Reading 1: Gentrification	February 20, 2015 – Volume 25, Issue 8
Are the young and wealthy displacing the urban poor? By Alan Greenblatt

Introduction: As rising numbers of young professionals, wealthy foreigners and baby boomers move to America’s urban centers, they are bringing prosperity and new life to once-derelict neighborhoods. But the newcomers also are causing real estate values to soar, sparking concern that people with less means are being forced to move to lower-cost suburbs, where jobs and social services are scarcer and commutes longer. Some experts say fears about gentrification’s negative effects are overblown. But advocates for the poor worry that gentrification is contributing to income disparity, leading several big-city mayors to seek ways to minimize the effects on low-income residents, such as expanding paid sick leave and living-wage requirements and mandating some affordable housing units in new residential developments. While many cities have embraced the prosperity that gentrification has spurred, experts question whether the changes are sustainable, especially if cities can’t continue to appeal to younger residents as they begin raising families.

Overview: When Ivan McCuistion began studying at the University of Cincinnati five years ago, he liked to explore the city’s diverse neighborhoods in his spare time. But he never considered a foray into Over-the-Rhine, a down-at-the-heels historic neighborhood with grand 19th-century Italianate architecture. The scene of urban riots a decade earlier, it was still considered among the country’s most dangerous areas.

“Different people would tell us different things, like don’t even go there after dark,” he says.

By the time he graduated last year, Over-the-Rhine had become one of his main hangouts. Some $500 million in public and private investment has reshaped the neighborhood, bringing in new condos and offices, craft breweries and restaurants where evening wait times can stretch to two hours.

“I love the density and the close buildings and the variety of people you see here,” McCuistion says on his way to meet friends for brunch.

The transformation of Over-the-Rhine is a striking but not unusual gentrification success story. Around the country, neighborhoods once struggling or tagged as derelict have become prime real estate for young professionals and empty nesters, older couples whose children are grown up and not living at home. Meanwhile, the business mix in many downtowns has gone far beyond the traditional law and financial firms, attracting a broad range of companies eager to move back in from the suburbs.

Demographics are partly driving the downtown population boom. The United States has a population bulge of young adults (18- to 35-year-olds) who may have grown up in suburbs but prefer living in denser areas. They are being joined in many cities by “empty nesters,” older couples whose children are grown up and who are helping to fill condos and apartments in and around downtown areas. Those two groups have contributed to double-digit population growth in many urban cores since 2000. At the same time, people who are in their prime child-rearing years are still opting more often for suburban life.

All of this means center cities, after decades of decline and depopulation, are healthier than they’ve been for years. Not too long ago, urban planners worried about the “doughnut hole” left empty when prosperous suburbs surrounded a decaying city. But now, it’s often the older, close-in suburbs, known as inner-ring suburbs, that are struggling.

Plenty of longstanding inner-city residents are being pushed out by rising rents and property costs, and sometimes by developers who convert apartment buildings to upscale condos. Average rents in San Francisco shot up 13.5 percent last year, and 5 percent in Boston and about 6 percent in Miami.2 Officials are just beginning to grapple with problems of income inequality within city limits and the tensions arising between neighboring jurisdictions as populations shift.

Meanwhile, although most people and jobs remain in the suburbs, poverty has become more prevalent in suburban America even as major cities are once again thriving. In fact, cities are growing faster than their suburbs for the first time since the 1920s. “People in the suburbs escaped the city to flee the problems [of the urban core]. But that’s changing,” said Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley. “You’re going to see cities in a better financial situation than a lot of the suburbs.”3

Cities where industry once flourished, such as Cincinnati, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, had been losing population since the 1950s, but are now drawing tech companies and other modern businesses along with the young workers with advanced degrees they employ. Cities where the economy is thriving, such as Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, and Denver, have become even more trendy and crowded.

Major companies are making big investments in urban cores, and workers are following them. Dan Gilman, a Pittsburgh City Council member, represents the Oakland section of town, where tech companies from Google and Apple on down have expanded operations. He says property values are climbing so fast — up 23 percent over the past year, according to the online real estate site Zillow — that he can’t afford to buy a home in his own district. “I love my landlords,” he said jokingly at a recent fundraiser.4

While professionals like Gilman may be feeling pinched, many low-income and blue-collar workers complain they are being priced out of their hometowns entirely.

And, for those who can remain, life is becoming increasingly segregated economically. “Poor people are being concentrated in places with less resources,” says Jennifer Ritter, a community organizer who works on housing issues in Chicago. “It’s the stratification of the city.”

