So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[tonyb]

Everything important comes in e-mail. Bank statements are online. Bills are paid by electronic bank transfer. Only junk mail comes in the mail. I removed the mail box. I was in my driveway when the postman walked the block. He asked me what to do with the mail since I don't have a box for him to put it in. I told him to just have the post office stamp "return to sender" and return it. He looks at me, and says, "it's all junk mail, we can't return catalogs and advertising". I said, "what makes you think I want the junk mail?"

I send and receive lotsa things via the United States Postal Service. I’ve found it every bit as reliable as other shipping services and generally less expensive. (Although there have been a couple-three or four exceptions, mostly in the latter months of last year, when the Priority Mail packages got to the distribution center in the destination city in a timely manner and then either disappeared for a couple days or got misrouted by hundreds of miles. But I’ve yet to have one lost and never to materialize again. I’ve made hundreds of Priority Mail shipments and have yet to file an insurance claim.)

But yeah, my money transactions are almost entirely done online these days, usually on my iPhone. But I still opt to receive paper billing statements. I file them away and let the CPA determine what tax benefit, if any, there might be. I suppose I could learn how to make those files entirely electronic, but I haven’t needed to (yet), so I haven’t done it.

 

[tonyb]

There you go Tony. A real pen with real ink, written by your's truly.

If you ever attempted to read my handwriting, you’d rather I’d sent an email.

 

[tonyb]

I never owned a house solo until I was in my fifties -- I'd rented it for ten years before I bought it -- and the only reason I bought it was because I couldn't afford to live in this town anymore if I'd had to pay prevailing market prices for rent, which are steadily forcing the people who actually do the work here to live twenty miles away, while smug retirees enjoy "the matchless view and cultural benefits of this fine community." A no-down-payment USDA loan made it possible for me to buy, at a mortgage payment nearly $300 a month less than what I'd have to pay for an equivalent rental. and the price was kept down by the existence of an operating junkyard directly behind the house. But now that the junkyard is gone, speculators and investors have invaded the neighborhood. The mail constantly brings letters like this, and one reason I let my rose bush grow wild and thorny over my front door is to keep the real-estate parasites from knocking on it. They still find a way to stick their business cards in the door, though.

I have no illusions that I'll live to pay it off, and other than the theatre kids, I don't have any family to leave it to when I go. But I'll be damned if I'll give the flippers the satisfaction of pushing me out.

What I find most objectionable isn’t the profiteering off others’ unfortunate circumstances (such as the pricing out of the people doing the honest work) so much as the gentrifiers smug suggestion that they’ve “saved” the neighborhood.

Those charming old houses in those wonderfully “diverse” districts wouldn’t exist if not for the people who can no longer afford to live there. The speculators may as well be saying, “Thanks so much, now get the hell out of here.”

 

[Tiki Tom]

Here the indigenous Hawaiians call it “colonization”. Strictly speaking, they are correct. All the real estate has been bought by wealthy mainlanders and young people cannot afford to stay here. The town I’m in is now nearly all caucasians who bend over backwards to tell anyone who will listen how long they’ve been here and how sympathetic they are to the plight of the Hawaiians. Of course, I must admit to being part of the problem.

 

[tonyb]

Here the indigenous Hawaiians call it “colonization”. Strictly speaking, they are correct. All the real estate has been bought by wealthy mainlanders and young people cannot afford to stay here. The town I’m in is now nearly all caucasians who bend over backwards to tell anyone who will listen how long they’ve been here and how sympathetic they are to the plight of the Hawaiians. Of course, I must admit to being part of the problem.

That’s about the size of it. We’re all compromised, to one degree or another. It’s the failing to acknowledge it that annoys.

I have a far more comfortable existence than the run of humanity. Good luck is what it is, mostly.

 

[Harp]

Here the indigenous Hawaiians call it “colonization”. Strictly speaking, they are correct. All the real estate has been bought by wealthy mainlanders and young people cannot afford to stay here. The town I’m in is now nearly all caucasians who bend over backwards to tell anyone who will listen how long they’ve been here and how sympathetic they are to the plight of the Hawaiians. Of course, I must admit to being part of the problem.

Fee simple and leasehold and the haoles hold the land. And the ol saw slung all over Kaneohe Beach:
"The missionaries came to do good and did quite well." I caught tuberculosis in Hawaii, I suspect the bacillus
found me inside my Makkiki Heights Honolulu crash pad, the apartment complex obviously a fee simple leasehold
portfolic held property. I wondered what depreciation allowance the actual structure offered owner/and/or
leaseholder over the lease term. Fortunately the TB was caught and a year of isonizid administered by
the Cook County, Illinois TB Dept with periodic chest x-rays proved successful. Wiped out by a wave,
a wahinie, or a Hawaiian apartment real estate lease transaction.

