Gentrification is Generational

I have really never done a generational post and I think the timing is good for me to start with this. There's so much coming to a head right now: quite literally the final standoff between fascism and the will of the people, the start, possibly, of World War III with two destructive, expensive, and inhumane wars (with a new normal of bombing hospitals and massacring both journalists and medical professionals, as well as children) going on, both of them in Europe. This could be the start of something we haven't seen in a very long time. Increased civil disobedience, increased police presence, more militarization of the role of the police; perhaps even more surveillance, and certainly more scrutiny of the existing data sets that are already getting pulled every day. I really wish the future didn't look the way it looks right now. But just as my dad and his generation endured their wars as children in the early decades of the 20th century, and their parents fought them; so must we be ready for whatever the cost is of these next years to come. We will be paying the so-called technical debt of decades past: political, socioeconomic, ecological. The bill is coming due, and we - as a society - and our children, and their children, will bear this cost.

Who Did It

The Boomer generation gets a really bad rep, and in some ways it is deserved. The accusation goes something like this, that the Boomers inherited a thriving, postwar economy, and with it, they flourished collectively, and have gone on to own a very large piece of the proverbial pie. All of this is true. The rest gets complicated. If they had done more politically, could they have sounded the alarm about climate change earlier and in a way that could have been more effective? Maybe. Do they deserve some blame for all buying houses in their 20s and 30s and then NIMBY-ing away the next generation's access to same a few decades later? Maybe. But here's the thing. I don't really know any Boomers that well.

What I can say is that my father was born at the end of the Greatest Generation, and my mother at the tail end of the Silent Generation. So I didn't have boomer parents. My siblings and I all fall squarely into the range for Gen X. And if you wanna look for culprits, if my observations are any indication, I think Gen X also deserves a fair amount of blame. I would say most members of my generation fall squarely into one of only three categories.

Classic center-left: laissez-faire liberal, apolitical

far left: slightly anarchic liberal, very political, media savvy

far right: Country fetish, conservative, somewhat political

By political, I mean, directly participates in democracy. The issue with these three groups is that with modern media the way it is, they can be fed completely different narratives by the channels and streamers that know their audience. And because media consumption is so vulnerable to peer pressure in terms of preferences and habits, the daily news landscape is where we see an increased failure of impartiality along with a movement towards aggression and polarization. We went from learning about things to just picking a team. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this lately. It's why we have basically no power as an electorate. We can't even agree on what the problems are.

The other day I was watching this interesting piece by channel 5 about gentrification, which does a great job of laying out the pros and cons. But right at the beginning was this little snippet about the boomers, that really blew me away. It was a cathartic moment. Let's get into it.

The first generation born into a post white flight reality were the boomers. It should come as no surprise that they loved it. After all, most of their parents were hardscrabble World War II vets. The children of the boomers, Gen Xers, kind of liked the suburbs but were starting to show some sings of angst, but the generation after them - the millennials - they envisioned a vibrant, new life, a world beyond cul-de-sacs and strip malls.

The context here was just that gentrification is becoming a problem in Mexico City, and millennials comprise a large share of the 800,000 US citizens that have crossed the border as digital nomads in the last four years.

Why the Boomers

There is sort of a meme that's been going around, perhaps it's even a proto-meme, in that I would argue it was a precursor to the concept of a 'Karen,' or a 'Chad.' It's basically the idea of old people getting grumpy at kids for having fun. Maybe those kids are trying to fish, maybe the wanted to go swimming somewhere in the river that belongs to somebody else, maybe they're skateboarding, or doing videos for TikTok; whatever. It's just this concept of somebody always coming over to complain the minute you're having any fun whatsoever. In my completely unscientific research, it's become clear that many of these instigators are boomers. Some are older gen x-ers, and perhaps some also silent generation, but most are boomers. Why?

We just saw why. They were the first generation to get shooed away from the cities into these 'idyllic' suburbs, which led to the death of public transport in the United States with the Fords and Goodyears of the world falling in lock step to kill the trains in favor of cars and buses. To the boomers this was a good thing. It's not that they necessarily did this to us, but certainly they celebrated it. That to me was the real harm. It maps directly to the blindness this generation has around the issue of climate change. The life of any boomer was characterized by constant messaging around the benefits of suburban living, the advantages of doing so as compared to the city, and over time, I would argue, created a natural us versus them mentality, which, as old age comes along, tends to turn into a sort of defensive nativism. That can be very hard to work with; & combined with the natural tendency towards narcissism and braggadocio that comes with wealth, so Karen is born.

It's because they were literally taught that it's better to be separate. It's better to look over the fence at somebody. It's better to leave the city center to be somebody else's problem; and if you watch the video from channel 5 that I linked above, they go on to argue that the one thing the architects of this so-called white flight didn't think about, was that the cities would continue to be the cultural hubs, regardless. Many, if not all of the cities affected, fell on hard times because of this white flight, but that was decades ago, and in many cases they have recovered. But now, we have a general resentment from white people in the suburbs that they don't have the cultural power that they once did. So Chad is born.

The boomer generation is under fire right now. There is a little question of that. You could argue that wealth tends to concentrate with the elderly for obvious reasons, and also for obvious reasons, it is the wealthy that are criticized. This, of course, is true. But it is also true that the boomer generation had access to a idyllic childhood that is no longer even on the table for subsequent generations. So the resentment is both palpable and at least a little bit on the mark.

But really, I don't even have a dog in this fight. Like I said, no one in my family is a boomer. And beyond that, our story isn't particularly typical for the average American family: Swedish dad, Mexican mother. We did live in the suburbs for a spell, but not as part of any so-called white flight. Both of my parents were first generation immigrants. it's just that when I saw that data point, something clicked. It's like people don't understand that, but they should. One of the defining characteristics of a boomer is having been part of the once-in-a-century phenomenon where the world was made to look like it was their birthright. Like the majority of an entire generation got spoiled for attention, and didn't really learn how to handle rejection.

Veruca Salt: I want one, daddy.

The Breakdown

Here are some generations and their birth years:

• The Greatest Generation: Born 1901–1924
• The Silent Generation: Born 1925–1945
• Baby Boomers: Born 1946–1964
• Generation X: Born 1965–1979
• Millennials: Born 1980–1994
• Generation Z: Born 1995–2012
• Gen Alpha: Born 2013–2025