On the flip side, urbanists are regarded with mistrust from multiple corners. They get perceived as elitists, as niche interest groups ("spandex-clad cyclists"), or as shills for corporate developers. Grassroots YIMBY groups especially are frequently accused of being phony "astroturf" organizations cooked up by tech and development companies.

In the worst cases, in cities where neighborhood change is most profound and threatening, this mistrust leads to perverse alliances. San Francisco is the preeminent example of this: a city where well-heeled, mostly white, homeowners and poor, mostly non-white, renters are united in the belief that what they need to do to save their city is to put up walls against invading forces.

The siege mentality that can pervade both sides of this discourse is stifling. Urbanists, instead of dismissing gentrification concerns as another face of NIMBYism (they're not), must articulate an affirmative agenda of a "gentrification-proof" city. This means a city in which new investment in the built environment generates real wealth, and in which that wealth is equitably shared, including with those who have been systematically excluded from enjoying it in the past. It means a city in which renters and homeowners alike have meaningful stakes in the places where they live.

In Part 1 of this series, "Gentrification or Economic Exclusion," I described how semantic battles over what "gentrification" means and whose experience qualifies often miss the point, and result in smug dismissals of the very real problems faced by poor people in poor neighborhoods. The relevant fact is that marginalized people tend to be excluded from economic opportunity whether or not their neighborhoods are gentrifying in some particular sense.

Not only that, but the experience on the ground in persistently poor neighborhoods checks many of the boxes associated with media coverage and popular understandings of gentrification:

Extremely high rates of involuntary displacement / housing insecurity

Rising rents as a cause of such displacement

Lack of investment in the built environment—and what highly visible investment occurs is not initiated by longtime residents, is not responsive to their desires, and often does not benefit them

Lack of community ownership; a sense that predatory outsiders are "colonizing" the neighborhood for profit (whether or not they're moving into it themselves)

Of course people in Buffalo and Cleveland and Detroit are worried about gentrification — what they experience every day is akin to what they read about people in Brooklyn and Seattle and Austin experiencing. If your first impulse is to give them a lecture about how what their neighborhood really needs is more development, you have missed the point. You haven't heard what they're asking: "How will we benefit?"

In Part 2, "Who Benefits From Neighborhood Improvements?", I discussed how gentrification critics in cities still dealing with pervasive poverty and disinvestment are correct in another sense: the decay of their neighborhoods is not unrelated to gentrification, but is in fact part of a process of which gentrification is the flip side. Disinvestment in a neighborhood over decades creates the conditions for exploitation of the rent gap: the gap between the potential value of development on the land and the value currently being realized. This exploitation is a second round of profit-taking on the land, and those windfall profits very rarely fall to the people who have been living there through the lean years.

Both parts of the cycle involve economic exploitation with little upside for the poorest residents — so again, this is what you should hear when you hear anti-gentrification rhetoric. It's not, "We don't want our neighborhood to improve." It's, "We want a controlling stake in it. We deserve to benefit this time." And they're right.

Gentrification as a Symptom of a Distorted Development Model

We talk about neighborhoods as though their fates are independent of each other, and as though decline and gentrification are opposite problems instead of two sides of a coin. This is clear in a lot of urbanist language, such as Joe Cortright's statement at City Observatory: "Concentrated poverty is a bigger problem than gentrification." The point made is valid and important. But that either-or wording elides a vital piece of the story.

It's more instructive to think of both concentrated poverty and gentrification as symptoms of a deeper distortion in the way we finance development and the public policies we use to direct and encourage it. The form of any city tells you a lot about the economic ecosystem that produced it. When downtown Cleveland sprouts new high-rises, the nearby Ohio City neighborhood sprouts microbreweries, and much of the rest of Cleveland sprouts weeds around abandoned homes (15,000 and counting), it's obvious that many Cleveland residents are poorly served. What kind of economy is doing this?