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change how people view gentrification so we can see the positive outcomes without removing the culture and beauty within these communities that are gentrification

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D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) stands with D.C. Council member Brandon T. Todd (D-Ward 4) on 14th Street NW in May. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)

Neighborhoods have been developing and changing since the dawn of civilization, but the idea of gentrification - when an influx of new money and new people transforms a community - has emerged as an issue since only the 1960s. And it is a complicated and often misunderstood term.

In some communities, gentrification evokes instant distrust. It implies the arrival of selfish developers, investors and corporate chains replacing locally owned, independent businesses - and a flood of well-off white people who inevitably push out the poor black and brown people who were there before.

But for many neighborhoods, gentrification represents much-needed investment. Local residents welcome the resurrection and revival of neglected and disinvested areas. Community leaders desire capital investments, leading to better services, jobs, thriving businesses and other components of a healthy, vibrant neighborhood. As one resident of West Baltimore put it: "How can we get some gentrification in our community?"

It turns out both views are correct. Gentrification does not have to mean displacement - if the circumstances are aligned correctly.

An analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and demographic data from 2000 to 2013, released last month, confirmed what community activists in many cities have long reported: Yes, gentrification often pushes people out of their neighborhoods. The analysis, by researchers at the organization I lead, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, found that at least 135,000 black and Hispanic residents were displaced from their neighborhoods during the period we studied. In Washington, 20,000 black residents were displaced, and in Portland, Ore., 13 percent of the black community was displaced over the decade. Our report on the study includes interactive maps so you can see what the data reveals about your neighborhood.

But displacement of people of color in gentrified neighborhoods wasn't uniform. For instance, Minneapolis had gentrification in 22 neighborhoods, but only one had indications of displacement. In Los Angeles, 73 neighborhoods gentrified, and there was displacement in 13 of them. The data showed displacement in just 22 percent of the neighborhoods that experienced an influx of new people and new money in the time period studied. The rest did not show displacement.

That suggests that investment and revitalization of poor neighborhoods doesn't have to push out the people who lived there before. It does, sometimes. But why not always?

The notion that gentrification doesn't always result in displacement may seem antithetical to some, because the term is often used as a synonym for displacement. In fact, if a neighborhood keeps the same number of housing units but has an influx of new residents, then displacement inevitably will occur. But in some places, it appears investment and economic revival are occurring without immediate displacement, suggesting some capacity for longtime residents to stay put and reap the benefits of increased property values - or the production of new housing or utilization of empty units.

In our study, we defined a neighborhood as "eligible" for gentrification if in 2000 it was in the lower 40th percentile of home values and family incomes in that metropolitan area. We identified a neighborhood as "gentrified" if it met three criteria: increases in median home value, educational attainment and income by 2013.

Other research on gentrification suggests that ownership plays a key role in resisting displacement. For communities that have endured decades of disinvestment, where banks don't invest in small business or mortgage lending, gentrification finds few homeowners who can reap the rewards of the new investment. A 2016 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that gentrifying neighborhoods in that city lost low-cost rental units at nearly five times the rate of non-gentrifying neighborhoods.

On the other hand, in lower-income neighborhoods where a significant percentage of residents own their homes, gentrification can be a life-changing event for some families, leading to the kind of wealth-building that can dramatically improve their economic mobility.

The neighborhood bounded by the southeast corner of Gallatin Street and Georgia Avenue in Washington's Petworth neighborhood in Washington is an illustrative example of the complexity of the issue. In 2000, that area had about 3,500 residents, 85 percent of them black. Homeownership was about 80 percent at the time. Today the homeownership rate is 85 percent, and 63 percent of the people there are black, with Hispanic and white people moving in.

Home values increased from about $167,000 to $367,000 and continue to trend up. We see gentrification and displacement of African American residents in this area, but given the high levels of existing homeownership, almost certainly some people are selling their homes for much more than they originally paid. Involuntary displacement is always a bad thing, but wealth-building for longtime residents is good. So how do we achieve less of the former and more of the latter?

D.C. residents see class, not race, as city's great divider

Our study looked at data and patterns but didn't compare policies and local practices that might explain them. But community leaders around the nation have developed approaches to encourage investment and avoid displacement. For instance, most states and many local governments offer caps or breaks on property taxes for longtime residents. This is known as a homestead exemption, and it's often offered to help the elderly on fixed incomes remain in their homes even while their home values increase. For instance, in Maryland, every county is required to have a 10 percent homestead tax credit in place for elderly or disabled homeowners. The District also provides homestead tax relief for low-income elderly, as do Alexandria city and Arlington, Fairfax and Loudoun counties in Virginia.

There are other ways to help people stay rooted in their communities: provide renters with the opportunity and financing to purchase their units; preserve and expand public housing; protect elderly and long-term residents from property tax increases; enforce building codes and offer easy options for renters to report bad landlords; negotiate payment plans with homeowners who have fallen behind on their property taxes; establish community benefits agreements with investors in large projects to ensure that local residents benefit from the investment; offer developers higher levels of density in return for funding more affordable housing units in their projects; establish a loan fund to help small business owners buy their buildings.

In Washington, a policy called inclusionary zoning requires that up to 10 percent of new or renovated residential apartment buildings must be maintained as affordable housing. It's a good idea, but our study shows it wasn't enough, or wasn't enforced well enough, to eliminate displacement in the city. The definition of "affordable" isn't very useful when the median household income for black Washingtonians is $42,000 and $134,000 for whites. The "affordable" rent is still far more than a typical black family can afford.

Another finding from the study revealed a startling problem hiding in plain sight: Although gentrification is a common enough term, it's not a common experience. A small number of booming metropolises attracted the bulk of the investment, construction and demographic shifts that fit our definition of gentrification. The rest of the nation's cities, towns and rural areas languished. Nearly half of all gentrification occurred in just seven cities: Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Diego and Chicago.

This suggests another stark and difficult policy challenge. Not only is the nation's population increasingly concentrated in urban areas - but investment capital and growth are even more concentrated.

This came up last year when cities across the nation competed for Amazon's second headquarters. Any of dozens of struggling Rust Belt or Southern cities could have been transformed by the Amazon investment. Imagine what 50,000 high-paying jobs and a massive building boom could have done for Detroit or Milwaukee. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Some say gentrification is by definition a process that pushes people out. Perhaps the problem is in part the word itself. So if people aren't pushed out when new money and people arrive, what's that called? Should we call that process something other than gentrification? Reinvestment? Revitalization? Integration? Or can the word gentrification suffice for what turns out to be a more complex matrix of factors that lead to stronger communities in some cases, displaced populations in others and, at least in the recent past, absolutely nothing in most places?

Whatever we call it, we have a starting point, a baseline of data that shows that investment and displacement are related but distinct phenomena. That's important. Cultural and physical displacement occurs when the people who live in booming neighborhoods are pushed aside to make way for wealthier newcomers. Understanding the difference between these phenomena will help community leaders, lenders, investors and policymakers promote sustainable investment and economic growth without destroying the social fabric of cities and neighborhoods. The benefits of urban living, access to work, cultural events and great schools shouldn't just be available to the rich. Now we know: They don't have to be.

Poverty is moving to the suburbs. The war on poverty hasn't followed.

Five myths about public housing

Adrian Fenty, Vincent Gray and the politics of race and class in D.C.

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Perspective | Yes, you can gentrify a neighborhood without pushing out poor people

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Neighborhoods have been developing and changing since the dawn of civilization, but the idea of gentrification - when an influx of new money and new people transforms a community - has emerged as an issue since only the 1960s. And it is a complicated and often misunderstood term.

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Compares gentrification, the revamping of neighbors into more colonized like places, to revitalization, where you upgrade neighborhoods on what needs improvement not one someone else thinks would be better to place instead

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Gentrification and Neighborhood Revitalization: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

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Renovated former tobacco warehouses near downtown Durham, North Carolina There are many definitions for gentrification, which can make discussions about development and displacement confusing.

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[narration of some sort]

[argument to counterargument]

Gentrification is inevitable, so how can we prevent the loss of culture, design communities without stripping people of their livelihoods, have little displacement within those communities, and recognize the destructive effects of gentrification in order to make it equitable for the world?

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COUNTERARGUMENT YIPEEEEEE

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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.
This post appears courtesy of City Observatory.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

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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."

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los angeles gentrification on business (CULTURE!!!)

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Gina Fields talks almost wistfully about one of her favorite activities growing up in "The Jungle," the part of South L.A. that most Angelenos now know as rapidly gentrifying Baldwin Village.

"I used to walk through Leimert Park as a kid to Audubon Middle School and look at the houses and be like, 'One day, I'm gonna buy that.'"

After years of traveling and renting apartments in New York and San Francisco, Fields managed to do just that. "Being able to fulfill that dream and buy property in Leimert Park as an African American was huge," she told me.

But Fields, who serves as chair of the Empowerment Congress West Neighborhood Development Council these days, is becoming ever-more convinced that other Black people won't have the same opportunity.

(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)

"I fear that we may lose this," she said of Leimert Park, where single-family homes are now fetching more than $1 million and luxury apartments are rising along once-neglected commercial corridors. "We may lose this culturally significant neighborhood to overdevelopment."

This fear - of gentrification, of displacement, of erasure - has long been a part of life in South L.A. That residents are getting priced out of their historically Black neighborhoods and being forced to move to cheaper cities in the high desert is nothing new.

What is new is the level of despair and, in some cases, sheer panic over a confluence of - at least on the surface - seemingly unrelated events that could forever change South L.A.

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First, there was the sale of Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza to a corporate developer, ending a years-long quest by activists to buy it and turn it into a community hub. Plans for the soon-to-be revitalized mall include new condos, apartments, stores, offices and restaurants, all at a cost of about $1 billion.

Then, last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bills 9 and 10, drastically changing zoning laws in the state by making it much easier to build apartments or condos on land that was previously designated for only one house.

And now, as my colleagues Jack Flemming and Andrew Khouri reported, there's the unavoidable reality that the COVID-19 pandemic has solidified economic inequality in Los Angeles, making million-dollar neighborhoods the norm even in South L.A.

In Crenshaw, where rapper and activist Nipsey Hussle spent the last few years of his life trying to buy back the 'hood, home values have doubled, hitting a price point far out of reach of longtime residents struggling more than ever to pay rent. In West Adams, where homes are also going for seven figures, it also was only a decade ago that a typical home was less than $320,000.

All of sudden, it seems as if South L.A. has reached some sort of tipping point. The only question now is what to do about it.

"It frightens us," Fields confessed. "That's the fear. That we will no longer be able to live here."

::

Full disclosure: I'm glad Newsom signed SB 9 and SB 10. I imagine it wasn't an easy decision to make politically, even after surviving a recall, but it needed to be done.

California is trapped in a housing and homelessness catastrophe of our own making. The only way out is to build at least 180,000 new homes and apartments per year - and maybe as many as 500,000 per year - by 2025. And yet, the state is stubbornly still tracking closer to 100,000 new housing units per year.

That just won't do.

