[Glice]

I think the 'who's worse - US or UK?' is a moot point; there are statistically more people in poverty in the US, and a higher proportion of those are from classically disenfranchised backgrounds, certainly. But I'm very skeptical of eliding locally (or nationally) qualified poverty on a global scale (because we're all well off next to state x). Um... by which I mean, we have different problems to y'all; the fact that (from where I'm sitting) yours seem worse needn't stop me whinging about things.

Gentrification doesn't necessarily displace a local population; this isn't true of St Werberghs or St Pauls I mention above; it is true of Bedminster (where all the normal people moved to Hartcliffe and Divvywood). Often, in areas like Hackney (London), there's a lot of fairly poor people who bought council houses under Thatcher's right-to-buy scheme and ended up very wealthy indeed when Hackney became hip (whenever that was). In which case you suddenly had a sizeable number of the poorer people in a formerly-deprived area benefiting enormously from gentrification (and it's worth bearing in mind, much of Hackney is still rough).

I take your point that with gentrification often comes displacement, but I can only really speak for the UK when I say that this isn't always true; and my major pont is that poverty and ghettos are not good places for anyone to be. It's fair to say that rejuvenation is frequently mis-managed by self-serving cunts; it's not fair to say that rejuvenation (if that is a synonym for gentrification) should be resisted because sometimes it leads to incomprehensibly-named coffee. I don't know, I suspect we fundamentally agree, I'm just really annoyed with hearing that places which breed muggers and rapists are somehow good places to live. It's education and poverty (amongst other factors) which cause these problems, but sometimes a financial kick up the arse/ makeover can bring that change (see St Pauls in Bristol).