But precise data on displacement are difficult to find, and some local residents may choose to move either to a cheaper location in the same area or to a different place entirely. Older home owners in particular may take the opportunity to move away if their children do not want to live in their house and they can make a large profit by selling it. Gentrification has social, political, and economic consequences which can differ across groups of individuals; thus, examining potential modifiers are important for pointing toward populations particularly vulnerable to health impacts of gentrification. As gentrification often descends on high minority resource deprived neighborhoods, prior inequities may persist despite neighborhood revitalization. More research is needed to disentangle the independent and joint influences of gentrification and race on health. Additional differences observed among the economically vulnerable are backed by previous research indicating poorer health status among low-income residents of gentrified neighborhoods outside the US 19, 20.
What Is Gentrification? How It Works, Who It Affects, and What to Do About It
Stage one began with various architects and architectural students who were attracted to the affordability of the neighborhood. The renovations efforts these “marginal” gentrifiers undertook seemed to spark a new interest in the area, perhaps as word of the cheap land spread to the wider student community. The blame for gentrification can be attributed to private investment, public policy, and public investment. Without controlling these factors for the benefit of all, gentrification can take place. Gentrification is derived from the word “gentry,” which historically referred to people of an elevated social status. In the United Kingdom, the term “landed gentry” originally described landowners who could live off of the rental income from their properties.
The Historical and Social Context of Gentrification
In these ways, much of urban development policy has been linked to a neoliberal agenda that centers the economic outlook of a neighborhood at the expense of lower-income and minority tenants who often end up being displaced by these initiatives. Some examples include the enclosure of public spaces like parks, and the privatization of public goods like housing, public transportation, and schools. It often also comes with the criminalization and surveillance of more marginalized groups as well as the homeless.
German municipalities and other cooperative actors have and maintain strong roles on the real estate markets in their realm. For one thing, very few urban neighborhoods have been built or expanded since World War II. When more people move in, either landlords raise the rents on existing housing or existing housing is razed to make room for high-rise apartment buildings. Twenty-first century analyses have also illustrated the role individual corporations can play in the gentrification of city neighborhoods.
- Most adapted existing gentrification measures from Freeman 32 which incorporate publicly available data and reproducible methods, but confines gentrification to urban environments—disregarding the less studied phenomenon of rural gentrification 33.
- The accompanying report calls for “data drilldowns” in neighborhoods identified by the typology as at risk of gentrification.
- In smaller cities, the suburbs are still the principal place where people live and the center is more and more akin to a commercial estate where a lot of commercial activities take place but where few people live.
- This supply crunch contributes to the incentive for property owners to push out lower-income tenants.
- The late 1940s was a transition for the area from primarily families with children as residents to a population dominated by both retired residents and transient renters.
Exact driving forces behind gentrification are debatable, with contributing factors including market forces, government policies, and crime rates 1, 16. Neighborhoods that have previously undergone disinvestment are prime targets for gentrification. In the US, mechanisms such as redlining and de jure (by law) segregation led to decreased mortgage lending, lower home values, denial of services, and withdrawal of capital 17, 18. This means an intrinsic tie between neighborhood gentrification and racial housing discrimination.
In its early days, this area of Darien Street housed only Italian families; however, after the Second World War (1939–1945), when the municipal government spoke of building a cross-town highway, the families moved out. Most of the houses date from 1885 (built for the artisans and craftsmen who worked and lived in the area), but, when the Italian Americans moved out, the community’s low-rent houses went to poor African American families. Despite the decay, Darien Street remained charmed with European echoes, each house was architecturally different, contributing to the street’s community character; children were safe, there was no car traffic. The closeness of the houses generated a closely knit gentrification community located just to the south of Center City, an inexpensive residential neighborhood a short distance from the city-life amenities of Philadelphia; the city government did not hesitate to rehabilitate it. One of the country’s most infamous examples of gentrification, it was home to primarily Black low-income families, many of whom relied on public housing to survive.
Using Data and Dashboards to Mitigate Homelessness, Increase Public Trust
- Gentrification targets specific neighborhoods, pushing out existing residents and creating a decreased “ability of low-income residents to move into neighborhoods that once provided ample supplies of affordable living arrangements” (Newman & Wyly, 2006, p. 26).
- This process unfolds in distinct stages, beginning with marginal gentrifiers—such as artists and young professionals—who seek affordable housing and invest effort into improving their surroundings.
- Gentrifying neighborhoods are “very tiny pieces of the story,” says UC Berkeley professor of city and regional planning Karen Chapple, who leads the school’s Urban Displacement Project (UDP), which has worked to map gentrification in several US cities.
- Upper-middle-class professionals, often politically liberal-progressive (e.g. teachers, journalists, librarians), are attracted by the vibrancy created by the first arrivals.
- As a result, “nearly five hundred fires ripped through tenements and rooming houses in the square-mile city,” Gottlieb writes.
As this area of study progresses, researchers must weigh the comparability of a simplified measure to the local relevance of a more nuanced and precise measure. Historically, the term “gentry” referred to landed people; in the twenty-first century, it usually refers to the upper middle class. As young, single professionals returned to the city to live, the English dubbed the process, “gentrification.” Gentrifiers can be single or couples without children, heterosexual or homosexual; their occupations are generally professional, technical, or managerial.