The idea that there are “two Chicagos” — one benefiting the rich and the other where the poor and even the middle class are struggling — has been the major complaint against Mayor Rahm Emanuel leading up to his Feb. 24 re-election bid. Similar “tale of two cities” debates are occurring in places such as Detroit New York and Philadelphia, where less-affluent residents wonder whether elected leaders can slow the growing levels of income inequality within city limits.

Some economists argue that the notion of upscale urban villages, filled with dog walkers and e-cigarette lounges, displacing low-income residents has been greatly exaggerated. For one thing, many neighborhoods described as gentrified — such as Over-the-Rhine — had been largely abandoned. Many developers are building downtown condos in vacated or under-used industrial sites. Due to earlier population loss in Over-the-Rhine, the rehabbing has avoided the usual arguments about gentrification: There was almost no one to drive out. “We were able to do this because everything was boarded up, and hardly anyone was living there,” says City Councilman Chris Seelbach, who lives in the neighborhood.

Maryland-based development consultant Peter Katz, founding director of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a Chicago group that promotes mixed-use development, and others say that the poor suffer less from gentrification than from lack of investment in their neighborhoods — investment such as property development or even upkeep of streets and other infrastructure. That situation had prevailed in many urban neighborhoods until recently. “I’ve been around long enough to remember when having the middle-class fleeing the cities was the problem,” says Howard Husock, vice president for policy research at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

Some observers believe media coverage of big cities such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington has created the impression that gentrification’s effects are universally negative. Prices might be going up in parts of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, but plenty of affordable housing remains available outside the trendiest neighborhoods. “If you’re in Syracuse, Buffalo or even Richmond, Va., you don’t really have aggressive displacement,” says Ned Hill, dean of the college of urban affairs at Cleveland State University.

But even if the greatest gentrification challenges are taking place in only a handful of places, those cities account for a significant share of the U.S. economy and population. “Even if one were to say that only the greater metro areas of New York, Boston, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago and Seattle are transforming, you are still talking about a combined megalopolis where around 20 percent of the [U.S.] population lives,” says Suleiman Osman, an urban history scholar at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Osman notes that gentrification and the trend toward center-city living have survived two major housing slumps, in the early 1990s and the mid-2000s, reflecting white-collar professionals’ preference for downtown living. But the affluent haven’t always chosen to live in the heart of cities. Some civic leaders are worried that although the combination of condos, restaurants and nightlife in dense neighborhoods has proven successful, it may not be sustainable.

Sustainability is tied to cities’ need for demographic variety. That means cities need to capture more than members of the professional class at certain stages of their development. “Every mayor in America knows that to survive they need middle-class families, and if they’re going to retain families they have to restore faith in the city schools,” says Steven Conn, an urban historian at Ohio State University. “If they think it’s impossible to send their kids to schools in the city, and they leave the city in large numbers, we may see a slump in those neighborhoods that are full of coffee shops and locally sourced foods.”

As cities wrestle with ongoing demographic and population shifts, here are some of the questions people are debating:

Does gentrification displace the poor?

Vanny Arias, a lifelong resident of the Highland Park section of Los Angeles, is living in crowded quarters. After her mother was evicted from a house that was refurbished and sold, she moved into the one-bedroom apartment Arias already was sharing with her three children. Now Arias is worried that rents are rising so fast that they’ll all be forced out.5

Highland Park, a hilly neighborhood northeast of downtown Los Angeles, is at the center of the city’s ongoing debates about gentrification. The area’s traditional mix of taco stands and dive bars is making way for designer doughnut shops and fusion-burger joints. In addition to the changing commercial mix, housing prices are rising fast. According to the online real estate site Trulia, the median home price in Highland Park is $515,000 — up 60 percent just since November.

Nearly 30 apartment buildings changed hands in one Highland Park ZIP code last year. Some of the new owners plan to raise rents on existing tenants, but a bigger worry is that other owners plan to empty the buildings and redo them to draw much higher-paying tenants. “There’s a handful of buyers who are doing that,” Dana Coronado, a local real estate broker, told the Los Angeles Times. “They have tons of money, and they’re willing to spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars that it takes to redo these buildings.”6

The changes in Highland Park and other areas have sparked several protests against gentrification in recent months, with mock eviction notices pasted on some new businesses.

In Washington, a halfway house that accommodates 40 ex-offenders and has been operating for nearly 60 years is being converted into a nine-unit luxury condo building.7 In New Orleans, a proposed condo development at the site of a bulldozed school in the Lower Ninth Ward — badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina a decade ago — has residents worried that the once-impoverished neighborhood will, as one occupant put it, “feel like it belongs to the rich.”8

As city centers draw more affluent residents, critics charge that they are becoming de facto city-sized gated communities, where low-income and working-class residents are no longer welcome.

