gentrification

organization. James Carr notes that revenue streams such as this can be capitalized andsecuritized, making further financial resources available to the community. 50Buck Bagot, a former San Francisco housing commissioner, argues that in rapidly gentrifyingareas, it is essential to secure resources to shield as much affordable housing as possible frommarket forces. After building affordable housing on public land, or buying and upgrading affordablehomes or apartments, the units can remain affordable (and lower income tenants can stay in place)over the long term through cooperative ownership, limited equity ownership, federal Section 8subsidies, and other long-term affordability strategies. He notes that 25 percent of the housing in theTenderloin area of single-room occupancy hotels is now in non-profit hands, because non-profitsthere worked diligently to retain this essential component of the city’s housing stock and to rebuffgentrification and pressures to extend the financial and tourist hotel districts into the Tenderloin area.7. Educating Residents About Their Legal Rights and Other OptionsRegulatory requirements like those outlined above can be very useful in promptingrevitalization or slowing gentrification pressures, but they work only if their targets are aware of them.Community leaders in Atlanta recognize that increasing property tax rates for elderly homeownerson fixed incomes can lead to their displacement, but they were not aware of the city’s tax defermentregulation, and city staff acknowledge the program is rarely used.Mission District leaders express concern that the neighborhood’s less-educated andsometimes undocumented Spanish-speaking tenants are less likely than most city residents to knowtheir rights as tenants, and less likely to demand those rights even if they are aware of them. Thislack of education about landlord/tenant law can significantly increase the chance that tenants willunduly bear transition costs due to gentrification, and it serves to hasten the gentrification processitself, since developers are drawn to this more vulnerable population.Homebuying workshops are a frequent component of homeownership strategies forredevelopment. Their counterpart, home-selling workshops, are much less common, yet critical toensuring that lower income homeowners in gentrifying areas get full value for their homes.Cleveland offers a plethora of redevelopment incentives, but its brochures describing theseprograms tend to be of poor quality. To be more effective, staff need to think and act like marketersrather than regulation enforcers.8. Improving the Public Education SystemAs noted earlier, poor schools in neighborhoods ripe for gentrification rarely pose anobstacle, since many of those who move to these neighborhoods early do not have young children.As we pointed out above, the gentrification-driven influx of new residents into city school districtsdoes not appear to have the effect of increasing school quality, and there are many neighborhoods50 “Community, Capital and Markets: A New Paradigm for Community Reinvestment,” The NeighborWorksJournal, Summer, 1999, p. 20.37