A little over a year ago, we moved into a neighborhood in east Austin that was entirely unknown to me even a few months earlier. We are, to phrase it as pretentiously as possible, part of the vanguard of gentrification in this area. Our zip code ranks in the bottom half of Austin zip codes in terms of median income and education level. The signs of future gentrification, from a rising abundance of house flippers to the beginnings of actual road maintenance, are making themselves known—and part of me feels very bad about this.

The conventional wisdom among progressive white Gen Xers is that gentrification is a Bad Thing, but no one has ever come up with a viable alternative if you can’t afford to live anywhere else within a city. We wanted to live somewhere with convenient access to downtown (where my wife works), with a big yard (where our dogs run and poop), and with at least one extra bedroom to put my desk (where I “work”). Other neighborhoods didn’t just exceed our price range, they actively mocked it. But should I actually feel any sort of complicity in the fact that prices are going up in this area, and that sooner or later, people who have lived here longer than us won’t be able to afford it any more? Was there actually anything we could have done differently? Maybe, but maybe not, if a recent article by Daniel Hertz in The Atlantic Cities is any indication (h/t Marley):

Mine is a cohort – the youngish, college-educated, left-leaning set – that places a great deal of moral significance on geography. (Probably everyone does, but I can only speak to our particular code.) Most of us believe in a moral imperative to reject the suburbs: to disavow environmentally-destructive sprawl and alleged ethnic homogeneity and cultural sterility.

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We have a lot of conversations about whether or not it’s acceptable to live in our current neighborhood, or the one we’d like to live in. Sometimes, we reassure ourselves by discussing the obviously graver transgressions of the people who live in some other neighborhood, which has accumulated slightly more bougie coffee shops and restaurants. Sometimes we find solace in some part of the continuum of gentrification that we’re comfortable with: the very beginning, when you can kid yourself that your presence isn’t changing anything; or when the tipping point has tipped, and the damage has already been done.

The article goes on to say, however, that it’s not just the act of people moving into lower-income areas that drives gentrification. Keeping the ritzy areas the way they are plays a part, too:

Moving to a higher-income neighborhood – one where market and regulatory forces have already pushed out the low-income – means you’re helping to sustain the high cost of living there, and therefore helping to keep the area segregated. You’re also forcing lower-income college graduates to move to more economically marginal areas, where they in turn will push out people with even less purchasing power. You can’t escape the role you play in displacement any more than a white person can escape their whiteness, because those are both subject to systemic processes that have created your relevant status and assigned its consequences. Among the classes, there is no division between “gentrifiers” and “non-gentrifiers.” If you live in a city, you don’t get to opt out.

In fact, gentrification is only one part of a bigger issue:

The upshot here is not that we should all descend into nihilistic real estate hedonism. But we need to recognize what’s really going on: that what we call “gentrification” these days is only one facet of the much larger issue of economic segregation. That people get priced out of the places they already live in is only half of the problem. The other half, which affects an order of magnitude more people, is that people can’t move to the neighborhoods to which they’d like to move, and are stuck in places with worse schools, more crime, and inferior access to jobs and amenities like grocery stores. That problem is easier to ignore for a variety of reasons, but it’s no less of a disaster.

So I guess the point is not to miss the forest of economic inequality for the trees of gentrification. As The Onion snarkily-yet-presciently pointed out in 2008, the issue of gentrification pales in comparison to aristocratization.

Photo credit: Natalia Wilson [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Flickr.