From a city’s economic engine to the center of political and administrative power. From cultural heart and nightlife hotspot to dilapidated buildings and high crime rates. From opulent penthouse suites to derelict homes. The downtowns of American cities, both big and small, have always been dynamic places that shifted with the times. From the early… Read more »
San Francisco, the California city that has long been a haven for LGBT people, may have the highest rents on Earth, at least according to the financial site Walltwyse. Since the days of the 19th-century gold rush and, later, as a discharge spot for navy sailors, San Francisco has long served as the de facto… Read more »
Sit at Common Market in Plaza Midwood long enough on a weekend evening and it will inevitably happen. A red, open-aired bus will eventually drive by — a comedic tour guide blasting jokes through the onboard microphone as it drives toward the iconic neighborhood bar, deli and convenience store rolled into one. Regular patrons at… Read more »
SAN FRANCISCO — Dustin Becker jumps in his car at 5:30 every morning to begin a grueling 90-minute drive from his home in the suburbs to his telecommunications job 60 miles closer to San Francisco. He does it because houses cost twice as much where he works. The forces of population growth and gentrification have… Read more »
Boystown is arguably the most famous gay neighborhood in the world. Established in the mid-20th century on the North Side of Chicago, it has long been an area LGBTQ people could call home, where they could meet others like them and grab a bite to eat in a place where they’d expect to be welcomed…. Read more »
Like most young people, I’m perpetually broke. Thanks to a crushing mountain of debt, I moved to a cheaper neighbourhood. In the short time I’ve been here the area has become “hipper” and the condo developers have taken notice. It’s now at a point where beautiful and expensive micro-lofts are built in the shittiest parts… Read more »
Zip code 11216 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn has a spectacular stock of stately brownstones. The buildings — long ago sliced into apartments, but easily restored as grand townhomes again — composed the last major collection of brownstones in the borough that hadn’t yet been gentrified going into this housing cycle in the early… Read more »
Seattle is experiencing a new era of gentrification, one that doesn’t just bulldoze low income apartment buildings but is also wiping out traditional gayborhoods, severing the links between queer generations. Two artists respond with resilience. Seattle is “broverwhelmed.” Between the tech industry and the real estate developers catering to upscale tastes of the increasingly privileged… Read more »
Personal assistant Brenden Michaels is wondering if his days in Brooklyn are numbered. He still clings to a cheap rental flat in uber-gentrified Williamsburg, but has seen his neighbourhood’s prices skyrocket. He now laughingly suspects even the improvements he’s made to his own home may eventually come back to bite him. “I’ve repainted everything, put… Read more »
The Louis and The Harper are high-end apartment buildings on 14th Street in the heart of one of DC’s hottest neighborhoods. (Andre Chung for The Washington Post) When we think about the reasons behind the movement of younger, higher-income people into center cities — reversing the decades-long trend of suburbanization — lots of things come… Read more »
The Chinese restaurant across the street from me – one of the last, reasonably priced joints in the neighborhood – closed last weekend. Their lease was up for renewal and the rent increased from $5,000 a month to $25,000. Such an enormous jump isn’t unusual here in the West Village, part of Greenwich Village in… Read more »
My name is Carye Bye and I make my living as an artist. My work comes in many forms–some of it I get paid for and some I just do because it makes me happy. You may know my wood-block prints of Portland’s bridges or animals on bicycles, which I create in my one-person print… Read more »
The West Village of Manhattan is a place “where the streets are so tiny, so isolated from the hubbub of the rest of the city, they have managed to stay trapped in a time warp,” said Barry Benepe, an architect and urban planner who has rented an apartment on Jane Street since 1971 and was… Read more »
Seattle is dead and Amazon killed it. The recent news around Amazon has focused on the company as a workplace. Much of it has been unflattering, all of it is accurate. But a more comprehensive indictment of Amazon would also describe its effect on the rest of Seattle, which used to be a great place… Read more »
Most of the San Francisco residents will find it hard to purchase a home given the rising cost of houses. Based on a study conducted by the California Association of Realtors (C.A.R.), only 10 percent of prospective home owners in the area could afford to buy a single family house. C.A.R. released their 2nd Quarter… Read more »
There is a mystery rising around the corner from my home in Northeast D.C. Its reveal has been slow: one floor at a time, the metal skeleton taking shape over months. The work seems to sputter on and off, and several times I’ve wondered if something went wrong. The money ran out. Or the inspectors… Read more »
Del Seymour knows all about the pimps, drug dealers and vagrants of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district – because he used to be one of them. “I was a real bad dude down here. I’ve pissed and shitted myself on these streets. I’ve felt the cold and felt the fear of being attacked. I’ve been stabbed… Read more »
Gay neighborhoods are not just more expensive than most other neighborhoods in their metropolitan area, they also appreciate more quickly. In the last three years, home prices in neighborhoods with high numbers of male same-sex couples have increased by an average of 23%, according to a new study by online real estate service Trulia; prices… Read more »
For many years, a perplexing phenomenon has made its way into real estate markets across the country: where there is a high concentration of same-sex couples, real estate tends to be more expensive and appreciate in value faster. The trend was made famous by a 2001 study by Richard Florida and Gary Gates, which found… Read more »
