Gentrification creates a stifling homogeneity in urban areas that makes it less suited for the everyday lives of the lower class and more suited towards the leisure and tourism of those with expendable income.
An old, decrepit laundromat gets replaced by an upscale bakery? And people are mad? It’s not that the poor hate organic vegan cupcakes, it’s that most of us don’t have a way to do laundry in our own home.
Run-down corner stores replaced by hand-made designer clothing boutiques? We don’t hate your eco-fabric shawl, but I can’t eat that for dinner after work like I could have a can of beans I grabbed from that corner store when I don’t have time to take the bus to the real grocery store after work.
What gentrification brings in and of itself is not typically bad, it’s that gentrification brings institutions of leisure and pleasure and makes it so that the poor have to go farther out of their way for basic necessities. It turns low-income living spaces into local tourist attractions. It can even create food deserts by putting restaurants, grocery stores, etc. in that the majority of the lower class cannot afford.
Imagine if someone totally renovated your house and turned it into a mini theme park - they took away your sleeping space, where you prepare food, where you clean yourself and get ready for your day, and replaced it with things that will please people who are visiting, who have their own homes they can go back to, who are here not for their entire life but just as a distraction from their otherwise mundane existence. It’s not that you hate theme parks, it’s not like you’ve never been to a theme park and vow to never visit one again. It’s just that you need to live! To survive! And the leisure of those who have more than you should not invalidate your existence.
Not to mention if that laundromat or corner store merchant sees people in the neighborhood who can afford to pay extra, they will increase their prices to where some of the long term residents won’t be able to afford it.
I work at a sign/large format print shop. One of our biggest customers sent me a linked file that I needed to download to print. It was a one gigabyte PDF, which surprised me. We often print decals with rasterized graphics for 12’x12’ walls, and those files tend to be around 300-500 MBs. This print job was just for 2’x3’.
It took over half an hour to download, and when it did I opened to investigate. I was expecting Hi-Res photos or original art, but instead it was a whole bunch of white space with some colored text. There was literally no reason it should be a gig.
Turns out, EVERY line of text was a clipping mask to a rasterized solid color layer. I had about a dozen 2'x3’ 600 dpi layers of solid rasterized color. Turns out that adds up to a GB.
I kept the clipping/text paths, eyedropped their corresponding colors, filled them, and deleted the rasters. I literally reduced the file to 1/10,000th the size for the exact same thing.
Thank you for linking the source this is hysterical.
Every time I see this post I think “There’s no way this is actually real” and then I check the sources and my jaw drops in awe.
jkr doesnt understand anything about america if she thinks the northern and southern states will share the same wizarding school lollll. like the south would have formed its own school anyways after, if not before or during the civil war?
hell east coast and west coast magic has got to be different (european settlers on the east, mexican/hispanic in the whole new mexico, arizona, cali area).
not to mention historically black wizarding schools would have absolutely been a thing bc african magic survived thru slavery hello??? not to mention under slavery and jim crow laws i highly doubt black children would have been allowed to study with white students. you could even make the assumption that white slavers forbade them for using their magic at all (african magic = dark magic and all that Fun Racism)
underdeveloped and struggling to thrive native american reservation schools of magic in the dakotas?
texas has to have its own school on its own school. like its just a given fact. TEXAS WIZARDING SCHOOL QUDDITCH (like texas high school football #texasforever)
and obviously you have the elitist new england schools which everyone assumes is the pinnacle of american magic education lol
