After Durham Mayor Bill Bell’s State of the City address yesterday Herald-Sun reporter Ray Gronberg got this reaction from Larry Hester:
But a longtime critic of the city’s development strategy, shopping center owner Larry Hester, said the mayor’s comments Monday overlooked the need to combat the potential gentrification of the neighborhoods the city targets.
Plans already on the book already “affect every man, woman and child that lives between N.C. 147 and Cornwallis Road,” Hester said. “They’ll have to move, but move where?”
God forbid that gentrification might happen in Durham. And just what IS gentrification, this term thrown around like an epithet by some? Try this:
Gentrification, or more specifically urban gentrification, is a process in which low-cost, physically deteriorated neighborhoods experience physical renovation and an increase in property values, along with an influx of wealthier residents who typically replace the prior residents. The process often returns decaying parts of a city to the middle-class, economically viable neighborhoods they were originally built as.
In actuality, gentrification is part of a cycle (sort of like global warming and cooling) whereby areas of a city ebb and flow. If we have any sense, we’d like them to do more flowing (gentrifying) instead of ebbing (decaying). But gentrification gets pulled into racial politics, especially in a city like Durham, where some people insist on making every issue racial, even improving downtown.
