Gentrification in the Meat Packing District, New York - Term Paper Example

Introduction With the current situation of the world’s economy now a days, people cannot help but wonder what will happen to them, now and in the future. And one of the foremost concern is whether or not their most basic needs would be met, which of course include their housing. However, despite the ongoing concerns on housing within and outside the United States of America, there is one initiative being promulgated which focused on altering the housing alternative for people, and this is the introduction of gentrification. It was the urban developers who are currently practicing this idea of gentrification wherein they have targeted to modify the lower cost housing and inner city ghettos into a more urbanized and higher cost housing (such as condominiums, high-rise apartment buildings, etc). Because of this, a number of questions arises: 1. What can the local government benefit from such gentrification? 2. What will happen to the populace belonging to the lower-income bracket? Can they afford such type of housing? 3. What are the other concerns raised that pertains to gentrification? Gentrification Defined Urban gentrification or simply called gentrification is a ‘process’ of changing urban areas by moving the lower class residents (or people in a poverty state) to assigned areas and then putting up much higher cost of different variety of housing such as condominiums, apartelles or apartments (Marcuse, p 226). Such process involves demographic shift. Those who can afford the urban developed housing move in and those who cannot would of course transfer to other areas with cheaper accommodation. With gentrification come various changes from the entire neighborhood, investors and other members of the industrial sector. For the neighborhood, such moving in and out will result to a change in culture and character. Those who will be living in the urbanized and/or highly cost housing will have to adapt with the seemingly sophisticated environment (Kennedy and Leonard, 2001). They will have needs which may not be their usual requirements such as higher and more privatized education, modes of transport and the likes. On the other hand, those who will need to move out and opt to live in a more affordable housing venues, they will have to become accustomed with the increasing crime rates and a seemingly chaotic environment. It is because of this movements and change in culture why gentrification has been believed to be a factor that leads to discrimination of race and of wealth (Kennedy and Leonard, 2001). Meanwhile, through gentrification a change in the industrial sector also comes in. There will be an increased opportunity for various investments which can be in the form of incentives for redevelopment, improvements in the access to housing loans for low-income mortgage seekers, assistance to lending to first-time home purchasers, and improvement of rental properties. This would of course result to reductions in local property crime rates, increased property prices and increased revenue to local governments from property taxes (Kennedy and Leonard, 2001). Gentrification – How and When did it Start? Gentrification, as many would like to imply, is a form of social housing. Its primary concern is to create a venue where people of shared values, culture and ideology will thrive to live in their most convenient manner. This is the primary reason why gentrification, however debatable it may sound, is still a form of social housing. So where and when did this whole concept of social housing start? History of Social Housing Shortage of housing after World War 1, coupled with dissatisfaction amongst workers and the returning soldiers led the then Prime Minister David Lloyd George into thinking of a consideration for a national housing program. Hence, in the 20 years after the end of the First World War, 4 million new homes were built in England and Wales, and of those, 1.5 million were council homes. The 1933 Housing (Financial Provisions) Act had attempted to limit the scope of public housing away from general needs to re-housing the poor. It signaled a shift in housing policy towards a view of council housing as welfare provision, a theme that was to be revisited in the 1950s and continues at the end of the century (Hennessey, 1993). At the outbreak of war in 1939 housing conditions were on the whole greatly improved and state intervention in housing was established as a permanent feature. However at the end of the Second World War 450,000 homes had been completely destroyed or rendered uninhabitable (Hennessey, 1993). The policy of demolishing and rebuilding that had taken hold in the years after WWII was slowly coming to an end, partly as a result of an increasingly failing economy. Many councils began to look for ways of providing housing more cheaply and local authority support for housing associations in renovation and conversion work greatly increased. Tenants had also begun to protest against the demolition of their existing homes favoring renovation in the inner cities and a resistance to moving away from community. Mass produced homes became a thing of the past (Malpass and Murie, 1994). Since 1979 the direct role of local authorities as landlords has greatly diminished and the introduction of Housing Action Trusts and Tenants Choice in 1987 has greatly increased the housing association role (Hennessey, 1993). The role of the social rented sector As it is apparent that gentrification is indeed a form of social housing. It has been that way before and it has the same goals being promulgated even up to now. The instigators of gentrification are still part of the social rented sectors. There have been the same roles of social rented sectors (may it be in a gentrification mode or not) in majority of the countries around the world. In four of the countries surveyed, including USA, the social rented sector now makes up around 20 per cent of the housing stock. The Netherlands has the largest social rented sector (more than 33 per cent), and Germany the smallest (6 per cent) (Malpass and Murie, 1994). There is no consistent trend in the size of the social rented sector. Whilst it has diminished greatly in USA and Germany as a result of government policy, it has been stable elsewhere. Production fell generally in the 1990s, usually due to financial constraints, but USA had the smallest social housing building programme during this time (Malpass and Murie, 1994). As the importance of social rented housing, including gentrification, in meeting housing shortages has diminished, differences in its role have emerged. USA places much importance on its use as a safety net for vulnerable households, and is the only country where specified groups have a legally enforceable right to housing. Various