Cities have to become denser, moving away from the Southern California lifestyle that, for so long, has been enabled by single-family zoning. Forcing every neighborhood to allow at least two housing units on every lot just makes sense.

But I'll admit, some of the NIMBYs in South L.A. give me pause because they make good points about what's being sacrificed to save the state. People like Robin René Cole, a longtime homeowner in Park Mesa Heights.

"I'm very concerned," she told me. "This is what I consider my African American cultural neighborhood. That is far and few between in the city. We don't have much. Every group has a place that they can say is their cultural mecca, and this is one of them."

Indeed, Leimert Park, in particular, is the center of Black life in Southern California.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

It's also, arguably, a center of Black wealth in a state where there has long been a gap between Black and white Californians on that front - and it has only gotten wider during the pandemic.

Fields understandably worries that unchecked gentrification will upend the way Black Angelenos have been able to build wealth through homeownership and pass it down generation to generation.

"If we destroy the single-family neighborhood by allowing developers to come in and tear down the single-family homes and put up triplexes and duplexes and quadplexes that we can't afford to buy, we've lost," Fields told me.

No one knows for sure what will happen with SB 9 and SB 10. Neither bill is perfect. The latter, which allows up to 10 units of housing to be built on a single lot near transit, is voluntary for cities.

But there are still lots of fears.

Fears that, because of the relatively cheap land, developers will haphazardly target South L.A. for new projects.

"The first money that's going to pass hands is the money from the current owners to the developers," said Michael Lawson, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Urban League. "Everything else is a wing and a prayer."

Fears that older Black residents will sell their homes, tempted to cash in on Southern California's red-hot housing market before it cools down. (And who could blame them?)

"You never see those 'we buy homes for cash' signs in Beverly Hills. They're not the folks that are pressured to sell," said Damien Goodmon of Downtown Crenshaw, the activist group that tried to buy Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza. "They're not the ones that have been denied economic opportunity in so many other ways in American life, like the Black and brown folk who make up many of the communities where this activity takes place."

Fears that once new residents move in, they'll act like gentrifiers and start calling the police on longtime Black residents.

"We are diverse. We welcome everyone into our neighborhood. But we hope, just as when they move into Chinatown, or Japantown, that they recognize this town is based on African American culture," Fields said. "I don't want to go for a run outside my house and have somebody chasing me down thinking I'm causing trouble."

::

So what can be done?

Leimert Park homeowner Carmen Hill wants to teach more Black residents new ways of fighting back, including how to take advantage of little-known government programs - from first-time home buyer loans to grants - so they don't get displaced.

"We need to get the message out," the longtime Realtor told me. "Everybody just sitting around saying, 'Oh, they are taking over our community.'"

Goodmon, meanwhile, hasn't changed tactics. He said Downtown Crenshaw isn't giving up on buying the mall and that "ultimately, we will be the rightful owners legally of this property."

How they plan to do that is unclear, which is probably why Fields is moving forward as if Harridge Development Group will remain the new owner.

Harridge's CEO told The Times that a mere 10% of the condos and 10% of the apartments that will be built at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza will be below-market rate. Fields and the neighborhood council are pushing for more, just like they are pushing other developers building housing in South L.A. for more.

There's more than just fear.

"I am just hoping that perhaps developers are appeased by building along the commercial borders," Fields said. "I'm hoping that our continued engagement inspires them to offer a reasonable amount of affordable housing. And that developers don't think, oh, yeah, let's come in and destroy something beautiful."

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Column: 'We may lose this.' Despair over gentrification reaches new depths in South L.A.

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Gina Fields talks almost wistfully about one of her favorite activities growing up in "The Jungle," the part of South L.A. that most Angelenos now know as rapidly gentrifying Baldwin Village.

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gentrification in my home town

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teenagers point of view on gentrification (okay take....)

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"Gentrification is forced economic displacement."

In recent years, the word "gentrification" has reached a larger audience as shows and films, like Gentefied and The Last Black Man in San Francisco, present how American cities are being transformed. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has left millions unable to pay rent and fueled a swell of people facing eviction notices, has prompted conversations about a possible new wave of gentrification.

But what does gentrification even mean? Coined in 1964 by British sociologist Ruth Glass, its five, fancy-sounding syllables can trip up older community members and new activists alike. Here, we'll walk through what gentrification is, why it matters, and how communities are mobilizing to stop it.

What is gentrification?

As Glass wrote in her book London: Aspects of Change, "One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes - upper and lower... Once this process of 'gentrification' starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed." The word she chose to describe this phenomenon borrowed from the word "gentry," referring to the British upper classes.

In brief, gentrification happens when wealthier newcomers move into working-class neighborhoods. New businesses and amenities often pop up to cater to these new residents. Potholes might get filled; a new bus line might appear. These changes attract even more affluent people, and property values go up. Landlords raise rents to what these new arrivals can afford to pay, so the original tenants get forced out. Real estate speculators may pressure homeowners to sell their family homes. Some of those pushed out will move to more affordable neighborhoods, others to entirely different cities; others may become unhoused.

Gentrification is economic displacement: whole communities uprooted when rents rise. In the United States, forced displacement often happens along racial lines. It is occurring today in cities across the country, from Silicon Valley to New York City, from Seattle to Austin.

Who gets priced out?

For decades, particularly in the Jim Crow era, redlining and racial covenants have prevented Black families from renting homes or taking out mortgages in certain neighborhoods. This helped create concentrated, poor communities of color in cities across the United States. Then local governments began removing resources from these nonwhite communities, in a policy some refer to as "benign neglect."

"The schools were in a state of decline, the roads, the buildings, representation," Noni Session, director of Oakland's East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, a community investment cooperative, tells Teen Vogue of urban cities during the Reagan years. Because of this, she says, poor Black and brown neighborhoods become "prime targets for property speculators" trying to make a quick buck by pushing out the existing community to bring in new, wealthier, whiter residents.

In the words of Daniel Gonzalez, a lifelong resident of San Jose, California, "It makes the most sense for developers and people in local government to eye poor neighborhoods to 'upgrade' and increase profitability from." He sees these profit-driven neighborhood expulsions as a form of colonialism, the latest chapter in a story that began with the mass kidnapping of Africans through chattel slavery and forced dispossession of the land of Indigenous peoples to build the United States.

So, it's bad?

Some people try to make the case that gentrification is good. When white people start pricing people of color out of a neighborhood, on paper it can look like an area is becoming more "diverse." And who would argue that "safer" neighborhoods, higher incomes, or more bus stops are a bad thing?

One problem, says Liz Gonzalez of the nonprofit South Bay Community Land Trust, is that "the places that get gentrified seem to be where people of color live. You just push 'em out, push 'em out. You know, nobody cares where these people go, if they go to the street, if they go to another city, if they leave the state." From this perspective, gentrification may make a neighborhood temporarily "more diverse," but only as neighbors are priced out, which is less a victory for racial justice than it is window dressing for racial displacement.

Research into displacement rates paints a more complicated picture, though. Two studies published in 2019, one by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and another by a trio of professors at NYU, found that city dwellers move frequently for a multitude of reasons, and changes can increase quality of life and educational attainment for neighborhood children. On the other hand, Jean Anyon's book Radical Possibilities describes a successful community school reform campaign in Chicago's Logan Square that inadvertently created a situation where "housing values rise, businesses increasingly invest in the neighborhood, and low-income residents are pushed out by higher rents."

Researchers and academics have not come to anything resembling a consensus on the effects of gentrification in American cities. But for those on the ground, the perception can feel quite different. It's not that anti-gentrification activists are against nice things for their communities; these organizers say the problem is that often these nice things aren't actually designed for them, but for their replacements - like a boutique that professionals new to the area can afford to patronize.

Meanwhile, they say, the human cost of gentrification is immense. "It's been pretty devastating having my family displaced from the region," says San Jose's Daniel Gonzalez. "That separation just tore into the fabric of the family. I see this whole process of displacement and gentrification as an attack on families, communities, and the networks of mutual aid and support we've built here in San Jose."

Policing displacement

Another source of tension between longtime residents and more recent arrivals can be their relationship with police. A 2017 report by the Economic Opportunity Institute using data culled from Seattles's police department showed that police reports in the city's gentrifying Central District increased by 62.4% between 2008 and 2016. A 2018 BuzzFeed story recounted how a group of Harlem neighbors who had played dominoes outside their buildings undisturbed for decades said they dealt with 311 complaints, presumably from unhappy neighbors.

And in March, Louisville, Kentucky, police fatally shot a 26-year-old emergency medical technician named Breonna Taylor in her own home. She was a Black woman living in a gentrifying neighborhood.

As Dezmond Goff, of Seattle's Black Frontline Movement, tells Teen Vogue, "They increased police presence because that was one way [to break up the neighborhood.] If we incarcerate more people we can break up community that way, we can get people out that way."

As the "spaces that Black bodies are clearly allowed to circulate are often more highly policed, more highly traumatized by that policing," says Session, of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, "a sense of control and ownership is slowly withdrawn from those communities."

Some cities that report they're too poor to afford quality public schools or affordable housing have somehow found the cash to buy impressive military hardware for their police departments. In Oakland, California, the school district has seen millions of dollars in budget cuts, but, in February, the local sheriff's deputies reportedly rolled up in an armored personnel carrier to remove two unhoused moms from a vacant building, according to accounts given to Fox KTVU by supporters of the moms who were members of the local homeless advocacy group Moms 4 Housing. (The Alameda County Sheriff's Office's confirmed to Teen Vogue that they deployed the vehicle, a Lenco BearCat, but denied that it was used in the arrest itself. According to KTVU's report, the moms who were arrested were not charged.) There are many reasons for the militarization of the police in poor cities, but organizers maintain one of them is that city governments have a lot to gain from gentrification and the racialized policing that facilitates it.

Causes and effects

The reason gentrification is profitable has to do with big changes in the American economy. There was a time when big business needed low-wage workers to man the factories in American cities. "Continued industrialization... further increased the number and size of US cities," authors of Social Problems: Continuity and Change wrote in 2010, among other factors like population growth and immigration. Millions of Black people left the South to move to the cities of the North, Midwest, and West Coast in what came to be known as "the Great Migration." "To fill the assembly lines," Isabel Wilkerson wrote in the September 2016 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, "companies began recruiting black Southerners to work the [northern] steel mills, railroads and factories." The southern San Francisco Bay Area was urbanized to house microchip assembly line workers as the nascent Silicon Valley "exploded," in the words of Richard Walker's 2018 book, Pictures of a Gone City, "across a well-established agrarian landscape."

These workers weren't treated well and they didn't get rich. They often lived in the worst, segregated neighborhoods doing repetitive, back-breaking work. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, tells the story of one Chrysler auto plant in 1970 Detroit where two workers lost their lives due to workplace accidents in a period of just two weeks. At the same time, Black workers "couldn't buy a home in Dearborn, Grosse Point, Warren, or many other Detroit suburbs." But the labor of assembly line workers made America's richest companies rich, so these employers paid workers enough to live close enough to their jobs. As Robert Fitch put it in The Assassination of New York, "Cities grew because mass production required masses of people concentrated in one place."

