'Welcome to Gentrification City'

I just received an email from a local editor-in-chief which reads, "David Zahniser's piece in this week's LA Weekly .. is brilliant. I'm jealous." The subject of the rave is a takeout examining the social effect of the condo conversions and other increments of gentrification that are altering the essence of Los Angeles and neighboring cities like Manhattan Beach. The piece comes out in tomorrow's Weekly. Some excerpts, starting with the nature of the beast:

Welcome to Gentrification City, where an overheated real estate market is dramatically reshaping neighborhood after neighborhood, where no one � from Salvadoran immigrants living in tenements to homeowners in affluent coastal neighborhoods � is being spared by the dramatic changes wrought by a condo-fueled, property-mad economy. Tenants are appalled by rising rents, fearing the day their buildings could be demolished or cleaned out for a new class of buyer. Homeowners who have built up a ridiculous amount of equity have watched even as their communities change before their eyes. The sense of dislocation is everywhere.

For those higher up the economic food chain, the transformation wrought by gentrification can be a heady, if occasionally disorienting, experience. Homes have tripled and even quadrupled in value. Fix-�n�-flip artists are buying up cottages and adding the telltale signs of the comfortable class � ornamental grasses on the outside, refinished floors on the inside, earth tones throughout. Low-income neighborhoods long dominated by 99-cent stores, with their discount tube socks and corn flakes from Mexico, are suddenly sporting Zagat-worthy businesses....

For those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, the dislocation is far more precarious. Landlords, developers and even government agencies are pushing tenants out of hard-to-find rental units, sending them to the outer reaches of Los Angeles or even neighboring counties and states. With rents reaching historic highs, the departure of a single roommate can throw a household into disarray, leaving those behind to scramble for a new roommate or another scarce apartment.

Everyone wants to talk about gentrification � unless, of course, that conversation is on the record, printable in a newspaper.

Then the metaphor:

Perhaps the best way to understand gentrification is to view it as something akin to a weather pattern, like a tsunami, a hurricane or a driving rainstorm. Like the storm systems that pass through Los Angeles each winter, gentrification starts with the ocean, where buyers have shown themselves willing to pay outrageous sums to live near the water. The most expensive property in Los Angeles � and in the United States as a whole � is along the coastline, where properties routinely run in the seven figures.