Urban Gentrification Quotes

The price of property in city centres is making it impossible, particularly in the big cities, for any kind of social mix to take place. It's castrating the whole notion of city life

Liberals want to live downtown. All over America - in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Georgetown - there are crowds of liberals living in the gritty, ugly, dirty neighborhoods sensible people are trying to flee.

There was a time, a few decades ago, when the cost of living did not vary all that much from city to city. Since then, as places like New York, San Francisco and Seattle have been hit with skyrocketing rents and home prices, the regional disparity in housing costs has altered how Americans of different incomes pursue opportunity.

Sometimes, I feel that Manhattan in particular has gotten really tame and gentrified or something.

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.

When you clean up a city, you destroy it.

I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Sweden, which, during my teens, gentrified and is now completely middle class and even upper middle class.

Compton is this amazing place with a rich history. I see it as a new Brooklyn.

At least Manhattan, in terms of danger and eccentricity, is much more of a theme park now. You couldn't really shoot the old Law & Order in New York today. It's a different city.

Harlem is not a playground for rich bankers and consultants. It's got students of all colors. It's got old people who keep history and tell tall tales.

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.

One of the best things I found out about Detroit is that bears have started returning to the city. When bears are gentrifying your neighborhood and opening Thai restaurants, that's a poor neighborhood.

New York has definitely turned into more of, like, a hipster place.

You know, Greenwich Village was the traditional bohemia of New York. I wish I could say that was entirely true now. It's, uh... changed. It's now got, God help us, investment bankers and journalists, but it's still a very beautiful part of New York.

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

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.

In the past Berlin was much more radical and extreme and now it's becoming much more of a conventional European city.

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.

I kind of miss the old sleazy Times Square, in a way. And yet I don't mind not being accosted by all sorts of strange people.

Folks are leaving Silicon Valley, mostly because they can't afford to stay.

I think there are some very evil things about gentrification.

I did grow up in a rough neighborhood in Portland, which is an abstract concept for anybody who's rolled through Portland because now it looks like a TV set, literally.

If you've driven over to the gay section of Los Angeles, it's like a golf course... Real estate values go 'boom!'

I lived in Park Slope, which is probably one of the most homogenized areas of Brooklyn. No offense to Park Slope.

In other words, New York has gone all suburban and bourgeois on us.