Gentrification: We’re Both the Problem and the Solution

"Almost twenty years ago, just married, my wife and I bought an old house in a friendly but economically depressed old neighborhood. It was, at the time, a predominantly black neighborhood though, like many historic neighborhoods in and around Atlanta that predate our tumultuous, race-driven urban disinvestment of the 60s and 70s, it had also been a predominantly white neighborhood at one point as well."

"Its history is significant and, in the almost two decades since, the process of learning and understanding it has been a meaningful experience. But at the time, all those issues, together with the baggage that accompanies them, simply weren’t on our radar."

"Like most people, our understanding was shaped by the lens of our own circumstance. And that circumstance was that we were relatively broke. Yes, we both had white collar jobs but they were the lowest of entry level and we had a lot of work and dues-paying ahead of us before any sense of expendable income might ever become something real."

Scott Doyon goes on to share some stories not to argue whether or not he and his wife and friend are gentrifiers but as a means of demonstrating that what constitutes gentrification. And whether or not it’s a positive or negative phenomenon.