Word: neighborhood
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Back when city planning was still a matter of deciding which neighborhood to carve up with the new freeway and how many grim apartment towers to insert in a newly leveled megalot, the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency decided to move its offices. The agency was stuck in an unfashionable downtown building on grubby, declining Spring Street, so in 1955 the city's official redevelopers fled to new quarters...
...landmark, thus saving the beaux arts wonder from having a gargantuan 54- story modernist tower built over its waiting room. And it was a mere 20 years ago, give or take, that St. Louis razed 40 quaint blocks of riverfront warehouses; that Pasadena, Calif., tore up a fine commercial neighborhood to build a standard aluminum shopping mall; that Madison, Wis., let Burger King raze an 1850s stone house for its headquarters; that New York City tore down McKim, Mead and White's glorious Pennsylvania Station...
Preservation can set up a self-destructive cycle. When a historic neighborhood is restored, it becomes desirable and prices go up, and when prices go up sufficiently, developers think dollars per square foot, high- rise, wrecking ball. They wind up selling the view of a historic district from a condominium tower that has supplanted a piece of that history...
Alas, another irony: while gentrifiers as they first venture into an old neighborhood may be democratically inspired -- The diversity! The grit! -- they attract mobs of merely stylish followers who diminish the diversity and sweep away every last speck of grit. The old-line residents and the anchors of their communities -- the hardware stores, the cobblers, the taverns -- are driven out by suddenly high rents. Gentrification is not fun for everyone. Walter Reinhaus, a white graduate student, is renovating a Charles Addamsesque mansion in the middle of an all-black Chicago neighborhood. "With gentrification," he says, "it's easy...
...historic district, and the predominantly black and Hispanic residents are restoring scores of neo-Renaissance houses. In Savannah, the National Trust has provided seed money so that 300 apartments in the Victorian historic district can be set aside for low-income residents. In a rough-and-tumble north Toledo neighborhood 165 Victorian buildings recently rehabilitated for $20 million are now occupied by more than a thousand federally subsidized tenants. And in Boston's South End, not far from Union Park, the Villa Victoria neighborhood stands as a monument to several unlikely successes. In the late '60s the row houses...