mechanisms exist in other countries to ensure that social rented housing provides a safety net, for example the use of local authority nominations in Denmark and Sweden. But in France, social landlords are often reluctant to house the poorest households (Hennessey, 1993). The social rented sector in other countries performs a greater role in enhancing housing affordability for a wider range of income groups. Income limits exist in Finland, France and Germany, but these are sufficiently high as to permit income-mixing. Allocation procedures often depart from the needs-based system frequently operated in USA. Priority is given to existing tenants of estates in Denmark whilst application-driven systems, where time waited is the main 'currency', are widely used in the Netherlands (Malpass and Murie, 1994). America housing exhibits a greater level of polarization between tenure than other countries. After adjusting for the relative size of the social rented sector, households from the poorest two income deciles are much more likely to be housed in the sector than in the other countries. Moreover, the rate at which the use of the sector falls as incomes rise is most dramatic in USA. This pattern is not the result of the exclusion of 'nuclear' families from the America social rented sector - in common with France and Germany there is a greater proportion of such families in the America social rented sector than in the population as a whole. Further analysis showed that greater income inequality in USA combines with tenure polarization to give America social renters substantially lower average incomes compared with the national average than their counterparts in the other countries (Power, 1993). Gentrification: Rental setting Recent policy debate in the US has focused on anomalies in rent structures, between regions, landlords in the same region and within landlords. Rent setting at the level of the landlord is determined by the debt structure of the organization, subject to various subsidies that are generally designed to tackle the fact that debt is most expensive to serve in its earliest years (Zukin, 1987). In US a distinct advantage of monopoly local landlords has been the ability to pool rents, limiting rent anomalies between old and new properties. More so, cost-rental system operates largely at an estate level; this creates particularly acute rent anomalies, with older, popular properties in central areas sometimes having lower rents than newer, peripheral and less popular estates. Other countries, including the Netherlands and Sweden, also reported anomalies in rents at the level of the landlord, with rent structures often failing to reflect fully differentials in popularity (Zukin, 1987). Based on other literatures also revealed that rent rises in the 1990s had been greatest in US, Britain, Finland and Sweden. These countries recorded real rent increases of more than 30 per cent. In Sweden rent rises are agreed in negotiations between local landlords and tenants' associations (Zukin, 1987). The French government issues guidelines, but landlords are free to set rents as they wish, whilst cost-rental principles apply in Germany, Finland and Denmark (subject to small profits in Germany and Finland). In recent years, American government has introduced more central control over rent increases in England, a policy also followed by the Dutch government. Credit rating agencies have expressed concern that such rent controls limit the financial flexibility of landlords and might endanger long-term maintenance (Zukin, 1987). Gentrification as a Community Planning Strategy Developers have their own reason for instigating the idea of gentrification. For them, gentrification is just one developmental way of arranging and/or organizing a new community. In today’s world, planning and designing the organization of the community is not an easy task. There are certain considerations that policy makers and community planners have to see before deciding for a particular physical arrangement of the community or area. This is the very reason why there are strict guiding principles that policy makers and community planners follow in order to achieve a successful community plan. There are various approaches of planning the ‘arrangement’ of the community, which is also being followed as a way of gentrification. Some of possible arrangement is: 1. Zoning and separating the industrialized area from the residential area. This approach’ goal is to set an area for business establishments and another for the residential houses. There are businesses which would require bigger space or would be needing waste disposal areas which when smelled by children could be harmful. Zoning is the usual approach use by any government to effectively any efficiently uphold the land use policy. Ideally, zoning is set to separate industrial, commercial and residential functions, thereby controlling the form and density of any new land development. However, zoning is also seen to be an approach used in community planning to provide a line that would divide people with varied income and race background. Thus, zoning per se is believed to be causing the segregation even if its actual plan is not focused on that. This is because the codes of conduct under the principles of zoning reinforce segregation patterns that are created by discrimination in real estate (Angotti, 2004). Another method of zoning that is believed to be reinforcing residential segregation is the approach that allows most of the harmful, polluting infrastructure to be located only in the city's dwindling number of manufacturing districts. It should be noted that the number of people who are living in such areas are inexplicably the people with modest incomes and people of different skin color (Angotti, 2004). Best examples for these are the new Brooklyn that is established in New York. Unintentionally, the white men were able to ask the policymakers into choosing a different area to be zoned, rather than where they are living so that they would not need to relocate. And the policymakers actually approved such request. However when the black-stricken residential area did the same request about the zoning plan, they were declined for the reason that such zoning plan should be strictly implemented already, and has no rooms to evaluate or redesign a plan. 2. Another possible approach is separating the agricultural lands. These agricultural lands will be used for growing plants, raising animals or combined. 