Gentrification 7

Trying to rename New York neighbourhoods in order to gentrify them has a long history. (@davidjmadden)

Wake up Nimbys, the option is either Tory housebuilding or Marxist social engineering (Daily Telegraph 7 June 2017) Can they possibly mean “Look out, they’re going to plonk poor people next door to YOU?” Of course they can. “Planning would soon be completely centralised, with bureaucrats in Whitehall dictating everything to the smallest detail… Mass council-house building, including in leafy areas, run by Marxist ideologues, a giant social engineering programme directly aimed at growing the Labour base and killing off the home-ownership dream?” The Tory alternative is new garden cities and suburbs, where poor people can be segregated and “home-ownership culture” preserved. Because of course, apart from the annoyance of having poor people living next door, it would bring down the price of your house. Oh I see – the whole point of Tory “garden cities”, ie new towns, is to keep house prices up, and keep people who need to be housed away from Tory voters. (And note the weasel “leafy areas” for “rich areas”.)

I grew up in the Yorkshire equivalent of what posh people who live in Essex claim is Hertfordshire. (John Avocado ‏@SuperCroup)

Increasingly clear my mum has been slyly upgrading my London location to Greenwich for the benefit of the neighbours. (via Twitter)

The British obsession with class has left writers inventing their own, fictional settings, in order to escape judgments about their characters' background and social standing... Sophie Hannah, the bestselling crime author, said she had created a new county for her novels after finding homegrown readers could not avoid thinking about the stereotypes of the British regions. Saying people are now "obsessed with attaching ideas about what kind of people live in a certain place", she claimed she had struggled to escape judgments about storylines. (Guardian. “Now”? They always did it!)

“Islington dinner-party” is now code for “dangerously left-wing, not nearly racist enough”. (Islington may have a few million-pound houses, but it also has a lot of social housing and deprivation.)

Complaining about the "easy condemnation" of gentrification is the most tiresome form of fake contrarianism there is. (@davidjmadden)

A vandal in Fresno explained his actions: “If you truly love downtown try embracing the folks who’ve been here for decades instead of just running them out and replacing them with snobby little hipsters looking down their noses at everyone else.” He complained that rich white people from North Fresno didn't want to mix with the more diverse people of South Fresno.

Let's rip down anonymous big blocks & spend millions replacing them with anonymous big blocks. (@createstreets on 21st century architecture and planning)

Upwards like to say of a place “It’s very atmospheric”, meaning that it's close to the stereotype they have of a (Polish restaurant, Greek island, Russian housing estate). East London is so atmospheric - like something out of Dickens!

Gentrification used to be called “tarting up”. Workers’ cottages got brightly painted front doors flanked by little trees in pots. Now, when your area is rechristened “something quarter” you can consider yourself gentrified. But it usually includes knocking down something decent and building tin-can flats.

In the 80s, Upwards used to say hopefully that their area was “coming up”, meaning that middle-class people were moving in, so the pavements would surely become cleaner, the street lights brighter and the shops less grimy. And you might even be able to buy lemons, rocket and tarragon vinegar. They waited years while everything stayed the same apart from one Marxist bookshop. What they really wanted to “come up” was of course the value of their house.

It happened in Hackney – the street lights are brighter, enabling “night life” for young people, but we’re too old for that now. We were thinking more of reclaiming beautiful old Georgian houses which were too good for the garment factories and working-class families that inhabited them.

The South Bank... entirely full of pop-up fish restaurants and jugglers on unicycles. (‏@IanMartin Juggling unicyclists haven't been seen since the 80s, but there are too many street food stalls, and over-amplified singer-songwriters given busking licences by a tin-eared committee.)

Central London used to be quite seedy and downmarket and there were few tourists. It was full of chorus girls and motor salesmen, according to a friend – also market traders, tarts and film companies. The area around Centre Point was all guitar, sheet music and drumstick shops. Now it's getting more and more crowded with restaurants, especially noodle bars and burrito bars for the Japanese and American visitors. And everywhere is rather expensive. When I was young and a student we couldn’t afford to eat out all the time! I suppose now young people get decent salaries, and affluent middle-class people send their children to university in greater numbers.

Someone makes the point that hipsters can’t afford a flat or get a regular job – but they can have locally sourced sausages and 50 different types of coffee. (Perhaps because they only job they can get is to open a café.) Surely the market can’t sustain ALL those coffee shops? Except they don’t just sell coffee, they are shared offices as more and more people “work from home”. And middle-class people live in public more than they used to, and they have laptops, and it’s easier to work surrounded by other people, and they don’t have tables at home because there isn’t room.

http://classsystem.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/gentrification-6.html

Gentrification V

Church Street

Sure sign of gentrification is the anti-gentrification graffiti by the last generation of gentrifiers. (Huw Lemmey ‏@spitzenprodukte)

My Romanian taxi driver bizarrely complaining about... mass arrival of more Romanians next year. "They will work for less. Keep them out." (Sathnam Sanghera)

That’s me – complaining about all the middle classes moving into the area I… moved into 30 years ago. But I moved here because it was working class! Though looking back, there weren’t many decent pubs or cafes, there wasn’t much to do, and friends were scattered thinly.

We predicted the area would “come up”. And then it didn’t. Years passed. And now it has, but not in time for us. Damn!

