Where are poor people supposed to live?

I know - it's sort of an abstract question to throw out just days after celebrating our blessings by overeating and watching football on excessively large TVs.

But I believe it's a question worthy of discussion as metro Augusta's urban core becomes increasingly non-poor.

In case you haven't noticed during the past several years, nearly every corner of this city's urban core is in the midst of revitalization.

Neighborhoods that have been predominantly poor for decades - mainly Olde Town, Laney-Walker and Harrisburg - are attracting a small but growing group of middle- and even upper-class denizens who, just a generation ago, would have settled in one of the metro area's more distant and expensive suburban communities.

Having rediscovered the benefits of urban living, these new inner-city dwellers are - to use the parlance of a local revitalization organization - "turning back" these neighborhoods block by block. It's a very organic and mostly private-sector-driven effort to purchase and renovate these charming but dilapidated homes, which are then sold or rented at market-rate prices.

The influx of investment in these historic neighborhoods has caused property values to rise and rents to increase, to the point where low-income residents get "priced out" of the formerly dirt-cheap properties, causing them to gradually move out.

Hence, the opening question: Where are these people supposed to go?

I'm not sure anyone knows. This return-to-the-city movement is somewhat new to Augusta (mid-sized cities in Southern markets aren't known for being trendsetters).

However, inner-city repopulation has been a hot topic for decades in major metro areas such as New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C., where the vigorous and scholarly debate over where and how people choose to live has made terms such as "gentrification" and "displacement" part of the mainstream lexicon.

Those words - which most urban sociologists consider "dirty" - will surely be bandied about in Augusta in the coming years as the transformation of its inner-city neighborhoods accelerates in the New Economy age.

Many young professionals working in downtown's burgeoning high-tech sector (think Unisys, RSI, TaxSlayer, MealViewer, EDTS, etc.) want to live in and around downtown. So do many students attending Augusta University's expanding Health Sciences and Riverfront campuses. So do many of the cyber and intel geeks who help run Fort Gordon's expanding electronic warfare mission.

These are not poor people. Far from it, in most cases.

The dialogue about gentrification and displacement in Augusta's urban areas, whenever it reaches its crescendo, likely will sound like the discourse Atlanta is having right now over its BeltLine project - a 22-mile mixed-use pedestrian/bike trail that loops around the heart of the city. The multi-year, $4.8 billion project is designed to alleviate the city's notorious traffic problems and create two things modern urban dwellers want most: greenspace and walkability.

The ring-around-Atlanta already is bringing prosperity to formerly downtrodden areas, especially in the city's historically poor southside and eastside neighborhoods. Restaurants, craft breweries and upscale apartments now sit on once-vacant properties.

Real estate values along the BeltLine path have skyrocketed during the past several years as more private investment flows into rebuilding areas that for decades were obscured by weeds, trash and debris.

This prosperity has turned some BeltLine areas into middle-class neighborhoods. Now that the streets are safe, clean and lined with businesses, the poor who have lived there for years are no longer able to afford rents or mortgages.

When viewed through a racially color-blind prism, "gentrification" and "displacement" are virtual non-issues. They are simply capitalism at work: free-thinking people freely choosing where to live based on financial wherewithal, personal preference and the innate desire to live among those with shared value systems and beliefs.

But the world isn't racially color-blind.

And in the South, as in many parts of the country, the poor are largely black; the middle and upper classes are largely white. That racial-political undercurrent is precisely what gives urban revitalization - something that should be celebrated and encouraged - its little tinge of negativity.

From the perspective of some inner-city blacks, racism fueled the "white flight" to the suburbs in the 1950s and '60s, and the return of middle-class whites during the past two decades is simply racism in a new form.

That sentiment was succinctly illustrated in a report produced by the nonprofit Housing Justice League when it quoted Nia Brown, a young woman living in subsidized housing in Atlanta's Peoplestown section, an area being gentrified by the BeltLine: "I just feel like, why should we have to move outside of our community so that they can make our community better? If you're going to make our community better, make us an example of the community being better! Why should we have to move out for our community to be middle class? Make it middle class with us being here."