Most of these jobs are now gone. Many factories have moved overseas in search of cheaper labor with fewer environmental and labor protections. From the 1970s through the '90s, many American cities became impoverished as deindustrialization and white flight to the suburbs stripped them of their tax base and the last stable jobs disappeared. The service and hospitality industry became a leading source of employment, offering employees low-wage jobs in retail and restaurants. Anyon wrote in Radical Possibilities, "Large and small factories used to dot the downtowns of most large cities. Today, most neighborhoods in the central cities and urbanized low-income suburbs have bodegas, 'deli's' and other small businesses - and relatively few jobs, compared to the number that are needed."

"I really view what happened with my family as the reverse of industrialization," says Gonzalez. "The reason there's not really a need for people like me or members of my family around is because it's more profitable to urbanize and do it with a certain type of individual, especially here in Silicon Valley. You know, tech workers and people who work in high-paying jobs."

As Session puts it, "If you start from the 1940s, when my grandparents came and a lot of people like them, Oakland was a major port. It was really booming for the shipping industry and heavy industry and heavy manufacturing. All of the empty but now sort of trendy warehouses" being rented at a premium to new gentrifiers "were a result of being a heavy manufacturing and heavy shipping city."

The big moneymakers of today's economy aren't automakers and canneries but tech and biotech companies, finance and real estate firms, and the elite universities that train workers for all of the above. Instead of masses of workers assembling cars, we have smaller numbers of higher paid "skilled workers" sitting in offices to code, invest, or teach. These workers are paid enough to gentrify neighborhoods, and cities compete to attract them. The working-class people of color who might have worked on the assembly lines a generation or two ago? They are using diverse tactics in fights to hold on to their neighborhoods, their homes, and their lives.

How are communities fighting gentrification?

When Amazon wanted to build a new campus in Queens, New York, residents who feared being priced out mounted a successful campaign that contributed to stopping the development. In San Jose, some residents are fighting a proposed Google campus that could lead to the displacement of thousands, with some even blocking a Google bus carrying employees to work in 2018. Though the company recently announced its "vision" for a transformed downtown, the South Bay Community Land Trust is still moving forward with its vision of cooperatively owned land as a solution to displacement from San Jose.

According to the Oakland Community Land Trust (CLT), "By removing land from the market and holding it in perpetuity, a CLT buffers its housing and other land uses from the volatility of economic, environmental, and political crises that often disproportionately impact low-income residents and communities of color."

Across the country, movements are pushing to decommodify housing and treat it as a human right. Rather than investment opportunities for property developers or wealthy individuals, these organizers want homes to be safe shelters in which people are able to live affordably and build their lives.

"Decommodifying land reminds us of the right usage of a roof and a door and a window and ground upon which to stand," says Session. "The right usage is to ground community and ground the future."

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: An Eviction Crisis Is Coming - We Need to Treat Housing as a Right

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How Gentrification Happens and What to Do About It

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"Gentrification is forced economic displacement." In recent years, the word "gentrification" has reached a larger audience as shows and films, like Gentefied and The Last Black Man in San Francisco , present how American cities are being transformed.

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Responsible communal reinvesting

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Designing with Community in Mind: Revitalization vs. Gentrification - Samuel Centre For Social Connectedness - Samuel Centre For Social Connectedness

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Looking into the positives like less crime rate and more industrialization (can be argued good or bad, all about preference)

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Gentrification has long been a dirty word for forcing poor people out of neighborhoods across U.S. cities.

When a poor neighborhood attracts higher income residents, expensive cafes and pricy vintage clothing stores move in, making daily living more expensive. The narrative is that gentrification displaces low income residents and in the worst case scenario causes homelessness.

Now, a new storyline is emerging that shows that it isn't fair to blame gentrification for displacing low income residents and that there might actually even be some benefits.

A study by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve recently concluded that poor people are no more likely to move out of a gentrifying neighborhood than from a non-gentrifying one.

That doesn't mean low income people are not pushed out of their neighborhoods. They are just not more likely to be displaced than a person of similar income in a neighborhood that's not gentrifying.

Experts say there are may even be some benefits for the low-income residents that decide to stay in gentrifying neighborhoods.
-- New job opportunities emerge as more stores open and construction picks up.
-- Longtime homeowners benefit from rising property values.
-- There's often a decline in crime.
-- On average, credit scores of the poor residents improve in gentrifying neighborhoods.
"It appears that when a neighborhood gentrifies, it doesn't necessarily lead to widespread displacement,"says Lance Freeman, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University.

Freeman conducted a nationwide gentrification study in 2005, which also came up with similar conclusions reached by the Philly Fed's findings that gentrification does not lead to higher chances of low-income residents being pushed into another neighborhood.

Related: Innovative Cities: Philadelphia

The Fed's study -- which focused on Philadelphia -- found that people in gentrifying neighborhoods tend to move more often than those in non-gentrifying neighborhoods. But it's not who you might think.

It's the people with high credit scores -- who tend to have high incomes -- that move out of the neighborhood more frequently and often to wealthier parts of the city or suburbs.

Related: Who's to blame for gentrification in San Francisco?

David Fiorenza, an urban economics professor at Villanova University, says low income folks in Philadelphia's gentrifying neighborhoods have benefited by seeing an increase in jobs and lower crime.

"Gentrification in Philadelphia is a good thing," he says. "For some other cities, it may not work."

Researchers stress that it's a complex picture.

Despite the benefits, even these studies show the negative effects. Low income folks may not have a higher rate of moving out, but when they do move, it's often to a poorer neighborhood.

And when low-income residents move, they often see their credit score decline too. It's also highly unlikely that they will be able to move back into their old neighborhood.

And because rents and costs of living rise, it's more difficult for low-income residents to move into gentrifying neighborhoods in the first place.

Related: It's expensive to be poor

Clearly, it is not a linear narrative as American cities change.

Eileen Divringi, one of the co-authors of the Philly Fed report, said the neighborhoods they researched have "changed significantly." (The other authors of the Philly Feds report are Lei Ding and Jackelyn Hwang.)

Despite the benefits for low-income residents, Divringi noted that the city's "most vulnerable residents are less likely to move into gentrifying neighborhoods" because of the higher costs.

CNNMoney (New York) First published November 12, 2015: 10:41 AM ET

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When a poor neighborhood attracts higher income residents, expensive cafes and pricy vintage clothing stores move in, making daily living more expensive. The narrative is that gentrification displaces low income residents and in the worst case scenario causes homelessness.

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Good and bad of it

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By Lindsay M. Miller

Just before Thanksgiving 2017, Ink Coffee displayed a sidewalk board in the middle of the Five Points neighborhood in Denver, Colorado. Five Points is a historically black neighborhood with many black and Latino residents that, like many other neighborhoods in Denver, has experienced rapid change as the city has expanded and welcomed thousands of new residents. The board read, "Happily Gentrifying the Neighborhood Since 2014."

Many neighborhood residents, activists, and community members responded in anger to the sign, calling it insensitive and charged it with making light of an important, and potentially harmful, process. Activists organized protests outside the store, and many residents committed to boycotting the chain of sixteen locations across Colorado.

As with many politically-loaded controversies, the company also received significant backlash on social media. By Thanksgiving Day, the founder had issued an apology via the company Facebook page, stating that, before the incident, he "did not fully appreciate the very real and troubling issue of gentrification."

Gentrification is a political topic that is deeply emotional and personal to many. Also, when it happens, it happens very quickly; so many of us lack the social or historical context with which to root our opinions or suggest solutions. What's more, it is a topic that, like so many others, integrates political ideology, economics, and legacies of systemic, de jure, and de facto racism.

For all these reasons, conversations about gentrification - whether informal or officially organized - tend to turn into ideological boxing matches. And like all discussions related to social change, the first step must not be to pick up our gloves. We need to examine the ring.

Though gentrification manifests itself on the local level, its causes are national and international. To address this challenge will require a better understanding of the context for this complicated process so that we can be thoughtful and realistic with our local, national, and even global solutions.

What is Gentrification?

The term "gentrification" was originally coined in the 1960s by Ruth Glass to describe the transformation of working-class London neighborhoods into middle and upper-class neighborhoods. Colloquially, gentrification has come to mean "a process in which a neighborhood gains wealth and sees its population become more affluent, whiter, and younger." ¹

Debates about gentrification tend to fall into one of two camps. On the one hand, people argue that gentrification is good for cities because it brings a higher tax base, revitalizes previously derelict neighborhoods, improves public safety, and attracts newcomers to boost the economy. On the other hand, there are those that argue that gentrification is bad, an evil made possible through decades of disinvestment of poor communities and the disenfranchisement of communities of color. Critics of gentrification point to displacement as the primary threat to low-income communities. Displacement is the process by which a neighborhood becomes too expensive for its long-term residents to live so that, over time, lower-income residents get priced out due to rising rents, property taxes, or general cost of living.

Gentrification in Context

First, gentrification is not solely a result of individual actions. Just as public investments in things like highways and mortgages spurred suburbanization, public investments have encouraged re-urbanization.

One of the most important types of public investment that spurs gentrification is public transit. Neighborhoods near subways, light-rails, busses, and other forms of mass-transit attract affluent people in dense metros. This happens for two reasons: first, it allows people to exchange long car commutes for shorter commutes on public transit. Second, it allows relatively affluent people to ditch their cars and spend more money on rent. This has the effect of driving property values up in gentrifying neighborhoods because individuals moving in are able to spend a higher proportion of their already higher salaries on housing.

Other types of public investment that spur gentrification are investments in public schools, including the creation of new charter and magnet schools; investment in universities, colleges, and affiliated medical centers; new or improved parks and open space; and investments in waterfronts in formerly industrial cities that transform old warehouses and factories into restaurants, bars, workspaces, and housing.

Beyond understanding city-level policies that attract middle class people to various neighborhoods, it is important to understand the problem of gentrification in its global and national contexts. Even some of the best writers on gentrification, and the city leaders most dedicated to addressing it, often address gentrification as the result of city-level policies and, thus, view it as a problem that can be resolved by cities alone. This questionable perspective keeps the conversation away from much-needed debate about the role cities play in the global political economy and national policies that can address the problem on much wider scale.

Many economists argue that the United States and other advanced nations now have "post-industrial" economies. Urbanist Richard Florida calls the new economy the "creative economy;" economist Enrico Moretti calls it an "innovation" economy; managerial theorist Peter Drucker calls it a "knowledge economy." Importantly, what all these terms have in common is that advanced countries rely primarily on the production of ideas, rather than physical goods, to grow.

Furthermore, while the U.S. relied on manufacturing in the first half of the twentieth century for economic strength, manufacturing has declined in this country and expanded to other countries that still rely on it for growth. Moretti writes:

Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy has gradually shifted away from traditional manufacturing toward the creation of knowledge, ideas, and innovation. As traditional manufacturing jobs keep disappearing, the innovation sector keeps growing. It will soon be what manufacturing used to be in the 1950s and 1960s: America's main engine of prosperity. ²

Globally, manufacturing and the production of material goods has been transferred to industrializing economies in the developing world, while post-industrial economies like the United States, Japan, and most of Europe adopt innovation and knowledge-driven strategies for growth.