In San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the Bay Area, one-bedroom apartments are renting for $2,500 per month, says James Tracy, a housing activist and the author of Dispatches Against Displacement, a 2014 book about housing issues in San Francisco. “It puts up a gigantic wall so that people who are seeking housing just can’t get in,” he says. “It’s an economic and racial wall that’s going up around cities like San Francisco.”

While housing prices are rising in many cities — and quickly in coastal cities such as Boston and Seattle — some economists and urban planners argue that concerns about displacement are overblown.

Journalist John Buntin wrote recently in Slate that there is “very little evidence” that gentrification is displacing the poor. He cited work by economists including Lance Freeman, who teaches urban planning at Columbia University, and Jacob Vigdor, a public affairs professor at the University of Washington, that indicates residential turnover is no higher in gentrifying neighborhoods than other parts of cities.

“That gentrification displaces poor people of color by well-off white people is a claim so commonplace that most people accept it as a widespread fact of urban life. It’s not,” Buntin wrote. “Gentrification of this sort is actually exceedingly rare.”9

Other research indicates that more census tracts have slipped into poverty than have been gentrified. A recent study of the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas by the Portland, Ore.-based think tank City Observatory found that fewer than 5 percent of the neighborhoods that had high poverty rates in 1970 had climbed above the national average in income level by 2010. In other words, most poor neighborhoods remain poor over time, with very few gentrifying.10

Only a few metro areas — Chicago, Memphis, Tenn., New Orleans, New York, and Washington — saw a significant number of neighborhoods shift from poverty to affluence from 1970 to 2010, the study found.

Stories about displaced residents and struggling business owners in transitioning neighborhoods may be catnip to journalists, but they are “isolated vignettes” that don’t represent the larger picture, says development consultant Katz.

“When people in transitioning neighborhoods are interviewed, even the poorest, most people say they like the changes in the neighborhoods,” he says. “They like the fact that there’s less crime and there are fresh vegetables in the store at lower cost.”

Todd Swanstrom, a public policy professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, agrees that gentrification’s effects are sometimes overblown, at least in cities with overall moderate or low home values. “An economic tipping point that pushes out low-income residents — that appears not to be happening in rebound neighborhoods of St. Louis,” he says. “There’s some displacement around the edges, but even then a household can move maybe eight blocks away and get an affordable apartment.”

But Jennifer Ritter, executive director of ONE Northside, a social justice group that works on housing issues in Chicago, says the notion that renters and other low-income residents are not harmed when their neighborhood turns over is “infuriating.”

In the neighborhoods where she works, such as Lakeview and Uptown, affordable housing has become scarce to nonexistent, with poor people turned out of their homes as apartment buildings large and small are converted into more-upscale residences.

“Most recently, a hundred-unit building that housed low-income people was emptied out, and in its place is a 60-unit, new, awesome urban dwelling for people with money,” Ritter says. “The people being displaced may be going to a shelter in the neighborhood. I know one guy who moved into a storage unit.”

While many neighborhoods described as gentrifying were formerly industrial areas, other urban settings once housed many more poor people of color than they do now, says Ali Modarres, director of urban studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma, and editor of Cities: The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning.

“What happens is that over time there’s displacement,” Modarres says. “The displacement is not overnight, but it happens over time.”

Can cities reduce inequality?

Bill de Blasio made income inequality a central theme of his 2013 campaign for New York City mayor and won a resounding victory. Since taking office he has sought to tackle the issue in many ways.

He expanded paid sick leave and living-wage requirements, revamped the city’s workforce-development programs, imposed new hiring requirements on city contractors and is seeking to create or preserve 300,000 affordable units over the next decade. “We are confronting inequality in every way we can,” he said last year.11

With inequality rising in much of metropolitan America, numerous big-city mayors are searching for ways to address the issue. Last year, Seattle enacted the nation’s highest minimum wage, requiring that workers earn at least $15 an hour. Chicago anticipated President Obama’s recent call for free community college — an idea that has yet to gain traction in Congress — by paying tuition for many of its best high school graduates. Providence, R. I., and Cambridge, Mass., have programs encouraging poor parents to expand their children’s vocabularies, building on studies that found children from more affluent homes started out even in infancy with advantages because of their advanced verbal skills.

“Cities can be fantastic laboratories for social justice,” says Tracy, the San Francisco housing activist. “You can raise the minimum wage and, in certain cities, you can talk about universal child care.”

