Regeneration without new land for suburbs created the problem of Haringey

If you restrict the availability of land for housing, poorer parts of town get gentrified - "regenerated" as we like to say in England. And, because we've restricted land for housing the poor people who live in those gentrifying areas lose out:

And that displays the flaw behind the creative class theory up to now. The idea itself is excellent–creative class professionals enhance urban cultures and economies, and should be welcomed. But cities that have embraced them so far, such as San Francisco and Austin, have not anticipated for this by allowing the necessary new housing. And the results are predictable: wealthier professionals are fighting with poorer service-class workers over the same set neighborhoods and housing stocks–and the latter group is losing.

Right now - as Claire Kober has discovered - the political consequences of this trend are problematic. Not because the people opposing gentrification have got any better proposals than the gentrifiers and regenerators but because a bunch of left wing agitators are riding to power on the back of promising a better world without really explaining how. And doing it violently. It's not just Momentum agitators in Haringey but a trend seen in Barcelona, Seattle, Berlin, San Francisco and Sydney. In every case existing residents are promised new homes, protected rents and the benefits of a delightfully shiny regeneration and, in every case, those residents see wealthy incomers changing their world.

As it happens, I think that local leaders like Claire Kober deserve credit for their efforts - it's not their fault that we've had four decades of urban containment in London - but they should also be saying to people like London's mayor and whoever is in the revolving door as housing minister this week that the city needs space to grow. Central London has pretty close to the world's highest rents (Manhattan and Hong Kong are worse but they're islands so have an excuse) yet nobody is prepared to say that it is wrong-headed planning policies that are to blame not foreigners, property developers, landlords or local council leaders.

.....

Why we're so agitated about 'gentrification' (and how London needs a 'Green Belt' review)

****

As one of the self-important semi-rioters attacking the Cereal Killer cafe put it:

While I understand people’s annoyance at property damage please put it into the context of the violence of poverty, hunger and homelessness many thousands of Londoners are being subjected to. The cereal cafe was back open on Sunday morning while the destruction caused by gentrification continues - as will the fight back.

A veritable avalanche of concerned articles now tumble into the UK press - following in the footsteps of the same words about different places: Berlin, Sydney, Seattle and San Francisco. For some the criticism centres on the wealth of new arrivals or else on the mundane daily lives of those new residents - on the Google Bus.

But always and everywhere the thing that drives the attack on 'gentrification' is the cost of living in these cities and, in particular, the cost of housing. Even when people try to make it out to be more complicated by saying its "a complex, layered suite of intersecting measures" they end up talking about housing:

Given crippling student debt, rental costs that even those on “average salaries” can’t afford and the hyper-gentrification of previously affordable urban areas, even middle-class people have a right to be angry at an urban capitalism that is pricing them (and their children) out of the city.

So, given that it's housing that's the problem, perhaps we should ask why this is the case. Not my coming up with instant fixes like rent caps or rationing but by looking at the underlying reasons, which boils down to supply and demand. And especially supply:

By rationing land, urban containment policy drives up the price of housing and has been associated with an unprecedented loss of housing affordability in a number of metropolitan areas in the United States and elsewhere. Urban containment policy has also been associated with greater housing market volatility. This is a particular concern given the role of the 2000s US housing bubble and bust in precipitating the Great Financial Crisis that resulted in a reduction of international economic output.

And this exactly describes the situation in London. Elsewhere in England this doesn't apply - population densities for the London boroughs are, almost without exception, higher than anywhere else (even a place like Portsmouth that's constrained by its geography). For inner London these densities are three times greater than in Manchester or Bristol. There is little reason to change or review 'Green Belts' around Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds - other than the understandable preference for people to live in or near those 'Green Belts' - but for London, ending the policy of urban containment and densification is absolutely essential if problems with affordability and price volatility are to be avoided. Moreover, because London is so critical to the UK economy these decisions should not be left merely to the Mayor of London (or a collection of borough and district council leaders).

The consequence of failing to do something to address this problem isn't just more unpleasant rioters but a threat to the golden goose that is London's economy. Without a workforce able to access your jobs, the businesses will look elsewhere. We might hope this is Leeds, Manchester or Cardiff but it's just as likely to be Brussels, Frankfurt or Milan. Maybe even Cape Town, Djakarta or Lagos.

....

Gentrification should be welcomed by cities not treated as a curse

One of the single most important challenges facing Bristol and cities like it as they grow their economies is how to do development without doing gentrification. I set out from the start that I believe gentrification to be a social ill.

