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Sunday, 17 December 2017

Gentrification: Pros and Cons

The good side of gentrification is that it makes everything look better; nicer shops, streets, markets, better houses; getting rid of 'ghetto' like communities. But the bad side is that there's an increase in housing prices, which pushes out the people who live there.

I was born and raised in London. The class gap in the city has been getting larger and larger in the new Millennia, due to the rise of housing prices as areas get gentrified. As a result, people who grew up in areas that were once lowly priced end up moving out to poorer areas, which become 'ghettoized.' No one wants to live in a shit and shoddy area. I certainly don't. Poor, urban areas are nothing to shout about; the poorest boroughs in London include Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham. East London has the highest levels of crime and violence in the city.

With ghettoization comes gang violence; youths engaging in gun-and-knife crime, robbings, stabbings, all that awful stuff. This is because when people are poorer they become more 'desperate'; the Black Market is a quick way to make money, hence why youths in deprived areas turn to drug dealing. Young people in poorer areas are statistically more likely to come from broken homes and be raised by single-parent families. (Of course being raised by a single-parent doesn't necessarily follow that the parenting is going to be bad. But if there are two people working the household income is obviously higher, plus the child is getting love and support from two people rather than one).

I do see gentrification as an overall positive thing, because it transforms shitty areas into nice respectable ones. You have trendy shops opening, less crime, less poverty, and aesthetically the area looks better. However, it would make more sense for people's wages to increase in line with gentrification, so that locals could still afford to live there. Homelessness has increased by 65% in the UK over the last 7 years, with one in 200 people said to be homeless. It's very sad that this is one of the wealthiest and most affluent countries in the world, with liberal social attitudes and tolerance for people of all racial backgrounds. Yet poverty is still a massive problem here, especially for young people.


1 comment:

  1. eh i can kinda see both sides and i do feel bad for poor people that get priced out of their homes