From the perspective of black elected officials, whose power and paychecks are largely dependent on catering to low-income voters, the influx of middle- and upper-class whites into their political subdivisions poses a political threat. That is as true in big cities as it is in Augusta, where civic leaders often butt heads along race-based geopolitical lines purposely drawn with gridlock in mind during city-county consolidation two decades ago.

Could this be why Augusta lacks a "champion" for downtown - the very heart and soul of the city?

What does it say to current and future downtown residents when the district's primary representative, Commissioner William Fennoy, actually supports an initiative to move James Brown Arena out of the downtown entertainment district?

Constraining prosperity in pursuit of political power reminds me of a quote from a New York Times article about Detroit a few years ago: "Some people would rather be the king of nothing than a part of something."

Obviously, there will be plenty of future opportunities for a "community discussion" about the city government's commitment to promoting economic growth in the urban core, which is teeming with turn-of-the-century neighborhoods with revitalization potential.

Not only that, Augusta's central business district is filled with commercial buildings - most notably the Marion and Lamar buildings - that are prime for residential redevelopment. The product demand is there, as evidenced by the recent announcement by Rex Property &Land LLC that the last of the original 51 condominiums at the JB Whites Building (a once-vacant department store) has been sold.

The backers of the Augusta Cyberworks complex (whose tenant, EDTS, recently received one of Historic Augusta Inc.'s historic preservation awards for its renovation of Sibley Mill's Building 4) also have plans to covert the next-door King Mill into 250 market-rate apartments, which would infuse more wealth into the rough-and-tumble Harrisburg neighborhood.

The good news, from a civic leadership standpoint, is that the gentrification wave has probably not yet crested. There is still time for city leaders to take a thoughtful approach to deal with urban revitalization's impact on low-income residents.

Augusta also has the benefit of not repeating the mistakes other cities have made during the past 40 years of trying to balance housing affordability in the presence (and absence) of gentrification.

In Detroit, America's poster child for urban decay, the largest single property owner is a government agency called the Detroit Land Bank Authority, which pours money into homes that often sell below their cost of construction.

How can organic private-sector investment ever be spurred in Detroit when the government loses money on nearly every home it builds?

It would be folly for Augusta, whose Housing and Development Department appears to exist solely to spend federal Housing and Urban Development grants, to go down a similar path.

Here's a idea for city leaders interested in growing the city's stagnant tax base: encourage inner-city gentrification.

If you haven't surmised by this point, I don't consider the "G-word" dirty. Like many people, I enjoy walking the streets of interesting urban neighborhoods - something I was able to do recently in Chicago's once-sketchy Wicker Park section -without the fear of being robbed or assaulted.

I also believe social scientists pack too much hyperbole into the word "displacement." The reality is that poor people, like other people, move all the time. To read some reports, you would think every move is gentrification-related. To the best of my knowledge, no invading horde of yuppies and hipsters has ever forced any poor person from their home or apartment at gunpoint.

And what about low-income people who own homes in previously destitute neighborhoods who are able to sell at prices far beyond what they could have imagined because of gentrification? Where is the injustice there?

What about homeowners who choose to stay and benefit from the safety, economic security and new stores that gentrification brings with it? How, exactly, are those people being victimized?

The reality-based answer to my opening question - "Where are poor people supposed to live?" - is this: "Wherever they can afford to."

I live in a middle-class neighborhood because it's what I can afford. Upper-class people live where they live because that's what they can afford. Poor people are no different in that regard.

Is it possible we've been attacking the problem of housing affordability from the wrong angle? Instead of trying to shoehorn ever-increasing numbers of low-income people into inexpensive (often subsidized) housing, perhaps we should focus on mainstreaming the poor into the middle class.

That way, they can choose homes and neighborhoods that they want to live in, instead of whatever is left or specially set aside for them.

Recall the words of Nia Brown, the public housing resident in the Housing Justice League report, who demanded the affluent newcomers make her neighborhood "middle class" with her in it. She just might be on to something.

Gentrifiers, obviously, have put forth the effort to be in the middle class. Is Ms. Brown willing to do the same?
