There’s no greater gentrifier than climate change, and that’s no matter whether you think gentrification is a good or a bad thing. If you define it as displacement of people of color and the poor, climate change got that covered. If you define it as neighborhood improvement, climate change will turn your town tabula rasa and then draw all sorts of public, private, and philanthropic funding to pay for an extreme makeover.
Even if you believe gentrification is not a problem, because poor African Americans and Latinos get displaced more often than not by economic instability, there’s still nothing that will clear out a community faster than a natural disaster. As former Louisiana state Rep. Richard Baker said after Hurricane Katrina, “We finally cleaned up public housing. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”
[For more of this story, written by Brentin Mock, go to http://grist.org/living/climate-change-is-the-ultimate-gentrifier/]
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