Its funny how one day can impact your life drastically, for me that day was so unexpected. It all started one rainy saturday morning when my mom and I had just come back from grocery shopping. We bought as little food as we could afford, which wasn’t much because my mom’s job didn’t pay much. Just a few months ago we had been able to find an affordable apartment to live in while we were still saving up to find a better home. My mom worked two jobs just to be able to pay rent and other necessary things. We lived on the second floor, the wooden staircase was very narrow and cold, it was painted a pretty nude color that matched the apartment walls. We were both so tired by the time we got to the top of the stairs because the grocery bags we were carrying were heavy. There was a very weird feel in the apartment, the halls were quieter than usual. The only sound there was, were the raindrops the size of a grain of sugar, hitting the floor outside. While my mom and I were walking to our apartment door in silence, I started to notice that there were papers put on every door including ours. “Mom? Why are there paper stuck to every door?” I asked my mom cluelessly. My mom stayed quiet, she placed the groceries on the floor and started reading the paper that was on our door. “Were being evicted.” She finally said in shock. “What’s that?” I asked confused. Without another word my mom opened the apartment door, and placed the groceries on the kitchen floor , and i followed her. I closed the door behind me and sat down next to her in the kitchen chair. My mom looked so sad, her blue eyes were watery. “An eviction means we have to leave the apartment and… we have to find another place to live.” she said crying, and barely getting the words out. I couldn’t believe it, we could barely pay rent here, how were we supposed to find a new home and pay rent there? “What are we going to do?” I finally asked. “I don’t know. I have to continue to work so i can make money to pay for an apartment room somewhere. We have a week to leave, so we have to start packing. I might need to get a third job in order to pay rent and buy other things.” I was heartbroken when my mom told me this. At that moment i felt the warm tears running down my cheeks. I felt so helpless because i couldn’t do anything to help. I spent that whole week packing as many things as i could, while my mom was out working and looking for a new apartment, but it wasn’t easy due to the small amount of money we had. When our last day in the apartment came, the apartment owner came to our door and told us we had thirty minutes to leave. So we gathered up the little things we had packed which were food, clothes, some blankets, and the little money we had. Everything else stayed in the apartment because we didn’t want to have to carry too many things. We weren’t able to find an apartment to live in so for the first three days we had to live in the streets while we were still looking for a new home. We had to survive cold rainy nights outside in the streets, we only had each other for company, and when my mom left to work i would just roam around the streets trying to find any food that i could afford. That is the worst feeling ever and nobody should ever have to go through that. Gentrification is when you make a new house or business, out of another house or store that was already there, usually taking the owners or the people living there out. This happens a lot everywhere, all around the world. Gentrification is harmful to our community because it causes evictions and people have to live in the street, also its discriminating people’s economic status, lastly it makes the city less affordable.
Gentrification is harmful to our community because it causes evictions. Eviction notice rates have been going up lately, due to gentrification. This is a big problem because each eviction notice means one more person in the streets. “According to the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a grassroots project that has been counting and mapping evictions in San Francisco, ‘The number of evictions in 2013 is greater than evictions in 2006, the height of the real estate bubble. Total no-fault evictions are up 17 percent compared to 2006. More importantly, there has been a 115 percent increase in total evictions since last year in 2012,’ ” says the article,”The Bleaching of San Francisco: Extreme Gentrification and Suburbanized Poverty in the Bay Area,” from the website, “Truth-out.org.” This proves that gentrification is causing more evictions in San Francisco throughout the years and if it’s happening here, than it’s probably happening in other places around the world too. This means that there were more people without a home this year, than last year and if we continue this cycle, a lot of people are going to end up without a home. This is harmful because people have to suffer the pain of losing their homes and trying to get back on their feet.
Also, gentrification is harmful to our community is because its discriminating people’s economic status. If you are poor you don’t have much power, and if you are rich you have more power, this also applies to the middle class community. An article that explains this very well is, “The Bleaching of San Francisco: Extreme Gentrification and Suburbanized Poverty in the Bay Area,” from the website, ”Truth-out.org,” when It clearly states, “Tenants are given five days to appear in court, which is barely enough time to get a lawyer and prepare oneself to fight a huge legal battle. Moreover, most judges are property owners and landlords. As a result, "They come in assuming that the tenant is wrong," says Tyler Mcmillan, the director of the Eviction Defense Collaborative (EDC),” This proves that rich people have more power over the lower class people, and this isn’t fair because we should all be able to have equal advantages. It is harder for people in the lower class to get justice, due to money issues and that’s unfair because who ever said that justice was going to have price? It sucks to think that you need to have a certain amount of money in order to be able to get the same opportunities as someone in a higher class.
Another reason that gentrification is harmful to our community, is because it makes the city less affordable to others. Not everyone is able to afford their own house so they depend on finding an apartment with affordable low price rent to live in and with gentrification that is practically impossible. One day you’re at home happy and the next you’re having to leave your home because you can’t pay rent. An article that really explains this is “Truth-out.org” when the text says, ”San Francisco rent has skyrocketed to crazy levels. Median rent in San Francisco is over $3,000 a month, with some neighborhoods in the $4,000-$5,000 range. Average rent is in the same range. Rents in 2013 increased over 10 percent from the previous year, which is more than three times higher than the national average of 3 percent. This makes San Francisco perhaps the least affordable city for middle-class families in the country, with New York City following closely behind. It's so expensive that even San Francisco's minimum wage, which is the highest in the country at over $10 an hour, is barely enough to live.” This means that San Francisco is getting really expensive and it’s because the owners of these places are raising up the prices, and guess who are the owners of these businesses, highly doubt it would be a lower class person, these businesses are owned by rich people and they are the ones raising the prices and with all the money they are earning they are getting richer and richer every day. Low class people have no other choice but to leave to find a cheaper home because they can’t afford the high prices of their previous home. If this continues San Francisco and other places are going to end up without any people and nobody will be able to afford anything anymore.
Although we all know gentrification is harmful to our community, some might say that gentrification is not harmful because it will provide more schools for kids to learn, but that isn’t necessarily true. When these people close down a store they don’t usually make it into a school they usually make it into a store, or something that will benefit them by giving them more money and a school doesn’t exactly make money. Therefor there won’t be many more school for kids.
While it’s clear that gentrification is harmful to our community, others might say that gentrification isn’t harmful because they think there will be more protection in the community. This statement is a faulty assumption because that isn’t necessarily true. In fact it might even be more dangerous because there will be more stores and better quality things and people aren’t going to go rob a poor store with cheap things. A robber is going to want to rob something valuable and expensive, therefore the city won’t be as safe, there will always someone bad looking for an opportunity to commit a crime.
As you can see, gentrification is harmful to our community for many reasons, and if we want to live a better life then we should get rid of gentrification and give people their homes and jobs back. In conclusion, if we don’t stop gentrification than we will all be forced to leave our homes or live poorly. If you don’t want our world to be chaos, we should start by raising awareness about how harmful gentrification is, than we should all protest together to stop gentrification, we have to do something to stop gentrification before it’s too late.
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