Detroit Entrepreneur guy meme

[antongast]

You can’t force a building owner to continue to provide low-income housing.

Why not? It's called rent control. Lots of cities do it. I'm not saying Detroit should necessarily do it, but it's been done, and it's perfectly legal.

Any type of government intervention will either be unfair to building owners

So maybe it's unfair to building owners. That by itself shouldn't eliminate it from consideration. It should be one thing that gets weighed in the decision-making process, but it shouldn't be the only thing. If unfairness to low-income tenants doesn't by itself make gentrification intolerable, why should unfairness to building owners by itself make rent control intolerable?

or will mean using tax money to pay for low-income people to live in now middle/higher income neighborhoods...which I don’t think too many people would support.

This already exists too. It's called Section 8 vouchers.

My using of neighborhood change for the non-poor was just to illustrate that “unfair” neighborhood change isn’t exclusive to the poor. “Filtering” isn’t new, but nearly everyone I know that live in “middle class” suburbs have talked about “lower class” people moving into their neighborhood since housing prices dropped. They typically attribute it to more homes being for rent than for sale in their neighborhoods. Of course the housing crisis affected lower class neighborhoods more than middle & higher class ones...but that doesn’t invalidate my point that change can happen anywhere and that neighborhood change isn’t always fair to those already living there.

I get all that, and I didn't mean to imply that your point wasn't valid. I just think it's worth pointing out that poor people tend to catch more than their share of the negative effects of basically every kind of neighborhood change, because it ties back into my broader point about why we need policy interventions.

Don’t get me wrong, I know where you’re coming from. Ideally, it would be nice to have mixed-income buildings or neighborhoods. Or even better yet, enabling the poor to have true upward mobility. However, I don't think either of these are easy to accomplish [[and may be impossible in a capitalist society).

Mixed-income neighborhoods exist, I promise! I didn't just make them up.