Indeed, when the AFL-CIO announced its policy priorities for 2015, labor officials said they would initiate efforts in seven cities to push for higher wages, paid sick leave and other measures intended to address inequality. “It’s cities, not states, that have set the highest minimum-wage standards, adopted the most immigrant-friendly policies and passed the most far-reaching environmental protections,” commented liberal Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson.12

After all, the mayors of most of the largest cities are Democrats — many of them, like de Blasio, quite progressive — while more conservative Republicans hold solid majorities in state legislatures and governorships after last November’s elections.

That partisan disconnect highlights some of the limits on mayors looking to address inequality. State legislators in New York approved de Blasio’s effort to expand pre-kindergarten education but balked at his desire to tax the wealthy to pay for it. When San Francisco officials pressed legislators in Sacramento to make evictions more difficult to carry out, they similarly met with defeat.

“We’re strong advocates of giving cities more tools, but right now, cities largely are stuck with whatever tax system the state gives them,” says Chuck Marohn, president of Strong Towns, a nonprofit group in Minnesota that studies municipal finance issues.

Cities themselves often lack the resources to do much about inequality. One of their biggest efforts — promoting affordable housing — generally relies on other actors, whether it’s the federal government subsidizing rent and construction or private developers whom they call upon to set aside a certain percentage of units at below-market rates.

“That’s pretty cheap for the city, because the cost is borne by developers, but the number of families helped is very small,” says Vigdor of the University of Washington. “If you’re going to adopt a policy that would address all the need in the area, you’d run out of money.” About 20 percent of the units at some new developments are set aside at below-market rates, but competition to get into them is fierce in expensive cities such as San Francisco and New York.

Ohio State’s Conn applauds cities’ efforts to address inequality, but he notes that their toolbox is ultimately limited. Struggling industrial cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, he says, could do little in the face of the “tectonic shift” that drove away much of their manufacturing bases from the 1960s through the 1990s. “No individual city has control over that,” Conn says. “They can’t solve those problems on a large scale.”13

The question now is whether individual cities today can do much to address the larger economic forces that are helping to make some of them successful but at the same time bastions of inequality. “It’s worth noting that the cities with the biggest income inequality problems are the most prosperous in America — San Francisco, Austin, New York,” says Husock, the Manhattan Institute vice president.

Several studies have found a link between cities doing well in today’s knowledge economy and their rates of inequality.

“Inequality is not just an occasional bug of urban economies,” according to Richard Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and a prominent chronicler of cities and the so-called knowledge economy. “It’s a fundamental feature of them, an elemental byproduct of the same basic clustering force that underpins metros’ rise as centers of innovation, startups and economic growth.”14

In response to the shifting and increasingly automated economy, policymakers are working on many fronts to modernize job training and improve education. But those are long-term efforts that offer no guarantee of success for all participants. For that reason, some observers believe cities will have to make substantial efforts to redistribute wealth from those who are profiting from the growth in jobs and property values in major cities to those feeling the pinch.

Cities should “tax the benefits” property owners in global hubs are getting from population and economic growth to help pay for housing, transit, parks and other programs and services lower-income citizens rely on, says Rolf Pendall, director of the Metropolitan Housing & Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington.

Florida argued that cities that are prospering as they become hubs for workers with advanced degrees should adopt policies that help those less able to afford rising rents. “Certainly, the rise of urban tech creates new sources of jobs, money and municipal revenue that cities can use to address mounting inequities through initiatives that raise the minimum wage, upgrade low-wage service jobs and build more affordable housing,” Florida wrote.15

Critics warn governments that attempts to redistribute wealth, such as by raising taxes on the wealthy, can have serious consequences. Reducing the assets of productive citizens and industries can discourage economic growth, they argue. Cities should be concerned less about inequality — an outgrowth of people being rewarded for their skills — than about creating jobs, Husock says.

Conn, the historian, is also skeptical about whether cities can create more egalitarian economies within their borders. “Cities function best when they are places for economic opportunity,” he says. “It’s not where you get stuck but when you start going up the ladder. The question is, can cities be made to function at all levels of economic opportunity, and not just for hedge fund managers and Russian oligarchs looking to park their money in Manhattan real estate?”

Can cities retain families?

Craig Vercruysse, a hospital administrator and longtime San Francisco resident, decided to stay in the city when his son was born. Living in the city has been great for his family, he says. “The minute you go to the suburbs, you have less time for your kids because your commute is longer and you have higher transportation costs.”

Many parents seem to agree. Urban neighborhoods from Philadelphia to Portland are seeing greater numbers of strollers, while associations devoted to downtown family issues have popped up in Seattle, Minneapolis and other places.

