Cabin's solution to gentrification (with a twist)

💡 Open Discussion
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tl;dr Is Cabin causing gentrification? Nope - just the opposite.

Based on a discussion in Cabin’s Telegram (Priya Mentoring subchannel) and personal conversations, I realized that I have a different perspective on gentrification than most people. And a different solution )). As a bit of personal background: I have been on both sides of gentrification, lived under both Capitalism and Communism, and am very much influenced by being an immigrant/refugee. But anyway…

The conventional Perspective

Gentrification is caused by people with more disposable income moving into a neighborhood where people with less disposable income live. As a result, rents go up and push out previous residents. And big boring corporations replace local businesses. Gentrification is very bad and, for many, is seen in racial, classist, and other ideological terms. Ergo, we must fight gentrification to save our _______ (neighborhood/city/community/people/group/etc.)

My Perspective

Gentrification is a partial picture taken out of context. What i see are two paradigms of how a community/neighborhood/city can exist over the medium/long-term.

A: Cyclical
B: Stagnant

Let’s start with A and use a neighborhood as an example. A neighborhood is build around something of significance (train station, coal mine, Willy Wonka’s lesser known Carob Factory). The geographic and employment opportunities bring new people into the neighborhood. Generally speaking (very broad strokes), the people coming in for jobs are poorer. And as they work those jobs, the become richer. Consequently, the neighborhood becomes richer. Those whose economic and social status improves faster and bigger than the neighborhood average, move out. New people looking for opportunities move in. Eventually, the neighborhood either becomes more upscale or (more likely) becomes poorer and more neglected (because all the highest tax payers with the highest demands have all moved out to suburbia).

At some point, the neighborhood becomes again desirable because of that central location for which it was chosen. As the nicer, surrounding, neighborhoods get saturated, this one too gets gentrified. For a while. Because the cycle inevitably repeats itself. Gentrifiers attract other gentrifiers. People moving away from other people end up attracting the very people they moved away from and then wanting to again move away. As a result, the neighborhood has its good times and its bad times. But really, no time is not perfectly good or bad: is low income + high crime + tight connections + strong local culture better or worse than the opposite? Depends on your preferences. We love complaining about gentrification. But we never think about Paradigm B.

Paradigm B is stagnation. Most of us are lucky enough not to experience real neighborhood stagnation. But if you could ask your grandparents who maybe lived in a Jewish shteitl outside Krakow in Poland (like mine) or a shantytown part of Rio, for example, stagnation really sucks. And for centuries, even millennia, stagnation has been the norm for neighborhoods and towns all over the world. I’m talking the kind of poverty most of us can’t even imagine (thankfully). And absolutely zero hope for a better future not just for yourself but your grandchildren and theirs. People still found happiness. People still survived. But it’s not something I’d ever aspire to.

And even for those better off, stagnation sucks. Like it or not, but it was capitalism and economic cycles that drove the watershed of inventions and quality of life improvements that made modern life and pre-Industrial revolution life seem like completely different existences. As they say, not even the Queen had running hot water a couple centuries ago.

So when talking about gentrification, we are really talking about the “up” part of the cyclical paradigm and ignoring that the only widely available alternative is the stagnation paradigm. But there is a solution.

Cabin
People have asked if Cabin is causing gentrification. Actually, cabin is solving it.

One of the simpler way to explain Cabin’s current mission, IMHO, is: Make your friends your neighbors and your neighbors your friends. This is how we reconcile the paradigms.

People move out of their neighborhoods because their evolving needs are not being met. As people grow, they want their neighborhood to grow with them. When you bring your friends into your neighborhood, you’re also bringing their:

  • Energy
  • Creativity
  • Desire to connect
  • And yes, money

Meanwhile, the current neighbors bring:

  • Rootedness in the neighborhood
  • Local culture
  • Knowledge of how everything there works (or doesn’t) and how to communicate with local service providers
  • Existing interpersonal connections in the neighborhood

When these two groups merge, they can help the neighborhood to evolve without losing its character. The local experience of the neighbors can work together with the enthusiasm of the friends to do all sorts of placemaking:

  • Create and maintain shared spaces
  • Paint the buildings with murals
  • Fix nagging problems either themselves or by pressuring city government
  • Support local businesses by hosting and going to events there, creating a local currency, etc.

Most importantly, this enthusiasm for connection can become contagious. From one building it could spread to one street, one block, etc.

But won’t the rent go up?

Maybe but not necessarily. Neighbors can have more negotiating power with landlords by sharing how much they pay in rent. Or more political power with local governments by acting together, with strong, coordinated actions. They can create co-ops and colivings. They can lower costs of living by sharing resources and organizing collective purchasing.

Let’s look at rent prices from another perspective. Property owners want to make money off that property, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But they won’t make anything if the neighborhood falls into stagnation or the bottom half of the cycle. On the other hand, big developers love buying up land to build megamalls and whatnot. So focusing on making stronger connections among neighbors, with landlords, and with local businesses creates a natural barrier against those big corporate buyouts. Landlords are not the enemy — hedge funds buying up housing are.

Since Cabin people are neighborhood builders, so too are our friends (at least the ones we choose to bring to live closer to us). If the big gentrification concern is the influx of strangers who don’t care about the socio-cultural fabric of the neighborhood, saturate the neighborhood with non-strangers, with friends.

This works for the downward part of the cycle too. With a critical mass of neighbor-friends making your neighborhood prettier, cleaner, safer, and - most importantly - more connected, it lowers the chances of the neighborhood spiraling downward. Neighbor-friends share job opportunities, offer each other gigs (can even set up a treasury for mundane gigs like fixing light bulbs in the building or a pothole on a side street), babysit each other’s kids, share cars, and much more.

In short, Cabin can significantly lower the cost of living, but not only financially! Cabin neighborhoods can lower the socialization cost, the self-realization cost - heck, bring in the entire Maslow pyramid!

Yes, people will still think about that greener grass . But now, in a Cabin neighborhood, their reasons to leave will be well balanced by (and, hopefully, far outweighed) by reasons to stay.

So what’s the Cabin paradigm?

Tbh, I don’t fully know. I envision it as a sort of slow growth, as opposed to sharp, fast growth that soon enough peaks and crashes back into the cycle. Someone more economically minded than me may be able to come up with an optimal neighborhood growth rate, akin to a target inflation or GDP growth rate.

What’s important here, at least to me, is that a Cabin neighborhood is getting a little bit better every day, in terms of:

  • Connection
  • Desirability
  • Economic and physical security

And at the end of the day, when asked if I’m worried about Cabin contributing to gentrification, my answer is that Cabin is the answer, possibly the best one can think of today.

PS. This is all written in a free-flow brain fart style. I welcome all constructive criticism. More than anything, this is an invitation for a conversation, like every post in Cabin’s forum.

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Super interesting thoughts here @Dahveed. I’m really excited to be building this with you!

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Yes! This is a great point. There seems to be a general assumption that when a group moves into a neighborhood they’re necessarily hostile to the existing neighbors, and existing neighbors are hostile to them. But that hasn’t been my experience at all. In fact, I found it much easier to befriend neighbors once I helped some friends move near me. To make a friend alone, you have to be pretty extraverted. But with a group it’s much easier to: (1) co-throw events that you invite neighbors to, (2) be seen having fun in a group in a way that makes people come up to you rather than the other way around (for example, we used to throw trash pick-ups, and people walking or driving by often asked us how they could attend future ones!), (3) have one extraverted person in your group who naturally befriends all the existing neighbors and introduces them to everyone else

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I like that tactic — even as an extrovert, I find it intimidating to approach strangers on my own. But so much easier with a friend.

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