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): Continue reading →