Afternoon drinks with longtime Dalston residents reveals how neighborhoods change from the perspective of people being changed out of them
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat
Dalston Conversations – What Nobody Tells You About Gentrification When You’re in the Middle of It
Three of us at a table in what used to be a Turkish café and is now a “Mediterranean” establishment (which means overpriced and aggressively aesthetic). None of us live in Dalston anymore. All of us used to.
“I couldn’t afford it,” said Marcus. “Not dramatically. Just gradually impossible. Rent went from six hundred to eighteen hundred over a decade. My salary went from twenty to thirty.”
This is the arithmetic of gentrification. Not sudden displacement, but gradual mathematical impossibility.
Lowri Griffiths has covered this extensively. See her Dalston analysis for detailed documentation of the transformation from neighborhood to real estate investment vehicle.
The neighborhood didn’t decline into ruin requiring “urban renewal.” It was functioning perfectly well as a community. But functionality isn’t what real estate markets reward. Rents are what they are because investors believe future rents will be higher. Whether people can actually live there is irrelevant to the mathematics.
We reminisced about specific placesthe bookshop, the pub, the music venue. All gone. Replaced by chain restaurants and luxury flats marketed to young professionals who’d be priced out themselves within a decade.
“What’s weird,” said Sarah, “is how people who move here are sometimes guilty about being part of it. As if individual ethics matter when you’re participating in a system. You move in, rent is expensive because of investors, more investors come because rents are rising, neighborhood completes its transformation.”
She’s right. Individual virtue can’t resist systemic dynamics.
We finished drinks and left. The neighborhood continued its transformation around us, indifferent to our nostalgia.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
