once they come, buildings get fixed, and people stop dying in the street
They stop dying in the street in that neighbourhood, while people in another begin dying.
The process of pushing a group of people from one area to the next doesn’t eliminate the problems that created that blight in the first place. It just becomes another, usually less equipped and more unprepared community’s problem. Gentrification isn’t an all-in-one solution, otherwise if it were, we wouldn’t be talking about it as some generally understood negative phenomenon. It is inherently exploitative and harms more than just the area of gentrification itself.
Even the girl in that first video admits her neighborhood is a shithole.
My personal living space is a shithole but it’s still home. similarly, this is why she is distraught at the changes to her home and the cultural force that is pushing her out.
cringy hipster culture that isn’t as cool and authentic as black culture
i try not to see things in terms of what’s “authentic” or “cool,” because at the very least, it commodifies tradition and culture as something to consumed or visited as part of a social trend.
It like, reduces it to a cultural zoo.
It wouldn’t be such an issue if zoning laws were different, so more housing units could be constructed more cheaply where the jobs are.
There is also the matter that the ways that people live have a significant impact, in the aggregate, on how a community functions - something that we weren’t really supposed to talk about under tolerant liberalism, but which social conservatism often goes overboard with. Many of the wealthier communities can handle a higher level of dysfunction, but in poverty, dysfunction is a lot more costly relative to income and relative to the income of the surrounding community.
No one is really interested in fixing the conditions properly, though.