Gentrification's indo-european word root derives cognates in indo-aryan e.g. that literally mean "race" (janas) [1]. Incidently, India, Iran, and everyone else has staggering amounts of institutional racism and other kinds of discrimination. You might think that it hardly matters.

However, gens in the Roman republic concerned nobility of certain families, often only in name and different degrees. So it is not the 20th century black and white kind of racism, but something a little more particular, what is very much related to oligarchic nepotism, land ownership rights, and yes, nationalism and racism.

The irony of the matter is that gentrification in its current public image concerns people being priced out of the inner cities where their families have been living for gen-erations.

On the other hand, besides pricing, it might implicate discriminatory practices for who's being given a room, and a job, a place to study, who creates the jobs, and who gets the chance to raise a kid without toiling away as a wage slave on no income after rent.

Gosh, that's only the word's root and I'm not even totally sure about that one. Genious and gene (drift) are related as well, but I typically like to compare rhymes which on the face of it are unrelated, like centri, because it's entertaining to speculate how they could be related. See, old classical Latin had no G but used C (or Cu, whence the practice of transcribing hard G as Gu in French, e.g. Guernica); Greek and everyone else had /g/ in the alphabet where Latin has C and I have it from a good source that place value was rather more structly observed than one would think, at least since Egyptian. Classical Syriac (Aramaic) has qentron, qantron(?), which is thought to be a related loan, and the q (ܩ 'qoph') does imply to this Semitic novice a sound quite different from /k/.

Centrum is commonly thought to be a loan from Greek, and kentrom would typically reconstruct a voiceless palatal velar, whereas gen- reconstructs a voiced palatal, thus AGr. genos and kentrom cannot be cognate in the traditional theory under the assumption that both words are inherited. The assumption is myopic though, because Ancient Greek is known to have a lot of external influence and kentron itself has too few cognates to establish heritage with any amount of significant probability. It may therefore be an open question, if it was a loan word, where it came from. Although the question would appear fatuous if the semantic distance is easy to bridge that first looks implausible from AGr. "spike" to Lat. "middle" but looks more plausible if cast as "pointed tool" and "middle (of a circle" (eg. via maths, if you can imagine it). It is all the more ridiculous to go so far before "gentrification" was coined--rather recently, I presume. Yet it makes sense to contrast gentry with the peasents, and pitch fork with the ruling stem or tribe. On a rather theoretical level it is at the very least not implausible to hask for each of the roots individual internal derivation, but I'll spare you the rest which invariable devolves into world-conspiracy theory at the latest when Semitic is involved, much worse in fact when racisim was the topic, while I'm sure a more trivial argument can explain why "something with a sharp point" had to be borrowed into languages so diverse as Latin, Aramaic, Georgian, Armenian, whereas my information basis is too poor and thus biased to see ghosts in the noise, such a trade marked compass needle cartell.

Nevertheless I hope you (and Maybe McWorther if he should read this thread with interest) can appreciate the ironic saecasm that, if I was into something, then gentrification would in effect protest the centrification of the city centre. That's literally circular reasoning.

The idea that city centres are Haram (forbidden, holy, thus also Harem) is quite old actually. I think that's what we are looking at in the abstract, although in the conclusion it seems more like the industrialisation and beaurocratization of the home stead. It is a self similar problem, because it may lead to urbanization of the outer rim, and thus the gentrification of villages, which I have experienced in my own time, though to a profitable effect so far. The flip side is desertification and geront- (oficitation?) of rural areas, "Landflucht", when the youth looking for work flees to the city. Migration is topical on a global scale of course, and racism plays a huge role in that topic no doubt, be it in Texas, the Mediteranean, China, or Dubai (where the term "wage slavery" is no hyperbole, and nepotism the name of the game, I suppose), the list goes on and on. So you have to consider aglomeration between world cities, too, which is what I mean with self similarity.

In result it--whatever it really is--is a problem so complex I cannot disagree about racism not being the root cause, despite the copious evidence in the word root itself.

But I do disagree that it is about money, which is only symbolic and begets the question what it symbolized, if not the head figures depicted on the obverse. I do think cost is a more relevant term (a homophone and either way not totally secure; rhymes with caste if you mumble, and with κεστός "girdle, belt; stitched, embroidery" which is a cognate to kentron, haha, I could go on all day).

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...