I always hear about gentrification, but I never really understood the catastrophic impact it has aside from people being forced to move. The fact that low-income citizens are forced out of their homes, whether explicitly or implicitly, is awful. Gentrification is chaotic and destructive when low-income families are forced to move because their landlords increase the rent to accommodate the wealthier people moving in. It is equally devastating when some are forced to move simply because they can’t keep up with the standard of living of the wealthy, high end lives the people around them start living.

But even people who are not forced to evacuate their gentrifying towns suffer tremendously. One major way they suffer is that they are not represented by their “peers” in jury. A jury of peers exists in court cases to provide the defendant with a way to be judged justly and equitably through ordinary people who can relate to him/her. However, gentrification is slowly removing the element of justice that a jury of “peers” once provided. In the article in the New York Post article, “When Brooklyn juries gentrify, defendants lose”, John Saul describes how jurors in a gentrifying Brooklyn are changing with the neighborhood and most of them now have advance degrees. As a result, minorities are being represented less and less. Therefore, when the plaintiff is from a minority group, his trial is not being judged as fairly, because the jurors are not his peers.

Another impact of gentrification I never understood is the “broken windows policy”, or the increase of policing minor infractions to prevent greater and more devastating crimes. Playing the “pipeline” game made me realize just how corrupt the justice system can be, where so many kids are arrested for little to no reason. Additionally, their arrests are many times laced with racial undertones, with the majority of these arrests occurring in blacks (Paddock, Ryley). These baseless arrests can ruin a person’s record and their entire future. This policy of stopping minor infractions to prevent major ones has proven to be an enormous failure, succeeding only in further removing rights from minorities.

As we discussed in class, the decline in the living standards that gentrification is having on minorities and the lower class is a continuously deadly cycle. The failed attempt of the broken windows policy exacerbated the decline even further by harming many of these citizens (even those who were not forced to leave their home.) I believe that cities can aid these poor victims by helping with affordable housing and more reasonable tax demands. In his book, Ross Levine discusses a “grassroots organized effort” to help fight for public housing and prevent the gentrification of parks and apartments. Overall, I think there are some major steps that can be taken to prevent or at least mitigate the damage that gentrification can cause.