Apropos of the recent brouhaha over dense development in Seattle’s downtown (a few opinion columnists in the city have decided that high-rises are pricing out the middle class) here’s an interesting op-ed by John Norquist, president of the Congress for the New Urbanism, on gentrification in US cities. The gist…
[T]he gentrification issue is best understood as nuanced with costs and benefits. It’s also better understood in local context, i.e. it is genuinely a debatable issue in San Francisco or Manhattan, but a totally phony issue in Detroit or Buffalo. Some places fall in the middle of the spectrum. Faint signs of gentrification can be detected in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Memphis, but there is so little of it that concern about it should logically be among the lowest priorities. Yet it isn’t. The hot rhetoric spewed (perhaps appropriately) in San Francisco gets mindlessly repeated in cities that desperately need investment in their building stock.
I don’t know where Seattle, Portland, Vacnouver, etc. would fall on Norquist’s spectrum. But in general I think that that his perspective on the issue is worth giving a fair hearing.
