I'm currently reading a book on sprawl by Robert Bruegmann and I found an interesting section in the book concerning gentrification.
There was another powerful decentralizing force at work, but at the center rather than at the periphery. As early as the middle of the nineteenth century, in cities like Vienna or Paris, public authorities had undertaken massive efforts to redevelop and upgrade parts of the inner city. The new luxury apartment blocks facing tree-lined boulevards built during the reign of Napoleon III in Paris and the massive apartment buildings along the tingstrasse in Vienna fueled a major trend toward "gentrification" or the replacement of the existing population by one enjoying a higher economic and social position in society. Although the word "gentrification" has often been used in a polemical way, to suggest the problems associated with the involuntary displacement of poor residents, and it has been applied primarily to developments since World War II, I will use it given neighborhoods in socioeconomic status. Used in this way, the term indicating simply a change, a shift upward of any given neighborhood in socioeconomic status. Used in this way, the term can refer to a process that, like growth itself, is probably as old as cities.
In Second Empire Paris, for example, as the boulevards sliced through congested old quarters, the poor were pushed out and the new apartment blocks were marketed to the expanding middle and upper-middle class. The displaced population, for its part, tended to move outward to industrial neighborhoods farther out in the city or to the inner suburbs. By the twentieth century, many of these inner suburbs, with their industrial facilities and cheaply built apartment buildings, had become a "red belt," a set of working-class neighborhoods that regularly voted for the Communist and other leftist political parties. Outside the Red Belt, especially during the 1920's many suburbs saw in explosion of single-family houses for more prosperous working-class families and those of a burgeoning middle class, all happy to trade the noise and congestion of the city for the relative calm of the suburbs.
I guess the question I have is what does this mean for the poor? If gentrification has gone on for centuries where is it that they are pushed to? When you look at Harlem which is undergoing gentrification where have all the low income poor and working poor people been placed? Have they been pushed out to the suburbs? As the upper middle class and middle class move back to the cities and revitalize the area through urban renewal, is this the ultimate good for all?
Let's say that Harlem becomes a 21st century modern utopia. Does that mean other urbanized areas like the South Bronx and throughout the country will also be gentrified? Does this mean that the poor will be pushed into the exurbs and suburbs? When Manhattan was a horrible place to live you would never have thought of going down to 42nd Street. Now it's come around and you can find places to live that cost a million dollars. But where were all the poor people sent? Well, some ended up in the Bronx and other boroughs.
The sad thing with this whole issue is that it takes a higher income group coming in and kicking a lower income group out in order to rebuild. It seems that the only money for developers to make is with the upper middle class and rich. They'll tear down those dilapidated buildings and put up luxury apartment complexes. It's a shame that no one thinks that affordable housing for the working poor and middle class can still make them some money, it won't be as much as you would get from a Trump Tower but it would still be something.