David Nicholson's Outlook Piece on Gentrification

Created with fd's" Flickr Toys. This fake magazine cover was created in response to a negative comment posted about this photo to the blog Frozen Tropics. Cover influenced by conversations with two people who will remain nameless, and Stay Free magazine...

While I don't think the article was particularly scintillating, it does give me the opportunity to call attention to stuff I've written about this in the past, particularly "More about Contested Space--'Gentrification'", which is the latest rewrite of various emails I've written about this topic.

I don't really like the term "gentrification," because I think it applies a very broad brush to some complicated dynamics of neighborhood and community change.

Nicholson's article, It's a Change, Not a Conspiracy: The City Is Gentrifying. Live With It makes a couple good points: (1) that people's perceptions of "how things have always been" aren't historically accurate, and (2) that and these are my words, not his, and something I would like to try to write about definitively doing a survey and data analysis, that there is a lag in appreciation for urban living on the part of African Americans, which is why you see middle- and upper-class African-American outmigration not only to Prince George's County, but to counties increasingly distant from the center city, Calvert County being one.

Food for thought anyway, especially in recognition that people have some real and justifiable fears about being displaced, as well as the questions of race and class that often divide us, fears of loss of power and control, and all the tough and hard questions involved in "Growing an Inclusive City" when an influx of new residents means real and deep changes to ways of living and thinking on the part of "old" residents.