To appreciate just how stupid this statement is, you have first to note that the man who said it was very nearly elected executive mayor of Bristol. Marvin Rees was the Labour candidate in 2012 and fancies another go at getting elected next year. And Marvin believes that 'maginalised communities' must be protected from

...the focus on a high tech economy in which the highly educated are uniquely placed to exploit the opportunities and rising property prices and rents so that historically poor areas become increasingly unaffordable to their long established lower income traditional communities and their children.

This suggests that Marvin feels ordinary working-class Bristol folk won't be able to get good jobs in that exciting new Bristol that economic growth creates - they're excluded, as Marvin puts it, from "...the city of street art, the Shaun the Sheep tour, festivals, balloons, bridges, Brunel, the hipster and the Tesco riot." What a depressing vision for a city - you can't invest in buying a house, opening a coffee shop or brewing craft beer because that might exclude 'traditional communities'.

We see a lot of this anti-growth rhetoric wrapped up in a package dubbed 'opposing gentrification'. And resisting the blandishments of people like Marvin Rees is essential if cities are to reduce deprivation, create opportunity and develop into places where people want to live rather than places people want to escape. Marvin needs to ask himself a question about those traditional communities he cites - St Pauls, Easton and Southville. Do people growing up there who succeed stay there or do they leave for a place, often not far away, that they think is better?

I recall an old colleague who was born and brought up in Chapeltown, a part of Leeds as noted for its riots as for its culture. This colleague, Robert was his name, insisted that he would stay in Chapeltown: "these kids need a role model who isn't a gangster or a drug dealer". Some while later I ran into Robert again and he had succeeded - thriving business, got married, child on the way and living in Harrogate. So much for staying in Chapeltown.

Without gentrification this is what happens - the best from those 'traditional communities' move away as success makes that possible and the gap they leave is filled by a new generation of poor people. As my colleague Robert noted, the roles models for youngsters - other than pop stars, boxers and footballers - consist of criminals, gangsters and wheeler-dealers. In a gentrified neighbourhood there's a whole load of people - many from pretty ordinary backgrounds - who provide examples of success without negatives.

It is madness to want to preserve poor communities out of some misplaced sense of social solidarity yet this is precisely what people like Marvin Rees want, this captures the lack of aspiration and rejection of opportunity that results in places remained stagnant, dying slowly from neglect. It is a recipe for ossifying the social deprivation gleefully described by Marvin in his article. Places like Bristol - in truth most every place - needs those bohemian sorts, hipsters and the like if they are to succeed:

It gets down to what I call "the eye" - certain people have it. "The eye" in this regard is really about intuition and it allows you to spot things and live well without very much money. When my wife and I were building our first brand, Red or Dead, in the early 1980s, we opened a shop on Neal Street – now a buzzing part of fashionable London, but then it had no fashion shops and was a rather dowdy area stocked full of white good repair shops. We took a risk and acted outside of the mainstream. Our approach allowed us to spot a place where city investment and mainstream money wouldn't go. And it worked. We grew our business by spotting Neal Street equivalents in half a dozen UK cities and another dozen locations around the world.

Politicians and activists - most green sorts and the 'progressive left' - want to exclude people like Wayne Hemingway from their cities or else to corral them into specific regeneration areas thereby killing the initiative and innovation they bring. Let's not get this wrong, gentrification isn't the be all and end all - if we want kids from St Pauls to succeed we need great schools, good training and a wide variety of what they used to call 'jobs with opportunities'. But attacking success in the strange belief that its investment, excitement and choice excludes people can only result in less growth, less development and a poorer place.

....

Rags, swag and pet food - Gentrification, markets and the grocery store...

Scott Beyer writes about gentrification:

If you’re an urban pioneer who settled in downtown Cleveland sometime in the past decade, you’re probably happy with the neighborhood’s progress. Even as the city as a whole has continued to lose population, the central area has revived thanks to an influx of young and educated newcomers. Downtown Cleveland right now has its highest-ever population, with more than 13,000 residents and lots of new housing developments on the way. There are more than 4,000 hotel rooms, with another thousand expected by 2016. And residents today enjoy a more walkable neighborhood, as new restaurants and bars open around old cultural institutions like the theater district. If you are looking for a large grocery store, however, you’re still out of luck.

Partly this reflects the high income of those gentrifying folk plus their preference for eating out - not so much at fancy sit down restaurants but at those street food places, coffee shops and bars that sell slices of cured pig. But it also raises a question about the economics of food retailing and the truth that retailers (especially convenience retailers) are entirely driven by 'counting chimneys' - or whatever the urban high rise equivalent of 'counting chimneys' might be. If there aren't enough people living in the area, there won't be a grocery store.

