Gentrification

Leo

Leo

Well-known member
Thought this topic might as well have its own thread.

An interesting sort of a side note follow on to the NYC median rent posts in the "Pointless..." thread: the relationship between real estate developers and the Mister Sunday Night dance crew. And you thought it was just all about the party...

http://www.fastcompany.com/3033870/gentrification-inc

It is Sunday in Brooklyn, the July air oppressive. You get on the subway, heading for the depths of the borough, someplace no one you know lives--yet.

Off the train, phone and maps app in hand, you walk toward the pedestrian underpass of the noisy Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, meandering through a mix of residential buildings, bodegas, factories, and abandoned buildings. And then you find it: a huge, shady courtyard between two towering manufacturing buildings, strung with twinkling lights and tricked out with bars serving sangria, a taco stand, a dance floor, and most importantly, a DJ table.

You’ve arrived at Mister Sunday, one of the best daytime dance parties in New York. A sweaty, multi-ethnic tangle of scantily clad twenty- and thirtysomethings in barely-there rompers and jorts rub shoulders and butts on the dance floor with young parents with babies on their hips and aging disco-era veterans.

This throbbing, vibrant scene will play out each Sunday afternoon through the fall at a place called Industry City, a hulking 16-building industrial complex that had fallen on hard times since peaking in the mid-1900s manufacturing boom.

The hundreds of people who show up each week to party at Mister Sunday are out for a good time. What the carefree fun-seekers likely do not realize is that they are also a part of a powerful real-estate developer’s plan to remake Industry City--and the Sunset Park community in which it sits--into the Next Hot Property (with rents, of course, to match).
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owengriffiths

owengriffiths

Owen
I'm surprised the lengths the NYC property developers are going to to kickstart start a gentrification process through accommodating 'culture'. This side of the Atlantic they could probably get away with less proactive attempts to add cultural & historical value- realtors often get away with just talking this sort of stuff up with bullshit when in reality it's little different from most pieces of real estate. I assume the usual scenario with this kind of festival would usually have the promoters approaching the landowners ("can we use your semi derelict unprofitable estate which is on the wrong side of the tracks for a party"), but it seems the landowners were the ones who have instigated the whole thing ("come to our lovely 100 square acre piece of brownfield we've been landbanking for years, it's in no way a shit hole").

Taking a look at this place it looks a bit like what was used for the heist scene in the Dead Presidents film

DeadPresidents_Jose.jpg


It has that extremely institutional feel to it.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Interesting. One thing they're doing in the UK is building mock-ups of the flats in Hong Kong or Quatar or whatever for display and then just telling everyone that the real thing is in a cool area. People are buying £500,000 flats without looking at them and then turning up in London and realising that the area is horrible. You don't even need to gentrify to gentify. I'm not sure how much sympathy I have for someone who buys somewhere without looking at the area it's in but still...
 
trza

trza

Well-known member
Have you people read about the real estate markets in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Moscow, Rio De Janeiro? Crazy stuff happens, stuff like paying bribes just to get a chance to look at a decent apartment. Weird rules about building new buildings that just increase the cost of living, building on reclaimed land in earthquake zones. Urbanism is complicated stuff, cities are crowded places, people love to segregate themselves into "their" neighborhoods. Then they get angry about other people moving into "their neighborhood", when it was a completely different place just a few years ago. Where are the gentrification complainers when a neighborhood just totally turns to crap?
 
owengriffiths

owengriffiths

Owen
IdleRich said:
Interesting. One thing they're doing in the UK is building mock-ups of the flats in Hong Kong or Quatar or whatever for display and then just telling everyone that the real thing is in a cool area. People are buying £500,000 flats without looking at them and then turning up in London and realising that the area is horrible.
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Fancy investing in a penthouse in a soon to be built 34 storey skyscraper that is close to the Olympics. Yes this dream of yours is achievable. This one minute promotional video raises the bar for unintentional comedy



Breathtaking views of.... the Bow Roundabout. And it's on the wrong side of the Lea.
 
