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gentrification

Identity

17 things that ‘poor people’ loved until rich people made them too expensive

Why does everything have to cater to rich people these days?

via Pixabay and Burst/Pexels

A gentleman camping and a woman shopping in a thrift store

Do you ever feel that just about every experience in life now caters to upper-middle-class and rich people? Sure, everyone is feeling the brunt of inflation, but something else happened along the way.

For example, over the past 20 years:

The price of going to a concert has quadrupled.

A one-day admission ticket to Disneyland has gone up around three times.

The cost of the average American home has gone up around two-and-a-half times.

Pleasures that were affordable to everyone suddenly had to become luxury experiences. Face-value tickets went by the wayside in favor of having to buy things on the secondary market. Simple things that blue-collar people enjoyed have been gentrified by upper-class people who thought they were cool and “authentic.”

It seems impossible for the average person to get a good deal in life, and if they do, someone will figure out how to make rich people want it and sell it for double the cost.

A fed-up person on Reddit named r/degreeofvariation, asked the online forum, ”What was loved by poor people until rich people ruined it?” The question received over 18,000 responses in just six days. Given the commenters’ reactions, it seems there hasn’t been a simple, affordable pleasure in American life that hasn’t been co-opted by people with money and ruined.

Here are 17 things that poor people loved until rich people ruined them.

1. Living in warehouses

"Yes! They tore down all the real lofts to build condos they call lofts." — StrainAcceptable

"And people complained the windows are too big and everyone can see in, and they didn't like the open floor plan. That was the whole point. Artists had lots of room and tons of natural light." — richarddrippy69

2. Etsy

"I bought so much stuff for my wedding in 2012 from Etsy. It was all handmade and so cute and inexpensive. It’s changed so much from the cool site it once was." — PrudentConfection

3. Food banks

"My local food bank put out a news article basically saying that rich people need to stop using the food bank as a 'life hack' to lower their grocery bills." — ConfidentlyCorrect

"This is why food banks in my area now need proof of need. Which is shit, because it means jumping through more hoops to put food on the table when you’re already desperate." — DoorSubstantial2104

4. eBay

"It used to be so useful to get all kinds of cheap or unique things. Then more and more big commercial sellers joined the club, and eventually, eBay itself forgot about what and who made their platform a success in the first place." — Onesmilematters

5. Cabins

"Quiet out-of-the-way country cabins sitting by lakes. Now they are overpriced Airbnbs." — Amyaaurora

"I'd even say Airbnbs themselves. They started as a potentially cheap alternative to hotels run by people who have extra space they aren't doing anything with. Now people build guest houses specifically for Airbnb and treat It like a full-on rental." — Jarf17

6. Fixer-uppers

"Buying a 'fixer-upper' home and spending weekends working on it. I was really looking forward to that." — Couldstrife1191

7. Thrift stores

"Thrift shopping. I'm not 'thrifting' I'm f**kin broke." — Elduroto

"Sometimes I feel like it's cheaper to buy clothes at Target or Walmart brand new than it is to buy from a thrift store." — Urchintexasyellow

8. Festivals

"Burning Man was on my bucket list until rich fucks started showing up with bodyguards and started establishing private zones." — hgaben90

9. Farmers markets

"That's what our markets are turning into as well. It's gone from local farmers and affordable produce to artisanal creations for the elite." — KeepOnRising19

10. Houses

"We poor people would work our entire lives to own one. Property became a great investment and way to increase wealth so rich people started buying them. Not to live in as intended but to rent to the poor and keep them poor by renting so they will never be able to save enough to afford their own." — Etobocoke

11. Fajitas

"I remember being able to get skirt steak really cheap and sometimes for free." — DiegoJones4

"Oxtails/ crab/ wings used to be so cheap when I was younger." — Glohan21

"A few influential chefs decided to introduce traditional peasant food to the world, and now oxtail ragu with pappardelle is a $30 dish in fancy restaurants." — Patorama

12. Carhartt

"Blue collar workers needed the durability, then celebrities wore 'fashionably' and drove up the price." — Pepperdice

"...and then Carhartt realized that their brand was fashionable, and started throwing their logo on cheap shit to capitalize off it." — Glochnar

13. Hobbies

"Burning Man, Collectable Card Games, Retro Video Games, GOING TO CONCERTS...like seriously, just pick a hobby. Once the re-sellers get into it, prices go through the roof, and nobody can afford to do anything." — divine_shadow

14. NFL games

"While I can afford them I have to ask myself what the actual F/ $500+ for a football game? The experience is awful too. Too many breaks, too many calls you can't hear. It's so much better to be on your couch or in a bar. Who is buying these tickets? $2300 for good seats in LA? That's insane. It's a game. On TV." — StanFigjam

"In 1995 the average ticket to the Super Bowl was $200... This year it was $3800." — RumWalker

15. McDonald's

"It was originally a place for a quick eat because it was cheap, but now it’s just mid food for high prices." — DrMcSpicy

