Embracing Optimism in an Age of Gentrification | Kyle Shenandoah | TEDxPhiladelphia

The purpose of this talk is to walk away understanding the difference between intentional efforts to revitalize a neighborhood and unintentional gentrification. It is also an opportunity to embrace development as more than a one-sided conversation. Sometimes the best development ideas can have long-lasting consequences to a community. Kyle Shenandoah is a community leader and advocate in Grays Ferry. As the VP of the Grays Ferry Civic Association, he has been instrumental in the rise of newfound revitalization in South Philadelphia. He adapts a three-pong approach toward reducing poverty through advocacy of accessible housing, workforce development, and equitable transit. In response to resident needs, Kyle co-founded the Tasker Morris Neighbors Association where he regularly organizes community meetings with developers and community leaders. His most recent achievement is his successful advocacy of the SEPTA 49 route. Through conversations with the community and SEPTA, Kyle was pivotal connecting his neighborhood to University City, 30th Street Station, and Fairmount. Due to Kyle's impact, he's received several awards including a congressional commendation, mayoral & city council citations, 1st place for The Philadelphia Innovations Awards, and recently received The 2019 Community Leader Award from PACDC. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at www.ted.com/tedx

[@AlexZorach]

I really loved this!
I wish more people would have this sort of realization. I think the topic of renaming neighborhoods lies at the heart of gentrification...it's often one of the key or core aspects of gentrification, and I think you are right that it's a major cause of it. The names are often chosen by panels of people who have a vested interest in increasing property values, people like realtors, developers, and absentee landlords. Often, I also have a visceral negative reaction to "new" names for a neighborhood...for exactly the reasons you describe, they sound "trendy" and it seems like they are being forced on neighborhoods by people who are trying to get rich at the expense of the community.
As a society I think we need to embrace the realization that rising property values in urban neighborhoods is not a good thing. The low-net-worth people who are most vulnerable to gentrification, nearly all rent their homes, and they do not reap any of the benefits of rising prices. With a few exceptions, the people who benefit the most are typically the people who already were well-off and did not need help.
Even people who do own homes can be harmed by gentrification if the businesses they rely on to live their life end up closing or being pushed out by rising rents, and replaced by businesses out of their price range.
When I lived in West Philly for three years, I saw gentrification happening while I lived there. My rent was soaring, rising faster than inflation. I saw affordable restaurants and stores closing, and new ones moving in that were out of my price range. I.e some places closed where you could get a meal for under $10, but there were places moving in that were $20-30 for a filling meal. Thankfully, there were still enough affordable places the whole time there, but I didn't like the direction the neighborhood was moving in. Home prices were also high and getting higher. Although in other cities I've lived, like Cleveland, OH, or Newark, DE, I could easily afford buying a home, similarly-sized homes in West Philly were already out of my price range, even when they were in shoddier condition.
One quibble, I don't agree fully about New York City's rent control and rent stabilization being a good model. These policies create a whole series of problems. They tend to privilege older tenants over younger ones. Although this helps some vulnerable tenants (like elderly or retirees) it is terrible for young people, another economically vulnerable group. In order to benefit from rent control, you or a family member need to have lived in the apartment for a long time....someone lucky enough to get in on a "good deal" apartment gets really cheap rent, whereas other people end up paying much steeper prices for less. This is harder on younger people, people who move to NYC for jobs, people who don't have family in NYC, people who have smaller or no family, people who are forced to move by various circumstances, or people who would otherwise qualify but missed the cutoff (which is WAAAY in the past, it's July 1, 1971, or March 31, 1953 for 1- or 2- family homes).
In some cases NYC's law can be very hard on landlords. It also creates a massive "accidental" disparity between landlords. A landlord lucky enough to have all their apartments end up free of regulation, gets to charge market rates, whereas a landlord unlucky enough to have a large portion of their apartments under rent control, is effectively screwed, because the cost of maintenance of the property is often going up faster than the stabilized rent, because it's driven in large part by the majority of units that are NOT rent controlled. Based on what I've seen, as of 2017 almost 43% of units in NYC are unregulated, 1% are rent controlled, and the rest are under varying levels of rent stabilization. The small number of rent controlled units represent a bizarre type of privilege that disparately goes to a small number of very lucky individuals; the effect of stabilization is a little less pronounced but the disparity is similar and not necessarily fair or equal. The portion of rent-stabilized and controlled apartments also actually further benefits the landlords who own unregulated units: this stabilization does somewhat drive down the costs of living and support services which affect maintenance costs, which can benefit landlords of unregulated units. And then these effects magnify: because you can't change the regulatory status of a unit by selling the property, the unregulated properties themselves soar in price, further enriching their owners, whereas the prices of the regulated properties stagnate. Basically it creates a wealth transfer from some landlords to others. And...as always happens, it's the wealthier and more powerful people who are better able to game the system to benefit, and the little guy who gets screwed.
I tend to think of rent control and rent stabilization as well-intentioned but ineffective interventions that work against rather than with the free market. They don't seem to address the core problems, which to me, seem to be the way real-estate and property ownership functions in our society more as an investment vehicle than as a form of work where people provide value to society.
I think we could remove some of the worst perverse incentives for gentrification through changing our tax and regulatory structure so that it made things less favorable for using real estate as an investment vehicle. Things that I think could help achieve this would increasing tax rates on capital gains from real-estate sales, making property tax rates progressive as a function of a person's net worth (i.e. if your total net worth is higher, you pay a higher tax rate on property, thus incentivizing not-so-well-off people owning their own homes, but disincentivizing already wealthy people from owning tons of property.) and increased recordkeeping requirements (I think a lot of landlords under-report their rental income and may also over-report expenses, and the status quo makes this hard to catch. Making existing income tax code more fully enforced so all landlords comply with the law might fix the problem. I saw a 2014 study from Boston, an area with a major problem with gentrification, that said that in that area a whopping 22% of rent payments are still done in cash, and there is a major risk of cash income being unreported or under-reported by landlords.)
All that said I think the core ideas in your talk are spot-on!

[@SibGirl01]

Ahhhhh!!!
What a genius!!! 😭

[@trinesmith3362]

Amber Earls
Sadly he was struck by a car and has since passed on. My prayers and condolences to the Family and Friends of Kyle
I never met Kyle but he's a man after my own Heart.

[@SoundOfPage]

@@trinesmith3362 Yes like two months after he did this. Life is so precious. We never know