Top 42 Gentrification Quotes & Sayings

Silicon Valley today is populated mostly by people who would consider themselves winners of the traditional race. This causes the exclusion of the voices that are vital to a round, robust society. It's beyond gentrification.

I am used to experiencing so much trauma, that when I see it, I have to speak out. I don't think rappers have a responsibility, but if you don't say something or be silent or avoid it, I believe it shows your true real character to the world. It's like, if no one wants to rap about gentrification then I am going to fill that void!

In my opinion, gentrification can sometimes affect what's happening on the ends. You're placing people in different places, moving them around, and you're taking them out of their comfort zone and into places they're not used to being in.

This thing is such a ripple, the way lives are affected by gentrification. On one hand, yes, you're cleaning up this area, you're making it more livable for people. But you're not saying anything about the people that live there.

I grew up at this incredibly odd intersection in Los Angeles, where it felt like the black 'hood met black elegance met white gentrification met Latin culture met wetlands.

You know, I personally think that gentrification happens long before you start seeing white people in formerly people-of-color neighborhoods. It starts happening when we start telling the young, hard-working, quote-unquote "smart" kids that they need to measure success by how far they get away from our communities.

For me, the only drag about the whole thing is that a lot of my childhood friends had to be relocated to the outskirts of New York because of the gentrification. But I think it's always a good thing when you bring people of all different backgrounds together, that's sort of what New York is.

Housing is where it all begins. Where you live determines everything from where you shop for food, to how safe your neighborhood is, to your kids' school, to whether you're exposed to toxic chemicals on a daily basis. And as a New Yorker, I found it impossible not to notice and be bothered by the huge number of homeless people in the city, as well as by the segregation and gentrification that's all around you.

When we were doing shows in the mid-'90s, the audiences were 95% black. What's happened now is the gentrification of hip-hop. A lot of cities passed ordinances that made it hard for black audiences to gather in large groups. Clubs are more open to hip-hop now 'cause it's the same crowd that goes to rock shows.

Artists are always the Johnny Appleseeds of gentrification.

I personally think that gentrification happens long before you start seeing white people in formerly people-of-color neighborhoods. It starts happening when we start telling the young, hard-working, quote-unquote 'smart' kids that they need to measure success by how far they get away from our communities.

Many times when we are talking about displacement, we talk about it within the frame of gentrification, which focuses on transitioning neighborhoods. But man, every city I've looked at, Milwaukee included, most evictions are right there, smack dab in ungentrifying, poor, segregated communities.

When the back-to-the-cities trend started taking root, albeit very unevenly, cities were so glad to finally land deals that they routinely overpaid, not having a solid grasp of the demographic and market forces they should have been channeling instead of subsidizing. It’s especially true for retail and entertainment projects, which generate very poor-quality jobs. I have yet to find a city that has figured out how to ‘take the foot off the pedal’ and stop over-subsidizing, even when gentrification becomes a problem.

Gentrification and consumerism... have destroyed the character of my favorite American haunts, like North Beach, Berkeley, Venice and Aspen.

I'm not dismissing prostitutes, but a lot has changed. This so-called gentrification, it can never be stopped.

Gentrification is a problem of poor planning.

MFA programs are to the world of art what gentrification is to your neighborhood.

One of the biggest things going on in London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, and New York right now is gentrification. Every major city is dealing with gentrification, and it's always the sex workers they come for first. Cities feel they have to clean up their image and make themselves more attractive for tourism, more attractive to businesses. The Gezi Park struggle in Turkey a few years ago, for example, was a popular movement defending public space and land. What I found when I was digging into the goings on there was that the park was a place where transgender sex workers felt safe.

I think Giuliani started a trend that Bloomberg continued with rampant gentrification, and I think it's tough because why would any city choose not to do that?

Gentrification is stripping people not only of their homes but also of their dignity and their lives, and it is effectively whitening public spaces.

Gentrification always makes me laugh. People complain about traffic. Live in Atlanta! You can't have it both ways; you can't live in an incredible city and not expect it to get congested.

People tend to think of gentrification in terms of race because it's presented that way, and I think it's presented that way because in poor cities that's what's really going on. Beyond that, I think it's presented that way as a way for the people who are really pushing it to make it just a black problem, so people don't care.

In the racialized space of capitalist gentrification, police are not only arbiters of the peace, they are the muscle of retail racism: You can only be in this space if you transcend your blackness by showing us some green dollars. Even then, there is no guarantee that green will transcend your black skin.

I think there are some very evil things about gentrification.

I've been sort of gentrification-obsessed. Right before I left Oakland in 2012, I was feeling it. Now I go back sporadically, and the change is drastic.

It's more about subtracting every single buck from the tourists that still flock there. Gentrification and the need for developers to maximize their profits from every square inch of the place means that there just aren't any scruffy little basement clubs left. Those scruffy little basement clubs were the areas lifeblood. Now, it's all penthouse flats and global brands. They destroyed the very thing that drew people there in the first place - it's superficial sleaziness.

Every genre succumbs to gentrification at some point- as equipment becomes cheaper, as crowds become younger, there seems to be a sheepish attitude towards producers - how they can follow a mundane, linear sound, and make money.

Gentrification is a form of immigration, though almost nobody calls it that.

As a child growing up in pre-gentrification Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, I went everywhere by bicycle. My bike was in many ways the key to my neighborhood, which, at the time, was Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. This was in the 60s and 70s, before all the white people and restaurants. I really can't underscore boldly enough the fact that I grew up in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, before it was gentrified. You could get mugged!

We need to define gentrification as separate from the process of displacement.

ulturally, we are definitely seeing people being to ask hard questions. There's been a major shift over the last year. The NSA revelations played a big part but there are all sorts of other issues too, like inequality and gentrification in the Bay Area, and labor abuses everywhere from Amazon's warehouse, to Apple's factories, to start-ups like Uber and TaskRabbit.

Working on the film really made me confront my opinions about change and gentrification.

I just feel like, especially after 'Crazy Rich Asians,' gentrification isn't affecting art. I am actually more inspired by art now than ever.

My take on gentrification and change is it's usually always a better thing, because when you see all these businesses open and flourishing, that means there are more jobs.

Some people are afraid of gentrification, but what I see is young people want to live in a different world. And they see possibilities here. They see that rents are relatively cheap compared to places like New York and California.

There are things that are only palatable until they become uncomfortable for us, so it's very easy to complain about some problem the minute it becomes a problem for you. But you're okay with certain aspects of gentrification if they're the aspects you like.

I'm Hackney born and bred and find it hard to call anywhere else home despite the extreme ongoing gentrification which gets me down.

I often notice how students can gain the capacity to use certain critical methodologies through engaging with very different texts - how a graphic novel about gentrification and an anthology about Hurricane Katrina and a journalistic account of war profiteering might all lead to very similar classroom conversations and critical engagement. I'm particularly interested in this when teaching law students who often resist reading interdisciplinary materials or materials they interpret as too theoretical.

Gentrification and housing shortages are complex issues.

I have lived in this city my whole life and have seen the way gentrification has changed it. I'm not necessarily against transplants, as 75 percent of my good friends, roommate, and boyfriend are not native New Yorkers.

Gentrification can be a plague, as it eats up neighborhoods.

We're missing a lot of the real-life stories of what people's work looks like. Those are the people that I want sitting on the zoning board meetings, on the zoning commissions. Those are the people I want participating in business improvement in their own industry. The gentrification processes that often happen in cities so often manifest in street sweeps of sex workers. How do you get sex workers on neighborhood associations, regarded as members of the neighborhood?