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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.

He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.

In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.

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Gentrification is recent urban phenomenon that swept through some of the most advanced countries, the same that witnessed suburbization since the end of Second World War. Many blend the purely social and economic with the ideological and partisan aspects of the phenomenon and try to stop it. Other see it as highly positive development that has to be sustained in the long run. What exactly is the gentrification, how it became possible and what may be some of its outcomes?

The gentrification, or the process of new influx of residential real estate investments in the old city centers, has affected many developed countries and more precisely many older urban centers that saw their golden age of development somewhere in the late 19th and early 20th century. After having developed large amount of residential and industrial real estate within a relatively small area due to the poor transportation systems at that time, these cities by different reasons saw their middle class, businesspersons as well as qualified workers, take refuge in the fast-growing suburbs when the better transportation system began developing since 1950s. This process began earlier in the United States and Canada, but gradually went across the Atlantic and affected many other developed countries like United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands, and Belgium.

The transportation changes made possible for many to live farther and father from their work places. The economic transformation and the process of de-industrialization made obsolete the old industrial centers. This double pressure on the old urban centers, the middle class moving out and the lack of sufficient financing for replacing the old housing and industrial facilities, led to gradual pauperization of the urban centers. The areas that 100 and even 50 years ago were places for leaving for well-to-do people in many cities now represent ethnic and racial ghettos, no matter what is the legal status of their occupants - guest workers or illegal aliens. They area trapped within this vicious circle of poverty, lack of good credit to move out, bad education, bad job prospects and again poverty. Such cities exist everywhere, they are symbol not of general social and economic problems; instead they rather reflect general social and economic prosperity. They are the last thing that links our societies with the capitalist world, as it existed in the books of Karl Marx and Charles Dickens.

How this has become possible, how millions of people were trapped in these ghettos, it depends on each and every case. In America the reason why exactly this ethnic or racial groups live is different from the case of Germany or France or the United Kingdom. The point here isn't to explain the causes of these ghettos but to show how they interact with the new urban trend called gentrification.

As the 1950s began the process of suburbization at large scale, similarly the last 10-20 year witnessed another phenomenon that went at the opposite direction. People from the upper and the upper-middle class, more often without children, moved from their comfortable suburbs to the urban centers, occupying modern condominiums close to their places of work. It seems that the mass suburbization has led to the point when moving every day to and from the city center has become a big problem for those with big fortunes that can afford buying expensive condos in the downtowns.

So the middle class was moving out, making the transportation for the upper classes a problem. The upper classes were moving in, making the housing for the lower classes big problem. These later can't go anywhere before moving up the social scale which has become more and more problematic during the last decades. Their last option as it seems to them is to stay where they are, lobbying for cheap social housings and trying to block the new luxury residential developments that gradually eat from their ghettos.

Two radical solutions, the pro-market and the socialist are hardly to give any lasting answer for the problem. The pro-market solution states that everyone should care about himself without any outside help. But if 10,000 poor people within one urban area are thrown on the street, this will make them neither eligible for cheap mortgage loans nor tenants in more expensive buildings. These people won't disappear from the downtown, but perhaps they will become more problematic for the society as criminals. Another attempt to solve the problem by constantly pouring public money into social housing projects also won't make these people more useful for the society. In general these new social developments are built where there are plenty of investment opportunities, which may otherwise bring substantial financial benefits for the cities.

The only real and sustainable solution is to make these poor people move up the social scale by educating them and helping them move away toward the suburbs. In every old city center there is a specific level of incomes needed for a household to move to the suburbs. This will make the city centers available for sweep gentrification by making large part of the present ghetto inhabitants members of the self-sufficient middle class. Instead of perpetuating the poverty by paying people for doing nothing, the public authorities may use the same amounts of money to help these people or at least the willing part of them move outside the vicious circle they are part of.