When did gentrification happen?

[bobobb.livejournal.com]

After reading some of the recent posts here, I wanted to ask...

I moved to Davis Square area in 2005. It seemed to me that gentrification had already happened. Is that people's sense? Was I a gentrifier? Did it happen since then and I wasn't paying attention? I'm sort of perplexed it is coming up in discussions in the recent election because it seems like this happened a long time ago.

Appreciate you being patient with my ignorance. Welcome people's thought though.

Comments

[gingicat]

I feel that it kinda sorta started with Diesel Cafe, which was founded in 1999. This LJ community was founded in 2002.

[ron_newman]

Or the Burren, which opened in 1996. Joshua Tree opened the following year. Before these, all of Elm Street from Day Street down to Russell was a pretty depressing and somewhat sleazy place, and certainly not a place to casually hang out at night.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I moved to Davis in 1995, and I think the gentrification process was just getting started then. It was the era of Someday Cafe, and I honestly don't remember what else dominated the square then, but I remember the cheeky "Paris of the 90s" nickname that Davis somehow developed. When I first moved here, I shared a 2-bedroom apartment on Elmwood for only $700 (total; my half was just $350). Then rent control went away, and the landlord jacked the rent to an unthinkable $900 a month. Up until then, it felt like a cheap neighborhood for artsy people to live in, and I felt like I fit in.

I think by the time you moved here, the gentrification was already in mid-phase. The archives of this LJ community are actually full of history, and you can click back to 2005 and get a sense of the neighborhood vibe at the time.

[desireearmfeldt]

The Davis Square T station opened in 1985, which I've always taken to be the inciting event of gentrification -- but obviously that means I'm thinking of it as a pretty gradual process. I grew up in the Davis/Porter area, moved in shortly before work began on the Porter & Davis stations; moved back here myself in 1997, but was around even when I wasn't living in the neighborhood. Sadly, a kid's perspective is not great for this kind of question...

But my vague impression is that in the 1980s, Davis was dominated by people who had grown up in Somerville, but people like my parents (college-educated, white-collar, but not rolling in cash) were moving into the close-to-Cambridge parts of Somerville because it was cheaper, and the T stations facilitated that; by the 1990s when I was in/graduating from college, Davis had become the place where just-graduated college students went because it was a) easily on the Red Line, b) full of 4-bedroom rental apartments, and c) affordable on a starting white-collar salary, if you had roommates. When I was looking to buy a place, ~2003/4, all those 2- and 3- family houses that had been rental properties were being converted into condos. I'm not entirely clear if the developers thought they were marketing to my demographic again, i.e. the people who went to college in the Boston area, stayed and got high-paying white-collar jobs, had not yet had kids, and were 5-10 years out of school and looking to move from renting to buying, but not looking to migrate to the suburbs. I don't think we were the people who particularly wanted granite countertops and jacuzzis -- we mostly still wanted to walk to the T and be near the ex-college-student colony. Come to think of it, I don't know a huge number of people besides myself who bought those condos (and mine is not the granite-countertops-markup variety). Which suggests that there must have been an even-more-gentrified-than-me population moving in around that time?

[ron_newman]

Somerville did not have rent control in the 1980s or 90s. Cambridge did, but that ended suddenly as a result of a state-wide referendum in 1994.

Edit: I added the history tag to this post. Those posts are worth looking through again. (Thank you plumtreeblossom for bringing the tagging system to this LJ community.)

Edit 2: Your mention of Someday Cafe prompted me to look up when it opened and closed: 1992 to 2006.

[cos]

See my comment below. I think you're right, 1995 was the first year of a massive wave of it, driven by the 1994 statewide referendum to end rent control in Cambridge and Boston.

[gruene.livejournal.com]

Definitely agree with "midphase". Gentrification is a process or a cycle of rising rents and changing businesses that feeds on itself. We certainly could have more gentrification than we've already had and end up like Belgravia in London or parts of Manhattan, with largely empty luxury boutiques and all the housing stock is owned by billionaires who mostly reside elsewhere. Fortunately Saudi princes are unlikely to want vinal sided triple deckers as vacation homes, but that's where this game ends.

http://jensorensen.com/2013/04/15/gentrification-cartoon/

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I work in Malden on Pleasant Street, and it's exactly as you say -- empty luxury apartments, looming over papered-over empty storefronts where mom & pop businesses used to thrive. It must be the saddest street in Massachusetts. People come here to park and sit in their cars all day. And I never see anyone go in or out of the luxury apartments.

It is indeed where the gentrification game ends. :-(

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Another factor in the dynamics is the local schools. A friend of mine noted back in the '70s that the first wave of gentrification was the gays -- "They don't care how bad the schools are." (His view was to see where to invest in real estate.) I've not heard whether or how the rising tax income and parental pressure is improving the local schools, or whether the incomers will flee as soon as their kids get to middle school.

