The Gentrification of an Area

iguana

I've noticed in the UK that locals living in an area which gets an influx of property buyers chasing cheaper houses can have a very hostile reaction to the newcomers. I've been lurking on a few message boards and I've seen a lot of very nasty comments, blaming these people for pushing up house prices, most notably with regard to Hackney and Brixton.

I understand that it must be frustrating if you are saving for a deposit for a place in your area. But before you are ready to buy the area gets noticed by people who are priced out of surrounding areas and suddenly you are not able to buy what you were aiming for. But I don't see how that is the fault of the people buying in the area, they most likely had a different first choice area that they were priced out of.

I was wondering if anyone had noticed a similar vibe in Ireland. Shortly before I left Dublin I was hearing a lot about Rialto being a good spot to buy in. I heard more than one agent call it the new Ranelagh. (Though that only made me laugh).

So has anybody bought in one of these areas or do any locals have opinions on when this happens in their area? Or is this trait especially English, as there appears to be a very conscious class divide here.

RuggieBear

i vaguely remeber a post on boards (i think) about some people who were intimidated out of buying a place by locals...who wanted to keep the property for "one of their own"

TempestSabre

Why would Ireland be any different?

FillSpectre

The only areas I have heard of this happening are the extremely poor areas but they rarely need a reason to dislike "outsiders".

Most people are happy to have new people move in as it tends to mean somebody they know has made some money and there will probably be new life in the areas.

ionapaul

There are great hopes that Cork St. and surrounding area will undergo gentrification over the next few years...I would be extremely pessimistic about this, as despite the lovely looking (from the outside) new apartment blocks that have sprung up on the street, I know from experience that the vast, VAST majority of these are buy-to-let units, most renters currently there are non-nationals, and the place unfortunately will probably will run down in a few years due to high occupant turnover. Just to specify, I am not saying non-nationals will run the place down, but the fact that there will be such high occupant turnover will do it! If the units were not mostly tax-incentivised and if there were a higher % of owner-occupiers, perhaps gentrification would have a chance there.

Without owner-occupiers, I don't think any area has a chance to 'enjoy' gentrification - whether or not this process is a positive thing in itself is an argument for another post!

antoinolachtnai

All the section 23 development from the 80's was non-owner occupied. At least some of it succeeded in driving gentrification, I think, although I don't have hard numbers or facts to back this. Where it didn't, it was because the area was just too 'hard' to start with or the location wasn't great, or the build wasn't that great.

It would be interesting to hear other views on this.

It seems to me that it often takes two generations of people (a group of renters and later a group of buyers) to 'gentrify' an area.

(I am not someone who thinks that gentrification is always a great thing, certainly not in its most extreme forms.)

hmmm

ionapaul wrote:

.I would be extremely pessimistic about this, as despite the lovely looking (from the outside) new apartment blocks that have sprung up on the street, I know from experience that the vast, VAST majority of these are buy-to-let units, most renters currently there are non-nationals, and the place unfortunately will probably will run down in a few years due to high occupant turnover. Just to specify, I am not saying non-nationals will run the place down, but the fact that there will be such high occupant turnover will do it!

I agree with that, I've been in blocks in similar developments and it's obvious that where you have a high incidence of rental units, the area can suffer from a "it's not my place so I don't care" syndrome and a general decline in the standard of the building. I don't know if there's any effective way of reversing this other than encouraging ownership. I know in the US, many apartment blocks are effectively owned by the current occupants who can vet any new entrants to the blocks. Not so over here.

I'd also say that the quality of apartments offered in many inner city parts of Dublin is utter rubbish - tiny sizes and poor construction. Even if owned and not rented, I can't see the owners hoping to stay in that property for any length of time.

Calina

hmmm wrote:

I'd also say that the quality of apartments offered in many inner city parts of Dublin is utter rubbish - tiny sizes and poor construction. Even if owned and not rented, I can't see the owners hoping to stay in that property for any length of time.

Agreed. Not just in the inner city though - some of the outlying areas too.

iguana

TempestSabre wrote:

Why would Ireland be any different?

Because it was never apparent to me in Ireland. But within a year in the UK it has become obvious that it is a really big deal to some sections of the community.

अधिनायक

A lot of areas that have gone up in value significantly seem to have a mix of old poor people and rich younger people. There is little contact between the two groups. Cottages off the South Lotts in Ringsend would be an example. Gentrification is a process of replacing poor people in an area with rich people, not an improvement in living standards for the locals. The children of the original residents can no longer afford to live near their parents (the birthright of every rural person) and head off to Lucan.

