May have accidentally started me a new project. A few months back I was wandering around my old neighborhood with my wide angle when I noticed a notice on a couple of the buildings. For those of you unfamiliar with these sorts of things, that's one of the first symptoms of a bad case of gentrification.
There goes the neighborhood... Had to snap a few shots before they were gone. Once that was done I promptly forgot about it until I was once again wandering there a couple weeks back.
Fuckers hadn't wasted any time. Both buildings were gone and they were already working on foundations for the new ones. Seems this case is advancing quickly.
I've lived in Louisville since 2004, gotten to watch several other neighborhoods gentrify in that time but this is the first I've realized what was going on in time to document it. Usually it's a case of waking up to find your rent has doubled and you're starting to miss the sound of gunfire.
By then it's way too late to get 'before' shots. Any of you photographers ever did a long term photo project? My attention span is best measured in seconds so I've always shied away from anything requiring me to stay on track for years.
Should have some nice reminders with this one though. Wonder what the zoomer equivalent of hipsters will be?
We used to joke that there was a quota of hipsters that had to die in an area before gentrification could succeed but this area long ago exceeded any quota. The old mantra "A gunshot a day keeps the gentrifiers away" seems not to have held true unfortunately.
This has turned into a mess. Stay tuned, in another few months I might remember to go back and then I'll treat you to more photos of construction sites!
Years ago I took this photo of some graffiti on the abandoned hospital in my neighborhood:
At the time I thought it was funny because I had been living down the block from abandoned buildings for some time.
Since then, they have developed most of the land ...and my rent has doubled.
Don't you hate it when the joke turns out to be on you? That sucks. The last place I lived in this neighborhood we'd gotten lucky in having an absentee landlord who had no clue about the gentrification. A few months after I moved out my old roommates got the boot, I guess the landlord wised up and decided to cash in, wouldn't renew the lease so he could sell the place. It's a nice catch-22, you'd rather not have the abandoned stuff but the effects of new stuff coming in are usually worse.
Whats the betting the replacement buildings will lack any soul or character. If they are going to ‘ gentrify’ places I think local government should stipulate replacement builings be kept in character with the local architecture so at least the place evolves with some personality even if we know it’s all done for very mercenary reasons
I believe that's what they call a sucker bet. This neighborhood is close to University of Louisville, so it's most likely going to be a generic lump of a building albeit optimized to get as much student loan money as possible. Sometimes they do manage to build something with character but it's usually more expensive than the locals can afford.
They do that with some neighborhoods, declare them historic or a preservation district and then the buildings can't be torn down. The local politics and the money that requires means it doesn't happen very often though.
Nice pictures
Thank you!
Oh why!
That white cutie didn't deserve to be demolished, look at that porch!
Seems like you are solving there everything with guns. :D
Wild, wild west 😂
Because somebody thought they could make more money off having something else there. They do have some fun porches, spent a good deal of time on a few of them there.
You ain't kidding. We do have more guns than people in this country, so it tracks. There's at least three times as many guns in civilian hands in this country than all the world's armed forces combined...
Lol, me and my partner have had several conversations about how we have this perception of the 'wild' west but there's just as much if not more gunplay now than there was then, plus we have a lot heavier firepower at our fingertips than they did then. One of the activists and leaders from the Breonna Taylor protests here in 2020 was shot and killed in a carjacking just around the corner from where these were taken.
Ah the grass is always greener...
This scares me, but I suppose when you grew up in that kind of environment it becomes fully natural, like oh I'm on guard daily, waiting to be shot.
Yeah, it's so normalized that it's kind of difficult to imagine what it'd be like to not have to be prepared for gunfire to break out. In 2020 at the Breonna Taylor protests I was often carrying a pistol and a tourniquet in addition to my Nikon, I'm still amazed I never had a need for either.
We're caught in this giant catch-22, it's dangerous so people want guns for security but the more people have guns the less secure everyone is. If you look at the numbers of gun deaths here, the US is quite an aberration, we usually have almost twice as many suicides by firearm as we do homicides by firearm.
I don't think it's not true conceptually. It's just quantitatively inadequate.
Thanks!
Lol, true. It'd be a bit difficult to scale that up effectively 🤣