Too many McArdles spoil the neighborhood
Megan McArdle moved into my neighborhood when I was in college, and I felt that hello there are already McArdles here, find your own neighborhood foreign McArdle. But as I have reversed her journey from New York to DC, I have made peace with sharing U Street. Anyway, it seems like she's pushed the frontier farther east, moving into Eckington, where my little brother used to go to school. (I have not walked around Eckington in maybe 5 or 6 years, so I am not sure how it has changed, though if the rest of the city is any sign I might not even recognize it. Suffice to say, 5 or 6 years ago, it was not a "mixed" neighborhood.) She writes a little bit about her role as a gentrifier here.
Alex Baca, at Greater Greater Washington, challenges McArdle's (god it's weird we have the same last name) complacency.
I've complained before that McArdle takes a rather reductionist and simplistic view towards gentrification, and her latest piece is no exception. She boils gentrification down to middle-class (and likely white) buyers moving in, displacing poor (and likely African American) residents. Note that she does not specify whether she believes her neighbors do or do not own their homes. Neighborhood change, whether it's gentrification or not, extends far beyond this assumed black/white binary -- especially in cities other than DC.
McArdle responds to Baca's critique, and offers a lot of urban planning policy that I don't have the chops to break down. I am skeptical of McArdle's worldview, and though it she aptly underlines the long-term difficulty of maintaining a mixed income neighborhood, she leaves out the individual agency of the gentrifiers. While I was on the ground (Fussell has made me wary to say "in the trenches"), firmly in the gentrified, rather than gentrifier, mode, what made me the most angry, indignant, was a disrespectful and selfish attitude of new residents, which manifested itself in the lack of a sense of shared ownership of the neighborhood with long-time residents, and in the wholesale destruction of entire buildings, blocks. Gentrification is essentially a phase, an uncomfortable transition from poor to rich, and maybe it's foolish to demand a more sane and respectful process, when a majority of the people who care most will be gone in the long run. But I wish that gentrifiers took more seriously the idea that it is fundamentally unjust to dislodge a community from its home. It is difficult to find a place to live, but it doesn't preclude responsibility, shouldn't discourage a generosity of spirit.