A year ago I was walking through the streets of Berlin, surprisingly in love with the city. While looking at the photos of the trip, I stopped by the ones I took at Tacheles,

The Kunsthaus Tacheles (Art House Tacheles), was an art center in Berlin (…) Huge, colorful graffiti-style murals are painted on the exterior walls, and modern art sculptures are featured inside.

It was built as a department store in the Jewish quarter of Berlin (…) Serving as a Nazi prison for a short while, it was later partially demolished. After the Berlin Wall had come down, it was taken over by artists, who called it Tacheles, Yiddish for “straight talking.” The building contained ateliers and workshops, a nightclub, and a cinema.

I was there on a Friday night, after attending a service at the restored Great Synagogue of Berlin, just one block away. And I loved it. As a site abandoned after the reunification of the city — where most of the inhabitants of the east fled westward searching for jobs — Tacheles is a symbol of Berlin, the cheapest capital-city of Europe, and that is why it attracted students, artists and young entrepreneurs from across the continent.

Not any more. As portrayed by The Economist last year, the surge of the Real estate market is making the slogan Berlin ist arm, aber sexy (“Berlin is poor but sexy ‘) come to an end, resulting in the exile of those who can not pay higher rents. Anyone who has experienced the cost of living in European capitals — London and Paris at the top- will know what I mean. Tacheles artists were expelled last month after years of struggle to maintain this space where Dutch musicians interacted with Czech painters and Irish muralists.

It’s a process called gentrification. When does it take place? When an area that once had ​​little value, like an industrial district, goes through a process of revaluation — usually through public investment — and this attracts large developers. Those living there are tempted to sell and those who rented can no longer afford it because the cost increases. They leave the place, the upper middle class moves in and society is glad because it sees a “nicer” neighborhood.

As I was reading about this in my house, I looked around. I moved from Rosario to Buenos Aires this year. After 2 months of searching, I settled in a remodeled apartment in the Palermo Viejo neighborhood, part of a over-50-years-old structure, because I did not want to live in these horrendous new buildings that include “amenities” but you can hear when someone four floors above you is sneezing.

The apartment is near the Juan B. Justo Avenue, an area in Palermo that is experiencing a boom thanks to (1) the piping of the Maldonado stream, that no longer floods the area whenever a hard rain falls; (2) improvements in transportation such as bike paths and a BRT called Metrobus; and (3) the conversion of large abandoned buildings and railway lands into a Scientific Complex and a soon-to-open new Mall.

In the building where I live it is visible that there are “initial residents”, mostly working class families (oh, euphemism!), and some young professionals like me who pay the rising rent cost of the area. Gradually, I reckon that the “initial residents” will decrease and there will be more of the new breed who dwell here.

Is gentrification a positive renewal process, a negative process of expulsion of those who have fewer resources or just a natural process about which no value judgments should be made?

I really don’t know . But ever since I started relating the closure of the Kunsthaus Tacheles with my life in Palermo, when I read about gentrification the words of the comic Pogo come to my mind: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”