This global economic reconfiguration has produced a situation in advanced economies where income classes at the top and the bottom are growing, while the middle steadily shrinks. Moretti writes:

In general, job opportunities in the U.S. labor market as a whole have been concentrated in high-skill, high-wage jobs (professional, technical, and managerial occupations) and low-skill, low-wage jobs (food service, personal care, and security service occupations). Job opportunities for middle-wage, middle-skill white collar and blue-collar workers have declined sharply. ³

Here, we see that U.S. jobs are most concentrated in the top and bottom rung of labor when measured by pay and skill. The stable jobs that supported a vast middle class during much of the twentieth century are disappearing steadily, while the largest and fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. economy are now very low-wage service jobs-disproportionately occupied by women and people of color-and high-wage knowledge work occupied by mostly highly-educated whites. ⁴ (However, in some metros, the non-white share of those occupying "creative" occupations exceeds 40 percent, with the most diverse "creative classes" along the coasts and the Texas/Mexico border.) ⁵

From 1973-2011, the United States experienced many waves of economic growth. Yet, while the productivity of the U.S. workforce rose 80.1 percent, the wages of the average worker rose only 4.2 percent in the same period. ⁶ Service work in hospitality, home health care, and other services are now the largest section of the U.S. economy, but this work remains very low-paid and typically comes with few or no benefits.

The federal minimum wage has remained so low-at $7.25 per hour-that less than 1 percent of full-time minimum wage workers can afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment in any state in the U.S. without being designated as "housing burdened." ⁷ Even states that have raised the minimum wage to $11 per hour, or companies like Target and Walmart that have done the same, have not raised it high enough to allow a family of two to acquire basic needs like housing, food, clothing, and healthcare. ⁸ In 2017, an estimated 39.7 million Americans lived in poverty, as measured by estimates of the level of income needed to cover basic needs. ⁹

The Realities of Gentrification and Urban Poverty

Gentrification gets a lot of attention by news outlets, academics, and cultural critics. In 2015, journalist Peter Moskowitz wrote a book called How to Kill a City that rebuked local governments, for-profit developers, "hipsters," and "yuppies" for the damage he saw sweeping across cities like New Orleans, New York, Detroit, and San Francisco. In 2014, filmmaker Spike Lee decried gentrification as little more than a modern take on colonialism, a "Christopher Columbus Syndrome" that propels whites to push people of color out of their homes. Many academics, too, have denounced gentrification as inherently harmful to low-income communities and robust economic development in general a threat to all but the wealthy.

While these interpretations ring true in many respects, the realities of gentrification are more complex. Displacement, for example, is not always the inevitable result of gentrification. Multiple studies by Lance Freeman, an urban planning professor at Columbia University, have suggested that direct displacement of long-term, low-income residents by wealthy in-movers happens relatively seldomly. Displacement tends to happen via the exclusion of low-income in-movers in gentrifying neighborhoods rather than via the direct displacement of low-income individuals already residing there. ¹⁰

What's more, Freeman's book, There Goes the Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up, demonstrates that long-term residents' views on gentrification can be quite ambivalent. Many long-term residents Freeman interviewed welcomed the improved access to services and amenities that come with investment, as long as that investment didn't lead to displacement. ¹¹

Gentrification-fueled displacement is a hot topic with a myriad of political, historical, and social justice implications. Yet, our fascination-and often visceral reactions to it-detract attention from a much more pervasive problem facing cities: persistent, concentrated poverty. A 2014 study by City Observatory tracked neighborhood change in 51 metropolitan areas from 1970-2010 found that the number of high-poverty census tracts nearly tripled from 1970 to 2010, and 75 percent of 1970 high-poverty neighborhoods were still high-poverty four decades later. The likelihood that a neighborhood "rebounded" from high poverty to relatively low poverty (below 15 percent) was 1 in 20. Only 100,000 poor people in 1970 lived in neighborhoods that have since "rebounded" by 2010. The number of high-poverty neighborhoods in urban areas has tripled, and the number of individuals living in high-poverty neighborhoods has doubled in the past four decades. ¹²

The number of poor persons living in "fallen star" neighborhoods-those that were not high poverty in 1970 but now exceed the poverty rate of 30 percent-has increased by 1.25 million, while the poor population in rebounding neighborhoods has decreased by only 67,000. In other words, exponentially more poor people lived in neighborhoods that were newly poor rather than were displaced or pushed out of neighborhoods that gentrified in 2010.

In much of the same time period that gentrification has garnered attention, urban poverty has dramatically increased. Substantially more non-poor neighborhoods have become poor than poor neighborhoods have become wealthy.

We notice gentrification because it happens quickly and often drastically: a new building goes up, a park gets refurbished, new residents move in, or public spaces change. Yet, it seems we are so used to concentrated poverty that we no longer see it-or avoid it altogether. While we debate the issue of gentrification, chronically poor neighborhoods slowly decay, and more and more neighborhoods slide downward and into poverty.

A myriad of studies has already demonstrated the deleterious effects of concentrated poverty. Concentrated poverty is associated with higher crime, worse mental and physical health, low-quality public services, and lower economic mobility. It also disproportionately affects people of color: 75 percent of poor people living in urban neighborhoods with concentrated poverty were African-American or Latino in 2010. ¹³ Concentrated poverty and segregation inflict a double-blow on communities of color, too often ensuring that opportunity is determined by one's race, place, and income.

Growth Is Not the Problem; Equity Is

In times of robust economic growth-and in places of rapid change-it can be easy to forget the struggle that comes from economic desolation. Growth seems so fast, so unpredictable, that we resist its externalities. We might even start to idealize times passed, desolate neighborhoods that don't bear the burden of rising housing costs, or the de jure racial segregation of the 1950s and 1960s. We might think: segregation was real, but at least there wasn't gentrification.

We start to fear growth itself, rather than pinpointing the real evil: inequitable distribution of the fruits of growth.

It's easy to think that a problem that manifests in urban settings can be solved with urban solutions. Yet, gentrification is just one symptom of a greater problem: a political and economic environment in which even well-paid workers spend over half of their salaries on rent, allows almost two-thirds of our country's workers to be paid unlivable wages, and does not guarantee, or even actively promote, access to necessities like healthcare or quality education.

Gentrification is a problem that can only be manifested where vast wealth inequality already exists. Perhaps it hits home so harshly because it forces all of us to look at our country's legacy of economic and racial injustice square in the face: in our own neighborhoods, right outside our front doors.

In 1993, Peter Dreier wrote in the National Civic Review:

[N]o city can solve its social and economic problems on its own. Progressive municipal policies can make a difference, but they cannot address the root causes, or even most of the symptoms, of urban distress. Unless the federal government is committed to addressing America's urban crisis-and finding common ground between cities, suburbs, and all Americans-the nation will continue to stagnate in the increasingly competitive global marketplace. ¹⁴

Over twenty years later, this problem remains. City leaders must recognize that unless we address income and wealth inequality on the national level, cities will continue to be driven apart and low-income communities will continue to have little say in the future of their own neighborhoods.

What Can Cities Do?

Equitable development strategies are some of the most innovative strategies to address the negative consequences of rapid, urban growth. Equitable development, as defined by the Local and Regional Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE), is when, "quality of life outcomes, such as affordable housing, quality education, living wage employment, healthy environments, and transportation are equitably experienced by the people currently living and working in the neighborhood, as well as for new people moving in. Public and private investments, programs, and policies in neighborhoods meet the needs of residents, including communities of color, and reduce racial disparities, taking into account past history and current conditions." ¹⁵

Local equitable development strategies work to ensure that the benefits of growth are enjoyed by everyone, and that long-term residents can "prosper in place." Equitable development is necessarily citizen-led and fueled by aggressive civic engagement. Some contemporary examples of equitable development are Seattle's Community Cornerstones and Equitable Development Framework and the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston. ¹⁶

Another exceptional example of resident-driven equitable development is the Melrose Commons project in the South Bronx. There, residents and business owners came together in response to a proposed market-rate condominium and apartment development project. They formed the organization "We Stay/Nos Quedamos" in February of 1993 and developed a proposal for a new plan that included affordable housing and space for locally-owned businesses. In 1994, their plan for the project was approved by the city.

Other rapidly growing metros like Denver would do well to mirror these examples.

Conclusion

Gentrification is a highly contested issue, in part because of its stark visibility. Gentrification has the power to displace low-income families or, more often, prevent low-income families from moving into previously affordable neighborhoods. ¹⁷ It also has the power to completely transform the cultural landscape of a neighborhood-changing everything from a neighborhood's colloquial name, to the use of public space, to the small businesses that can locate there.

This controversial urban problem, however, should not detract attention from one of our less visible, yet growing urban problems: concentrated, chronic, urban poverty. It should also not blind us to the widespread problems facing American cities: what Richard Florida calls the "new urban crisis" that represents nothing less than "the crisis of modern capitalism, writ large." ¹⁸

Cities are at the nexus of the globalized, knowledge economy. To be competitive, cities must attract highly-educated, highly-skilled talent and encourage urbanized, technological, and creative growth. Yet, growth accompanied by vast economic inequality is not only unsustainable, it deepens the social problems created by policies past. Cities, and the nation, would do well to note that equality-and equitable development-are in all our best interest.
Lindsay M. Miller is a Robert H. Rawson, Jr. Fellow at the National Civic League. She holds a Master of Social Sciences in Social Justice and is completing her Master of Public Administration at the University of Colorado Denver.
1 Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 59.

² Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs (New York: Mariner Books, 2012), 47.

⁴ Joan Entmacher, Lauren Frohlich, Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Emily Martin, and Liz Watson, Underpaid and Overloaded: Women in Low-Wage Jobs (Washington, D.C.: National Women's Law Center, 2014), https://nwlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/final_nwlc_lowwagereport2014.pdf.

⁵ Richard Florida, "Mapping the Diversity of the Creative Class, CityLab, May 11, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/05/mapping-the-diversity-of-the-creative-class/516171/.

⁶ Hendrick Smith, Who Stole the American Dream? (New York: Random House, 2012), 73.

⁷ Ester Bloom, "Only 0.1 percent of US Minimum Wage Workers Can Afford a 1-Bedroom Apartment, Report Finds," CNBC.com, July 14, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/14/only-point-1-percent-of-us-minimum-wage-workers-can-afford-a-1-bedroom.html.

⁸ Daniel B. Kline, "What Living on an $11 Minimum Wage Looks Like," USA Today, Jan. 11, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/budget-and-spending/2018/01/11/what-living-on-an-11-minimum-wage-looks-like/109360122/.

⁹ "What is the Current Poverty Rate in the United States?" Center for Poverty Research, University of California, Davis, Oct. 15, 2018, https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-united-states.

¹⁰ Lance Freeman, "Displacement or Succession? Residential Mobility in Gentrifying Neighborhoods," Urban Affairs Review 40, no. 4 (2005): 463-491.

