September 21, 2019

Gentrification Is a Hard Problem

A 577-unit market-rate development planned for the Crenshaw district in Los Angeles.Los Angeles Department of City Planning

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Gentrification has been a flash point in race relations for some time now. In Los Angeles it’s an endless battle, with activists fighting to keep everything from skid row to historically black neighborhoods out of the hands of the rich. One councilmember not only wants to reject a housing proposal proposed for an empty lot in his district, he wants to establish “anti-displacement zones”—which probably means rent control—around all upscale housing developments.

It’s a difficult issue because it’s so easy to see both sides. On the one hand, longtime residents really do get pushed out as rents go up and affluent white folks move in. It seems obviously unfair to toss that onto the bonfire of all the other abuses and inequities that blacks and Hispanics already suffer. On the other hand, can we really say that low-income areas should stay low-income areas forever and never be improved? That hardly seems like a great answer either.

I don’t have anything new to offer on this front except to recommend this story from the Washington Post. It focuses on one particular area of grievance, but it does a good job of laying it out from multiple points of view and without trying to put all the blame on one side or one thing. In a small way, you will probably understand the issue a little better if you read it, and that’s something I so rarely get to say these days.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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