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Certainly some good points, but I must contest your first. To me, it seems like the points you describe illustrate my point about the systemic nature of capitalism's effects on the urban environment; I think you're conflating the idea that capitalism is bad, thus gentrification must be bad. I do hold that capitalism and gentrification are bad, but that is also my own take on the situation, based on my position in the whole scheme. The greater point, and I should have been more clear, is that gentrification is only bad depending on where you are located on the class scale. For people of middle to upper class birth, "cleaning up" an area is positive; for those that it displaces, it's a negative thing. It might be a little easier to see in the United States than in Britain. Not that there aren't whole swathes of poor people in Britain, but I think the income inequality is more glaring in the United States, and so its easy to get this image of rich people shoving poor people around: buying up their property and making them move. The idea that gentrification "cleans up" an area, even in areas where you might deem the change positive, is not really fixing the issue of crime or "cuntness" (as you would have it), but merely relocating it. I think the problem with gentrification, and I mean this specifically as an urban area which is "rejuvenated", is that it displaces the populations that were already there. Whether you deem this good or bad is ultimately up to you.
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