The question is whether families will stay within city limits. Vercruysse says he intends to, and he well might. But his son is only 2 — much younger than the age when many of today’s urban parents are heading for the suburbs. That often happens when a child reaches school age, or after parents have a second one. “Once their children reach about 5, about half of them have left,” said Jon Scholes, president of the Downtown Seattle Association, which promotes economic development in the city’s core.16

Public schools are perceived as offering suboptimal education in nearly every major city in the country. Some parents are optimistic about independently run charter schools, but overall such schools have not outperformed public schools.

“People in their 20s, maybe early 30s, are flooding in, but when they have families, they want a little more space and they start thinking about schools,” says Sean Randolph, president of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, a business-backed research organization in San Francisco. “Private schools are very expensive, and when you add that to the cost of housing, it’s going to send a significant number of those people out of the city over time.”

Some proponents of urban living are hopeful that public schools can turn around, in the same way that violent crime’s big drop over the past 20 years has made cities more attractive. When enrollment grows, schools will gain resources and flexibility to solve problems, says Marohn, the Strong Towns president. Public education “becomes a lot easier to fix once you have a critical mass of people in place who want to see it fixed,” Marohn says. “Parents show up, they affect change, and change starts to happen.”

Reaching that critical mass, however, can be difficult. Declining enrollment has led cities such as Chicago and Kansas City, Mo., to close schools by the dozens in recent years. Meanwhile, some of the cities that are magnets for young adults in their 20s are simultaneously losing their school-age populations. San Francisco, a boomtown for young professionals, has the lowest percentage of children of any major U.S. city.17

 

Citation:

Greenblatt, Alan. “Gentrification.” CQ Researcher, 20 Feb. 2015, pp. 169-92,            library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/cqresrre2015022000.

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Reading 2

Examining the Negative Impacts of Gentrification

SEPTEMBER 17, 2017 by Emily Chong

 

Change to cities, neighborhoods, and communities is inevitable—however, with the latest tide of change, many communities are experiencing gentrification. Gentrification occurs when “communities experience an influx of capital and concomitant goods and services in locales where those resources were previously non-existent or denied.”[1] Usually, gentrification occurs when more affluent people move to or become interested in historically less affluent neighborhoods. Gentrification is a phenomenon subject to much debate—some believe that its effects are purely positive, while others argue that gentrification brings about harmful consequences. I argue the latter and examine the problems that gentrification causes.

Some argue that gentrification is beneficial since the gentrification process creates more development, rapid economic investment, and support of projects related to consumption and entertainment.[2] The incoming population of more affluent residents and people of privilege is directly connected to an increase in resource allocation to schools, stores, and other development. While these effects can be beneficial, the gentrification process becomes detrimental when it forces original residents to leave the neighborhood through exponentially increasing property prices, coercion, or buyouts. If there is no widespread displacement, and the shifts in the neighborhood are carefully planned through with community input and involvement, gentrification can be a good thing for the community, increasing “socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic integration.”[3] However, this is rarely ever the case.

Gentrification usually leads to negative impacts such as forced displacement, a fostering of discriminatory behavior by people in power, and a focus on spaces that exclude low-income individuals and people of color.

During gentrification, poorer communities are commonly converted to high-end neighborhoods with expensive housing options such as high-rises and condominiums.[4] As property prices increase, the original residents of the neighborhood are forced out in a variety of ways. First, with an increase in the prices of buildings, the gap between the price of the building and the income that the landlord gets from renting the building grows bigger; landlords thus increase rent prices, which forces out the low-income residents.[5] As building prices continue to increase, the problem exacerbates because it becomes even more profitable to convert these apartment buildings into non-residential areas. Additionally, since investors can earn more money from selling buildings, real-estate dealers have less incentive to improve the buildings. The real estate dealers instead sell the buildings at higher prices. This cycle of rising building prices continues until only large and well-financed investors are able to continue.[6]

Because of the potential for large profits from the conversion of ordinary living spaces to high-rise or office buildings, unscrupulous landlords have used immoral means to intentionally displace low-income residents from rent-controlled areas.[7] For example, a development corporation in New York Chinatown applied for a special zoning permit for the construction of an apartment on a plot with rent-control housing; before the city decided whether or not to issue the permit, the developer had already evicted the tenants and demolished the rent-controlled building.[8] The residents stated that the corporation forced them out of the building through deprivation of services, harassment, gang intimidation, and arson.[9]

Even when the living spaces in a gentrifying area remain residential, the developers attract new residents with higher incomes because of the services and amenities that improve in conjunction with the increase cost of living and property values.[10] The influx of these new and more affluent residents puts pressure on the housing market that produce inflated rents and prices that effectively displace low-income residents.[11] Furthermore, during rezoning, the new residents, who are in the groups with the “most spatialized privilege” and “high economic [standing, have] the power to shape city policy to protect themselves from further gentrification that might have priced them out of the area.”[12]

Displacement from these aforementioned methods is disproportionately borne by low-income individuals of color, many of whom are elderly individuals.[13] Physical frailty makes it more challenging for elderly individuals to resist the actions that landlords take to remove tenants.[14] Researchers have also found that elderly people are more intensively affected by social changes around them; for example, many older adults cited loss of friendships or community networks as a reason to move.[15] This is a problem that builds on itself— with gentrification, many people are rapidly forced out of their neighborhoods, leading to less community networks and more reason for elderly low-income individuals, who are already facing struggles from rising prices, to give up on their homes and move out of the neighborhood.

