system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What is gentrification? Positives/Negatives of it?

I've never really fully understood what it is and why it is undertaken. Thanks reddit.
gpt
Let's say we have a kind of poor, working class (that means the people who work in the area aren't earning a whole lot of money from their jobs) neighborhood in a city. The people there are mostly minorities, sometimes immigrants.

Now, some artistic, creative people find that the hip neighborhoods in the city are just too expensive. They can't afford to live their and have space to do their creative things. So they start moving to the working class neighborhood, where rent is cheap and there's a lot of space. At first, this is okay. They get along with the people there, add some interesting things to the neighborhood (they open a coffee shop in a previously empty store, turn an empty lot into a garden, open art galleries, etc.).

Suddenly, though, the people with money from the hip neighborhoods start hearing about all these cool things opening up in the working class neighborhood. They start traveling there to visit the restaurants, see the art galleries and music shows.

This makes the neighborhood look more attractive, and soon people who aren't creatives, but like being around creatives, move in. With all these new people moving in, they cause the rents to go up, and more and more "hip" stores and places opening up, and the minorities/immigrants who lived their originally find that they no longer can afford to live there. Eventually, the neighborhood becomes so expensive that even most of the artistic types move out, and our previously working class neighborhood has now become another hip neighborhood.

The positive side of this is that it does make neighborhoods nicer. There's businesses where there used to be nothing, often brings down crime rates, and can be a more effective way to "renew" a neighborhood than government efforts.

The negative side is that it doesn't really get rid of poverty, it just displaces it. The working-class of the neighborhood don't become rich, they just move somewhere else, often farther out from where they live. Which means they have longer commutes, often high pay higher travel prices because they're using more gas in their cars, and so their quality of life gets worse. It also can remove the "character" of a neighborhood, the things that make it unique. It just turns it into a copy of all the other "hip" neighborhoods.