owengriffiths

owengriffiths

Owen
trza said:
Have you people read about the real estate markets in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Moscow, Rio De Janeiro? Crazy stuff happens, stuff like paying bribes just to get a chance to look at a decent apartment. Weird rules about building new buildings that just increase the cost of living, building on reclaimed land in earthquake zones. Urbanism is complicated stuff...
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Funnily enough the Japanese build houses with the intention of knocking them down again in a few decades, whether they are in good condition or not. It's a relic from the time when buildings were expected to be destroyed every few decades due to earthquakes & the like. And yet now they have earthquake proof concrete housing estates that will last a century or more- except the plumbing system rots away after four decades and as it's been positioned in load bearing walls it costs so much to replace that you might as well bulldoze the whole building and redevelop. Built in obsolescence taken to an extreme level.
 
yyaldrin

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
trza said:
Have you people read about the real estate markets in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Moscow, Rio De Janeiro? Crazy stuff happens, stuff like paying bribes just to get a chance to look at a decent apartment. Weird rules about building new buildings that just increase the cost of living, building on reclaimed land in earthquake zones. Urbanism is complicated stuff, cities are crowded places, people love to segregate themselves into "their" neighborhoods. Then they get angry about other people moving into "their neighborhood", when it was a completely different place just a few years ago. Where are the gentrification complainers when a neighborhood just totally turns to crap?
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Where can I read about this?
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
IdleRich said:
Interesting. One thing they're doing in the UK is building mock-ups of the flats in Hong Kong or Quatar or whatever for display and then just telling everyone that the real thing is in a cool area. People are buying £500,000 flats without looking at them and then turning up in London and realising that the area is horrible. You don't even need to gentrify to gentify. I'm not sure how much sympathy I have for someone who buys somewhere without looking at the area it's in but still...
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The big Guardian article on Woodberry Down http://www.theguardian.com/society/...tion-how-woodberry-down-became-woodberry-park
talked about this process a lot. I know someone who lives there, and he was a bit sceptical about some of the stories contained therein.
 
trza

trza

Well-known member
My "insider knowledge" tells me that the people selling the flats like to have blonde English women as sales agents. Something about blonde English women getting foreign guys to spend money, lots of it, they are supposedly good at it.
 
trza

trza

Well-known member
Long read on East Palo Alto, including bits from Raegan era California:
East Palo Alto has been portrayed as a haven of affordability for a low-income and primarily black and Latino community and alternately as a stubbornly intractable core of poverty and violence amid Silicon Valley’s glittering wealth.

In 1992, the city earned the moniker “Murder Capital of the U.S.A.” after having the highest homicide per capita rate in the country. Three years later, its high school students became the center of the Michelle Pfeiffer movie “Dangerous Minds,” with the Coolio single “Gangsta’s Paradise” on the soundtrack.

But today, with Facebook constructing a Frank Gehry-designed office complex that will let the company support roughly 7,000 workers while Palo Alto and Menlo Park balk at building housing even though median home prices have soared beyond $2 million, East Palo Alto may change enormously over the next decade.
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http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/10/east-of-palo-altos-eden/
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Patrick Swayze said:
Cereal Killer
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I'll see your cereal café and raise you a crisp sandwich pop-up shop - in Belfast:

http://www.itv.com/news/2015-01-12/...-shop-sells-out-just-two-hours-after-opening/

The city centre café boasts 35 different flavours of crisp, mostly Tayto crisps but with some Walkers on offer too, as well as a variety of breads and sauces.

Traditional-cut is represented along with novelties like Monster Munch and Frazzles.

The shop is the brainchild of Andrew McMenamin, who transformed his business That Wee Café in Bedford Street after reading a spoof article on satirical website The Ulster Fry.

The Fry posted an article mocking the opening of the Cereal Killer Café in London - but when the piece went viral, Mr Mcmenamin decided to cash in.
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Real life is increasingly satire-proof, don't you think? Things that would have made a good gag in Nathan Barley a decade ago are now being treated as serious business ventures, and more often than not succeeding.
 
