Thoughts and Policy for Building a Better Pennsylvania

Gentrification is Anti-Family

 

When you think of a vibrant city, what kinds of people do you envision? The artsy hipster barista? The forty-something entrepreneur dressed in jeans? The fashionable women in high heels enjoying rosé in an outdoor canopy cafe? Now try to picture another demographic living in the city: a family.

As a general rule, cities aren’t designed (or redesigned) to accommodate the needs and desires of families. A series on cities from The American Conservative describes how more and more cities are being transformed into what the industry refers to as the Vibrant Urban Neighborhood. “The VUN—with its standard-issue bike shops and vintage clothiers, its “authentic” live-work spaces and dive bars, its predictable purveyors of vinyl records and locally-sourced foodstuffs, its de rigueur venues for generically hip “live music,” its uniform throngs of overwhelmingly unmarried and childless active or aspiring knowledge workers ritualistically intoning the shibboleth of “diversity”—has metastasized from those erstwhile white-hot centers of hipness—Williamsburg, the Mission, Wicker Park, Silverlake—converting Bell Town and Bushwick, Echo Park, Seward, and the Pearl District, transforming D.C.’s H Street Corridor, LA’s Highland Park, and dozens of other districts.” (source) This approach to city development is eager to attract young working professionals but doesn’t plan for how these working professionals can “remain in our cities as they age, change, or grow.” (source)

A city made or remade to accommodate young adults doesn’t require good schools. It doesn’t need to provide a diversity of housing options beyond the studio and one-bedroom apartments. Affordable eating options aren’t really on the radar and neither are playgrounds. In short, a city not built to accommodate families won’t be able to accommodate families.

Even worse for families is the process of gentrification. Indeed, gentrification is inherently anti-family. When a city undergoes this process of becoming the kind of place that attracts young, childless urbanites, it raises rent prices, often resulting in driving out poorer families that can no longer afford to reside in the city or at least forcing them to allocate more of their income to basic housing.

As we seek to revitalize and develop our cities, we must remember our obligations to the family. Being consistently pro-life means promoting the flourishing of all people of all demographics.

David Brooks on Lost Hills and Strengthening Communities

If you ask New York Times columnist David Brooks what he thinks is the defining issue of our day, he would say social isolation. In one of his columns, he writes that “gaps have opened up among partisan tribes, economic classes and races. There has been a loss of social capital, especially for communities down the income scale. ” Brooks is thus pointing to the same negative phenomenon noted by Luvin in his new book The Fractured Republic (read my review of that book here).

To illustrate this problem, Brooks references Lost Hills, a farming town, writing that “there’s still no permanent church. Up until now there has been no library and no polling station. The closest police station is 45 miles away. Until recently there were no sidewalks nor many streetlights, so it was too dangerous to go trick-or-treating.” Fortunately, Lost Hills is the location for a new experiment in developing the social capital of the community. Brooks writes:

The experiment is being led by Lynda Resnick, who, with her husband, Stewart, owns the Wonderful Company, which includes FIJI Water, POM juice and most of the pistachios and almonds you eat. You should know that I’m friends with Lynda and Stewart and am biased in their direction. But what they are doing is still worth learning from.

…They’re not trying to find one way to serve this population. The problems are so intertwined, they are trying to change this community from all directions at once. In Lost Hills there are new health centers, new pre-K facilities, new housing projects, new gardens, new sidewalks and lights, a new community center and a new soccer field. Through the day, people have more places to meet, play and cooperate with their neighbors.

Brooks concludes by noting that communities are where social repair takes place. “The community is the right level, picking a piece of land and giving people a context in which they can do neighborly things — like the dads here who came to the pre-K center and spent six hours building a shed, and with it, invisibly, a wider circle of care for their children.” – Read the whole thing here.