¹¹ Lance Freeman, There Goes the 'Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2006).

¹² City Observatory website, accessed January 16, 2019 at http://cityobservatory.org/lost-in-place/

¹⁴ Peter Dreier, "Ray Flynn's Legacy: American Cities and the Progressive Agenda," National Civic Review 82, no. 4 (1993): 403.

¹⁵ Ryan Curren, Nora Liu, and Dwayne March, Equitable Development as a Tool to Advance Racial Equity (Local and Regional Government Alliance on Race and Equity, 2015), https://www.racialequityalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GARE-Equitable-Development.pdf.

17 Freeman, "Displacement or Succession?"

18 Florida, The New Urban Crisis.

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We Need to Change How We Think About Gentrification - National Civic League

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Gentrification is a hot political topic that is deeply emotional and personal to many, and when it happens, it happens very quickly. But the causes of gentrification are more complicated than may appear at first glance. Addressing this ever-present challenge will require policy-makers and members of the public to better understand its root causes.

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Post-Covid gentrification

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why it's bad

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Examining the Negative Impacts of Gentrification

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Increasing cost in neighborhood makes it more difficult for individuals to maintain health

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The affects of gentrification and the hidden tax rises and costs that are the cause of poorer families usually of color to move out and wealthier families to move in.

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Our experts choose the best products and services to help make smart decisions with your money ( here's how). In some cases, we receive a commission from our partners; however, our opinions are our own. Terms apply to offers listed on this page.

When a neighborhood gentrifies, new homes rise, new businesses move in, and property values go up. But longtime, low-income minority residents are also often priced out.

Activists say that changing single-family zoning laws and taxing owners of vacant properties can help to create more affordable, accessible housing.

Empowering residents to "buy back the block" and resist developers is another way to protect existing communities.

This article is part of Business Insider's "Inside the racial wealth gap" series. Read more "

When a low-income neighborhood has been gentrified, it generally means that old buildings have been torn down, new residences have been built, big-name businesses have moved in - and the demographics of the area have changed.

While gentrification may increase property values, it also raises rents and property taxes, pricing longtime residents out of their own neighborhoods, often leading to more white and fewer Black residents. That means less wealth in the hands of Black Americans, who already own just 10% of the wealth of white Americans on average.

The gentrification process may feel inevitable, but it doesn't have to. According to community leaders and housing activists, there are ways to mitigate the harmful effects of gentrification and fight to keep longtime minority residents from being displaced, including passing new residential zoning laws, taxing vacant properties, and organizing residents to pool their capital to buy property.

Preventing gentrification through zoning and other housing regulations

King Williams has seen the consequences of gentrification in urban Atlanta firsthand. He's the director of the documentary " The Atlanta Way," which chronicles the razing of public housing in Atlanta from 2008 to 2010.

Williams told Business Insider that public housing in his city was destroyed at the behest of Atlanta Housing, the local housing authority, which was "trying to remove concentrated poverty in the city."

He said, "This effort really just opened up the most viable areas of the city for development, and pushed poor people to the periphery or relocating in other poor pockets of the city. Most of the people who were able to get a Section 8 voucher moved to other, lower-economic pockets of the city, and the majority of people did not get these vouchers and no data has emerged as to where they went."

To keep residents in their neighborhoods and prevent gentrification, Williams said that cities need to foster economic growth and opportunities in low-income communities, and tear up existing zoning laws. "It would take some serious changing of local zoning ordinances and existing housing laws, building more immediately affordable housing units, breaking up the love affair of single-family homes, and going in on mixed-use, mixed-income properties," he said.

How zoning can lead to high housing prices

Here's an example of a zoning law that preserves the low-density character of suburbs and blocks the development of affordable housing: Single-family zoning (often called R1) prevents the building of any kind of housing except detached, single-family homes. This keeps population density low in these areas by regulating how many people can live in a certain square footage.

In cities with more land set aside for single-family homes, R1 zoning creates a shortage of affordable housing, since multi-family dwellings - such as apartment buildings - can't be built. In Los Angeles, 70% of residential land is zoned as R1, and in Seattle, it's 80%, which advocates say sets the stage for a competitive and exclusionary housing market. Many families displaced from multi-family dwellings in urban areas cannot afford to move to single-family communities, so by breaking up these zoning laws, it creates opportunities to build more affordable housing.

Some cities are already starting to alter their residential zoning laws. Bend, Oregon made news last year when Gov. Kate Brown (D) signed a law requiring Oregon cities with more than 1,000 residents to allow duplexes in areas that were previously zoned exclusively for single-family homes. The same law requires that cities with more than 25,000 residents must allow townhomes, triplexes, and fourplexes.

Other cities, like Minneapolis, have followed suit. The Minneapolis law allows duplexes and triplexes to be built anywhere in the city. Previously, nearly three-quarters of the city was zoned for single-family housing.

Taxing vacant properties to free up housing stock

Housing advocates say that without government action, low-income residents across the country face displacement because of rapidly changing neighborhoods. Shirah Dedman's 2018 documentary "You a Nomad'' analyzes the gentrification of Oakland, California, where over a period of 10 years, Oakland lost 25% of its Black population. Dedman said that the loss was fueled in part by "generations of economic apartheid," a term used to describe a system designed to keep Black people from equal access to things like housing and jobs.

Because of Oakland's proximity to San Francisco, it became home to growing tech companies looking for tax breaks, and tech employees looking for a cheaper place to live. From 2011 to 2016, the median home price in Oakland increased 178%. The demand for property in Oakland drove up home values, but it also drove out many Black residents.

Dedman said the way to protect residents from gentrification is to first decrease the number of properties that sit empty. According to the Census Bureau, there are thousands of empty homes in the Bay Area - and nearly 6,000 vacant homes in Oakland alone.

"I think one of the most promising strategies for protecting long-standing residents from gentrification is Oakland's vacancy property tax," said Dedman.

The vacancy tax was approved by a ballot measure in November 2018 and went into effect the following year, establishing an annual tax on vacant properties of $3,000 to $6,000. So far, it's too soon to tell whether the tax has provided more affordable housing.

Dedman hopes the tax will eventually increase the number of homes and rentals in the market, and hopefully drive down housing prices. "In general, curbing Oakland's highly speculative housing market and increasing the number of living-wage jobs is what's needed for long-term housing sustainability," said Dedman.

Empowering residents to resist gentrification

In Atlanta, Kamau Franklin is fighting gentrification by working to organize and educate residents. He's the director of Community Movement Builders, and their mission is to create sustainable, self-determining communities through cooperative economics and community organizing.

For Franklin, the answers to gentrification lie in education and organization. Franklin told Business Insider that the only real way to achieve success is to organize people so they can collectively respond to real estate developers, finance capital, and elect officials who are more interested in keeping working-class people in their homes than in building new real estate.

"Several organizations we work with, including the national organization Right to the City, use organizing renters and/or working-class homeowners to challenge the power of these organized groups, who admittedly have the advantage because of their wealth," said Franklin. "So, the model is organizing renters' associations, neighborhood associates, and activist groups. That includes political education to confront the ideology that homes are just a commodity to be bought and sold without any thinking about what happens to the social fabric of a neighborhood."

Franklin's Community Movement Builders organization has been able to purchase two properties in the historically Black neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and they are currently raising money to buy more properties through a "buy back the block" campaign to protect the community from developers.

Long term, though, Franklin sees the need for a complete paradigm shift in the way we approach housing. "In order to fight gentrification, there has to be a change in how we think about housing," he said. "As opposed to the 'market' being the arbiter of who deserves to have shelter or not, we should move to a human-rights-centered approach that says everyone deserves homes and that government policy should reflect this."

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Gentrification doesn't have to force minority residents out of their homes. Activists say there are 3 ways to protect communities.

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Gentrification leads to exposure of potentially dangerous chemicals that can lead to dangerous illnesses

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Elisabeth Haub Law School of Law
Pace University
Land Use Law Center
Supervisor: John R. Nolon, Distinguished Professor
Blog No. 33 of the Land Use, Human Health, and Equity Project
Editor: Brooke Mercaldi
Contributing Author: Gabriella Mickel [*]

Gentrification: Remedies and Consequences

Gentrification is defined as "the process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, typically displacing current inhabitants in the process." The inequities caused by gentrification in many communities are manifest. For example, the disinvestment in lower-income neighborhoods caused by redlining, racial covenants, and zoning provisions preventing property improvement resulted in dilapidated buildings, lowered real estate prices fueling development of manufacturing and industrial uses, and lowered the cost of investment in polluting infrastructure, such as highways and public works facilities. The legacy of these effects is the exposure of the residents of such neighborhoods to toxins and pollution not found in moderate- or higher-income residential neighborhoods. In fact, Black Americans are 75% more likely to live in communities where they are exposed to soil, air, and water pollution and experience a higher risk of cancer, asthma, and other life-threatening illnesses.

This is clearly an equity issue that many municipalities are interested in rectifying, but they must be careful to assess and avoid unintended consequences. One solution, for example, has been to build green infrastructure, such as parks, in these neighborhoods. It may seem as though the neighborhood would benefit from this supposed step away from the historic inequity; however, once the green infrastructure is built, gentrification and displacement can occur. Those trees and parks can cause property values to rise, gentrifiers to move in, and low-income residents to be displaced. Displaced residents are more likely to experience negative mental health effects, food deserts, less walkable streets, less access to transportation, and more exposure to pollutants.

The same cycle happens with other "solutions" to historic inequities. Reducing crime leads to higher property values. Giving school vouchers to kids in underfunded schools can encourage moderate-income parents to become gentrifiers and move into low-income neighborhoods. Increasing transit options and transit-oriented development can drive up rents and property values. Even addressing food deserts and swamps by attracting grocers, encouraging farmers' markets, and incentivizing community gardens can result not only in food mirages, but also in gentrification.

The question thus becomes: how do we stop this cycle of inequity? Part of the answer could be leveraging the resources of gentrifiers and preventing displacement of low-income residents through land-use solutions. To prevent displacement, municipalities are building more affordable housing, preserving current affordable housing stock, and keeping residents in and returning them to their communities.

The Neighborhood Jobs Trust in Boston, Massachusetts is funded by fees paid by commercial developers with projects greater than 100,000 square feet. Boston's zoning law requires these developers to obtain a zoning variance. To get the variance, the developers must pay a linkage fee, based on square footage, to the Neighborhood Jobs Trust. The trust supports job training for low and moderate-income residents. By creating this trust, Boston is using its land use authority to mitigate a con of gentrification in addition to displacement - the loss of low-skill jobs.

Right-to-purchase ordinances offer cities, tenants, or both with advanced notice and the right to purchase a multifamily rental property "when the owner decides to sell the property, exit the affordable housing program, or convert the rents to market rate." These ordinances not only mitigate displacement, but they also create low-income home ownership opportunities for residents in gentrifying neighborhoods. The possibility for home ownership is especially important given that building equity is an equity issue. Homeownership is an established route to building generational wealth, yet Black Americans have a homeownership rate of 46.4% compared to 75.8% for white families. The homeownership and racial wealth gap are the legacy of slavery, segregation, redlining, and other anti-Black policies.

