Optimization is Gentrification

Notes on the life cycle of a neighborhood

Gentrification, like most entropic processes in life, is bittersweet. It makes a neighborhood economically viable, but the neighborhood loses something wonderful in the shuffle.

The process is well-documented. Struggling artists are attracted to a long-standing lower-income neighborhood. The low costs allow these artists to experiment with their ideas and combine them with the existing cultural vibrancy of the neighborhood to create something very interesting. It is a symbiotic relationship distant enough from the life-sucking pipelines of capitalist extraction that it can nurture something truly original and cool. What is cool eventually becomes valuable, as yuppies realize that they can buy into it for social capital. This eventually snowballs into a full development of the neighborhood, driving up costs, and driving out both the artists as well as long-standing members of the community. Eventually, it becomes yet another yuppie stronghold, high walls surrounding a void.

Gentrification is a lifecycle, the lifecycle of a neighborhood. Its death is driven by an entropic process, the same process behind Common in a GAP commercial, Che Guevara t-shirts, tech startups, kobe beef sliders, life hacking, and data driven decisions. The slow, painful death by optimization and…