The 5 Phases of Gentrification -- When can it be stopped?

[hunter]

14. Kill it all past step one.

Everything goes to shit at step 2, and the neighborhood goes entirely to shit at step 3 as more money comes in from outside "investors."

Past a certain point money ruins everything.

I grew up in a place that is now a big money shit-hole where the most boring white bread people in the U.S.A. live, a conformist corporate consumer utopia with a very low crime rate, and a patchwork of homeowner associations ruled by petty tyrants whose only concern is "property values."

Economic "productivity" and "development" as we define them today are a direct measure of the damage we are doing to the natural environment of the earth and our own human spirit.

The economy we have today is not sustainable. We can abandon it on our own human terms, or we can wait for Nature to deal with us as she has dealt with all innovative exponentially growing lifeforms for billions of years now; with massive die-offs, possibly extinction.

The wealthy, which includes most of us posting here, tend to think money will insulate them from any sort of natural catastrophes. But it will be the poor who carry on, for no other reason than there are so many of them.