Neighborhoods rarely attract renovation and investment at random. Developers and new residents are usually drawn to a specific texture — cheap studios that let artists work, a particular immigrant business district, a genuinely mixed-income street where very different lives overlap on the same block. The uncomfortable pattern is that the investment those qualities attract tends, over a decade or so, to price out the exact conditions that made the neighborhood distinctive in the first place.
A renovated neighborhood rarely keeps the character that made it worth renovating
Investment follows character, then quietly prices it out. The result usually looks better in photographs and feels less specific to actually walk through.
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