Where Have All the People Gone (Long Time After)?

Gentrification. I love it. Tacky neighborhoods being overhauled. Fear no more as you walk through the Boston’s South End, or even sections of Jamaica Plain. Turn-of-the-century brownstones and Victorians given new life by those with taste and money. It’s a pleasure to walk around without the affront of having to stare at drunks in doorways, menacing youth following you down the street. But where are they? Their absence is so striking that you realize that to call their existence an affront to the sensibilities of upper middle class citizens is a horror. I looked down alleyways, in gardens. No one. Gone are the corner liquor stores which catered to the clientele that upwardly mobile Bostonians would refrain from giving their spare change to those that “will only spend it on booze, so why should we give them our hard earned cash”. Replaced by Tapas restaurants and galleries. Even the police station in the South End has been relocated to a more distant address while the D-4 station on Berkley Street is turned into pricey condos.

This seems to me to be in keeping with the rest of the current administration’s thinking: if we keep telling people how good things are, we can brainwash them into thinking it’s true. AND, if things LOOK good, why, they must BE good. Funnily enough, if you check the government income statistics (even before Hurricane Katrina), median household income has gone down over the last year. So it makes me wonder two things: Who is buying these properties; and Where did everyone else go?