In addition to displacement due to rising property values and coercive techniques, low-income individuals and people of color also can face exclusion from the newly planned spaces in the gentrifying location.[16] Common in gentrification efforts is the urban planning shift from “fostering community formation” to “investing the city with money and consumption-oriented spaces that resemble suburban shopping malls that exclude low-income and people of color.”[17] Instead of community integration, there is selective development and enforcement of distinction between different areas.[18] Moreover, when developers do build houses, they are not building these houses for low income families. There are frequent cuts in low-income housing federal assistance, and so new buildings are usually intended for upper-income families.[19] These spaces are societally problematic because they disproportionately exclude people of color and low-income individuals.

Most gentrification occurs because of a lack of policies that value community input, offer equitable rezoning policies, and provide intentional housing options. Without policies that attempt to remedy the trends that cause forced displacement, gentrification will continue to dismantle and displace lower-income communities. To develop such policies, we must recognize the disproportionate and destructive effects of gentrification.

 

 

 

Reading 3:

5 Myths of Gentrification

Byline: Lance Freeman

Everything about gentrification is controversial – even its definition. One recent study by sociologist Michael Barton compared how the New York Times and researchers used the term to talk about city neighborhoods; he found very little agreement about where change was happening. That’s not the only thing we can’t agree on. Gentrification is painted alternately as a destroyer of neighborhoods or a savior of cities. These competing views are driven in part by misconceptions about what the word means and what it entails. Here are some of the most common.

– – –

1. Gentrification leads to lower crime.

Over the past decade, urban crime rates have dropped precipitously. City-watchers often point to gentrification. A letter to the editor in the New Orleans Times-Picayune called “a city getting safer” one of the “chief byproducts of gentrification.” A Mic article attributed a 30 percent crime drop in one Brooklyn neighborhood to the phenomenon. The logic is simple: Poorer neighborhoods tend to have more crime. Gentrification, which brings an influx of wealthier residents, should lower the crime rate.

In fact, studies of the relationship between crime and gentrification have found the opposite: Gentrification often leads to increases in crime. One study found that larceny and robbery went up in gentrifying neighborhoods across the country.

There are at least two explanations for this pattern. The new, wealthier residents might be more lucrative targets for would-be burglars and robbers, perhaps enticing them to engage in more illegal acts. And crime thrives on instability, anonymity and weaker social ties, all of which make it easier for criminals to blend in and less likely for neighbors to look out for one another. Gentrification, by definition, destabilizes a neighborhood.

2. Gentrification causes widespread displacement.

For many, gentrification is synonymous with the expulsion of low-income residents. As urbanist Richard Floridawrote in CityLab, “Displacement can be and is a big issue in places where gentrification is occurring at a feverish pace.” The Charlotte Observer warned that “gentrification may be complicated, but it’s not a myth and neither is displacement.”

Of course, when neighborhoods change, some families do get pushed out. But my research shows that longtime residents aren’t more likely to move when their neighborhood gentrifies; sometimes they’re actually less likely to leave (in part because of the improvements gentrification can bring). In one study, I found that the probability that a household would be displaced in a gentrifying neighborhood in New York was 1.3 percent. A 2015 study in Philadelphia found something similar – that neighborhood income gains did not significantly predict household exit rates.

What distinguishes gentrification is not who moves out; it’s who moves in. In a gentrifying neighborhood, new residents are more likely to be well-off. As a result, the neighborhood’s poverty makeup can shift, even if no one leaves. In 2004, I found that a neighborhood’s poverty rate could drop from 30 percent to 12 percent in a decade with minimal displacement. That’s because gentrification often leads to new construction or to investment in once-vacant properties.

It’s also worth noting that the vast majority of poor neighborhoods across the country aren’t gentrifying. Outside of hot metro areas such as New York, Washington and San Francisco, most poor places stay poor.

