Courtney A. Kemp Quotes

Gentrification and housing shortages are complex issues.

If you people can’t afford to live in our town, then you’ll just have to leave.

Going in and out of a proverbial 'poor door' - a separate entrance for income-restricted residents of mixed-income housing - of your city every day has its costs, even if the 'poor door' woman would be considered affluent in another location.

If we cannot create a beachhead, an anchor of affordability in our communities, in our urban areas, we will lose the people who actually make the community what it is.

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson has been resorting to the 'It's racism' dodge for years now in order to shut down scrutiny of his determined inattention to the catastrophe of Vancouver's housing crisis.

The housing crisis may not be the worst thing that's happened to New York City because it was becoming impossible for some of the young doctors, for some of the young artists, for some of the people that make the city so special to be able to live here.

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.

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

The bad news in our most cosmopolitan and vibrant cities is that many middle-class people can no longer afford to live in 'middle-class' school districts.

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.

I know we haven't cleaned up all the slums, but I didn't create the slums, did I?

There is plenty of affordable housing —it is simply occupied by the wrong people.... The problem in New York is not high rents, but low incomes.

London is the greatest city in the world, but we're at a crossroads. Ordinary Londoners have been priced out of our city because of the housing crises. We're a city that's growing in population, but the infrastructure can't cope with the growth.

I wanted to write a book about poverty that wasn't only about the poor. I was looking for some sort of narrative device, a phenomenon that would allow me to draw in a lot of different players. I was like, 'Shoot, eviction does that.'

There is plenty of housing - for the rich. But a series of outrageous policies ensure that it remains inaccessible to the poor.

It's often been said that politics in Islington, in many ways, begins and ends with housing, and it's not hard to see why. Despite the borough's image of exclusivity - the stereotype that it's all Georgian squares and cappuccino bars - the reality is much more complex.

There's a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest.

I have the ability and the will to lead San Francisco in building more housing. Without it, people like me who grew up in San Francisco, and people who came here for the values we embrace will simply not be able to stay.

I know that the Seattle my parents knew is not the Seattle I know and that these things exist in a state of constant flux and change. The hope is that at least some of that change can be for the better.

Housing being a top-order issue for cities is something that's not trivial.

I've always thought that the level of homelessness in society is likely to be a truer measure of how civilised we are then almost any other factor.

Chicago is an incredibly great city, but it was clear to me that greatness wasn't being spread to all our neighborhoods.

Low income persons in need of social housing should be housed in more prosperous areas to avoid placing an extra burden on the poorer areas and to redress the balance in terms of housing, redressing the balance in terms of schooling.

I think, for me, the biggest issue is poverty in general, poverty in this time of plenty. It's reflected in homelessness. It's reflected in educational gaps. It's reflected in racial disparities.

New York has changed amazingly; it's gentrified everywhere, and it's a much gentler place.