The LA Weekly offers an in-depth feature on gentrification this week, complete with “Five Signs You’re Gentrifying” — The list includes everything from artists to gelato –

The most maddening thing about gentrification — its very duality, the way in which it simultaneously delivers pleasure and pain, miraculous benefits and terrible consequences.

As middle-income residents move in, neighborhoods that once heard low-flying helicopters and automatic-weapons fire have found a greater measure of peace. Working-class families who scraped together the money to buy homes in the mid-1990s have happily cashed out, making hundreds of thousands of dollars en route to a five-bedroom home in Fontana, Las Vegas or Phoenix.

Those who stay behind, however, frequently find themselves in a neighborhood they don’t recognize. And those who rent in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood discover that they gained physical security while losing economic security, with rents rising steadily and the inventory of reasonably priced homes shrinking.

Read the whole feature to find out about commuter taggers and South L.A.’s Westside refugees. And for a current film that explores some of these gentrification issues, I recommend Quinceañera –

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