 

[Fifty150]

There's two sides to every story. We live in an open market economy. Homes are owned, then sold, by the owners. Where I live, there is an outcry against "gentrification". But without clear definition of what "gentrification" means. We have certain neighborhoods which were mostly one specific race or another. Pockets of the community, where most people belong to the same ethnic group. All the stores are operated by people of the same group. Irish immigrants selling soda bread. Russian Jews from The Ukraine selling piroshkis. Vietnamese noodle shops. Every big city had ethnic ghettos.

Many can recognize, in large cities, places like "Chinatown", "Little Italy", etc. In those communities, I do not see "for sale" signs. The same people hold onto those buildings, and pass them on from one generation to the next. Future generations are able to benefit from living in the building without the burden of a mortgage. Without rent or a mortgage, their personal income is saved and invested to create addition streams of income. They are able to leverage the property to buy more property for rental income, and allow their tenants to pay for the new buildings they buy.

Then there are neighborhoods which were dominated by other ethnic groups. A different pattern of behavior. As they inherited property, they sold it. Who buys it? The highest bidder. The sellers don't selectively sell their homes with the intention of preserving the neighborhood's ethnic flavor. In these neighborhoods, the new homebuyers are a cross section of people with enough money to outbid other buyers. People with money in hand for cash offers, and people with higher incomes.

I don't know if it's "gentrification", or what that even means. A person who suddenly inherits a 100 year old house, decides that they would rather have $800,000 to $1,000,000 in their hand. They don't care that the next buyer is whatever race. They have no interest in preserving the neighborhood's character. You tell him that he should stay in the ghetto, instead of taking his $1million and going somewhere where the cost of living is lower.

No science here. Just what I see firsthand. People I know. Real world people, I come in contact with. There are a lot of real world circumstances. Some people know how to strategically transfer assets. Some people leave their heirs with a huge tax bill. Some people know how to manage finances.

The elephant in the room is race. Nobody wants to say it. Black and Latino are crying out that they are losing their neighborhoods. Is it the fault of the new homeowner, that he or she isn't Black or Latino?

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

I'm certainly no expert, but here are my observations. In large cities I know those neighborhoods where "gentrification" is now going on mostly consist of large old houses built, say, in the late 19th or early 20th century, as homes for prosperous families.

Social and economic conditions changed and these grand old houses were remodeled as multi-apartment buildings. The apartments were occupied by not-so-prosperous families.

The wheel turns again and the prosperous are finding the architecture and location of these buildings attractive and are willing to pony up to buy, rehabilitate, and occupy the buildings.

Nothing is as permanent as change.

 

[GHT]

When you look at a map or photo of East London, you will see a horseshoe shape bend in the River Thames. It's an area known as The Isle of Dogs. One of the most common explanations for the canine etymology is that the King kept his hunting dogs kennelled in the area. Which king we're referring to depends on which explanation you read, but given that royals lived in Greenwich, just across the river from the Isle of Dogs for more than two centuries, it's not unlikely one or more monarchs did this. Henry VIII in particular was a keen hunting fan, and would have needed several dogs to tackle his many royal hunting grounds.

The Isle of Dogs was for centuries, London's dockland. Cranes lined the banks of the river, come later technology, locks were built with inland berths constructed. The dockers and their families lived cheek by jowl in row upon row of terraced houses.

Following WW2, the area was run down and wretched. Hitler's bombs had destroyed many of the homes, come post war, that destruction was simply razed flat and left to decline.

Come the early 1980's all the docks had closed, the area was derelict. The docks had moved down river much nearer the sea. New road and rail links allowed for much faster movement of freight.

Then came the rebirth of what became known as Canary Wharf. A second financial centre for the capital and a program of gentrification beyond recognition. https://modernlondondocklandshistory.wordpress.com/f/


When I got married in 1968 a home on the Isle of Dogs would have cost around £2,000. At the time the cost of property in London, for those on the bottom wrung of the property ladder was about three times the salary of a semi-skilled worker, which was an average of £1500 pa.
So a house on the "Island," was less than half price. There weren't many takers. How I wish that I had the foresight. Those two grand homes have been tidied up, modernised and now resell for around the one million mark. For those who once lived there, you can bet that gentrification was a blessing.

 

[Harp]

I habitually read The Sunday Times in college (Mayfair also) and the London realty section
was a favorite page turner, fee simple and leasehold properties similar to Honolulu and Hawaii.

 

[Turnip]

Never mind about real estate prices in London or New York, that will all be some meters under water in 50 - 100 years anyway…

 

[LizzieMaine]

When gentrification really hurts is when it's not the grand old houses that the bourgies and the retirees are fighting over, it's the 950-square-foot dumps they're fighting to get into because there's a half-assed view of Penobscot Bay, if you kinda squint past the smokestacks from the DuPont factory. "A delightfully quaint summer place, doncha know." Or even worse, for the "entrepreneurs" to rent out for two weeks at a time to Airbnb to feckless vacationers. Entire neighborhoods in my area have been gutted by this kind of gentrification, to the point where people who actually do productive work are unable to stay in the community. And a community with no productive workers living in it, is not a community at all. It's a "gated resort." Gawd Bless America.

