Authors React to a Gentrified House in the Bay Area
when you're even afraid of houses of color https://t.co/oVzk86Kf3G
- Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) February 11, 2019
A local Bay Area's tweet about a renovated house caught some traction among SFF authors on twitter. This renovation has been a passion project for the San Francisco house flipper who purchased it, but people online aren't so impressed with the final exterior results (no word about the interior updates though) and are seeing it as yet another nail in the Bay Area's gentrification problem.
Blue Wang (the house flipper) on gutting and renovating the house: "I'm the kind of person who pays a lot of attention to details. You walk into this house versus another house that's on the market and it's not going to be the same because of all the details I gave a lot of thought to. I wanted to go in and do this house justice. It has been standing for 120 years. I wanted to make sure to put form, function and quality at the forefront."
Others are taking issues with how stripped of its character the new house is.
Author Saldin Ahmed
if I read a fantasy story about gentrifiers literally removing the physical color from a historically POC neighborhood down to the buildings I'd be like I dig what you're trying to do but this is maybe too on the nose
- Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) February 11, 2019
Author N.K. Jemisin
...Are you yanking people's chain? The blue one looks fun. Like a home. The white one looks like some design student's C-grade midterm project.
- N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) February 11, 2019
"Gentrification" will do for me.
- N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) February 11, 2019
Author Neil Gaiman
...into a white soulless box that wishes only to die. https://t.co/hgsCb4n495
- Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) February 11, 2019
I’m pretty sure I’m allowed to have opinions about architecture and design. Most of them are about trying to maintain the character/feel of old buildings. The one on the right feels like someone spraypainted a Victorian painting white, and replaced a gilt frame with a walmart one
- Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) February 11, 2019
And if that had been done to the house by a family who had moved in with the goal of living there, I would have kept my mouth shut. But it’s been perpetrated by a self-declared flipper, trying to anonymise it for a quick sale. It’s sad, and makes the world less interesting.
- Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) February 11, 2019
Might I gently point out there is no “expression of home” when a house is built by a self declared flipper, not to live in but to do up and sell?
- Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) February 11, 2019
"before" is on the right, I hope?
- Lee Henderson (@LeeHendy) February 11, 2019
Screenwriter Jane Espenson
Oh no!
- Jane Espenson (@JaneEspenson) February 11, 2019
Yeah, it’s a nightmare. What’s funny is how @sfgate goes along with the fiction that the renovation is great. Who on earth would prefer the soulless update? Weird.
- Jennifer Finney Boylan 🦑 (@JennyBoylan) February 11, 2019
Source: 1/ 2/ 3/ 4/ 5/ 6/ 7/ 8/ 9/ 10/ 11
Have people ever strongly disliked your renovation choices?