Washington, D.C. runs the oldest right-to-purchase programs in the U.S. via the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) and District Opportunity to Purchase Act (DOPA). TOPA gives tenants the opportunity to purchase a building when the owner decides to sell and DOPA gives the D.C. the right to purchase if the tenants do not. Tenant ownership is typically structured through the creation of a limited equity cooperative, where residents collectively own their building with resale restrictions that preserve the long-term affordability of the units. The D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) encourages tenants to exercise their right to purchase to stabilize neighborhoods and prevent displacement. The DHCD provides tenants with financial assistance (seed money, earnest money deposits, acquisition funding, etc.), technical assistance, and "specialized organizational and development services, to include structuring the tenant association, preparing legal documents, and helping with loan applications."

Some municipalities are going a step further by trying not only to prevent displacement, but also to undo displacement. Local governments are using right-to-return policies to allow displaced people to move back into their communities after being pushed out by gentrification. Portland, Oregon created a right to return policy that allows tenants, mainly minorities, forced out by gentrification to move back to communities with the help of an affordable rent program. The program gives priority to displaced people via a point system that considers three generations of potential displacement.

In February 2021, Providence, Rhode Island released its Anti-Displacement and Comprehensive Housing Strategy. The strategy is a solid case study of how a municipality can address displacement and housing insecurity in the context of climate change, COVID-19, housing insecurity, and racial equity. These pandemics not only adversely affect public health, but they also do so interconnectedly. Therefore, addressing them effectively often means addressing them together. To create affordable housing, the Providence strategy recommends modifying zoning to allow more infill development (via pre-approved architectural designs that developers and property owners can use to build affordable housing on small lots), improve ADU regulations, allow for greater use of row houses, enable cluster development on large residential lots, provide density bonuses for land development projects, and creating a process to approve adaptive reuse administratively. To preserve affordable housing, the Providence strategy recommends creating a mandatory rental housing registry to facilitate code compliance inspections and creating a certificate of habitability that requires inspections every three years. To keep people in their communities, the Providence strategy recommends creating a Right of First Refusal Program to give the city an option to purchase existing income-controlled units.

For additional resources, the Gaining Ground Information Database is a free resource featuring best practice models used by governments to control the use of land in the public interest. Please direct your search toward the Healthy Communities topic.

[*] Gabriella Mickel is a second-year student at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law and Land Use Scholar in the Land Use Law Center.
Brooke Mercaldi is a second-year student at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law and Land Use Scholar in the Land Use Law Center. The previous blogs in the series are listed here:

1. Reframing Sustainability: Introducing the Land Use, Human Health, and Equity Project

2. Planning for Public Health: A New Beginning for Land Use Law

3. The Role of Density in Combatting Climate Change and COVID-19

4. Novel Coronavirus Claims Implicate Age-Old Property Rights Questions

5. State & Local COVID-related Emergency Powers: Individual Rights

6. COVID-Related Land Use Regulations and Judicial Deference

7. Mediation of Eviction Disputes May Hold the Key to the Survival of Small Businesses

8. Using Zoning to Help Eliminate Food Deserts: A Few Steps Forward

9. Urban Heat Islands and Equity

10. Urban Heat Island and Equity: What Can Local Governments Do?

11. The Recovery Lease: Preventing Evictions of Commercial Tenants During the Pandemic

12. The Role of Hazard Mitigation Planning in Promoting Public Health and Resilience

13. Hazard Mitigation Planning: A Case Study

14. Complete Streets: Protecting Public Health

15. Zoning and Lease Mediation as a Way to Retain Critical Small Businesses

16. Segregation by Law and the Racial Inequity Pandemic

17. Combating Food Swamps to Improve Equity and Public Health

18. The Pandemic Plan for Healthy Buildings

19. Remediating Distressed Properties to Improve Public Health

20. Housing, a Crucial Determinant of Health

21. ADU Introduction

22. NIMBY Restrictions to Poison the Prospects of Accessory Dwelling Units to Address Housing Insecurity

23. Zoning to Fill the Missing Middle Housing Gap

24. Old Tools to Fight Housing Insecurity: Adaptive Reuse and Infill Development

25. Racial Impact Analyses

26. A New Era of Equity-Based Comprehensive Planning...Finally

27. Equity-Based Comprehensive Plans: Land Use Policies to Correct Past Disparities

28. Reversing the Legacy of Redlining: Reducing Exposure to Toxins and Pollutants Through Land Use Law Reform

29. Addressing the Four Pandemics - A Case Study

30. Health Impact Assessments: A New Tool for Analyzing Land Use Plans, Zone Changes, and Development Projects

31. Putting the "e" in TOD

32. The Four Pandemics Explained and Addressed by Land Use Law and Policy

To subscribe to the GreenLaw Blog, please go to https://greenlaw.blogs.pace.edu/and click on the "Subscribe" envelope.

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Gentrification: Remedies and Consequences - GreenLaw

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Elisabeth Haub Law School of Law Pace University Land Use Law Center Supervisor: John R. Nolon, Distinguished Professor Blog No. 33 of the Land Use, Human Health, and Equity Project Editor: Brooke Mercaldi Contributing Author: Gabriella Mickel [*] Gentrification: Remedies and Consequences Gentrification is defined as "the process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, typically displacing current inhabitants in the process."

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Statistics on gentrification in some of America's biggest cities

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[mashshare]

Jason Richardson, Director, Research & Evaluation, NCRC
Bruce Mitchell, Ph.D., Senior Research Analyst, NCRC
Juan Franco, Senior GIS Specialist, NCRC

March 19, 2019

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Gentrification is a powerful force for economic change in our cities, but it is often accompanied by extreme and unnecessary cultural displacement. While gentrification increases the value of properties in areas that suffered from prolonged disinvestment, it also results in rising rents, home and property values. As these rising costs reduce the supply of affordable housing, existing residents, who are often black or Hispanic, are displaced. This prevents them from benefiting from the economic growth and greater availability of services that come with increased investment. Gentrification presents a challenge to communities that are trying to achieve economic revitalization without the disruption that comes with displacement.
This study found that from 2000 through 2013 the following occurred:

Gentrification and displacement of long-time residents was most intense in the nation's biggest cities, and rare in most other places.

Gentrification was concentrated in larger cities with vibrant economies, but also appeared in smaller cities where it often impacted areas with the most amenities near central business districts.

Displacement of black and Hispanic residents accompanied gentrification in many places and impacted at least 135,000 people in our study period. In Washington, D.C., 20,000 black residents were displaced, and in Portland, Oregon, 13 percent of the black community was displaced over the decade.

Seven cities accounted for nearly half of the gentrification nationally: New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Diego and Chicago.

Washington, D.C., was the most gentrified city by percentage of eligible neighborhoods that experienced gentrification; New York City was the most gentrified by sheer volume. Neighborhoods were considered to be eligible to gentrify if in 2000 they were in the lower 40 percent of home values and family incomes in that metropolitan area.

The study lends weight to what critics say is a concentration not only of wealth, but of wealth-building investment, in just a handful of the nation's biggest metropolises, while other regions of the country languish.

The strict tests for gentrification and displacement in this study and the limitations of the data available likely undercounted instances of gentrification and displacement.

Most low- to moderate-income neighborhoods did not gentrify or revitalize during the period of our study. They remained impoverished, untouched by investments and building booms that occurred in major cities, and vulnerable to future gentrification and displacement.

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A major transformation is occurring in the most prosperous American cities. Many of the 600+ member organizations of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) have raised concerns about gentrification, displacement and transformations in their communities. We wanted to better understand where gentrification and displacement was occurring, and how to measure and monitor it. Does gentrification also mean displacement?

Using U.S. Census Bureau and economic data, NCRC found that many major American cities showed signs of gentrification and some racialized displacement between 2000 and 2013. Gentrification was centered on vibrant downtown business districts, and in about a quarter of the cases it was accompanied by racialized displacement. Displacement disproportionately impacted black and Hispanic residents who were pushed away before they could benefit from increased property values and opportunities in revitalized neighborhoods. This intensified the affordability crisis in the core of our largest cities.

Gentrification was most intense in the nation's biggest coastal cities, yet in medium to small cities of the nation's interior it was rare: Most of the nation's cities and towns did not experience gentrification as measured in this study.

Neighborhoods experience gentrification when an influx of investment and changes to the built environment leads to rising home values, family incomes and educational levels of residents. Cultural displacement occurs when minority areas see a rapid decline in their numbers as affluent, white gentrifiers replace the incumbent residents.

In this study, neighborhoods were considered to be eligible to gentrify if in 2000 they were in the lower 40 percent of home values and family incomes in that metropolitan area.

Measuring gentrification and displacement is fraught with controversy, since people who are impacted by the economic and social transition of their neighborhoods feel the disruption of community ties directly. This study measured gentrification and displacement using empirical methods and data, which has its own flaws and limitations. First, while the use of U.S. census data improves the validity of the study's findings, it also restricts the population analysis to a time period extending from 2000 to 2010, while the social and economic data were gathered under the U.S. Census American Community Survey (ACS) program, covering the period starting in 2000 and until 2009-2013, a five-year consolidation of the social and economic data. This limits our findings to the not-too-distant past. However, neighborhoods with a more recent dynamic of gentrification and displacement could not be covered. Second, the use of census tracts, which average about 4,000 residents, as a proxy for neighborhoods could disguise neighborhood changes taking place at smaller community sizes. As a consequence of these restrictions on the time frame and scale of the study, it should not be implied that other neighborhoods have not experienced the same effects before, during or since the study period. Instead, the study is designed to identify instances of gentrification and displacement that can be measured with a high level of confidence, and avoid falsely noting gentrification where none occurred, but it cannot capture the full-lived reality of residents in gentrifying neighborhoods.

Disinvestment in low- and moderate-income communities results from a long history of discrimination in lending, housing and the exclusionary, racialized practice known as redlining. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago directly linked community disinvestment with historical redlining practices evident in the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) residential security ("redlining") maps, completed for all major cities of the U.S. 80 years ago. A 2018 study by NCRC found that three out of four neighborhoods marked "hazardous" by HOLC surveyors in the 1930s are still struggling economically, with lower incomes and higher proportions of minority residents. The economic outcomes for black and Hispanic families residing in disinvested areas are often stunted by lower incomes, fewer businesses and fewer opportunities to build wealth. This history set the stage for gentrification and displacement.

Local advocates and officials should pursue policies that encourage investment while promoting the ability of existing residents to stay and benefit from revitalization. In our 2016 paper, The Community Reinvestment Act: How CRA can promote integration and prevent displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods, we identified several ways in which local stakeholders can promote revitalization to benefit the broader community, such as partnerships between banks and community-based organizations to encourage equitable development; limited-equity co-ops and community land trusts; providing existing tenants with the right of first refusal in apartment conversions coupled with low-income and first-time buyer financing programs; inclusionary zoning regulations; and split tax rates for the incumbent residents of gentrifying neighborhoods. Additionally, HUD's Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) process provides an opportunity for community groups to engage with municipal leadership in the planning process. AFFH provides a mechanism for identifying areas that are vulnerable to, or may be in the early stages of, gentrification. Community groups can then work to develop strategies to avoid displacement of incumbent residents by attracting investment and providing affordable housing.