The response has been subsidy or financial incentive (or even worse - and UK planners are very guilty here - use class constraint). The problem with this approach is that it doesn't change the economic reality - if there aren't enough customers spending enough money then the store will close once the incentive dries up.

The answer - rather than chasing national retail chains or hoping for some hipsterish spin on the corner shop - may lie with something that can be great but is too often neglected by local authorities: the market. The problem is how to strike the balance between the municipal market's traditional customer base and the wealthier, trendier folk following in the wake of gentrification.

The commodification of the shopping experience, with its attendant fetishization of taste and provenance, is still in its early phase in Kirkgate Market, as indeed it is in other British markets. In this sense, Kirkgate and other similar markets are on the gentrification frontier.

Part of the irony here is that the 'hipster' is searching for authenticity, for the sense of discovery and difference, yet doesn't realise what is the authentic and genuine in an English municipal market (swag, rag and pet food as one trader described it to me a few years ago).  I have criticised Leeds Council's approach to Kirkgate - preferring long leases and high rents in the Grade I listed part of the market buildings thereby creating something of a false environment. This is not because I'm against long leases or higher rents per se but because it is very clear that this strategy doesn't work.

Given that markets are in publicly-owned spaces (whether open air or covered) and not operated for profit, there is the opportunity to both support the traditional low income customer base (who want swag, rag and pet food) and also to encourage new customers - whether from new immigrant groups or from those trendy gentrifying sorts. In and around Bradford's Oastler Centre (I still think I was wrong to agree to changing its name from John Street Market) we can see this mix in play as the old mix of stalls (meat, fish, greengrocery, clothing and cafes) is supplemented by stalls serving the new immigrant communities - the spice stall, the stalls catering for African, Philipino and middle-eastern communities. What has yet to happen is for new places to open that complement the customers served by the bars and cafes opening in adjacent streets.

But I'm not here to talk about Bradford's regeneration but to look more generally at how gentrification delivers both benefits and problems. The benefits come from the investment and from the spending power of a wealthier customer base -- no-one can deny that this can, and does, transform places. But the downside is that the improvements are all kecky-pooky. We get nice bars, cafes and specialist food or clothing retailers but the everyday stuff of the high street - grocery, hardware and so forth - doesn't arrive or at least doesn't arrive so quickly.

As Scott Beyer concludes (after two decades of gentrification) in Cleveland where the first general grocery, Heinen's, has opened:

Retail options are now focused around a few scattered nodes, namely the East Fourth Street pedestrian mall, the 5th Street Arcades and the Warehouse District. For the neighborhood to be truly livable, say Starinsky and others, the city will need to fill in the gaps with additional retail options. Attracting the right mix of stores will require continued focus by public officials and private groups alike. But downtown residents will no doubt look at the opening of Heinen’s as a crucial step in the right direction.

....

In praise of gentrification...

****

When we look at the worst examples of urban decline we see two sorts of thing - the desperate nature of life in such marginal communities and the sense of human spirit, the little glimmers of brilliance that suggest something better may emerge. But the reality of life in the slums - whether it's in East London, Merseyside or Detroit - is not served by pretending that such communities are worth sustaining.

Yet by attacking gentrification this is precisely what we are doing. By arguing that a process of improvement driven by new people arriving in a place is a bad thing we think the place was fine as it was. Let's be clear from the start that by gentrification I don't mean slum clearance and the forcible relocation of a poor community so as to replace them with a more 'suitable' population. Gentrification is a process driven by individual choices made by free consumers not a planned and directed change under the guidance of architects and urban designers.

And wherever we see this process there are voices raised against it - voices made more 'authentic' by being from the 'community' that gentrification dislocates:

Places such as Kingsland Road and Mare Street have become the trendiest places to be, but that has bought unrest of a different sort. The people who live here are not happy.

There are a lot of issues with the social cleansing that is becoming increasingly evident around here.

I try to keep away from the word 'hipster', and call them trendies instead. But it all means the same: gentrification. This means cleaning an area up and saying if you can’t afford to be here then you have to leave.

So says Pauline Pearce the women who famously stood up to rioters from her 'community' as they looted and pillaged their way through Hackney. Now she says those same young people cannot afford to stay in the area because the 'hipsters' (worse still the article is couched by Guardian sub-editors to portray the change racially charged - black versus white - rather than merely rich against poor) are charging £5 for a cappuccino.

What Mrs Pearce is discovering is the reality for a lot of young people. Not just the young people from poor black communities in inner London but young people from the leafy suburbs. Does she really think that a young man or woman brought up in Chislehurst or Cheam can afford to stay there other than by squatting with Mum and Dad? So they move and take with them their hipsterish ways with some - pale and wan - landing up in Hackney. Where they set about making their mark on the place with cafes and restaurants, bars and shops that suit the lifestyle.