 

[Hercule]

Something that we've noticed about the new community that we moved into (been here just a year) isn't so much annoying as it is amusingly stupefying. We live in the land of the lawn service. Of the dozen or so of our immediate neighbors (give or take), may be 3 (us included) maintain their own lawns. It seems that at any given time of the day (typically between 7:30am and 9:30pm), just about every day (though usually less so on Sundays), commercial lawn equipment (large mowers, trimmers and blowers) can be heard disturbing the peace. If not on our street then on the street behind us or beyond. Regardless, within earshot. It's amazing the amount of work the lawn service trade plies in our community. And they are there, week in and week out, whether the lawn needs mowing or not. But most surprisingly, to us, is that they are there REGARDLESS of the weather. We had a line of storms come through over night that brought periods or torrential downpours (this seems to be a very rainy summer). Well sure enough I returned home from taking my wife to work, and amid a very torrential downpour (VERY torrential - of "honey where did you put the plans for the ark?" magnitude) there was a lawn service mowing the lawn and trimming the sidewalk in the downpour. And this wasn't the first time either. I haven't yet quite figured out exactly what dynamic is driving it - stupidity? persistence? greed? diligence? All of the above? It's just so odd seeing guys out weed-whacking and tootling around on lawnmowers in a rain that I seriously otherwise would have had to pull over and wait out.

 

[tonyb]

As I’ve noted in one way or another on at least a half dozen occasions, it isn’t the “gentrification” that grates so much as the self-congratulatory tone adopted by so many of that ilk — the real estate agents and flippers as well as the new residents to the old districts.

In decades past such characters couldn’t get out of those older in-city districts, and into the relatively affluent new suburbs, fast enough.

No, Mr. and Ms. (and Mr. and Mr. and Ms. and Ms.) Two Professional Income Household, you didn’t save the neighborhood. You aren’t “urban pioneers.” You didn’t make the district “more livable” with your artisanal bakeries and brew pubs and “bistros” with exotic-sounding names, leastwise not for people not knocking down a mid-six-figure income.

And all that “diversity” you profess to treasure? You priced it out. Those people moved to the suburbs, which you abandoned in the same way your parents and grandparents abandoned the city in decades past.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

When gentrification really hurts is when it's not the grand old houses that the bourgies and the retirees are fighting over, it's the 950-square-foot dumps they're fighting to get into because there's a half-assed view of Penobscot Bay, if you kinda squint past the smokestacks from the DuPont factory. "A delightfully quaint summer place, doncha know." Or even worse, for the "entrepreneurs" to rent out for two weeks at a time to Airbnb to feckless vacationers. Entire neighborhoods in my area have been gutted by this kind of gentrification, to the point where people who actually do productive work are unable to stay in the community. And a community with no productive workers living in it, is not a community at all. It's a "gated resort." Gawd Bless America.

I now live in a high-income suburb. In the post-WWII years, the town was built up (from its pre-Civil War state) by construction of brick frame ramblers. Many years back (more than 40) I had a boss who owned one of those ramblers.
He marveled at the idea that houses like his (he called it a cracker box) were selling for $60K.

Today those cracker boxes are selling for $800 - $900K, only to be immediately demolished and replaced with McMansions. From what I see of the construction (and I see a lot of it on my daily walks) the construction is fragile-looking. But they sell for $1.5 to $2 million.

I doubt that anyone who lived in any of the cracker boxes has been gentrified out of town. More likely they are retiring to Florida or Arizona with a big pile of capital gains cash in their bank accounts. That's something I hope to do in a year or two.

 

[tonyb]

Something that we've noticed about the new community that we moved into (been here just a year) isn't so much annoying as it is amusingly stupefying. We live in the land of the lawn service. Of the dozen or so of our immediate neighbors (give or take), may be 3 (us included) maintain their own lawns. It seems that at any given time of the day (typically between 7:30am and 9:30pm), just about every day (though usually less so on Sundays), commercial lawn equipment (large mowers, trimmers and blowers) can be heard disturbing the peace. If not on our street then on the street behind us or beyond. Regardless, within earshot. It's amazing the amount of work the lawn service trade plies in our community. And they are there, week in and week out, whether the lawn needs mowing or not. But most surprisingly, to us, is that they are there REGARDLESS of the weather. We had a line of storms come through over night that brought periods or torrential downpours (this seems to be a very rainy summer). Well sure enough I returned home from taking my wife to work, and amid a very torrential downpour (VERY torrential - of "honey where did you put the plans for the ark?" magnitude) there was a lawn service mowing the lawn and trimming the sidewalk in the downpour. And this wasn't the first time either. I haven't yet quite figured out exactly what dynamic is driving it - stupidity? persistence? greed? diligence? All of the above? It's just so odd seeing guys out weed-whacking and tootling around on lawnmowers in a rain that I seriously otherwise would have had to pull over and wait out.

