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God forbid bad parts of town ever get good.
You mean make the non white parts white, right?
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That's not what gentrification is. Relevant to this article, I lived through the gentrification of large parts of Austin in the early 00s.

What happened was that good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives began gentrifying, driving up property values, which drove up property taxes, which became unaffordable to the existing residents (who had owned their homes for a long time). Many (actually, most) of these artists had to sell and leave.

They often left for other cities. But hey at least the good houses everyone liked all got torn down to be replaced by McMansions for the influx of techbros.

Austin still has that slogan, "Keep Austin Weird." It failed. Austin isn't weird anymore. The University of Texas still is responsible for a lot of great stuff about Austin, but huge chunks of the city are just boring these days. There's certainly much less interesting culture happening. It's been airbnbified.

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Let's talk about the East Side.

https://www.austinmonthly.com/in-photos-what-gentrification-...

I don't think many home owners got a price for their land that allowed them to buy a similar house elsewhere.

The world is far from an ideal model where what you get is what you deserve.

Note the history of the East Side power plant, which depressed property prices. Ditto, I-35 construction plans. The article says the plant will become a park now. After the new developers locked in purchases.

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Good for whom? If it's good for the residents, that's great. If it's bad for the residents, who get driven out, but good for some developers and outside rich people - that's what gentrification is.
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