I feel like people on the Urbanist side of the left housing wars are too ready to concede the premise that upzonings or new development cause more local gentrification relative to the status quo when most of our empirical evidence says that premise is wrong.

Not just academic studies, like common sense "you can point to the metro areas where it is the hardest to build and they are also the most gentrified" stuff

Written about this before but the fact that the same thing (high SES renters displaced from high SES neighborhoods seeking adjacent or connected neighborhoods with lower rent) causes both gentrification and developer interest, people get the causation backwards

The gentrifiers are not attracted by the condo buildings and fancy coffee shops, the condo buildings and fancy coffee shops are attracted by the gentrifiers. And if you block the condo building the gentrifiers come anyway.

The prominence of cash poor but high socio-economic-status people (i.e. college educated 20-39 year olds) in Left discourse is important since they are often themselves the first wave gentrifiers that attract the condo buildings

...and then who are subsequently displaced by successive waves of gentrification. Not exactly a great situation for them!

I don't think this is particularly obvious to anyone to be quite honest and I should probably be more charitable to those who are confused about it! Most normal people don't have spreadsheets of housing starts and comparative rents across neighborhoods https://twitter.com/nickrizzo/status/1301152636851367938

to an extent this is true but there's no policy fix for this because it's not the *new building* that makes the difference here. the fancy coffee shop is just as happy to displace an existing business https://twitter.com/JoshNH4H/status/1301151641643749378

like there's no policy you can pass in a free country that says "businesses catering to high socio-economic status white people are not allowed to open here" or "high socio-economic-status people are not allowed to move here" or "its illegal to rehab an existing building"

if you could actually prevent the white people or white-catering businesses from moving in you could indeed prevent gentrification but that's not legally possible and blocking new construction doesn't actually stop them, so what are we actually doing here?

rent control is great but it only gets you so far. even strict income restrictions can't stabilize a neighborhood permanently since landlords prefer higher socio-economic-status renters and "high SES but low income" are the prototypical gentrifier class https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1301157099490033665

do people really think blocking chain stores blocks gentrification? the places with the most onerous restrictions on chain retail are usually the most expensive places to live in the country, places like malibu or east hampton https://twitter.com/DY_MAX_ION/status/1301157921997434882