Gentrification in philadelphia PDF

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Essay about gentrification cause and effect in philadelphia...

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IBRAHIM KAMARA Dominick Giordano ENGLISH 102 March 15, 2019 Gentrification in Philadelphia (rewrite) I don't have a personal experience in the subject, but I think gentrification negatively impacts current residents. Gentrification refers to shifting a neighborhood's population from predominantly working or low-income class to mostly middle or upper class. In Philadelphia the word gentrification gets highly discussed. The changes which occur have different meanings to different people, but a common set of facts can help ground conversations. From an analysis conducted recently by RentCafe, two Philadelphia zip codes (19123 and 19146) are ranked top ten in the list of most gentrified in the nation. I am not completely for or against gentrification, but in this article, I will discuss changes involved in gentrification which makes me be in the middle. These changes will include Neighborhood changes, Price changes, and the creation of new places. According to Harry Schwartz, his neighborhood, Society Hill, was among the poorest parts of Philadelphia in the 1880s. But by the year 1968, when he moved to Society Hill as a lawyer, things had changed due to gentrification. Soon after they moved, Schwartz and his family found themselves surrounded by a large community and which they liked. Due to the good state of Society Hill, Schwartz was able to use his bike to go to work and back. He could visit his friends for dinner. He says that most of the American cities were not desirable places to live before gentrification. Before its renovation, Schwartz did not see the reason to come to Society Hill. Workers used to access their jobs on foot. Coal fires from densely populated

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neighborhoods mingled with smokestacks from sooty factories (Ding 2016 p.54). Sewages and other wastes were dumped into rivers. Hence, people didn't want to live near the rivers, and that's why in Philadelphia most highways run along rivers. There were no pollution controls, and crime rates were very high. However, due to gentrification, Philadelphia has become cleaner, safer, and more unequal. Gentrification in Philadelphia has negatively affected low-income residents. This is because prices for products, services, and taxes rise and also there is a disturbance of the existing social networks. According to Kelvin Gillen, after gentrification in Philadelphia, it was found that the typical Philadelphia home increased in value by 4 percent (Mallach 2018 p.102). The median sales price of a Philly home has risen from 118,400 dollars to 140,000 dollars. The rate of home sales rose by 25 percent from autumn to winter. Which implied that the losses in house devaluation due to the bubble and subsequent recession have now been recovered, and the average Philadelphia home has attained a new all-time high in value. After the University of Pennsylvania was moved to the West Philadelphia, Drexel University main building was constructed at Chestnut Streets seventeen years after. Mantua was located north of the University of Pennsylvania. Before the white flight which happened in the year 1942, Mantua was a neighborhood predominantly white and working class. The white flight occurred due to Mantua had become an African American neighborhood. In the year 2006, the residents of Mantua were living below the poverty line, and a large percentage of children in Mantua were living in the poverty line (Pearman 2019 p.132). It now became a priority for city leaders to improve Mantua. Two years later the Mantua Tower was demolished and will be replaced with a low with low-density public housing. The University of Pennsylvania developed the area to the west and south. The area occupied by the two universities is now called University

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City. Now the land around became cheap, and developers bought it to build students' accommodations. As a result, people who lived near were displaced and looked for new places. While gentrification is a great action, its disadvantages a little bit overweigh its advantages. For instance, gentrification raises the standards of living, but it leads to the loss of historical buildings. It causes displacement of people which is either by compulsion or by choice. When the low-income residents are displaced, they often move to a poorer neighborhood. Again, due to the high standards of living, it won’t be easy for low-income folks to shift into gentrifying neighborhoods in the first place. Therefore, this makes it hard to decide whether or not to support gentrification.

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Work Cited Acolin, Arthur, and Domenic Vitiello. "Who owns Chinatown: Neighbourhood preservation and change in Boston and Philadelphia." Urban Studies 55.8 (2018): 1690-1710. Crowley, John E. "The Philadelphia Country House: Architecture and Landscape in Colonial America by Mark Reinberger and Elizabeth Mclean." The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 140.2 (2016): 234-235. Ding, Lei, and Jackelyn Hwang. "The Consequences of Gentrification: A Focus on Residents' Financial Health in Philadelphia." Cityscape 18.3 (2016): 27-56. Mallach, Alan. "Gentrification and Its Discontents 1." The Divided City. Island Press, Washington, DC, 2018. 97-121. Pearman, Francis A. "Gentrification and Academic Achievement: A Review of Recent Research." Review of Educational Research 89.1 (2019): 125-165....