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benjybars

benjybars

village elder.
Mr. Tea said:
Real life is increasingly satire-proof, don't you think? Things that would have made a good gag in Nathan Barley a decade ago are now being treated as serious business ventures, and more often than not succeeding.
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yep.

a poncy new place has opened in Harringay (where the rate of gentrification in the last couple of years has been pretty crazy)

http://www.harringayonline.com/forum/topics/happy-opening-day-harringay-local-store-harringaylocal

"counter made from a recycled school basketball court"

"wonderfully innovative jams & marmalades"

jesus.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
If it's not a greengrocers/bakery/offie, pub, kebab shop or a somewhat tacky clothes or jewellery shop, it doesn't belong in Harringay, dammit! :mad:

Green Lanes is still my favourite place I've lived in London. Or was at the time, at least, not been there for a couple of years.
 
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benjybars

benjybars

village elder.
Mr. Tea said:
If it's not a greengrocers/bakery/offie, pub, kebab shop or a somewhat tacky clothes or jewellery shop, it doesn't belong in Harringay, dammit! :mad:

Green Lanes is still my favourite place I've lived in London. Or was at the time, at least, not been there for a couple of years.
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Nah it's changed A LOT in two years mate!

Not that I'm even saying all of these changes are necessarily bad (I like a wide selection of independently brewed craft ales as much as the next dickhead).

But yeah, it's changed.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF GENTRIFICATION.
BY ZAIN KHALID

- - - -
Then I saw when the Landlord broke one of the rent-controlled seals. I heard one of the four living creatures saying as with a voice of thunder, “Gentrify.” I looked, and behold, a green horse, and he who sat on it had a mason jar; and a fedora was his crown, and he went out pickling and to pickle. 
— Millennials 6:1, New Standard Greenpoint Bible (NSGB)

Brine
Greenpoint biblical scholars from the early 21st century were the first to interpret this horseman as not only the emergence of artisanal pickle shops, but of all unnecessary goods. It is said that after Brine visits your village, products will be made out of coconut oil for no reason whatsoever. The horse’s green color represents the thousands of dollars that will soon be wasted on items like serrano pepper dishwashing liquid.

- - -
When He broke the second seal, another, a horse with tortoise shell glasses went out; and to the rider it was granted to take peace from the newly acronym-ed neighborhood, and that men would drolly insult one another; and a great Twitter account was given to him. 
— Millennials 6:2, NSGB

Snark
Snark is thought to make his first appearance at a house party with a DJ who is “the truth,” where people say Vice showed up, even though Vice probably did not show up. Chalkboards will materialize outside of local stores as if from thin air, and they will have written on them a quote from Bill Murray or a reference to the chalkboard itself in an attempt to be what the experts call “meta.” Residents will be mocked for their inability to taste notes of stone fruit in single-origin Ugandan espresso.

- - -
The third seal was broken by Him, and verily there was a horse the color of poached egg; he who sat on it had a food and cocktail menu in his hands. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of mimosas for Denise, and three bellinis for Kyle; but do not separate the hollandaise.” 
— Millennials 6:3, NSGB

Brunch
There are those who believe Brunch to be the most destructive of the horsemen. Once he takes hold, an underage girl will line the streets with vomit because she heard once that tomato juice cancels out vodka. Brunch is often followed by the demon Tapas who ensures appetites are never more than whet. Wine will be served out of thimbles and all will despair.

- - -
When the Landlord broke the fourth and final seal, a ravenous horse emerged; and he who sat on it had the name Whole Foods; and Urban Outfitters was with him. Authority was given to them over the remaining area, to kill with overpriced chicken breast and with Vampire Weekend vinyls and with alpine-style cheeses and by the small dogs of the purse. 
— Millennials 6:4, NSGB

Whole Foods
As Whole Foods arrives, hope departs. Ethnic restaurants will be replaced with half an aisle dedicated to “international ingredients.” Greek will be the only variety of yogurt and the quality of kale will be as high as the rent for an alcove studio. Lana Del Rey will be elected to the city’s council. There will be a great migration of former residents to more affordable housing. As they are loading their U-Hauls, one of them, a man without a ukulele, will look to the heavens and ask “Why?” He will hear the voice whisper a single word: “Kombucha.”
 
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