"The old dollar menu stuff is like $3.50 minimum now." — Perrymasson

16. Camping

"I'd say people with campers ruined camping. Can’t drive two miles in the mountains without having to hug the side of the trail to let some dude with $100k+ truck and trailer squeeze past you on a road they have no business going down." — Reasonable-Tutor-943

"This and now it's impossible to get a campsite because of the plethora of Sprinter vans and RVs that cost more than my house. Nobody (few people) camps in tents anymore!" — all-about-climate

"I swear 95% of the time I’m the only person in the campground with a compact car and not a $70k+ truck." — DeliciousMoments

17. Life

"'Poor' people I knew were always happy with the simple pleasures. Now even these simple pleasures are almost impossible to afford unless they're necessary and you break your back to pay for them so you almost resent them. Rich people are literally ruining life." — Wenisdan

From Your Site Articles

inequality

Here’s why revitalizing a city doesn’t have to mean erasing its history.

True

Imagine your childhood neighborhood. Now imagine waking up one morning to a bulldozer ready to plow it down.

Plenty of people would, understandably, have an emotional reaction at the idea that the place they grew up was about to be torn to the ground.

For some, a city full of little boutiques and expensive coffee shops is the ultimate sign of progress and growth. But for the people who have lived there much longer — whose homes stood long before the frozen yogurt and the bike lanes — this can be a painful process.

As the face of their neighborhood transforms, the cost of living is driven up, often causing longtime residents to lose their homes and, along with it, their connection to a place and its history.

But does revitalizing a neighborhood have to mean erasing its history? In the Westside neighborhood of Covington, Kentucky, the answer is a resounding “no.”

Photo by Annie O'Neill, provided by the Center for Great Neighborhoods of Covington.

Covington once looked like any other casualty of urban flight, as residents began to move from the city to the suburbs for a variety of reasons. Then a state highway was expanded a decade ago, splitting the city’s Westside neighborhood right down the middle. This contributed to disinvestment in the area, as historic buildings fell into disrepair and the value of homes began to fall. Before long, Covington was a city in decline.

But instead of getting discouraged, community members and organizations began to mobilize to save their city.

One organization in particular — the Center for Great Neighborhoods of Covington — had a vision for change. And unlike many revitalization efforts elsewhere, they didn’t want Covington to become unrecognizable. In fact, they wanted the exact opposite.

Photo by Annie O'Neill, provided by the Center for Great Neighborhoods of Covington.

Rather than treating Covington like a blank slate for outsiders to change, they turned to the existing community to reclaim the city they loved.

They tried something called “creative placemaking,” which encourages creative and artistic efforts to strengthen a community from within. And they did this by getting their own local artists involved.

Photo by Annie O'Neill.

Kate Greene, program manager of community development at the Center, says that Covington had everything it needed all along. “It has a makers’ history,” she explains. “[There’s] a ton of artists — whether they define themselves as artists or not.”

The Westside had an abundance of creativity — be it storytelling, sculpture, ceramics, or stained glass — just waiting to be tapped into. “We’re really trying to take that and bring it to the surface again,” Greene explains.

Photo by Annie O'Neill.

For example, the Center worked with a local artist to organize a community dinner that included a stenciled paper tablecloth that attendees could write on. Residents were asked about their neighborhoods and how to make them better — focusing on access to fresh food in particular — and they responded directly on the tablecloth.

In this way, the Center was able to reach residents who might otherwise not share. “[It was] to get other people’s voices … who maybe weren’t inclined to raise their hand or speak up,” says Greene.

Photo by Stacey Wegley, provided by the Center for Great Neighborhoods of Covington.

It was these voices, many of whom were engaged for the first time, that began to transform Covington.

With the help of grants — including from The Kresge Foundation, as part of their Fresh, Local and Equitable initiative known as FreshLo — the Center was able to empower residents.

These funds allowed them to teach classes, rehab historic homes, organize community events, create artists’ studios, and most importantly, build lasting connections, with a particular focus on the Westside neighborhood.

“A lot of people [think] it’s just murals and sculptures and mosaics … but in our work, that’s really not important to us,” Greene explains. “How did you build that sculpture together? What connections were made? Who was making decisions? Did new leaders surface? All of those elements are the key.”

Tatiana Hernandez, Senior Program Officer at the Kresge Foundation, agrees. "Creative approaches are needed to meaningfully address the systemic barriers facing low-income residents," she explains. "[We can] give residents a sense of agency, and contribute to the narrative of a place."

Photo by Stacey Wegley.

“[It’s] a way to build pride in the community,” Greene adds.

These efforts have allowed the neighborhood to hold onto its identity and history, even as the city changes.

That identity is what makes Covington unique.

“I don't [want] Covington to lose its identity and become gentrified,” says Tashia Harris, a lifetime resident and community consultant for the Center. “I like the beautiful mix of cultures that I'm surrounded by here, and creative placemaking [is] helping Covington keep its identity.”

Photo by Stacey Wegley.