[ron_newman]

One could argue for December 1984, when the Red Line station opened.

[alphacygni]

I believe that the 1997 naming of Davis Square as one of "The 15 Hippest Places to Live" by Utne Reader is often referenced as a sign. I remember it being talked about lots.

[ron_newman]

Link to Utne Reader article. The part on Davis is short so I'll quote it in full here:

Out in Somerville, a blue-collar suburb of Boston awash in artistic-energy spillover from Cambridge, something is happening. Two of the 20 young writers in Granta’s fiction issue last year hail from here, and a lively cultural milieu has popped up around Davis Square. With its bookstores, Irish pubs, and adventuresome Somerville Theater, it's an alternative to franchise-filled Harvard Square.

[vonelftinhaus.livejournal.com]

I feel when the red line opened there was 5-10 years of "converting" going on and of course that time frame is not exact - but I'm sure you will all agree nothing happens over night. I moved to the Davis area in the summer of 1995 and like plumtreeblossom had a 3 bedroom ( maybe actually a 2 1/2 bed as one room was much smaller) for $820 a month - that same layout now which has obviously been upgraded goes for $3400 a month. I wanted to point out also certain actions taken by the city or businesses themselves I am sure help with "cleaning up" an area and do not always have gentrifying as there main goal, or at least I hope these are done because it's the right thing to do, as years back the Somerville theatre power washed the exterior of the building which was a huge improvement from the dark appearance it has before. Also they eventually upgraded the entire building added those additional movies screens.

[turil.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I first moved to the Davis Square area (initially right in Davis at a horrible place right on Cutter Ave) in '97 and I think we were paying $250 a month per person (that first place was a two bedroom with a living room and kitchen as well, and the second place up in Teele was, I think $1000 total for a large 4 bedroom with a big living room and dining room and kitchen).

[cos]

I'm pretty sure the really big wave of it began when Massachusetts voted to end rent control in a statewide referendum in 1994. Cambridge (where voters where overwhelmingly in favor of keeping rent control) was one of the very few places in the state that actually had it, and 1995 was the first year without rent control in Cambridge since the 1960s. Rents shot up dramatically for several years in a row, and a wave of Cambridge residents moved into much-cheaper Somerville, particularly the parts of Somerville near Cambridge. Rents in west Somerville followed and increased dramatically in the next few years, too. Eventually things settled down and became a bit more stable, but it took several years. So, 1995-1999 were the years when this change was happening rapidly.

[desireearmfeldt]

So here's a possibly interesting question: you're talking in terms of rent control changes affecting the differential between renting in Cambridge and renting in Somerville; but when my parents moved to Somerville (15 years before the period you're talking about) it was because *owning* in Somerville was cheaper than owning in Cambridge. I wonder how those two aspects of the housing market interacted with each other.

(And then there's the more recent conversion of a lot of rental apartments into condos, which I have to assume has pushed the remaining rents up still further, and probably shifted the population of residents towards somewhat older and richer demographics, i.e. buyers rather than renters, but youngish buyers.)

[keithn.livejournal.com]

I would actually expect rent control in Cambridge to artificially inflate rent in Somerville. People living in rent controlled apartments are incentivized to stay for a long time and vacancies are relatively rare, so many people who wanted to live near Cambridge would be forced to Somerville, where they would bid up the prices of apartments.

I think Ron is right, it was a gradual process that was the result of the opening of the T station in the 80s. It was helped by a national trend of young people moving away from the suburbs into more urban areas.

[turil.livejournal.com]

I remember starting to look at apartments in Somerville, in addition to the places I'd always looked over in JP, in the early 90's, so at least back then it was somewhat "hip" with the young, semi-affluent and/or artsy crowd (I went to MassArt). I met a few people who lived in the Porter Square area (and dated a guy who lived right around there somewhere for a bit), and went to a party (via another MassArt friend) over on Broadway by Tufts back in 92-ish, I think. So things were definitely not totally old school even at that time. But certainly young creative types have taken over far more, over time.

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

Well, the very very beginning was when the T stop went into Davis Square, but it took a while.

I think it really started in the late 90s (so yes, I am also to blame).

But now it is getting to that every home sale in the area is to turn into luxury condos, and the number of "good enough" apartments that don't have granite and stainless steel and also might have semi-affordable rent is dwindling even faster. At least that's my perspective from over near Lexington Park.

[ifotismeni]

+1 to all of this.

[totient]

The first apartment I rented in what's now considered the Davis Square area, in 1991, was $1000 for a fairly ample 3-bed just outside Ball Square with 4 of us living in it. We also looked at a 5-bed on a busy street a few blocks from the Davis T that would have been $1200 but decided we didn't want to take on an extra housemate.