Ours is a predominantly working-class neighborhood and even here more than a few households hire out lawn care.

Lawns are truly less than practical in this semi-arid climate. Without regular irrigation and applications of weed ’n’ feed and the like, “lawns” would nothing but hard-packed dirt and weeds. Hence the growing popularity of xeriscaping.

The neighbors on either side of us pay for lawn service. And yes, their lawns look better than ours, which is mostly three or four different varieties of grass and God only knows how many types of weeds. But hey! At least it’s green! Mostly.

 

[GHT]

Something that we've noticed about the new community that we moved into (been here just a year) isn't so much annoying as it is amusingly stupefying. We live in the land of the lawn service. Of the dozen or so of our immediate neighbors (give or take), may be 3 (us included) maintain their own lawns. It seems that at any given time of the day (typically between 7:30am and 9:30pm), just about every day (though usually less so on Sundays), commercial lawn equipment (large mowers, trimmers and blowers) can be heard disturbing the peace.

Ahem, guilty as charged. Our little home in London achieved a price that enabled us to indulge ourselves in a property with such a surrounding garden we need a little help maintaining it. We have a husband & wife team come round every Monday to mow, trim, prune and maintain all of our garden, and a grand fine job they do too. Just to add from your rain storm point, they are fair weather gardeners.

 

[Harp]

When gentrification really hurts is when it's not the grand old houses that the bourgies and the retirees are fighting over, it's the 950-square-foot dumps they're fighting to get into because there's a half-assed view of Penobscot Bay, if you kinda squint past the smokestacks from the DuPont factory. "A delightfully quaint summer place, doncha know." Or even worse, for the "entrepreneurs" to rent out for two weeks at a time to Airbnb to feckless vacationers. Entire neighborhoods in my area have been gutted by this kind of gentrification, to the point where people who actually do productive work are unable to stay in the community. And a community with no productive workers living in it, is not a community at all. It's a "gated resort." Gawd Bless America.

Rockland's economic evolve since ship building, hewn granite, light manufacture, fishery, toward service and tourism
has continually disrupted the established status quo-so whats newsz?

 

[Hercule]

Ours is a predominantly working-class neighborhood and even here more than a few households hire out lawn care. . . .

Ahem, guilty as charged. . . .

Ours is a working class city generally speaking. The schools suck so there really isn't any big influx of affluence. We moved here to be closer (4 miles) to his private school, so that doesn't effect us. It's just a comfortable bedroom community. The neighboring city to the south is a different story. Their schools are great and the city is borderline affluent. My wife's boss lives there and observed that every year you'll see a "congratulations class of XXXX" signs go up immediately followed a few days later by a for sale sign.

Anyway, our section of the street is predominantly retired and very elderly people, so we'll probably see a significant turn over in the next 5 years or so. I certainly don't begrudge their use of a lawn service. Not that that is something to begrudge in the first place. Except the retired police chief across the street (the one with the two identical corvettes in the garage only 1 of which get driven for a few hours each week) He does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for himself. He even has a service that comes and picks up after his dog!. I'm being facetious of course, I understand he's a great guy, actually we never have any interaction with him. Haven't even met him yet. I must sheepishly admit that we used his landscaper to rebuild our patio. So aren't we whoop-di-do?!!! (Believe me we're paying for it!)

 

[LizzieMaine]

I doubt that anyone who lived in any of the cracker boxes has been gentrified out of town. More likely they are retiring to Florida or Arizona with a big pile of capital gains cash in their bank accounts. That's something I hope to do in a year or two.

Alas, that doesn't sound like anyone I know. The people I know are young working people, desperately trying to survive on multiple low-wage jobs and getting either royally screwed by landlords (a small cartel of property-management "entrepreneurs" control the bulk of rental housing in my town) or being forced to burn up a large chunk of their wages on gas money to drive into town from whatever places they've been able to find twenty miles away. A co-worker at the theatre once spent a winter living in a barn. Not a "loft." A barn. Because that was all she could afford.

Or, they're elderly folks like my mother, living on $1300 a month social security in a decaying house they bought on a VA loan sixty years ago, and have had to mortgage and remortgage repeatedly over the decades just to keep it from falling apart, while trying to figure out how they're going to pay the property tax bill for another year. And there'll be no big cashout when she dies -- what she owes will consume most of what is realized when the place is finally sold. Or the town will take the place for non-payment of taxes and sell it off to some parasitical developer. "C'est la vie."

Oh well, she wouldn't like the climate in Arizona anyway.