Large and small local banks can also play a role by supporting the development of housing and finance options that accommodate the retention of low- and moderate-income families in the community, rather than excluding them. Bank regulators should recognize pro-integrative bank finance as responsive to the needs of the community, crediting banks for these efforts in their CRA exams. Strategies like those advanced through HUD's AFFH rule, promoting investment in inclusive and diverse neighborhoods, should be eligible for CRA consideration. It is essential that programs promoting the economic prosperity of incumbent residents of gentrifying neighborhoods be discussed on the public evaluations released subsequent to a CRA exam to document their effectiveness and encourage other banks to apply comparable investment strategies in their markets.

INTRODUCTION

Any discussion of gentrification is likely to elicit a range of responses. A conversation with an NCRC member living in an impoverished and high-crime neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, culminates with a plea: "When can we get some of that (gentrification) in my community?" Another NCRC member from Portland, Oregon, experiences gentrification as an erosion of community ties, as rents escalate and families are displaced. In Arlington, Virginia, a large rental community of 3,000 mostly Hispanic immigrants drawn by a robust Washington, D.C., economy is uprooted when the property is sold, bulldozed and replaced by a mix of luxury and affordable apartments, which are neither truly affordable nor plentiful for the former tenants. In the rapidly gentrifying Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the Lincoln Temple United Church of Christ, a congregation that had existed since the 1860s and was a landmark of the Civil Rights struggle, is forced to dissolve in 2018 as its membership drops to just 20 congregants. Gentrification is controversial because it affects people at the neighborhood level, it can disrupt the familiar and established ties of a place, creating a disorienting new locale. For people displaced as the neighborhood becomes unaffordable, this is more than just nostalgia or discomfort with the unfamiliar. Often, they must accept longer commutes and a disruption of the support structures provided by their old neighbors and family. In these cases, gentrification is understood as the terminal stage of exclusion of minority (usually black) residents from affordable housing inside the city. Public policy measures starting with "slum clearance" in the 1930s and 1940s then became "urban renewal" (Collins & Shester 2012; Hyra 2012) and construction of the highway system, which split communities in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s (Mohl 2004: Karas 2015), which then became "redevelopment" in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, the remnant of these communities face an affordability crisis as affluent, usually white gentrifiers with access to credit move in and transform the economic and social dynamics of a community.

While community perceptions of gentrification range from hope for better living conditions to anxiety and even hostility, research on gentrification is divided on whether displacement is an inevitable outcome. Some researchers assert that gentrification attendant with displacement is a complex issue and while mobility rates of low-income residents are equivalent in gentrifying and non-gentrifying areas, low-income families are unable to afford to move in and replace exited families as housing costs escalate (Ding, Hwang, and Divringi, 2015). Other researchers found that displacement was rare (Ellen and O'Regan, 2011; Freeman 2005), while others comment on its prevalence (Newman and Wyly, 2006). This divergence of opinion could be because both the scale and type of gentrification vary from place to place. The urban form, or patterns of land-use in U.S. cities, differ considerably in size and structure, and the process of gentrification can involve neighborhoods in a rapid process of change or unfold over decades in larger districts. Additionally, while the residential and commercial aspects of a community are interwoven, gentrification of residential and commercial areas involve slightly different dynamics (Meltzer 2016). Displacement also may take different forms: either racial/ethnic or by class and culture. Finally, Marcuse (1986) argues that in many cases displacement due to systematic urban disinvestment, which resulted in the abandonment of many downtown neighborhoods, often precedes gentrification. For all of these reasons, it is helpful to be clear about the type of gentrification considered, how it is being studied and over what period.

The focus of this report is residential gentrification and racial and ethnic displacement throughout urban areas of the U.S. It is a comprehensive national level analysis of gentrification and displacement in 935 metropolitan areas. The goal was to determine how widespread gentrification was in U.S. urban areas, and then identify neighborhoods where gentrification and displacement occurred simultaneously. The first step of this analysis is to find neighborhoods with indications of gentrification. Utilizing a methodology developed by Columbia University Professor Lance Freeman, the study examines increases in education levels, home values and income as the defining criteria of whether gentrification has occurred in a neighborhood (2005). We determine which neighborhoods (census tracts) show indications of gentrification over the period from 2000-2013. In tracts with indications of gentrification, a second analysis is conducted to examine whether racial/ethnic displacement occurred during the same time period. The research questions addressed by this study are: 1) How prevalent is gentrification and subsequent displacement? 2) Are there regional differences in gentrification and displacement? 3) What census variables are associated with gentrification across the nation?

LITERATURE REVIEW

The term "gentrification" was first coined in the 1960s by British sociologist Ruth Glass (1964) to describe the displacement of the working-class residents of London neighborhoods by middle-class newcomers. From its inception, gentrification has been understood as a form of neighborhood change, resulting in the displacement of incumbent residents of one social class and culture by another more affluent class, linked with an increase in property values. In the case of the United States, the segregated residential structure of American cities creates circumstances in which gentrification often occurs along racial lines. In these cases of gentrification and racial displacement, affluent white incomers often displace the incumbent minority residents.

Gentrification is a complex form of neighborhood change. At the street level, it is visible in the upgrading of the built structure of neighborhoods, as houses are refurbished and businesses established (Krase, 2012; Kreager, Lyons and Hays 2011; Papachristos et al. 2011). While the most basic understanding of gentrification involves the movement of people and investment to affect neighborhood change, it also involves broader political and economic forces. Policy decisions by governments impact both transportation and the availability of services and amenities in a community. The interplay between government and the public in decisions regarding zoning and the allocation of public resources, coupled with decisions by private developers on the investment of capital, deeply influence neighborhood desirability (Zuk et al. 2015). The forces driving neighborhood changes, like gentrification, also involve an interplay between the movement of people, public policy decisions and the availability of capital. Consequently, gentrification is a subject that requires analysis of social, political and economic circumstances.

The economic drivers of neighborhood change involve supply-side dynamics of public investments and land value within the context of the wider metropolitan economy. While working on his PhD at Johns Hopkins University, the late Neil Smith observed the gentrification of Baltimore's Inner Harbor (1979). This stirred him to establish the drivers that lead to gentrification in terms of land rents - the depreciation and physical deterioration of older built structures, and the increase in the potential income returns from the land on which they were built. When the potential income return from land rents exceeds the perception of risk by investors, neighborhoods become likely candidates for redevelopment. While economics explain the flows of capital to gentrifying commercial and residential areas, there are broader cultural factors that have shifted perspectives on the desirability of an urban lifestyle and increased the demand for downtown locations.

Neighborhood lifestyle preferences have always had a powerful role in establishing the desirability of different urban locations. The post-war era saw a shift in both federal policy and consumer culture that had enormous impact on urban residential patterns (Cohen 2004). Economic conditions of the Depression era and production priorities during World War II hindered construction of new housing for over a decade. This contributed to an antiquated stock of urban housing, the supply of which was too small to meet demands of a growing and increasingly affluent population in the post-war era. The availability of mortgage financing through the Housing Act of 1949 sparked a construction boom. Much of the housing was built in suburbs, where developers utilizing economies of scale could find large undeveloped tracts for massive new developments. This accelerated a reconfiguration of the American urban system, as white middle-class residents suburbanized, shifting population and capital away from downtown areas (Jackson 1987). Often, this left the downtown areas of cities with high proportions of minority and low-income residents, resulting in a reduced revenue base and greater demands for city services. This shift in economic prosperity and population away from the downtown areas of cities has become widely accepted as a theory of post-war urban decline; however, urban development varied greatly across the country and should not be taken as the sole explanation of post-war urban development (Beauregard 1993). In the present era, the aging housing stock of inner-ring suburbs has become less desirable as the demands of commuting and allure of downtown amenities have shifted demand for housing closer to the central business district (CBD) of urban areas.

The question "who gentrifies?" is contingent on demographics and class. Many authors cite the role of young millennials in gentrification (Hwang & Lin 2016; Baum-Snow & Hartley 2016; Couture & Handbury 2016; Ding, Hwang & Divringi 2015). Millennials are less likely to harbor racial and ethnic animosity than previous generations (Freeman & Cai, 2015; Owens, 2012; Glaeser & Vigdor, 2012). Many downtown areas of cities have also experienced reductions in violent crime over the last two decades, which could make certain low-income neighborhoods enticing to newcomers (Ellen, Horn & Reed 2016). Increasing work hours and reduction in leisure time has also created a demand to reduce commute time and work closer to home (Edlund, Machade, & Sviatchi 2016). Public policy decisions also have impact. Several researchers cite the role of the HOPE VI program in the demolition of distressed public housing (Goetz 2013; Vale & Gray 2013). Shifts in city level spending on mixed-income developments, parks and bike share enhance downtown desirability (Buehler and Stowe, 2016; Hyra 2012; Tissot, 2011). Finally, many city leaders have acted on the advice of influential urban planners, like Edward Glaeser and Richard Florida, who popularized the idea that the amenities of the downtown areas of cities draw Gen-Xer's and Millennials who are part of an affluent "creative class" that revitalizes neighborhoods (Clark, 2011; Florida, 2014; Glaeser & Shapiro, 2003). A combination of undervalued property and changing cultural perceptions about the desirability of urban living increases the demand for residences in downtown areas of many U.S. cities.

While gentrification implicitly involves economic transition as a more affluent class replaces the incumbent residents, many researchers also note that there are cultural and racial dimensions to this form of neighborhood change. Millennial perceptions about race have shifted from those of prior generations, so that minority neighborhoods are now seen as "cool and edgy" (Hyra 2016), but that does not necessarily mean they remain inviting or affordable for the incumbent residents. Several researchers found that neighborhoods transitioning to affluence create new social tensions that influence interactions, which can often result in micro-level segregation (Chaskin & Joseph, 2015; Tach, 2014; Hyra 2015). The new residents might shift the community's focus of concern and the dynamics of political power, including black and white middle-class gentrifiers wielding political influence in local initiatives that sometimes oppose the expansion of affordable housing in their new neighborhoods (Boyd 2005; Hyra 2008; Pattillo 2007).

Despite many studies on the issue a crucial question remains, does gentrification also mean displacement? The economics of gentrification explicitly state that neighborhood property values increase, decreasing the supply of affordable housing available to lower-income residents who are then displaced, as the cost of living in the neighborhood increases. However, several studies indicate that the mobility rates of low-income people are equivalent in gentrifying and more stable low-income neighborhoods (Ding, Hwang & Divringi, 2015; Ellen & O'Regan, 2011; Freeman, 2005; Freeman & Braconi, 2004; McKinnish, Walsh & White, 2010). Some cite this as evidence that widespread displacement is not occurring. However, Hyra (2016) argues that this is an incorrect interpretation that merely shows that low-income rates of mobility are uniformly high across all types of neighborhoods. It's not that displacement is not occurring in gentrifying neighborhoods, but that in general low-income people move more often. Additionally, the movement of other low-income residents back into gentrifying neighborhoods is constrained by a lack of affordable housing (Ding, Hwang & Divringi, 2015). Over time, the neighborhood experiences a net loss of low-income residents as housing costs rise, and the neighborhood becomes less and less affordable. This transition in the economic status of neighborhoods often occurs along racial lines, as incumbent low-income black and Hispanic residents move and are replaced by higher-income white gentrifiers. Freeman (2005) found a surge in white movement into black neighborhoods since 2000.