Your childhood neighborhood might not have had a gourmet sandwich shop. But maybe it had a corner store stocked with your favorite soda or an old Victorian house on the corner that always reminded you of a castle. Maybe it had a barber that cut your hair for the first time or a rec center where you learned to swim.

Revitalizing a city doesn’t have to mean losing what makes it special. And in Covington, Kentucky, it’s places just like these — and the history they hold — that make it still feel like home.

Imagine heading out to run errands at all your usual places, and your phone's "equity app" has a better idea.

Siri might say, "Buy your groceries at one of these other stores, just as close as your regular store." Or "There are three coffee shops within 2 miles. You haven't tried this one before."

We already get shopping suggestions when we bring up Google Maps, especially when our smartphones are transmitting our GPS coordinates. A similar type of computation is happening behind the scenes at Facebook and Twitter, whose targeted ads can sometimes be scarily on point.

But what if, instead of just boosting sales, those suggestions coming from your phone were designed to address social problems like inequality?

A group of researchers in France and Spain may have solved one preliminary puzzle toward getting us to that point.

In the paper, "Crowdsourcing the Robin Hood Effect in Cities," published in June 2017 in the journal Applied Network Science, the researchers describe a computer algorithm they created that attempts to "rewire" the complex network of commercial transactions and shopping trips people take part in every day. The goal is to redirect more money to poorer neighborhoods so that the wealth differences between rich and poor parts of a city are evened out.

The study used data from 150,000 people and 95,000 businesses in Barcelona and Madrid, and on the surface the pattern of transactions and the money spent revealed that some neighborhoods were up to five times wealthier than others.

But researchers were shocked to find that if as few as 5% of commercial transactions were changed — so that capital flowed from richer to poorer neighborhoods — income inequality in those cities was drastically reduced, up to 80%.

"We were not expecting that," said one of the study's authors, Maxime Lenormand of the National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture in Montpelier, France. "Actually, I checked the algorithm because I was not sure in the beginning that everything was OK in the code."

Lenormand conducted the study of the Robin Hood Effect with Thomas Louail of the Paris-based National Center for Scientific Research's Joint Research Unit of Urban Geography, Juan Murillo Arias of Madrid-based BBVA Data & Analytics, and José J. Ramasco of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Physics and Complex Systems in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

Their research began as an attempt to use a model in transportation planning that finds the most efficient way people can get to work and extend it into the area of reducing inequality, Louail said.

It also has potential applications in combating the "neighborhood effect," a self-reinforcing trend that describes how the relative wealth of a person's neighborhood affects their own wealth, which in turn accelerates the neighborhood's own tendencies toward wealth or poverty. Rewiring shopping trips to cross those neighborhood boundaries can decrease the gentrification — that urban neighborhoods experience.

But so far, it's just an algorithm.

"One of the first questions you can ask is — what extent is this scenario implementable?" Louail said. "What it's going to take to perform in real life, and how you will motivate people to change their travel destination for shopping."

The rise of so-called "big data" raises interesting questions about how social scientists and anti-poverty activists approach their work, said Sarah Elwood, a professor in the University of Washington's Department of Geography who studies the intersection of geographic information systems and technology with social justice and inequality. "We're seeing more of these sorts of practices that sort of try to get at the behaviors of individual people and try to get them to do something different."

Guiding and changing individual behavior to instigate social change is possible, both at the grassroots level and as "nudge policies" enacted by governments, she said.

Yet such small actions don't address the structural causes of poverty. "It's important to differentiate between questions of inequality and questions of impoverishment," Elwood added. "You can change the degree of inequality in a society without having acted to change the big processes of impoverishment."

Louail and Lenormand agree. If reversing inequality were the goal, then even an algorithm embedded in a smartphone app would require other measures, such as policy decisions or local government incentives to encourage participation. "But [the solution] is not an app, of course, and maybe I think that the city government, local government somehow could imagine some incentives to help, to motivate people to engage in these kinds of collective enterprises," Louail said.

"We remind the readers [of our study] that the possible tools of city governance to mitigate inequalities are necessary but they're not sufficient to resolve everything," he continued. "And so what we proposed is you can articulate or supplement governance with more bottom-up initiatives."

The researchers see this as an important first step toward using large amounts of data to address social problems.

Since their paper was published, they’ve been contacted by people from around the world interested in developing mobile apps or other technology based on their "Robin Hood" algorithm.

Louail and Lenormand are still considering what next steps they might take. Elwood thinks this is an opportunity to bring other dimensions into the research. "I think big data is going to continue getting bigger," she notes, "but I believe there are significant aspects of human knowledge, human experience, expressions in social life in cities that we are never going to be able to capture in data."

"I would want to put their data science expertise together with people who know and study the politics of urban redevelopment, people who think about housing policy, people who think about existing approaches to development in metro areas," she says. "For me, this is the moment for complex research teams that can ask questions from a variety of different standpoints and be more than the sum of their parts."

This story originally appeared in Yes! Magazine and is reprinted here with permission.