Jonathan Levine Quotes

I think it's good if areas get upgraded and gentrified, as long as the people who always lived there can stay. But they get pushed out to some place.

My take on gentrification and change is it's usually always a better thing, because when you see all these businesses open and flourishing, that means there are more jobs.

I've been sort of gentrification-obsessed. Right before I left Oakland in 2012, I was feeling it. Now I go back sporadically, and the change is drastic.

Gentrification is a problem of poor planning.

We should concentrate our work not only to a separated housing problem but housing involved in our daily work and all the other functions of the city.

I was a little lacking in vision as mayor - I failed to understand the significance that housing and the revitalization of housing means for a city.

Working on the film really made me confront my opinions about change and gentrification.

The city ... is involved in the fight for its life. One of the critical battlegrounds is the struggle to preserve middle class residential neighborhoods.

I have lived in this city my whole life and have seen the way gentrification has changed it. I'm not necessarily against transplants, as 75 percent of my good friends, roommate, and boyfriend are not native New Yorkers.

Gentrification and housing shortages are complex issues.

I would encourage more development in the boroughs outside of Manhattan as well. I think it's great that this natural emergence has occurred in the lower part of Midtown, but there's tremendous potential in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island as well.

I believe the challenge the city faces is attracting continued development into the inner and western part of Jersey City. Nobody should be left behind as Jersey City continues to prosper and grow.

We can't have Harlem become one borough for the rich.

I think that there will always be a need for Housing and Urban Development.

You can use up all the slums for new development. In all the cities of the world, there are large areas of these. Also, you can avoid the spread of these silly suburban houses. Chicago has thousands of them all over the place.

If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties should continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.

I used to walk in the Bowery in the early 1980s, and it was not safe. It went from this to Disneyland under Giuliani and Bloomberg. This is now one of the best-run big cities in the world.

The history of black people in Manhattan is a story of people getting pushed farther uptown as land acquires new uses and increases in value.

San Francisco is a wonderful city, but you do have housing issues. If tech companies don't do the right thing, they can dislocate a lot of what makes San Francisco special. At Workday, we want to be on the right side of that.

I had never heard this term before - gente-fication - which is also happening in Portland, Houston; it's happening in a lot of cities. It's upwardly mobile Latinx who want to come back to their neighborhoods where they grew up - or it's Latinx moving to L.A. and looking for a Latinx neighborhood to live or open a business.

Cities around the United States do not have land use planning like we have in Oregon, and they are all struggling with issues like affordable housing.

There are things that are only palatable until they become uncomfortable for us, so it's very easy to complain about some problem the minute it becomes a problem for you. But you're okay with certain aspects of gentrification if they're the aspects you like.

I saw in Chicago, on the street where I was visiting my sister-in-law, this "Urban Renewal" and it means one thing: "Negro removal." But they want to tear the homes down and put a parking lot there. Where are those people going? Where will they go? And as soon as Negroes take to the street demonstrating, one hears people say, "they shouldn't have done it." The world is looking at America and it is really beginning to show up for what it is really like. "Go Tell It on the Mountain." We can no longer ignore this, that America is not "the land of the free and the home of the brave."

The nation can no longer afford to continue policies that hasten the flight of persons to the distant suburbs.

They can't take your house and give it to the mayor's mistress, even if they pay you for it. But they can, apparently, take your house and tear it down to make room for a development of trendy shops and restaurants, a hotel and so on.