The topic of this post is gentrification. A reader had sent an email to the TNC (The New Colonist) Pittsburgh email group asserting that I.... The topic of this post is gentrification. A reader had sent an email to the TNC (The New Colonist) Pittsburgh email group asserting that I was a proponent of gentrification. That's been a hot button topic in urban situations for some time. It's also a hard one to get a handle on.

First, you can't stop a neighborhood from changing. It either gets better or falls apart.

We'd all like neighborhoods to be cheap and cool forever, but that's not reality anywhere. (Name one that has been cheap and cool for more than a decade or so!) Urban neighborhoods stay cheap and cool for a while until the houses start falling down or the crime rises beyond the tolerable level for most people. Or in the other direction, it becomes unaffordable, or at least living in a big space becomes unaffordable so we'd have to change our lifestyle to live there. Sometimes people move into an urban area in the second half of a "gentrification" process and then scream that they don't want gentrification, which really means "more gentrification," ie "post me" gentrification.

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