"Transient rich people" LOL!!

The "community activists" either forgot or didn't know that section of JP was not always a lower income, Hispanic area.  Neighborhoods evolve (South End) and not always downward.  The funny thing is a percentage of those railing against this development will pick up and move to the very neighborhoods or towns they don't want sections of JP to become (or go back to).

I live in Hyde Square Jamaica Plain, and I just want to thank these activists. By standing in the way of future development they do nothing to lessen demand for market rate housing in the neighborhood, but they do a great job of artificially lowering inventory--thus ensuring high prices for the housing that does exist (such as my condo). Keeping the competition out is a reward for those of us who began the gentrification process years ago. I for one appreciate it.

The overwhelming cry of many activists in these fights is that these changes will increase rents and drive out the mostly latino population around hyde square/jackson square. It's a double edge sword, though, as rents are already high - squeezing out poorer renters but helping the many immigrants who have been fortunate enough to become landlords. If you increase the market-rate housing stock, you lower rents - helping the renters but hurting the landlords, who in many cases are wealthy folks but just homeowners who bought a 2-family to get by. It's a complicated situation, but no one benefits by holding to the status quo and blocking every new development that comes along.

We are talking about the production of inequality in the residential space, in a particular historical form we call gentrification (the inmigration of professional-class residents into a formerly working class area, and the remaking of the physical and social environment to meet their lifestyle demands). At a time of high and rising income and wealth inequality, we are witnessing both increased residential income segregation on the one hand and an increase in "bipolar" neighborhoods where people who are quite poor and quite rich coreside (often without interacting) on the other. A store like Whole Foods has a material and a symbolic role to play in this process. Materially it attracts more of the higher-income professional class people who are its customers, symbolically it marks the space for this affluent group.

The recent wave of proposed housing developments are for high-end luxury housing that will exert upward pressure on rents in the neighborhood. There is a structural difference of interests between people for whom the neighborhood has use value (a place to live at a price one can pay) and those who seek investment opportunities for global capital (newly true of the investors for this latest wave of proposals). Moreover, these debates are about basic and big questions: how much should housing cost? who should reap the rewards of a for-profit housing system? what options do people have but to speculate in the homeownership market in the absence of strong social provisioning and the necessity of amassing personal wealth in the context of decades of wage stagnation? what is it that produces persistent racial segregation in housing? why must people be on the move in cities, despite the disruption to human communities? what should the role of local place be in generating returns for distant traders of investment products? We are talking about human-made outcomes with profound impacts for the well-being of individuals, that relate to big issues in our economy and demcracy but which take shape at the local level. We are talking about forces beyond the neighborhood that have people fighting with and distrustful of their neighbors.

It is your option to characterize people who are struggling face-to-face with the outcomes of these larger forces at the neighborhood level via ill-defined dismissive references to "identity politics" and "resisting change." But I don't see an outside to identity politics here -- your piece just plays into the identity formation of those who find self by asserting the rightness and inevitability of their own affluence and its purported creation by their own choicemaking.

I am a renter in the Hyde Square area and a participant in the neighborhood-shaping debates now underway. I regard my participation in part as self-interest for housing affordability and for human community, and in part as an act of resistance against local expressions of structural racism, as striving for a world in which people can be housed as a condition of being, as direct action against some of the negative impacts of concentrated wealth, and as a chance for skill-building in the work of participating in a democracy, among other things.

These 'activists' are missing out - they should move to a place like inner city Buffalo or Detroit. There are no 'rich (white) people' there! No Whole Foods in sight! No development! Great cheap housing stock! It sounds like these would be places they would really feel at home. Of course, those who already live in these places would love nothing more than to have the type of development taking place in JP and other parts of Boston.

JenDJenD: It is also your "option," I guess, to characterize everyone who might choose to live in a market-rate unit as an anonymous member of something called the "professional class" -- as if each of them is not a valuable human beings in his or her own right.  How insulting an attitude to bear toward your own neighbors!  Your assertion that a Whole Foods market attracts a "higher-income professional class customer" not only has been debunked, but also raises the question: why is this a bad thing -- especially if we are building brand-new real estate for them, the taxes on which will help our city?  It seems that you want to exclude a "class" of peole just because they are not the kind of people you want.  Even though, all due respect, from your writing it is obvious that you yourself have attended an over-priced institution of higher education, much like those whom you exclude because of attributes such as this. Tsk tsk!

To answer your " basic and big questions":

1.  How much should housing cost? Answer: Whatever the market bears, provided that people who can't afford to participate in the market get the assistance necessary to meet this basic human need with dignity.

2. Who should reap the rewards of a for-profit housing system? Answer: the person that took the risk to build it.

3. What options do people have but to speculate in the homeownership market in the absence of strong social provisioning and the necessity of amassing personal wealth in the context of decades of wage stagnation? Answer: Rent.  Squat.  Co-house.  Live on a boat.  To name a few.

4. What is it that produces persistent racial segregation in housing? Answer: A combination of persistent income gaps among racial groups, preferences to be with familiar people and a regrettable history of hyper-segregation in the Boston area.

5. Why must people be on the move in cities, despite the disruption to human communities? Answer: That's life, plus no one says people have to be on the move.

6. What should the role of local place be in generating returns for distant traders of investment products?  Answer: If you were a professor and you were my TA and you wrote a test question like this I would fire you.

Conclusion: you have made no case whatever against the apartments getting built.

McMorrow is right to call out "a false, idealized notion of class and ethnic identity in Jamaica Plain".  Some would say that the late 60's and 70's brought about a deterioration in most of JP and that section in particular as the middle-class left.  But few of the current community activists were around to even remember. For example, few remember that before Hi-Lo, that location hosted a Supermarket tending to the tastes of a mostly white, German-American Hyde Square neighborhood that connected with the back-side of the "lace-curtain Irish" Mission Hill. Change cuts both ways.