3. The third possible approach is segregating the residential lands based on racial differences of the residents. Assigning areas for the migrants and the natural residents is the common way of doing this. The above stated ways of community planning are just three among the many ways that can be used as basis to arrange and re arrange a community. There are different aspects to consider in physical planning of the community. Gentrification Overall Concept Goal Organizing and arranging areas for settlements always starts by using the strategies and knowledge of physical planning. Physical planning combined community designing is a product of evaluating other disciplines such as physiology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, behavioral sciences, philosophy, art history, and even fine arts, which are all facets of comfortable living. Moreover, physical community planning is focused on answering that various possible needs of the people in terms of physical, social, economic, and political aspects. Specifically, below are the objectives of physical community planning (Costonis, 1989): • To plan for the community which will answer all the possible considerations regardless of the plan’s simplicity and/or complexity • To establish a flexible plan with which varied groups will be able to use for different purposes It should be noted that normally, categorization, as a vial part of gentrification, is based on different researches about the basic human needs and perceived requirements about the wide range of concepts. Hence, before finalizing the nomenclature in detail, some background information can be of much help (Costonis, 1989). First of which is preparing the plan in a manner that it considers the two most essential components of the community: the physical environment and the user. The way people interacts with the environment and vice versa is a critical information for on this will rise all other background information regarding comfortable and efficient community living (Costonis, 1989). This is because the environment per se is the actual geography that users experience. An environment is composed of several elements such as masses (which include landforms, buildings, and structures), spaces (like parks and other types of open areas), and paths (which served as the linear travel ways). Users, on the other hand, are those who experience community design. They are those who literally who walk through cities and towns, visit the stores, and sit in parks. In doing this, they use physical, psychological, and sociological ‘senses’ to answer various human needs such as (Greene, 1982): • sensory satisfaction • safety and security • contain personal space and group space which will be for recreation, learning, socializing, and other group activities • diversity, mobility and self-development, and • sense of belonging, pride, and self-worth • beauty and aesthetic pleasure. Principles There are four principles of gentrification, on a physical basis. This includes (Alexander, et. al, 1987): 1. The design should work effectively for the convenience and comfort of the users. 2. The order of the plan should assure that users will become fully oriented to the environment and understand it. 3. The identity of each and every user should denote a visual image of the environment that mirrors special or unique qualities. 4. The appeal of the design should be characterized in a way that it will give pleasure to the users regardless of the time Gentrification as a Way of Residential Segregation Residential segregation is already happening, particularly the division of difference in economic status. This happens deliberately or not. However, that is not the real purpose of gentrification. For the references cited above, gentrification is designed to evaluate and organize a community in a way that every member would benefit from it. Needless to say its advantages is aimed for the people who will be residing in and out of the community. Yes, it can be inferred that, in many ways than one, gentrification enhances residential segregation. The areas for industrialized business are separated from the areas of agricultural ones. Urban is differentiated from rural. Residential houses are far from offices and building establishments. These are the most common arrangements that we now in the community and these are enough proofs that residential segregation is really at its peak. However, the other, or the negative side of residential segregation – the socio-economic variation of housing arrangement – cannot be attributed as a result of community planning alone. The designs surely did not specifically state that only rich people can live in an area or the poor ones should be living in a particular area only. This segregation based on socio-economic income of the family is the result, not of the design, but of the choices made by the users, the family, itself. Gentrification as a way of Social Stratification Social stratification, as the term implies, is the arrangement according to certain class, strata, and/or even race. It was Marx and Weber who first institutionalized the concept of class and status thus establishing the idea of social stratification. In today’s time, social stratification exist in a way that in a certain society or community, people are normally grouped together according to race or social status. Intentionally or not, people of same race and ethnical background tend to stay together. In the same manner, people of the same social status – like upper class or the rich versus the lower class or the poor – grouped together. Because of the idea of social stratification, the concept of racism and/or social discrimination has also been started. People of different ethnic background will tend to organize together, share the same values and perceptions which are normally opposed to what others have. This can be both beneficial and affective for the society as a whole. In the same manner, the grouping of people of varied social status or class offer both negative and positive implications in the society. The impact depends on how the people view the arrangement according to social class. Some, who are being grouped to the lower class, may take it as a challenge to aim higher and work harder, and some take it as a form of downgrading thus result to a negative attitude about it. As a whole, social stratification is both positive and negative. The intensity of its impact will always be dependent on how people view the type of classification being followed. Conclusion In many ways than one, gentrification enhances residential segregation, intentionally or not. However, it must be noted that the effect of such community planning is not always negative, like racial segregation and/socioeconomic segregation. Safety efficiency of the way of life is always the main concern of redesigning the community. It just so happen that racial and socio-economic segregation has always been the aftermath of residential segregation in community planning. References: Alexander, Christopher, et al. 1987. A New Theory of Urban Design. 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