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Originally Posted by 10023
I just can’t understand why anyone in a city like Chicago, which has massive underdeveloped areas and abandonment and is well below its peak historical population, would ever want to “stop gentrification”.
Gentrification is good. It brings in money and shores up the tax base. And it creates demand for housing to re-develop and re-populate areas that need it.
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Well, of course, San Francisco has made efforts to stop it in several areas, the best known being the Tenderloin. In the 1960s, the adjacent upscale tourist and shopping area of Union Square was inexorably encroaching on the working and lower class Tenderloin. Single room occupancy hotels were being bulldozed and replaced by high rise tourist hotels mainly. The result was essentially nowhere for lower income pensioners, immigrant families and those with some income but at the lower end of the scale to live.
Two controls were mainly applied: Height limits of 90 ft in some places, 120 ft in others were applied, and a ban was put in place on conversion of monthly rental hotels to by-the-night (tourist) rentals. This pretty much preserved the area as a place for the people already living there which is what attempts to stop gentrification usually mean to do.
I would argue, however, it has not allowed the area to deterioriate into a slum. San Francisco is fortunate to have a number of not-for-profit developers who have been building new building with "affordable" housing in the Tednerloin since the 1960s. By now most of the housing stock has been renovated or replaced by these outfits and, because of the height limits mainly, they haven't needed to compete with market rate developers for the building sites.
IMHO the intent of the law, whether or not you agree with it, has largely been fulfilled. The area remains a sanctuary for the city's lower income and working class--the retail clerks, waiters, hotel service workers and the rest--whom we need but who otherwise could not afford to live in modern San Francisco.
These are the sorts of modern buildings for limited income working people being put up by nonprofit developers. Note that at 9 floors, these meet the 90 ft height limit: