#gentrification

#gentrification

On a hot August Wednesday, I approach the 600-acre Dhamma Suttama silent-retreat center in Montebello, Quebec, a ninety-minute ride from Montreal, where I'm spending the summer. My driver, a Cameroonian man in his forties, hooks into a narrow forest corridor. We pull up to a concrete parking lot that wraps around a building paneled with wood and stone. Built in the eighties as a high school, it's now made up of sleeping quarters and meditation halls.

Consisting of five residential tenements, the area is home to more than 400 tenants, who have created a close-knit multicultural community over the decades. Credit Suisse, whose pension fund owns the building, has other ideas. The people of Brunaupark are served with notices as proposals for partial demolition and new construction get under way. Going from door to door, this documentary forms a vital piece of oral history, bearing witness to the defiance and resilience of those determined to stay.

Having recently passed the midpoint of a defining decade, we're just becoming aware of The Great Reordering's cascading collective traumas. The retail experience transitioned from shopping bags to cardboard boxes. Campuses with movie nights, lecture series, gyms and celebrity chefs were swallowed by Zoom meetings. Empty offices hollowed our cities and flattened urban social culture. Countervailing dynamics inevitably come into play, and the oversupply of commercial space has one silver lining.

CLUSTER (Cairo Lab for Urban Studies, Training and Environmental Research) in collaboration with THISS Studio and Orient Productions have completed an independent outdoor community arts space in Cairo, located in Giza's Agouza Children's Park, one of the city's few remaining publicly accessible green spaces. Titled Pergola and perched close to the Nile river front, the bright red, ten-metre tall structure offers a new beating heart for an emerging cultural scene in Cairo.

Mayra Flores and Cristal González Ávila honor their roots through poetry. Flores brings the stories of her East San José community. Her self-published debut, Flores, bridges generations towards change. Ávila, a daughter of farmworkers in Watsonville, has written and acted for the stage for the last 15 years. Her stories explore domestic violence and housing injustice, and recent playwriting credits include La Cortina de la Lechuga and Luz: Senior Stories, commissioned by Teatro Vision.

In Santa Ursula Coapa, the most constant sound is no longer that of shouts, cheers, and whistles from the stadium, but that of bulldozers. The neighborhoods surrounding the Azteca Stadium Santa Ursula, Huipulco, and Pedregal de Carrasco are experiencing an accelerated construction frenzy that many residents attribute to the impact of the 2026 World Cup. Mexico City will be one of the three host cities in the country for the tournament, along with Monterrey and Guadalajara.

I think the conversations we're missing in mainstream media about gentrification-there's a few. A lot of them just lack transparency, right? Like where gentrification starts, where it comes from. Mainstream media tends to leave race out of the conversation because it's an uncomfortable conversation for a lot of folks. We don't talk enough about the history of gentrification. We're especially at a point now in America where there's assumed knowledge around a lot of topics.

Adams revealed his intention in an interview with the New York Times a month after he ended his own re-election campaign which saw him register poor polling numbers. The race has been dominated so far by the fight between Cuomo, the former New York governor, and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, whose rise in the polls has created headlines around the world and symbolised hopes for a rejuvenated leftwing of the Democrats.

When the late writer Mary Cantwell bought at 72 Horatio Street in the early 1980s, the neighborhood was still gentrifying, located on the edge of the Meatpacking District on a block she associated with what she called "the garbage pier," where the city unloaded its trash. Coming home late, she'd grip her keys and avoid eye contact with prostitutes, as she wrote in her 1995 memoir.

Deep in the grimy, dimly lit back roads of King's Cross is a pub, a boozer in the truest sense of the word. McGlynn's, it's called, and when its landlord Jerry died in 2023, the pub died with him; it became just another ex-pub in a city full of ex-pubs. It was a special, unique place, a surviving slice of pre-gentrification London where you could still get a round in without taking out a mortgage,

The Department of City Planning (DCP), led by Mayor Eric Adams-appointee Dan Garodnick, is rushing to finalize a proposed 230-block rezoning of Jamaica, Queens under the city's Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP). City Council members are now deciding whether to green light this gift to real estate developers. Under ULURP, City Council's deadline is Oct. 14, so their vote-that has not been publicly announced-will happen any day now. The Jamaica rezoning must first clear the council's Land Use Committee, which meets this Thursday, Oct. 9.

" The only people who see me are people who hope I disappear... " "He was just trying to sleep." Shawn O'Malley, one of the houseless leaders from the Vallejo Homeless Union spoke to POOR Magazine's RoofLessRadio after the tragic death at a sweep of James Edward Oakley. James is just one of the ancestors of the violent war on the poor I wrote about in the new movie Crushing Wheelchairs.

In Mexico City, recent protests against U.S. expats and so-called "digital nomads," blamed for driving up rents and fueling gentrification, show not many people like them. Yet in other Mexican destinations, from Tijuana to Puerto Vallarta, Americans have been part of the social fabric for decades, often without the same public backlash.

The gradual gentrification of Britain's creative industries is a matter of record and an all too familiar theme. The alarm has repeatedly been sounded in recent years by senior figures in the arts. In 2022, Mark Rylance memorably questioned a distribution of cultural resources in which England's most famous public school enjoys the luxury of two theatres, while arts education is relentlessly downgraded in the state sector.

Mayor Lueb was the 2nd Leftist to resign from office in Tigard since 2022. I still miss Singh on the city council. What started out looking diverse in 2022 when Portland felt the need to go conservative and got screwed, now is more conservative looking. I feel so unrepresented and wish I were. Our current city council are primarily the fiscally conservatives who could achieve gentrification and more inequity.

"We have a small but powerful ecosystem here: exhibition spaces, artist studios, and people who are willing to work with each other," said Sabine Schumacher, director of BronxArtSpace in Hunts Point.

In the front rows that are filled with tourists, phones are raised to film the fighters with commentary in English, French and Japanese. In the stands, there's a torrent of insults and cheers typical of local long-term fans. The scene reflects a recent change: once the poor man's sport in Mexico City, lucha libre a popular form of wrestling in Mexico has become a tourist and cultural attraction with a global reach.

Since 1960, New York has been in a state of housing emergency, meaning a vacancy rate of 5% or less; today the vacancy rate is 1.4%, which, in turn, has driven up housing costs higher than ever. According to Apartments.com, the average rent for an available studio apartment is around $3,270 per month. In 2021, 53% of households in the city were spending over 30% of their income on rent.

Although we didn't always have the money for the expensive new kits every season (I'm sure you can spot my mismatched camo shorts), we always had something Chelsea to wear. My dad would often dodge the high ticket prices by taking us to watch the women's team play, as well as the under-21s, where you would witness great talent at a fraction of the cost.

Americans have long fantasized about moving abroad-usually with a cocktail of burnout, wanderlust, and dreams of simpler living. But what many don't realize is that some countries aren't just welcoming this idea. They're counting on it. Behind the scenic backdrops and seductive visa programs lies a deeper motivation: economic revival, demographic survival, and even soft power recalibration. These countries see American migration not just as a trend-but as a tool.

Cannes has banned large cruise ships and excess tourists from entering the city, while Italy has slapped entry fees to access Venice and imposed stricter check-in rules for Airbnb users.

Outside artists have established significant galleries, notably Roy De Forest's Nut Art Movement and Clayton Bailey's First Psychoceramic Church, contributing to the region's vibrant culture.