Roxbury is Getting Ripped Apart, Here’s How    

Roxbury’s people are being replaced, and it’s happening through our property values. As you are reading this, the current population of Roxbury is actively being pushed out, displaced, and inadvertently kicked out of their homes. Not through eye-catching crime rates and violence as one would suspect, but through the much more mundane method of rising property values. What’s currently facing the people of Roxbury is called gentrification.

Gentrification is, to put it simply, when rich people move or invest into a poor area, driving the cost of living up and inadvertently pushing poorer residents out. This definition however does not capture the full mechanics of gentrification, specifically in Roxbury. Northeastern University has a history of taking on more students than it can handle, often wealthy students. These students then enter the Roxbury housing market driving up demand and increasing local rent and housing prices. But more than just driving up demand, these wealthier students often can afford higher priced homes, incentivizing local developers to build more expensive housing or raise rent to capture this lucrative market. As if that wasn’t enough, Northeastern and other colleges buy up properties in Roxbury and only allow their students to live in them, decreasing the amount of supply and driving up the price of a home. Although it would be easy to just say that this is happening because Northeastern bit off more than it could chew, that would be missing a lot of nuances that could actually help us figure out solutions to curb gentrification. A lot of the time gentrification takes place because city planners begin pouring money into historically underinvested areas in an effort to revitalize them( In the case of Roxbury, historical underinvestment is due to racial demographics). This new investment then leads to an increase in surrounding property values, starting the cycle of wealthier developments and rent increases, which siphons money out of people’s pockets that could have been used on local businesses. This cycle of course isn’t done out of malice, but the effects remain the same on the community. Unless a method to simultaneously develop neighborhoods and maintain old residents is found, Roxbury will continue down its current trajectory.  

Now if you’d read this far you might be thinking this is a classic tale, rich people screwing over poor folks in ten different ways. But, what if I told you the rich people were actually just regular upper-middle class people, just trying to find what we all want to find, affordable housing. Usually these upper middle class people are just skilled workers attracted to an area by higher paying jobs and lower cost of living.  These people are not the ones to blame for gentrification. Yes, they may play a part in its process but they are little more than cogs in an economic machine. The real benefactors from gentrification, the people with power running the machine, are banks and large real estate agencies. These people buy up housing in a downward spiral of speculation and are attracted to potential profits like flies. They treat housing as a product to be made and sold, not as a shelter essential for life. And guess who takes the hit for these people’s ambitions, guess whose shelter is ripped away and bidded on like a prized pig, that’s right, it’s you!!!! The same people tearing Roxbury apart and putting a fresh coat of paint over it can do the same to your neighborhood. 

I would suspect that by getting to this part of the article you would like to know the solution to gentrification, the magic pill that saves Roxbury and an endless sea of neighborhoods from getting gouged out and taxidermied. Luckily there is a solution, in fact there’s more than just one solution. One solution is to increase the amount of subsidized housing. Another solution is tenant protections like anti-eviction ordinances, and finally, the solution that you can directly aid with, grassroot organizing for politicians against gentrification. We as a community, and just humans in general, have to stop allowing our representatives the breathing space to remain inactive on the problem of gentrification. Now I hope after reading this article you decide to take an active part in the war against gentrification, because no matter how many solutions we come up with we can’t prevent gentrification without your help, and hopefully you decide to take the first step in stopping Roxbury’s gentrification process.