And the existing inhabitants - the ones who haven't sold up to enable that hipster immigration - look on wondering what's happening, how (as Mrs Pearce puts it):

It has caused real problems for the youngsters. A lot of them don’t know where they should go now, or where their real communities are. Many of the venues they would have enjoyed in the past have shut down. Instead, we’ve been left with these trendy places that nobody can afford to go to. 

Gentrification changes places. I remember East Dulwich and Peckham from my youth thirty-odd years ago - one a slightly tired, dowdy place, the other somewhere you just didn't visit. So when I read Helen Graves' Food Stories it is with a sense of wonder that these places, once so tatty and dangerous, are now filled with fine eateries and vibrant life. Such is the process of gentrification, a process where people move to the margins of their tolerance in order to afford life in London.

When I left London it was because it had lost its appeal. For sure there was still the West End and a pretty decent nightlife but the choice was living on a train shuttling back and forth to work from Gravesend or Basildon, or finding a pokey flat out east where you needed three locks on the door and daren't go out at night. And the life we glimpse in Pauline Pearce's moan and Helen Graves' celebrations simply didn't exist.

Now London seems to have found its spirit again. Partly this is about migration both from overseas and from elsewhere in the UK. But mostly it's about gentrification - those hipsters, bohemians, trendies and what have you. I see little sparks of this process now escaping from London to places like Salford, Leeds, perhaps even Bradford. And this is a good thing, it is how urban places evolve. It is much better than the soulless, organised new garden cities that the planners would have us living in with their neat lawns, keep off signs and concrete shopping centres.

It's important we accommodate existing communities rather than force them to another place. But their presence should not be a signal to try and prevent the process of change in urban places. Indeed, this change presents opportunities for that community not just for the incoming hipsters and trendies. The change is not a threat but a challenge, gentrification should be a boon not a bone of contention.

....

Why Spike Lee is wrong. Some thoughts on gentrification.

American film producer, Spike Lee went off on one about the gentrification of Brooklyn:

Then comes the motherfuckin' Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can't discover this! We been here. You just can't come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherfuckin' African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can't do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father's a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherfuckin'-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin' people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He's not — he doesn't even play electric bass! It's acoustic! We bought the motherfuckin' house in nineteen-sixty-motherfuckin'-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the fuck outta here!

Language aside this is a pretty classic critique of gentrification - wealthy hipster incomers buying up cheap properties and doing them up. Soon followed by trendy bars, whole food stores and the other paraphernalia of hip modern urban life. And the place is unwelcoming to the people who were living there before the trend-setting bearded ones.

The problem is that, despite Spike's passion, he's wrong. That Christopher Columbus Syndrome applied as much to his Dad as it does to these white folk moving in on Brooklyn. Indeed, gentrification is a necessary urban process not something to be prevented. More to the point, as Spike polemically explains, the consequence of gentrification is better schools, more responsive public services, safer streets and, overall, a more pleasant environment.

Gentrification isn't slum clearance - people are buying property on the open market and improving it, they aren't rounding up poor folk and marching them to the next slum up the line. And don't those poor folk also benefit from better schools, safer streets and the litter getting cleared up?

Here's a slightly different take on gentrification - it contains some angst and a warning but it isn't the 'this-is-my-place-you-can't-live-here' attitude that Spike Lee (and many others who attack gentrification as anti-poor). This is Atlanta:

Personally, I credit her (together with many other people) for creating a lot of value over the years. Compassionate value. But that’s where irony steps in. Because value, once created, doesn’t just sit quietly in a vacuum. It attracts people and money and change at an increasingly accelerated pace. After the risk oblivious — my wife and me in our youthful naiveté — come the risk aware (folks who recognize the challenges associated with disadvantaged or depressed areas but are willing to accept them, at least conditionally) and, finally, the risk averse (those who’re only attracted to an area once certain levels of safety, predictability and comfort present themselves).

The process of gentrification does exclude but, in this case, it took 20 years. And in that 20 years the prior residents of the area have benefited from those improved schools, those better services and those safer streets. The very things they'd urged politically for years but that were delivered in a (relative) breath by economic change. Moreover, some of those 'natives' - if that's a word we can really use - will still be there happy and smiling because their lives were made better by gentrification. OK it will be a pleasant, maybe a little dull, middle-class neighbourhood rather than an edgy urban place.

However, we aren't all hipsters and seeking affordable urban edge isn't what we do. We want a safe, reliable, pleasant and stable community - Cheam rather than Peckham. And gentrification - not always but mostly - delivers just that sort of community.

...