One thing lost in the gentrification process is that poorer people tend to have more contact with their neighbours. Richer people work and go to school further from home and have more dispersed sets of friends. The extreme case is an area populated by young couples and single professionals who have zero contact with neighbours. An area like this has no soul despite much higher property prices.

One downside of community spirit is that it tends to define membership by exclusion so anyone different is unwelcome. Note how all working class soaps cast middle class charcters as evil people who spend all day drinking huge glasses of red wine and hatching cruel clever schemes. As gentrification progresses, the poor eventually become the minority so the problem is gone.

Obviously poor areas have plenty of problems and I don't want to romanticise.

iguana

I'm not neccesarily saying gentrification is a good thing. But it is an ongoing thing in many areas, as people get priced out of the areas they want to be in and then choose to move to a poorer area which has many of the aspects they liked in their first choice, such as good transport or style of houses.

People who do this aren't setting out to destroy the area, they just want to buy a home. And in Dublin and London I wouldn't have expected young people to have any expectation of living in the same area as their parents.

shoegirl

antoinolachtnai wrote:

It seems to me that it often takes two generations of people (a group of renters and later a group of buyers) to 'gentrify' an area.
(I am not someone who thinks that gentrification is always a great thing, certainly not in its most extreme forms.)

Interesting that you say this. Let me tell you an anecdote.

My parents bought a large 4 bed in Swords in 1982 for 40k. At the same time a friend was a curate in Ranelagh and he told me years later that at the time Ranelagh was mainly full of elderly singles in what was then run down houses. He remembers one particular old lady who never threw out newspaper who passed away. Because of the dry rot the house (think it must have been on Beechwood Ave) went for about 40k also! Also an in law of my mum's had a family home on the wonderfully named Woodstock Gardens (on the other side of the Sandford Rd) that literally fell down due to disrepair around the same time, again sold for very little.

By around 2000 (when my parents home was probably worth no more than IE150k at most) these houses had already hit the IEP600-900k mark. As I remember it at the time what had also occured was that 1,000 rental units had disappeared, displaced by owner occupiers who had converted the rented places back into houses, many of them I have to say, were beautifully restored. Now I think the going rate is anything between EU650k and 2 millions depending on the property and condition. Meanwhile the occasional sale around my parents place clock in around 520k. I think a lot of properties in Dublin in the 80s were undervalued because of neglect and damage by the existing occupiers (rented or owners) as well as high unemployment, high interest rates and emigration.

I think the point to take from this is that gentrification had more than one cause and more than one effect. There is a great little story in Alan Bennett's wonderful "The Lady in the Van" (an entertaining read about an old lady who lived in her van in his front drive for many years. He used to get regular callers at one point from people who had lived in the boarding house which his home previously was prior to gentrification. Most were quite bemwildered at the fact that the kind of facilities that once gave them somewhere to live had simply moved on and out. While it is obviously negative for them, generally a lot of the supposed "native" population are themselves blow-ins to start with in the first place. They either blend into the new surroundings, die out, or move on.

Areas where the native population are being displaced by apartments full of a transient rented population are not really gentrification, what however eventually tends to happen is that if the kind of family friendly accomodation exists, owner occupiers will move in. Otherwise a lot of these areas will turn back into the tenement style buildings that occupied these areas back in the 1950s.

shoegirl

अधिनाय&#2325 wrote:

A lot of areas that have gone up in value significantly seem to have a mix of old poor people and rich younger people. There is little contact between the two groups. Cottages off the South Lotts in Ringsend would be an example. Gentrification is a process of replacing poor people in an area with rich people, not an improvement in living standards for the locals. The children of the original residents can no longer afford to live near their parents (the birthright of every rural person) and head off to Lucan.

From my experience of Marino a lot of this happens because the local population dies off. I wouldn't however, have called them poor - if anything most of them retired on good defined benefit pensions compared to the younger generation, many of whom are now on defined contribution pensions. I do remember a cousin of mine from Glasnevin who married a guy from Ballymun and moved to Swords, laughing because his family thought they'd never see them again. That was because in the late 80s and early 90s a lot of Dubs didn't have cars or couldn't drive (in fact its still very common in the 60-something population in Dublin). However distances shrivel a lot when you have a car.

Besides I do know a lot of people who theoretically could afford to live in their native area but choose not too because they've a) better quality of life due to cheaper housing costs and b) because they work in the outer suburbs so living in their home area is not such a great benefit.

Back 20 years ago a lot of people in North Dub worked in the East Wall, Clontarf, North inner city etc. The next generation are now working in Dunsink, Leixlip and Swords so they are actually better off moving out to far flung places to get to these regions. Same goes for the southside - far easier to get to Sandyford from the south than it is to come from the city!