CityLab: The Hidden Winners in Neighborhood Gentrification

But without data to explain the changes happening underneath the very visible signs of gentrification—lofts, e-scooters, farmers’ markets—it isn’t easy to describe the costs, or who bears them. According to one just-released study, original residents gain more from gentrification than the traditional neighborhood narrative lets on. And the harms of gentrification, while hard to fully gauge, may not be so severe for original residents, especially for those who stay but even for those who choose to leave. What if the conventional wisdom about gentrification is kind of wrong? [...]

The study looks at original residents of low-income, central-city neighborhoods of the 100 largest metro areas using census data from 2000 and American Community Survey data from 2010 to 2014. Using the earlier data as a base, researchers Quentin Brummet and Davin Reed tracked changes in educational achievement and household status among less-educated renters and homeowners as well as more-educated renters and homeowners. While some of these neighborhoods saw gentrification, not all did, providing a basis for comparison.

For less-educated renters, who are among a neighborhood’s more vulnerable demographic groups, gentrification drives out-migration by 6 percentage points. Migration among renters is high whether a neighborhood becomes fancy or not: The research finds that 68 percent of less-educated renters and 79 percent of of more-educated renters move over the course of a decade. So, on average, gentrification spurs around 10 percent of moves for less-educated renters (and much less so for renters with more education). [...]

Not all the changes wrought by gentrification count as improvement! The paper acknowledges that rising property taxes can be difficult for existing homeowners to afford, for example—although the researchers still put higher values in the win category for homeowners. While moving from a gentrifying neighborhood may not lead to observably worse outcomes, the act of displacement itself, leaving behind family and community, packs negative social and psychological effects, as the researchers recognize. Culturally, gentrification involves neighborhood changes that can lead original residents to feel that they don’t belong.

read the article