Earlier this week, city supervisors in San Francisco considered an emergency 45-day moratorium on the construction of new market-rate housing in the Mission district so that the city could, in theory, pause to ponder what’s happening in its insane housing market. The Mission has long been home to lower-income residents, many of them minorities, and… Read more »
I had anticipated some of the rewards and discoveries of visiting cities in the process of economic and cultural recovery and re-invention. An unexpected reward has been the chance to get a time-capsule view, a kind of real-life time-line diorama, of how the downtown areas of cities look through all the stages of a decline-and-rise… Read more »
It was 3 in the morning last March when Ade Connere was attacked. Connere had been performing at the gay bar Pony on Capitol Hill and was wearing a shiny black coat over a dress. Connere, 36, is tall and lean and exudes a certain elegance, even without makeup or skirts. Two men were walking… Read more »
Emily Badger suggests chucking the word: Even researchers don’t agree on what “gentrification” means, let alone how to identify it. (And this is to say nothing of its even more problematic derivative, the “gentrifier.”) … The definition matters… not purely for linguistic nit-picking, but because we seldom talk about gentrification in isolation. More often, we’re… Read more »
Maybe you think you know a gentrifying neighborhood when you see one. It’s got all the shorthand: coffee shops, new condo construction, a few old storefronts awaiting renovation. What we think is easy to eyeball, though, is incredibly hard to identify in data. Quantitatively, what does gentrification look like? A change in median income in… Read more »
While many San Francisco neighborhoods are changing character, Dogpatch may be getting one. The enclave between the bay and Potrero Hill is a blink-and-miss-it spot, filled with warehouses, taverns along Third street and the local Hells Angels headquarters. The charm is hidden away. Several blocks along Tennessee and Minnesota streets are dotted with tiny Victorians,… Read more »
Just six miles from San Francisco’s increasingly expensive downtown is Hunters Point, a historically blue-collar neighborhood southeast of the city, which has been neglected since the shipyards closed in 1974 amid radiation contamination so bad it was declared a Superfund site. Today, 30 percent of the area’s residents earn less than $10,000 a year. “This… Read more »
At less than two square miles, West Hollywood has always proven that size doesn’t matter. The small but mighty city has marched to the beat of its own drum since Moses Sherman bought the land in 1894 to set up shop for his enterprise, the Los Angeles Pacific Railway Co. The settlement grew into worker… Read more »
Census data suggests that in 1980 a college graduate could expect to earn about 38 percent more than a worker with only a high-school diploma. Since then, the difference in their wages has only widened as our economy has shifted to bestow greater and greater rewards on the well-educated. By 2000, that number was about… Read more »
After picking up momentum over the last couple of years, there are some signs that the US housing market may be slowing. The Washington Post reports: The third installment of Freddie’s “Multi-Indicator Market Index” (or MiMi), which sizes up homebuying activity and other factors, found that only 10 states and the District of Columbia fall… Read more »
The year 2007, when Google first began driving those ridiculous camera-topped cars around U.S. cities, doesn’t feel so long ago. But seven years is a lifetime on the streets of a rapidly changing city like Washington. So much in the District has changed so quickly that it’s almost hard to remember what once-empty or neglected… Read more »
New York City has always been changing. But recently, the city has seen a wave of luxury condos and artisanal cupcake boutiques uproot local delis and dive bars. To make sure we don’t forget the city’s past, two New York-based photographers, James and Karla Murray, set out to document the city’s transformation. The result was… Read more »
When John Moser moved out of Oak Lawn 20 years ago, he was certain he would miss the sense of community that defined the area. His downtown-based company covered his costs for using public transportation, and on weekends he could walk to clubs and restaurants. “I loved living in Oak Lawn when I first moved… Read more »
In the past five years, Harlem’s empty lots and burned-out buildings have sprung up luxury condos, upscale restaurants, boutique shops, hotels, B&Bs, and unimaginable improved services in an area the city had long forgotten. And the resentment of this shift has targeted both Harlem’s recent and life-long LGBTQ communities. “Obama has released the homo demons… Read more »
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST: I’m Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. If I say I want to talk about gentrification, what comes to mind? Do you think new businesses and services revitalizing tired rundown neighborhoods or do you think higher taxes and snobby people with too much money and too few… Read more »
In the next few years Amazon said they will hire an additional 12,000 employees and they all have to live somewhere. But at what cost? The rapid redevelopment could become an epidemic for all of King County. The average one bedroom in South Lake Union costs $2,200. That’s more expensive than many of the trendy… Read more »
Cities are transforming, and it’s palpable. The reliable no-frills coffeehouse shut down and two months later, there’s an artisan bakery selling baguettes for $6. Your favorite barber tells customers he can no longer afford the rent; meanwhile a chain salon around the corner has an hour wait. These scenes are all too familiar for the… Read more »
Lost leases, rent increases, a shifting residential dynamic, and the influx of tourist and tech dollars are all playing their part in recasting the role of Eighth Avenue between 14th and 23rd Streets  the commercial spine of Chelsea. But this is not simply a story about the ever-gentrification of Manhattan, it’s also another telling… Read more »
Profiling some of New York’s newly mixed neighborhoods, Justin Davidson notes that the “link between a neighborhood’s economic fortunes and the number of people being forced to move away, while anecdotally obvious, is difficult to document”: In 2005, Lance Freeman, a professor of urban planning at Columbia, examined national housing statistics to see whether low-income… Read more »