3. Longtime residents hate gentrification.

Gentrification has a decidedly negative connotation, often painted as a loss for a neighborhood’s “old-timers.” This idea is amplified by the press. An In These Times magazine article about gentrification in the Big Easy claimed that “when native New Orleanians talk, the topic inevitably turns to conflicts with the new migrants.” In a story about a proposed apartment building in Washington, Bloomberg Views columnist Megan McArdle wrote that “longtime residents were vehemently opposed on the grounds that this would cause gentrification.” New York Daily News columnist Josh Greenman describes this as a “we-were-here-first” attitude.

Of course, some people don’t want to see their neighborhoods change. But often, residents appreciate certain aspects of gentrification. Homeowners stand to gain a windfall as the value of their property appreciates. Increased retail activity brings more goods and services to once-forlorn areas. With gentrification, residents may no longer find it necessary to travel outside their neighborhood to have a sit-down meal or avail themselves of fresh produce.

Whether residents appreciate the changes comes down to two things: the amenities in their neighborhood prior to gentrification, and whether the new services benefit the people who live there. In neighborhoods with severe disinvestment, lacking many retail services that most people take for granted, one may find long-term residents who appreciate gentrification. As the Washington City Paper wrote about the District, “Most longtime residents of low-income neighborhoods don’t clamor for ‘gentrification,’ exactly, but they do want the things it often brings: grocery stores and other retail within walking distance; better transit connections; reduced crime; and attention from the city government.”

4. Gentrifiers are white.

The stereotypical image of a gentrifier is a bearded white guy on a fixie or a young white professional who treats her dog like a spoiled child. One District of Columbia resident protested white gentrifiers in his neighborhood with lawn signs. Spike Lee has also talked about the phenomenon in explicitly racial tones, asking, “Why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better?” As the website Gizmodo put it, “Across the United States, white infill is associated with gentrification.”

But gentrification is hardly a white thing. In many neighborhoods, middle-class Asians, blacks and Latinos are part and parcel of the process. Millennials and young professionals of all races appreciate the attractions and conveniences of city living. In a 2009 study, I found that gentrifying neighborhoods are more racially diverse than non-gentrifying ones.

There’s another reason for this, too. Kesha Moore of Drew University has shown that professionals are drawn to some low-income minority neighborhoods because of a desire to give back to the communities where they or their parents grew up. In minority neighborhoods that are gentrifying, nonwhite gentrifiers aren’t as noticeable as white ones. And even when we do notice them, we don’t call them gentrifiers.

5. Gentrification happens naturally.

When we talk about a gentrified neighborhood, we may imagine something specific – a bustling street with new coffee shops, boutique clothing stores and artisanal breweries. Gentrification “probably does mean getting a Starbucks or another upscale cafe,” Gizmodo wrote. In fact, the coffee chain is so synonymous with the phenomenon that the Guardian asked: “In gentrified cities which came first: Starbucks or higher real estate prices?”

It’s true that a lot of gentrifying neighborhoods get these amenities. But it’s not inevitable. As sociologist Sylvie Tissot has shown, gentrifiers don’t rely on market forces alone to bring in the types of restaurants and shops compatible with a neighborhood’s new image. The same gentrifiers who are drawn to a low-income neighborhood for cheaper housing might also work to change the area more to their liking. This might mean leaning on police and code enforcers to drive out seedy bars, or pushing policymakers to provide subsidies to businesses that “fit in.” To be sure, market forces help change commerce in gentrifying neighborhoods. But often lurking behind the “invisible hand” are activists and policymakers who wish to nudge the market to produce certain outcomes.

Sometimes, the poor try to use these same levers to change their neighborhoods. Consider Harlem, where residents in the 1970s sought to stabilize their community by luring middle-class homeowners and retail. Their successes may have paved the way for outsiders to invest, move in and spur gentrification. But change began long before the demographic shift.

Lance Freeman is an urban-planning professor at Columbia University and the author of “There Goes the ‘Hood: Views of Gentrification From the Ground Up.”

 

Citation:

Freeman, Lance. “Five myths about gentrification.” Washington Post, 3 June 2016. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, https://link-gale-com.sunysccc.idm.oclc.org/apps/doc/A454216955/OVIC?u=sunysccc&sid=OVIC&xid=cfe268d8. Accessed 16 July 2020.

 

 

Reading 4:

In Defense of Gentrification

The prevailing narrative ignores an abundance of evidence that relatively few low-income neighborhoods get gentrified—and when they do, there’s much less displacement than is commonly assumed.

JOE CORTRIGHT

OCTOBER 31, 2015

 

When higher-income people start moving into lower-income neighborhoods, how does that affect longtime residents? Recently, three studies have pointed toward an answer that’s different from the most common one.

