or driven off their land by a conspiracy of local sheriffs and the local wealthy white folks. Yeah, it happened. Don't kid yourself it didn't.
When other white grandparents needed a loan to buy a house in town or start a business, they could get one. But black neighborhoods were redlined. The banks didn't extend credit for starting businesses or buying homes in "the wrong part of town." Yeah, it happened. It happened a lot. But it wasn't illegal when the blacks were forced to rent because they couldn't get credit and weren't allowed to have the good jobs, anyway. Thankfully, that practice is now illegal.
But it gets better. If a black run town or area started to do well, whites would drive them out. I don't mean gentrification. I mean armed violence, death and destruction. Check out the Wilmington, NC coup of 1898, when armed whites took over the town government, burned down the black run newspaper, and hung black community leaders. Then set up their own white-run government in its stead.
Or when whites rampaged thru Rosewood, Florida and massacred the black inhabitants in 1923.
Or Tulsa, OK, where the black neighborhood became so prosperous it was referred to as "Black Wall Street". White folks didn't care for that, so the police rented airplanes and dropped firebombs on the black part of town to burn the blacks out and force them to leave in 1921.
You think job prejudice and disgusting episodes like that didn't -- just a tad -- interfere with intergenerational wealth building in black communities? Just a little bit??
But let's assume for a moment that a black family in our grand parent's day got their act together and tried to improve things. We've all seen what a TREMENDOUS difference just a 1% financial fee is on wealth building. Don't you think that all the racist bullshit our country put blacks thru slowed down their wealth building just as much, if not more?
Let's add in piss-poor schools under the separate but (un)equal doctrine, piss poor libraries in black neighborhods, and few wealthy role models to meet, socialize with and learn from. Think about that for a minute. Think that might have interfered with the transfer of solid money management skills? When your daily focus is on getting by without a white guy beating you up or gunning you down because he's bored or frustrated with his life it tends to interfere with long range planning.
So, while I completely agree with you that too damn many of my fellow Liberals infantalize poor people and refuse to recognize that the poor have (and need to use) agency to improve their situation, your specific example is a piss poor one.