Gentrification Blog: 13

Every time I go to my friends' apartments on Taylor Street I know that I am seeing gentrification happen all around UIC campus. I live on the corner of Roosevelt and Halsted, and years ago, the stukel towers and university village didn't exist! In this class and one of my other soc classes, I've learned a lot of things about gentrification. I feel like when we look at the term, we just think of places being torn town and they become innovated and rebuilt into more expensive places to live. I actually looked up the definition of 'gentrification' on wikipedia and on there it said that gentrification is linked to reducing crime rates, increasing property values and renewing community activism. If you walk past Little Italy on Taylor and Racine, you see a lot of local shops and restaurants and new housing. A lot of apartments have been built there and mostly college students live in them, since the working class that was once there may not be able to afford it now.

My and my friend thought about gentrification and this is what we came up with:

"Gentrification is when white people with too much time and money on their hands get bored in their upperclass neighborhoods. they look for new ways to make money and expand their urban power by buying up cheap property in urban areas and giving new life to the region via renovation and construction of new buildings/business districts that cater to a growing populace of young urbanites. the newly built areas offer the the possibility of great financial returns on the real estate investments because the well-to-do white folks who buy up the property buy cheap and sell high after they fix up the neighborhood. these border neighborhoods tend to be very popular with the "hipper" young adults in cities. said hipsters are concerned with two things when looking for housing - 1. the cheapest rent possible so they can afford their expensive smoking and designer jean addictions and 2. being viewed as on the "cutting edge of trend setting". freshly revamped (gentrified) neighborhoods give hipsters the best of BOTH of these worlds. the new neighborhoods aren't established enough to demand expensive rent price tags but also maintain cultural integrity of the former lower-income inhabitants, thus adding a "flavor" and "flair" to the area, producing that perfect blend of urban intriguing chic that hipsters are so fond of. the changing of formerly undesirable neighborhoods into trendy hot spots has really taken off in recent history and is quite controversial as it displaces thousands of lower income inhabitants out of their homes and eventually the gentrified neighborhood grows so popular that it becomes another rich white hood, and the new generation of inhabitants start the whole process over again and the cycle repeats at nauseum. in essence, bored white men kick poor people out of their neighborhoods, turn dumps into hipster chic apartments/condos, and create hip neighborhoods in the outskirts of urban areas."

I think our definition beats wikipedia's.