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Local government condones years of disinvestment and capital flight from older areas, creating a “rent gap” between the profit to be gained at current housing prices and the likely profit from reinvestment in the future. Zoning laws prohibit the expansion of manufacturing, encourage historic preservation, and create special cultural districts. In some cases elected officials, business leaders, and old social elites plan the gentrification of a center city neighborhood to stall further decline of property values. The gentrification process is typically the result of increasing attraction to an area by people with higher incomes spilling over from neighboring cities, towns, or neighborhoods. Further steps are increased investments in a community and the related infrastructure by real estate development businesses, local government, or community activists and resulting economic development, increased attraction of business, and lower crime rates. Gentrification—demographic and physical changes in neighborhoods that bring in wealthier residents, greater investment, and more development—has become a buzzword in urban planning.
In order to combat the likelihood of gentrification increasing socioeconomic and racial segregation within cities, the authors note the need for policies like Philadelphia’s recently implemented property tax relief program, which prohibits increases in property taxes for long-time low- and middle-income homeowners. For the purposes of the study, an area was considered to be gentrifying if it experienced a significant increase, compared to other areas in the same city, either in median gross rent or median home value coupled with an increase in college-educated residents. In Philadelphia, there are many historically Black neighborhoods that have undergone gentrification over the last 20 years. Consider a study from October 2015 that used Twitter to look at how residents of different neighborhoods moved around the city of Louisville, Ky.
Times in Life When Extra Space Makes a Big Difference
For generations, Louisville residents have seen Ninth Street as the boundary of the poorer African-American neighborhood to the west and wealthier white neighborhood to the east. But by carefully tracking tweets that were geotagged, meaning they contained location information, researchers could study mobility patterns of residents in the different neighborhoods. In particular, they found that Twitter users from the western neighborhoods were far more likely to be found in different regions of the city than residents of the eastern neighborhoods. In this way, the researchers found that the traditional boundaries of the neighborhoods could be redrawn based on the way people actually behaved rather than just “common wisdom.”
Boston’s project illustrates the possibility for replication across gentrification and displacement mapping projects, even between communities with drastic geographic and demographic differences. Based on seven months of community engagement, the city developed a five-year plan for addressing the consequences of gentrification in the area, providing grants and loans for home repairs and mortgages, creating new affordable homes, and acquiring more land to be used for permanent affordable housing. The existing gentrification-health literature includes numerous study designs resulting in a variety of statistical methods and model stipulations.
During that period, some 500 fires broke out in low-cost residential buildings in Hoboken, killing 55 individuals and displacing about 8,000 residents. Gentrification unquestionably has its supporters, but among those individuals who oppose it are scholars who argue that it perpetuates detrimental circumstances for historically marginalized communities, most egregiously for Black Americans. Having faced centuries of exclusion in the United States, Black families continue to fare significantly worse economically than white families as a result of lower median incomes, credit scores, and educational levels. Because of these factors, low-income Black families in major cities often live in isolated neighbourhoods with fewer resources, fewer opportunities, and comparatively inexpensive housing. Nevertheless, nationwide, as the cost of living has increased and the supply of inexpensive housing has become more limited, privileged individuals have looked to inner-city neighbourhoods as housing options, and the opportunities for gentrification have grown.
What if city planners and neighborhoods had an early warning system that could sniff out the changes just as they begin? In that way, cities might prepare for the coming changes — securing a diverse range of housing options before land and rent prices shoot through the roof. By specifically identifying neighborhoods at risk of displacing residents, this model provides a more prescriptive roadmap than the neighborhood change map. While maps of historical change detail trends that residents and policymakers may be able to extrapolate into the future, displacement risk maps directly forecast the future, guiding interventions. Moreover, these maps furnish residents with a view into the future of their neighborhoods, providing a political call to action in neighborhoods likely to displace residents. We completed this systematic review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) Statement guidelines 22.
Access to Capital (CDFI/MDI)
Before introducing the Tier 1 analysis, designers noticed that a number of block groups that consisted almost entirely of public housing units were appearing as at high risk of displacement. While such a neighborhood—which may have many low-income residents and sit near a transit line—might initially appear prone to displacement, existing availability of affordable housing can mitigate displacement risk. With information on affordable housing, the city can identify those neighborhoods where interventions are already succeeding in preventing the dislocation of low-income residents, and those where intervention is most needed. Creating its first maps of gentrification in 2013, Portland was one of the first U.S. cities to use data visualizations in order to better understand neighborhood change and displacement. For the first of three mapping layers, the city’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS) used mostly publicly-available Census and ACS data on housing tenure and price changes, income level, educational attainment, and racial/ethnic population changes in order to assess gentrification risk in each Census tract.
This phenomenon is known as ‘gentrification,’ a word that’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue these days. Everything you need to know about what’s happening in the Delaware Valley – from news and politics to science and the arts– delivered with a fresh perspective, all in an hour. Learn something new and add your voice to energizing live conversations with co-hosts Avi Wolfman-Arent and Cherri Gregg.