Are Hippies To Blame For Gentrification?

Leslie Kern joins Emma to discuss the origins of gentrification. Kern contends that the roots of the movement began in the 1960s counterculture movement, with young white folks moving away from their conservative parents in the suburbs back into the cities.

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Is gentrification an inevitable condition or is it and I know it's not inevitable as you say but if the conditions of inequality are in existence does that make gentrification inevitable? Do you know what I'm saying? I think so. the way that I'm interpreting your question is this idea that if there are a different kind of pockets if you will in an urban landscape where some areas have been disinvested and undervalued over time then within a capitalist system within a capitalist land market I think gentrification is quite a likely right in that you want to buy low and sell high. So some of those areas that were once seen as less desirable or kind of lower income become attractive for Capital because there's the potential for that relatively low-level investment to rise in value over time. and it's the nature of capitalism that it always has to seek greater and greater profit margins. so in that context of that landscape of inequality yes the kind of very the pull of capital into certain areas is powerful. Can you trace the history of the concept of gentrification in the United States in particular? I feel like in the 60s you see this transition, this process beginning to happen, people leaving the cities. white flight Suburban centers and sprawl kind of becoming an ideal. and there's been active disinvestment in the cities as well. So, historically, when you were looking at gentrification as a concept, where did it start and how did it kind of evolve over time. The term itself was coined in 1964 in London by a sociologist. but of course, the process had already been underway in different places for some time. and it was referring at that moment to what seemed like given everything that you've just described a very counter-intuitive movement of the middle class often white hugs buyers into working-class Urban neighborhoods. and this seemed to go against everything that every of those trends that you just laid out. So the conversation at that point was very much around what was the kind of cultural driver of this that was attracting certain families and certain individuals to these areas? Now I think it's clear that that price was probably a factor but there was also a kind of a counter-cultural movement right? where some people wanted to reject the Norms of suburbanization and kind of a conservative ideology and to do something different.