Two comments on this thread:

1) Demolition doesn't cause gentrification. It normally ensures it won't happen. The most demolished cities are the least "gentrified". https://twitter.com/HoarseWisperer/status/1198974427574263810?s=20

2) Treating the disease *is* better than treating the symptoms. But when you haven't yet found a cure for the disease, treating the symptoms is better than doing nothing to help the sufferer. Mayors are often tasked with triage, and can't work in the lab looking for the cure.

3) One more: Anyone familiar with housing demolition in the Rust Belt knows that the houses that are demolished are years-vacant tax-delinquent nightmares owned by absentee LLCs. The neighbors beg the city government for them to be torn down. https://twitter.com/HoarseWisperer/status/1198974498726432768?s=20

4) I took this photo on Grant St in Akron. These houses sat as vacant rotting shells for years, because is not enough money in cities with eroded tax bases to tear them all down at once. They're gone now, and I'm confident the neighbors cheered.

5) This is the south side of Youngstown. Most of the houses are gone.

There is no gentrification. There is virtually nothing left to gentrify.

The city has 65,000 people. It used to have 170,000.

The median sales price of a house is $36,100.

6) Q: What do you do when you have a house that is worth $36,100 or less in Youngstown?

A: You milk it for rent as long as you can (because you are almost assuredly an absentee-owner) and then you walk away, and you let it become someone else's problem.

7) The longer that I am on here, the more I have become convinced that much of urban America has absolutely no idea what is going on (both good and bad) in cities in this part of the country, and has no clue what the day-to-day concerns of the people who live here actually are.

8) This is the east-side of Youngstown. The churches nearly outnumber the houses at this point.

Think about the urban issues that you read about every day on urbanist Twitter, and think about how many of them are likely to be active concerns for the people living here.