We moved to a great spot in the middle of everything but still in a suburb. We have a quarter acre but can get to Seattle or another large-ish city in less than 10 minutes. It's fantastic. I have no intentions to ever live in a downtown city environment- I like my privacy, quiet, and parking. But I also don't want to be in the boonies :D I know this area is kind of unique because Microsoft went off and built its HQ in a non-big city, which completely throws off all normal commuting conventions, and makes us fantastic with urban sprawl. But I wonder if there's something about city vs. suburbs vs. in-betweens... the burbs on the edge.

Bad public transportation also exists up in the northwest. For a supposedly green area, the Seattle metro public transportation is terrible. If you just need to get from Seattle to Seattle, you're golden. If you happen to live along the right bus line, it's great. But for most people who want to commute it doesn't work. I once looked at taking the bus to work- I would've had to take 3 buses, and to go southeast I would've had to go north, south, west, east. It would've taken an hour and a half versus my 35 minutes. No thank you.

I love that this sentence makes it sound like Florida is part of the southwest. Apparently geography was rearranged on me.

They weren't homes. They were tobocco warehouses and ciggarette factories and public baths and cold storage places left over from the industrial revolution through the early 1900s i guess era. If you have big ass buidlings that are no longer in use, and falling further into disrepair, but still have solid foundations and walls (bricks) and supports (hard wood beams) then why not rennovate them instead of just leaving them blank, as it were. It's not like anyone is being forced out. You can't force someone out of an abandoned building. They already abandoned it.

Yet it took forever for that to get approved. People are so short sighted. It makes us look so bad that our cities are like this.

kind of like a reverse midas touch? that's kinda cool.

You're just itching to be banned, aren't you?:rolleyes:

Man, I don't know. Harlem had a renaisance or whatever once but that was before the suburbs, i think the surburbs were described by Karl Marx and Peter Engles in "the Communist Manifesto" when they were talking about mixing up town and country so that you couldn't tell the difference. That is so wrong. I think the subdivisions and supercenters and all that drive through foodstuff is the result. Look at the colors of McDonald's, remind you of anything? It should: the old soviet flag. They're a bunch of commie pinko fry-kids.

The fry-kids don't even have names, they are just fry-kids. just like the nameless faceless workers of socialism.

But seriously, i do think it has more to do with class than with race. YOu can't just say "get rid of the blacks because some black people are trash" because some white people and other races are too, but there will always be trash, I just don't see at all why anyone would choose the suburbs in the first place.

The same negative of gentrification applies there.

So basiaclly, the negative is that it rocks the boat and upsets the status quo and the actual cities become where the rich/er people and poor people will move to the subdivsions? But I don't get how that last part happens, much less is forced. It's not like they evict people in Building A as soon as the rennovate Building B. Is it??

Sometimes.

Have you seriously never heard of the issue of gentrification?

I have heard of it, I just don't understand all of the negatives and what the arguements/reasonings against are.

ETA: I'm pretty sure I'm part of it. I just don't fully understand by statements like "people are being forced out" like literally forced out? As in, "hey your lease is up, some white people from the burbs want to move in so get out or else pay whatever rent" then that is wrong but is that really what is happening?

I remember back in 2005 it was predicted that the suburbs would look like the slums because of the high price of gas. People would rather live closer to their jobs. With gentrification and companies investing in poorer neighborhoods, it seems the fruits of those labor are coming to exist. Heck even where I have my current business. 10 year ago you could have bought the entire block for how much I pay for in mortgage. The good is you rehab a city. the bad is the elements that brought those neighborhoods down have to live somewhere. You are not really solving a problem just shifting it until it is time to shift again.

If the rent for a specific building goes from, say, $500/month to $2,500/month, the residents that were there before are not going to be able to afford it.

Oh. Okay, yeah that's messed up, people shouldn't be forced out like that. But who would pay $2,500.00 for the exact same apt. that was only $500.00? How would the landlord even get away with that, that is a 400% increase, were 400% worth of improvements done to the property?

If an area goes from being "nothing" to being "the next big thing," perceptions of what's acceptable will change.

I'll use Uptown Dallas as an example. It started out as "Little Mexico," but as attractions moved closer to the area, it became more desirable. Now, it's home to some of the most expensive real estate in the area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptown,_Dallas,_Texas

For Realz? I don't see why people would want to pay $400k for a 900 sq ft condo when they can get a 3,000 sq ft house with a yard and a driveway 20 mins outside town for $200k. Not everybody works downtown and some people want to own actual property, not just a unit in a building. While I prefer city living, I like it on a smaller scale a la Ann Arbor than Manhattan.

Landlords often rehab a building or an apartment to make it acceptable to raise the rent by 5x. They often don't spend enough on a place to warrant that but when you combine it with gentification that's what you get.

I live in a gentrified neighborhood. It's nice, but I'm aware of some of the problems. It makes me really glad that some people are unwilling to sell their smaller homes and I'll be sad if/when they do.