Urban Displacement Quotes

I'm from the burbs. I've been in the hood, but I don't live there. I have lived in the hood, but I don't live there anymore. I lived in Harlem, and that was crazy, even though Harlem is a lot nicer than it used to be.

With 'Greenberg,' I wanted to make a movie about Los Angeles... my great love for it and also the way that I felt not at home and alienated there.

People tend to think of gentrification in terms of race because it's presented that way, and I think it's presented that way because in poor cities that's what's really going on. Beyond that, I think it's presented that way as a way for the people who are really pushing it to make it just a black problem, so people don't care.

There are thousands on thousands in New York who have no assignable home.

It is almost impossible to open a newspaper without reading something about the London housing market. House prices are rising at such a rate that the vast majority of Londoners can't afford to buy, are being forced out of the boroughs they grew up in, or in the worst cases, are being made homeless. If nothing is done, people will continue to be driven out of the city and London will cease to be a hub for creativity and entrepreneurship.

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.

It's not just NYU. There are days when I feel like I'm stranded in some upscale mall in Pasadena. Don't even get me started on the insidious transformation of Bleecker Street!

It's - the working class of San Francisco and the Bay Area is being pushed out of its old neighborhoods because of the skyrocketing cost of housing, and there's no real working class left because these are jobs for engineers and managers and designers - very smart people.

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.

When I was growing up in New York, we were the anomaly. Our family stayed, but back then families didn't stay. Once you had a second kid, you immediately left, so the kids could run around outside.

A more courageous empathy is needed in our country to see the struggles of people from factory towns to farm towns to city towns who can't even afford the rent in their cities anymore because costs are going so high.

One of life's intriguing paradoxes is that hierarchical social order makes cheap rents and outré artists' colonies possible. Raffish bohemian neighborhoods flourished in the days of racial segregation; under integration the artistic poor have no safe places in which to create.... If America lacks a vigorous culture it is partly because studios and ateliers have become crack houses.

What I'm nostalgic for is the idea of an edge in New York. There used to be these fringes of the city where civilization sort of ended, and therefore young people could live cheaply, or open nightclubs or art galleries, or even squat. That fringe moved out to New Jersey and Brooklyn. The whole idea of the metropolis is the centralization of like-minded souls, and when the central real estate becomes too expensive, the dreamers, the young poets, and the artists will go elsewhere.

Men who were heads of families wandering the streets, eating from garbage cans

What most Americans don't realize is a lot of the challenges we're struggling with today are the result of conscious housing policies.

I am crumbling in sync with old Hackney.

When the government sees a poor area, its solution is to move the poor out.

No one is asking what happened to all the homeless. No one cares, because it's easier to get on the subway and not be accosted.

In many cities, it's become popular to hate 'gentrifiers,' rich people who move in and drive up housing prices - pushing everyone else out.

Its all big money, high rent, high prices in New York City now. The poor people completely got rolled over. I've never seen anything like it in my life. It's disgusting.

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.

I used to live in the Bronx, then I lived uptown on 106th St. and Broadway, and finally I moved to Harlem right before it became gentrified. I lived on 120th St. between Fifth and Lenox Aves. in a little brownstone. I knew the neighborhood was changing when they started putting trees in the middle of the block.

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.

Chavez Ravine is the dawn of Chicano consciousness.

New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.