That which is known as gentrification is pretty much the taking over and the purchasing of by people and organizations with power, money, vision, and connections of specific neighborhoods or certain portions of those neighborhoods, of which these neighborhoods typically have an abundance of low-income or limited-income residents, and the homes are often somewhat dilapidated, and somewhat neglected; in which, as part of this process is the deliberate and purposeful displacing of those that are currently residents of that area, through whatever means that are most effective for the accomplishment of that task.
This thus means that the upshot of gentrification is the removal of those that were once part of that neighborhood, with the replacement by those that are now the new owners and new residents to it.
To the extent that gentrification rehabilitates neighborhoods, makes material improvements within those neighborhoods, improves the infrastructure in and around that neighborhood, and basically injects “new blood” into a given neighborhood, one could readily see this as being beneficial. Of course, as might be expected, those benefits have a tendency to incur to those that are the new residents of such, and less so to those that have been displaced, depending upon whether those so displaced, received anything of real benefit from such displacement.
Nobody should be real surprised by the existence of gentrification, for the thing about real estate is that it is always about location, location, and location; so that those that see a desirable area of which the prices of the real estate contained within that area, is significantly undervalued as compared to what comparable areas would be priced at, is the type of dynamic that is going to appeal to those that have the gumption to take a foresighted and calculated risk that will enable them a fair chance to make a good investment.
What often is not considered in regards to those properties, so taken over by gentrification, is how it came to be, that those of today’s limited income, or the lower middle class, were able to secure those desirable properties in the first place. The answer to that question has an awful lot to do with historic prejudices within societies, of which, white flight, such as back in the 1950s, from very nice residential areas, having been purchased at a “princely” sum by those of color in order to buy into those neighborhoods, and of which, by their purchasing of such, this often resulted in the consequence that the value of that neighborhood soon thereof, went down in value, though the mortgage obligation did not. Yet, fundamentally the location of the neighborhood, the infrastructure, and the homes themselves, were all quite good at the time of the purchase; but therein lies the rub, for once the infrastructure begins to decay or to leave, along with the personal income being somewhat problematic in regards to the good upkeep of the home and property, some of these once nice neighborhoods were invariably going to go into a spiral of decline.
So then, what has occurred, is that those that once flew the coop, so to speak, are now back. They are back, because they recognize the intrinsic quality of that location, and the second time around, white flight, has been replaced instead by white greed, so that the favored race is once again back in the saddle, taking back and recovering what they believe to be rightfully theirs, though in truth, it is not.