First, a study from NYU’s Furman Center suggests that residents of public housing in wealthier and gentrifying neighborhoods make more money, live with less violence, and have better educational options for their children, despite also facing some challenges. Second, a study from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank finds that there has been much less displacement of existing residents from gentrifying neighborhoods than is commonly feared—and that those who do leave aren’t necessarily more likely to move to lower-income neighborhoods. And finally, a Columbia University study on gentrification in London also failed to find evidence of widespread departures in neighborhoods with rising average incomes.

Together, these stories suggest that while gentrification can cause social discord and make residents anxious about the future, it neither produces measurably more departures from neighborhoods, nor does it usually make residents economically worse off. If anything, residents of improving neighborhoods see greater wealth (as measured by their credit scores) and higher incomes ($3,000 to $4,500 higher for residents of public housing in New York City).

So why is it that the prevailing narrative ignores the abundance of evidence that relatively few low-income neighborhoods get gentrified, and that when they do there is much less displacement than is commonly assumed?

With the growth of research demonstrating the benefits of living in more economically integrated neighborhoods for low-income families, it’s surprising that this narrative doesn’t play a big role in how people think about gentrification. When the economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues’ findings about the connection between economic integration and economic mobility were reported, they were framed as an argument for moving poorer families into richer neighborhoods, and not vice versa.

The narrative that results from ignoring this more positive data is popular because of its “truthiness”—it seems to be right according to intuition, regardless of what factual evidence suggests. The truthiness here is that gentrification is assumed to be an intrinsically malignant process, and so any evidence to the contrary is deeply discounted or ignored, even as it piles up. The aforementioned studies, and others, simply don’t fit into the most common understanding of the issue.

The New York and Philadelphia studies both confirmed earlier research that gentrification is seldom associated with displacement, and that it is frequently associated with higher incomes and better economic results for the longtime residents of gentrifying neighborhoods. But few news-following Americans would get that impression.

Consider three examples. In a recent story headlined “In Chelsea, a Great Wealth Divide,” The New York Times described the plight of a retired resident of public housing who had to travel to New Jersey to find bargain-shopping opportunities. But not until the 14th paragraph did the story acknowledge the positive findings from a New York University study that public-housing residents in high-income or gentrifying neighborhoods enjoyed higher incomes, lower crime, better schools, and higher test scores. And not until the final paragraph did the story report the retired resident’s firm opinion that despite the disorientation of change and the challenge of shopping, her neighborhood was unambiguously a better place to live after it had been gentrified.

There was also a series of articles on gentrification that Governing ran earlier this year. While the magazine acknowledged that gentrification (as defined by rising rents and educational levels) and displacement of the poor are not the same thing, it proceeded as if the link between the two were strong. But in fact, there were more low-income people living in the neighborhoods that Governing identified as “gentrifying” in 2013 than in 2000.

There’s a similar issue in a more recent Next City story about the Philadelphia Federal Reserve study on gentrification. Although the piece leads by revealing that “gentrification hasn’t forced out as many residents as one might think,” and that those who do leave gentrifying neighborhoods aren’t necessarily more likely to move to more disadvantaged communities, it quickly pivots, announcing that the “findings didn’t leave much to celebrate.”

While the study in question was far from uniformly sunny, it’s odd that a report concluding that one of the most widely-feared aspects of gentrification is relatively rare would so quickly be dismissed. It’s true that on the whole, the news on housing affordability and economic segregation is bad. But reports like this one at least open the door to the possibility that when low-income neighborhoods begin to see renewed attention from people with incomes in the middle class or above, the effects need not be as exclusionary as they’re feared to be—and may even, with smart management, lay the groundwork for the kind of integration and reinvestment that has been a major goal of housing policy for decades.

There’s a man-bites-dog mentality that guides the narrative about poverty. While the gentrification narrative (having rich neighbors makes life harder for poor people) is common, news stories seldom promote the narrative of concentrated poverty (having mostly poor neighbors makes life harder for the poor), which is both more prevalent and demonstrably more harmful. More strikingly, more straightforward examples of displacement—such as a plan in the suburb Marietta, Georgia, to demolish 10 percent of all its multi-family housing that will fairly clearly move poor households to other cities—tend to go overlooked.

Implicit in all these narratives is a strong quasi-segregationist impulse: Rich people ought to live with rich people, and poor people ought to live with other poor people. Anything that changes this status quo is suspect: If rich people move into poor neighborhoods, it’s called gentrification. If poor people move into rich neighborhoods, it’s called social engineering. It’s difficult to see how this framing ever leads to a world in which there is less economic segregation.

 

Citation:

Cortwright, Joe. “In Defense of Gentrification.” The Atlantic. 31 Oct. 2015.             https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/in-defense-of-  gentrification/413425/