Portland homeless cesspool- Denver next?

[Martinjmpr]

I was trying to explain the whole "gentrification" controversy to my wife yesterday.

She said "so, people with money are moving into poor neighborhoods, improving the area, building up the economy, boosting property values and providing jobs. And the people who live in the neighborhood are angry about that."

I said Yup, pretty much.

Living in Charlotte, NC, I got to see the exact opposite of "gentrification" and it was pretty gruesome. That is, inner-city neighborhoods or close-in suburbs in decay, the people who have money (mostly the white people) move out, just beyond the city limits or the busing line (busing was a huge issue in Charlotte in the 1970's), and the inner city neighborhood (predominately black) continues to decline, while the suburbs that form a "ring" around the city are thriving. Then the city gets a GFI (Great F***ing Idea) to extend the city limits into the now-affluent suburbs, which just triggers another round of people with money moving farther out, and the once-thriving suburbs then start to decline as people flee beyond the city limits.

If you drew an economic map of Charlotte, with red for wealthy areas and white for poor ones, it would look just like a target: A red "bullseye" in the center of town (called Uptown in Charlotte) where the wealthy young people/hipsters live, surrounded by a ring of poor, mostly black suburbs, and that in turn is surrounded by a large ring of prosperous suburbs.

[BladesNBarrels]

Living in Charlotte, NC, I got to see the exact opposite of "gentrification" and it was pretty gruesome. That is, inner-city neighborhoods or close-in suburbs in decay, the people who have money (mostly the white people) move out, just beyond the city limits or the busing line (busing was a huge issue in Charlotte in the 1970's), and the inner city neighborhood (predominately black) continues to decline, while the suburbs that form a "ring" around the city are thriving. Then the city gets a GFI (Great F***ing Idea) to extend the city limits into the now-affluent suburbs, which just triggers another round of people with money moving farther out, and the once-thriving suburbs then start to decline as people flee beyond the city limits.

Denver went through the same 1968 - 1995 with court-ordered busing. The experiment was a failure in that the end result was white migration, burning of buses, hate and discontent on both sides.
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/17/us...ed-busing.html

How soon history is lost with the influx of masses of people with no clue as to what has happened in the past.