And we were imagining a clean-up, a paint-job, some repairs, maybe a left-wing café/bookshop, a hippy vegan restaurant in a squat, and no more prostitutes in the park or crumbling houses full of crack addicts - not farmers’ markets in Clapton selling ethical escargots. Dalston has become Camden Market.

“The activists and hippies who once lived in cooperatives where everyone paid according to ability and parents sang Nkosi Sikelele Afrika to their white babies have largely gone.” (New York Times May 2014 on Brixton) In the 80s, the middle-class incomers were political activists, who deliberately took up activities that meant meeting working class people of all origins. It may have been a mixed blessing for the working classes, but I miss singing Give Peace a Chance in a marquee while everybody eats Caribbean food off paper plates.

People say Stoke Newington High Street is ALL gentrified now (a few cafes called “The Haberdashery”). But for the past 30 years the gentrifiers have managed to ignore the large Turkish community which is still the most prominent culture in Green Lanes and on the High Street. To my knowledge, Upwards don’t exclaim over darling little Lahmacun restaurants (and don’t go there), don’t learn the oud, don’t listen to Turkish music, don’t learn Turkish, don’t go to Turkey on holiday. They shop at Turkish corner shops and take trips in Turkish cabs but they study Buddhism, not Islam. And of course you couldn’t run workshops teaching easy Turkish songs when you’re surrounded by expert Turkish musicians (and Turkish music sounds pretty hard).

Hipster junk shops in Stokey have even caught up with 70s owls! That was MY thing.

If my 35-year-old self could see London as it is now, she’d be amazed to see flats above shops made habitable (they used to be left empty for some legal reason), coffee shops everywhere - and all the buildings so clean.

More here, and links to the rest.

Classy Areas

More of a hamlet, really.

Where you live in London says so much about you - acceptability vanishes within a few streets. And it changes so fast.

I can’t believe my daughter is now priced out of – Walthamstow! (Middle-class Dad, Inside London, Jan 2014)

The chattering classes are furious at being priced out of Islington. They discovered the area in the 60s when it was grotty and working class, and beautiful Georgian houses were considered “slums” as they were divided up and whole families lived in single rooms and shared a bathroom.

Surely the way to tell whether your part of Croydon is going upmarket is to ask the question 'Is it in Croydon?' If yes, no. (Lee Jackson ‏@VictorianLondon)

Well-off homeowners in San Francisco object to affordable homes being built near them. “A strong organized opposition has emerged, called Grow Potrero Responsibly…. A resident states that she doesn’t like ‘the concrete jungles changing our quality neighborhoods.’ Another says ‘Too big for our sweet, quiet neighborhood’. Another homeowner said that the development would ‘surely tip the scale in favor of relocating to other counties.’ ‘You are seeing a real class protectionism where homeowners are trying to stop other people from coming into the neighbourhood.’” (bizjournals.com)

The premises — after a hiatus as a Filipino restaurant that didn’t sit easily in what estate agents in their wisdom once christened Brackenbury Village — are now in the ownership of Ossie Gray. (Fay Maschler, Evening Standard)

Is the latest middle-class thing complaining about people moving into your street and installing air-conditioning?

Do you live in a “real village”? Or is it “only a hamlet”, as my parents used to say about Linchmere. (Houses, church, farm, green, but no shops.)

Jilly Cooper describes upper middle-class couples who buy a country cottage as well as their city house, and spend hours every weekend in a traffic jam commuting between the two. (And the thing you want is always in the other house.)

Upmarket Caro Stow Crat thinks that because the Middletons are nouveau riche, Berkshire isn't really the country.

More here.

Quotes about Areas

Of course where you live reveals a lot about your place in the class layer cake. And what you call it tells us even more...

The word street, originally a Roman road, eg Ermine Street, came to mean crowded uniform rows of terrace houses or poky suburban villas to be found in every industrial town. At the end of the 19th century, enlightened community planners avoided the word "street". When Ebenezer Howard planned Letchworth, the first garden city, in 1903, he only named one street ... in the entire town. Early Letchworth, a mixture of Shavian enlightenment and Peter Pannish tweeness, called its main drag Broadway ... and there was a plethora of avenues, crescents, ways, shotts and even the Glade Briarpatch and Cowslip Hill. Developers throughout the land took the hint and enticed their genteel customers to live in avenues, crescents, promenades, ways, lanes and even "hoes" and "hays". But never streets. Nigel Agar (county councillor for Letchworth), Hitchin, Herts Guardian Notes and Queries March 20, 2007

According to property information site Zoopla.co.uk, the name of the street on which the property is situated can tell us a lot about how much that property is worth. The site found that properties found on streets with "Hill" in the name are worth an average of £341,666, well over 50% more than the average property price in the UK according to Zoopla’s own Zed Index.

Living on a "Lane" also commands a sizeable premium according to the study, with average prices an incredible £328,378.

Other names making up the top five include Mews (£294,869), Park (£283,069) and Green (£269,861).

In contrast, the cheapest properties are found on roads featuring the name "Street", with an average property price of £155,515 – less than half you can expect to pay to live on a Hill!

Other budget streetnames include "Terrace" (£156,387), "Crescent" (£176,488), "Court" (£178,488) and "View" (£184,546).