Gentrification Is Big Business

Salamanca Lawns: Once a Vibrant and Diverse Local Community

For a long time there I gave the Australian public the benefit of the doubt and assumed that gentrification was just a by-product of urbanisation. I was wrong.

It never crossed my mind that it might actually be spoken about in explicit terms. I always saw it as an unfortunate consequence of progress, not something people specifically set out to make money from.

Today, I learned I was Wrong.

When I Googled "gentrification Australia" I was really looking for articles of some of the social consequences of gentrification like this:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/apr/09/indigenous-people-are-being-displaced-again-by-gentrification-aboriginal-redfern-west-end-fitzroy

But what I found on the top of the list was investment advice like this:

https://propertyupdate.com.au/the-six-stages-of-suburb-gentrification/

And this:


https://propertyupdate.com.au/identify-a-gentrifying-area-and-capitalise-on-its-growth/

I particularly like this one's lovely tasteful expression "drab to fab"
https://www.realestateview.com.au/blog/2018/03/gentrification-in-melbourne/

People not only know it's going on, gentrification is big business, and business is booming.

I was sitting having a cigarette in town with some of the homeless people the other day and the security guard came over. He was very young and was treating these full-grown men like kids at a festival. One of them had just had a family member die and was clearly fed up with being moved on and pushed around, and asked the guy to just leave them alone this time as he'd had a hard day.

The security guard took issue with this and decided instead to press his point. Now before all this there really was nothing going on. These people were just quietly keeping to themselves in a place where they have always gathered for decades.

One of them pointed out the Aboriginal references in some of the art installed there and said "do you know what that means!? It means we've always been here."

I took the young man aside and asked for a private word. I told him that I myself had once worked doing what he's doing and that while appreciated that he was just doing his job, that there was zero chance of there being an incident before he showed up, but that if he kept pushing there was every chance he could create one and that sometimes it's just best to leave things be. I said if you just give them a moment, they'll sit and chat for an hour or two then they'll be on their way. No drama.

I managed to convince him to give them a break, but he didn't look to happy about it. I don't think they should have someone so young doing that job. Someone a little more mature and respectful is called for in a position like that.

This young man was far too inexperienced to even grasp that he is on the front lines of gentrification in Hobart - a conscious and deliberate push to make a profit from the destruction and dispersion of our communities.

I went up to him after and tried to appeal to his better nature and remind him that people in that position have experienced and are experiencing things that we would find hard to imagine. He was straight up convinced that on the contrary, he knows "plenty of people who have had just as hard times or worse" that don't break the law.

So that means he not only knew what the problems were that these guys face but also people that face worse (he must have a special kind of omniscience!). That's big assumption for a young man. But he was unconvinced. So I just reminded him that his job doesn't pay him enough to get himself in the kind of trouble he was about to get himself in and that he should be more careful pushing people who are having a very hard time. I saw him later and he had a pretty grim look on his face.

I was a bit concerned with how it would have looked to the others me taking the security guard aside, but I saw the group the next day and they were all smiles.

I hope it all works out.