Gentrification In Urban Areas

Cities and suburbs was a sociology class where I have learned issues like suburbanization, neighborhoods, culture and poverty, gentrification, deindustrialization, segregation, downtown redevelopment, and housing. Not only did I learned what these terms mean, but also how they have affected us every day. Professor Rosenblatt has given my classmates and I a chance to apply our knowledge through a neighborhood project. The town that I picked was called Wheaton. Through my field research, I think the best ways to raise the quality of life for everyone in the city are: make it more affordable to rent (subsidize), change people’s mentality on integrated neighborhoods through proper marketing techniques and advertising, funding (financially support
Gentrification is a process where old, often rundown, neighborhoods are taken over by affluent, young Caucasian folks, property values are raised, radically, and low- and working-class families and small businesses gets push out. Private sectors often would jump into these vulnerable towns as they see it as an opportunity to exploit the weak and poor. Not only that Smith (1992) pointed out that gentrification has been romanticized to the public audience to view the theory as “the cowboy taming the West” to steer people away from the predicaments at hand, which is to push the homeless, working- and lower class away using violent tactics to make room for the young, affluent whites. People think that by having the middle- and upper-middle class in these poor urban communities will “civilize” the people in the community. Yet when in reality, they are doing more harm than good. The homeless now have nowhere to stay or sleep. The community can’t use their park how they want to. And instead of putting funds into the shelters or build more homeless shelters, the government think that it is a wiser decision to build condominiums and extravagant buildings than to help the