Gentrification and British people: Or gentrification and me with an accent
Allo Govener’
Went looking for some gentrification sites again and came across a British site What is gentrification? There is a mild hostility towards gentrification with a bit of Marxist theory. Oh I miss Marxist theory, makes me pine for grad school again. A tad different than some other sites, the creator throws in how gender adds to gentrification, which gave me a bit of pause.
As the theory goes if you look at gentrifying couples they are DINKs (double income, no kids) so they have greater spending power over working class families because the woman in the DINK couple is not tied up with childrearing. Nor is the woman’s or family’s resources eaten by childrearing that could better be used in home buying and home improvement. I also found this statement of interest: “Tim Butler and Chris Hamnett have stated that gentrification is “not solely a class process, but neither is it solely a gender process. It involves the consumption of inner-city housing by middle-class people who have an identifiable class and cultural formation, one of whose major identifying characteristics centres around the occupational identity of its female members” (Butler and Hamnett, 1994, p.491). ”