I was living just over the Cambridge line when rent control was defeated. Our rent for a 3-1/2 bedroom (but a small one, so about the size of the Ball Square apartment) went from $850 to $1000 immediately and to $1600 within a year.

There have been a few really crazy periods of house price inflation. You know the kind, where sellers research what their house is worth and list it for a little higher than that but not too much higher because they don't want it to be unseemly, but in the meantime housing prices have gone up so much that all the offers are for more than asking. When we were buying in 1997 we walked into a well-kept 2-family in a great location that was listed for $370K, immediately knew that we couldn't afford it, offered what we could afford which was $390K, and didn't get it. I think of that summer as when the housing prices caught up with the rental prices. Of course that's happening again now, as rents have redoubled since then, with most of that coming in the last couple of years.

All that said, I think of gentrification as a wave that's been spreading outward from the T, with some pauses for recessions, almost since it opened, starting with the construction of what's now the Harvard Vanguard Medical building.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

This makes me (quietly) hope that the Green Line extension into Ball/Magoun Square doesn't happen after all. If it does, my landlord's property value will skyrocket, and he will sell. And there goes my 17-year stint in what I believe is one of the last reasonably priced 2-bedroom rentals in Ball Square.

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

haha, this made the #2 post on LJ!

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

So, according to Google's convenient graph, Somerville's population was 76,295 in 1990, and 78,804 in 2013. That's 3% growth stretched over 23 years. Boston has grown 13% in the same period. Cambridge, 12%. Massachusetts, 12%. The US as a whole, 28%. If population increase had been distributed evenly, there should be over 97,000 people in Somerville now. Or 85,000, at only the state's level of growth.

In reality there's been migration to warmer (or cheaper) states; OTOH, there's also been migration back into dense cities, as people who grew up in suburbs don't want to live there. Except hardly anyone's building dense cities anymore -- it's usually illegal[1] -- so the price of the old stuff gets bid up way high. 97,000 people wanting to live in the space of 78,000 people will explain a lot of the housing price increase even without bringing in tech or "have no kids"[2] money.

(And I think it's fair to use the higher number -- after all, Boston and Cambridge rents have been going up a lot too, indicating people want to move here faster than housing can be built for them.)

[1] A friend claimed that 99% of Somerville is non-conforming to the current zoning code. If the city burned down, it wouldn't allow itself to be rebuilt as it is.

[2] Or "have no car" money, what with relying on bikes and the Red Line.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Does anyone here have handy data on how Davis Square's population has changed (in size) over time? Like, has it gotten denser since the Red Line was put in? If not, you'd expect housing costs to go up somewhat just from that, since carless people could pay for housing with car money.

[fefie.livejournal.com]

Having lived in Somerville for 3 decades, my observation matches those of others -- the Red Line T stop started the gentrification process for Davis Sq., but the biggest dramatic change began in 1995 as spillover effect from the abolition of rent control in Cambridge and Boston.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Mmmm, I wonder, though. Just because there's an observed correlation doesn't mean it's causal, or mostly that cause. Gentrification has been happening all over, after all. Crime rates started doing down from the early 1990s. The younger generation is a lot more city oriented and drives less. San Francisco still has rent control and insanely high rents (quite arguably, worse *because* it has rent control.)

The Red Line is probably causal, because that's exactly the sort of thing we urbanites want. Rent control, though... basically, not having it means everyone's rent goes up, while not having it means the lucky residents don't have it go up, while market apartments go up *a lot*. And eventually residents move or die off, so it doesn't stop gentrification, just slows it down, and concentrates it on whatever units do hit the market.

It's a mix of things

[tequilamckngbrd.livejournal.com]

I came to Boston from Seattle in 2007 with only $500 in my pocket, and wound up in Davis Square in 2008 in-between jobs. There was a 4-room house on Winslow Ave, and I took the smallest room for $400/month. I guess as a "techie", here were my factors in staying:

1. I haven't owned my own car since 2005. The Davis Square T-stop on the Red Line is convenient for working in either Cambridge or Boston. I tried finding multiple jobs in Davis Square, but never had any luck.

2. Nearby basketball courts. I used to play for hours a day at the court across the street from Rite Aid on Highland Ave. Now, when I play, it's at the Tufts court next to the tennis courts. Looks like all the people who used to play there now play elsewhere, too.

3. It's not pretentious. I have to work in a dress shirt and dress pants. I hate it. However, I mostly wear a t-shirt and jeans or shorts. It hasn't gotten to the point where I get looks or jibes from anyone no matter what I'm wearing. I like that.

4. The cops are cool, and friendly, as well as the long-time residents in my neighborhood. Also, there's the occasional block party.

5. Somerville Theater. I'm a movie buff. What's not to like having a local movie theater?

6. Local shops. What's not to like about having non-chain stores where you live? As long as the owners and workers are local, the money stays in the community.

That's pretty much it for me.