The influx of affluent white gentrifiers to formerly low-income minority neighborhoods can be viewed as a form of racial exclusion from urban areas with vibrant economies. There has been increased exclusion of incumbent black homeowners from gentrifying neighborhoods, driven by racial disparities in access to home lending. Black and Hispanic applicants for mortgages in gentrified neighborhoods were 2.32 times and 1.96 times more likely to be denied credit than non-Hispanic white applicants between 1993 and 2000 (Wyly & Hammel 2004). Neighborhood level disparities in access to mortgage credit access have a long history and have been documented in several cities by NCRC (Richardson et al. 2015 & 2016). Rothstein (2017) documents the history of redlining going back to the early part of the 20th century. A combination of local policies related to zoning, restrictive covenants, prohibition of lending in "hazardous" neighborhoods and informal segregationist practices like residential steering and social pressure prevented residents of low-income and minority neighborhoods from gaining access to credit. This pattern of disinvestment prepared the ground for gentrification and displacement in many neighborhoods (Marcuse 1986). Gentrification, which decreases the supply of affordable housing, coupled with policies of public housing demolition (Goetz 2013), have resulted in the displacement of racial minorities and low-income residents in some cities.

METHODS

This study sought to quantify variations in displacement in U.S. urban areas by assessing changes at the census tract (neighborhood) level using nationwide U.S. census data normalized by the longitudinal tract database (LTDB). Normalization of the census data is necessary because tract boundaries can change over time, leading to inaccuracies. We analyzed LTDB data for socioeconomic changes during the period 2000 to 2013 for all 50 U.S. states. Population changes were assessed using decennial census data for 2000 and 2010, which was normalized by the LTDB.

Researchers have used several different methods to identify neighborhoods that seem to be experiencing gentrification and to then assess rates of residential change. The study adopted a methodology developed by Freeman (2005) and utilized by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve (Ding, Hwang & Divringi, 2015) and Governing.com (2015) to locate gentrified areas. The method involves assessing the educational level and economic status of residents, and the value of properties in the neighborhood at the beginning of the census period, then assessing changes in the next U.S. census. This includes several checks:

Eligibility determined by tracts in the Core Based Statistical Area (CBSA), which are below the 40th percentile in both median household income and median house value. In addition, the population must be 500 residents or greater at the beginning of the period.

Possible gentrification is determined by including all eligible tracts and then identifying tracts that were in the top 60th percentile for increases in both median home value and the percentage of college graduates.

Determining tract level median household income increases from 2000-2013 when adjusted for inflation is the final check.

Census tracts meeting all of the above listed criteria were then identified as undergoing, or having undergone, gentrification.

The criteria for gentrification are all indications that the socioeconomic status of the residents of the tract shifted. We then reviewed each tract for changes in the population of the racial subgroups. These changes were assessed using two criteria;

1. Did the racial group's percentage of the population decline by more than two standard deviations from the mean of all census tracts?

2. Did the absolute number of residents from that racial group decline by at least five percent?

If the census tract gentrified and met both of these criteria, we identified it as having experienced cultural displacement (Figure 1). Cultural displacement results when the tastes, norms and desires of newcomers supplant and replace those of the incumbent residents (Zukin 2010). Since this kind of cultural transformation of neighborhoods is difficult to measure directly, the decline in minority subpopulation was used as a proxy. Population shifts were examined utilizing decennial census 2000 and 2010 population data.

RESULTS

National changes - Gentrification

Nationally, 90.7 percent, or 67,153 census tracts have a micropolitan or metropolitan designation, and are assigned to an urban area. Of these urban tracts, 16.7 percent or 11,196 tracts met the criteria for being eligible for gentrification in 2000, the beginning of the examination period (Figure 2). A total of 1,049 census tracts met all three of the checks for gentrification: increases in median home value, educational attainment and increases in income by 2013. This amounts to nine percent of the eligible urban census tracts across the U.S. While this seems to indicate that gentrification is rare, the selection criteria was stringent and limited to a relatively short period of time. Gentrification appears to be clustered in sections of larger and economically vibrant cities that are close to central business districts. Residents are drawn to the neighborhoods by proximity to employers, and the clustering of amenities and services associated with an urban lifestyle. Finally, displacement was indicated in 232, or 22 percent, of the gentrified tracts.

While gentrification impacted a minority of census tracts in U.S. cities, it was quite concentrated in the largest urban areas. At the national level, almost a quarter (24 percent) of all urban areas, or CBSAs, saw at least one tract gentrify between 2000 and 2013 (Table 1). CBSAs are urban areas with a population of at least 10,000 and include small micropolitan areas, analogous to towns, and larger metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), or cities. In 13 percent of towns and cities, only one tract gentrified. More moderate levels of gentrification, between two and 10 tracts, occurred in eight percent of towns and cities. Intensive gentrification, cases in which more than 10 tracts underwent gentrification between 2000 and 2013, occurred in three percent of towns and cities nationally.

We assessed the population sizes of cities in which gentrification was occurring. Gentrification was concentrated in the largest urban areas. CBSAs with a population of one million or greater contained 79 percent of gentrifying tracts. Cities with populations between 500,000 and 1 million comprised another seven percent. Cities with populations between 100,000 and 500,000 contained 10 percent of gentrifying tracts. The smallest cities and towns, under a population of 50,000, contained only four percent of the tracts that gentrified nationally (Figure 3). The map shows that while coastal cities had the largest amount of tracts undergoing gentrification, large cities in the interior like Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis and Pittsburgh also underwent extensive gentrification.

Cities with the highest rates of gentrification included New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Diego and Chicago (Figure 4). These seven cities accounted for nearly half of the total gentrification nationally, or 501 tracts out of 1,049. It is surprising that Baltimore and Philadelphia metro areas are in the top 10 list, with the fourth and fifth largest number of gentrified tracts in the study, since these cities are not considered among the nation's most economically dynamic cities. Different patterns of gentrification seem to be evident for the three largest cities (New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago), compared with the next three largest (Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore).

The three largest metro areas (New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago) are in the top seven for the number of neighborhoods which gentrified in Figure 4. The top tier cities in population size have many more neighborhoods, and may be more economically dynamic than second tier and third tier cities. Examining cities by the proportion of neighborhoods eligible in 2000 and which did gentrify over the next 10 years provides a more meaningful indication of the rates of gentrification in some areas (Table 5). Washington, D.C., was the city with the highest percentage of gentrifying neighborhoods, with San Diego, New York City, Atlanta, Baltimore and Portland also having both high numbers of tracts and high rates of gentrification.

Examining the maps of different cities reveals patterns of concentrated gentrification in some, but more diffuse patterns in others. Analysis of the Baltimore map (figure 5f) indicates the concentration of gentrification around the Inner Harbor that then stretches from downtown north to Johns Hopkins University. Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., all show concentrated gentrification around their central business districts, while the pattern of gentrification is more scattered in the largest three cities: Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City (Figures 5a-f).

National changes - Displacement

Cultural displacement was examined by calculating the reduction of black and Hispanic residents in census tracts. Nationally, 187 of the gentrified tracts showed some level of black displacement, and 45 tracts showed Hispanic displacement (Table 3). This impacted over 135,000 people nationally. While white residents increased in most tracts, there were instances in which the Asian and Hispanic residential population increased in tracts experiencing gentrification and black residential population declined.

Next, we calculated the average losses in metro areas that experienced gentrification and black or Hispanic residential population loss. In the case of black residential displacement, the average loss per tract was 593 black residents (Table 4). New Orleans experienced the most average loss, 1,075 black residents per tract, largely attributable to massive dislocation of neighborhoods caused by the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005. Black residential losses in Washington, D.C., New York City and Philadelphia were especially acute due to the high number of tracts involved and their large displacement numbers. More than 20,000 black residents of Washington, D.C., nearly 15,000 in New York City and 12,000 in Philadelphia moved out of gentrifying neighborhoods.

Tracts with indications of Hispanic displacement were much fewer than those with indications of black displacement, though the average number of displaced residents per tract was similar. In the 45 tracts with indications of Hispanic displacement, the average residential decrease was 542. Denver and Austin had the highest average decreases of Hispanic residents in gentrifying tracts with 1,054 and 1,039 respectively (Table 5).

In order to examine regional differences in black and Hispanic displacement from gentrifying tracts, we calculated the percentage of gentrifying tracts and tracts with indications of displacement. Cities with the highest levels of black displacement between 2000 and 2010 were concentrated in the South, with nine out of 16 cities with high levels of black displacement located there (Figure 6). Richmond, Charlottesville, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans had the highest percentages of black displacement at the tract level (Figure 6). While Richmond and Charlottesville had moderate levels of gentrification, at least half of the gentrifying tracts in those cities also experienced displacement.

Hispanic displacement occurred in fewer cities than black displacement, and affected 45 census tracts nationally. The city with the largest number of tracts impacted was New York City, where nine tracts had losses indicative of Hispanic displacement. Aside from New York City, Hispanic displacement was most intense in the West, with Denver, Austin, Houston and Dallas having the highest percentages followed by Los Angeles (Figure 7). However, the number of affected tracts were small: five in Denver; four in Austin, Dallas and Houston; and eight in Los Angeles. This difference in the rate of Hispanic and black displacement might be attributed to the high rate of suburbanization for the Hispanic population of those cities, since nationally, 45 percent of Hispanic residents live in areas outside the downtown core. Suburbanization rates of black residents are lower at 39 percent (Massey & Tannen, 2018). The levels of segregation from non-Hispanic whites also diverge widely for the two demographic groups. The most common indicator of segregation is the dissimilarity index, which measures the evenness of the distribution of residents between two groups. At the national level, this index is much higher for white non-Hispanic and black residential areas at .60, than it is for white non-Hispanic and Hispanic residential areas at .40. The Hispanic population also increased quite rapidly over the study period, increasing from 12.5 percent of the population in 2000 to 16.3 percent in 2010. The black percentage of the population increased less, from 12.9 percent in 2000 to 13.6 percent in 2010. The lower levels of demographic displacement of Hispanic residents could be attributable to a combination of population growth, lower segregation relative to non-Hispanic whites and/or decreased frequency of gentrification in Hispanic-majority neighborhoods, which are more likely to be located in suburbs than black-majority tracts.

Critics of gentrification sometimes argue that long-term disinvestment and depopulation of neighborhoods established the economic and social conditions for later cultural displacement (Marcuse 1986). In order to test this, we examined cities with a high number of tracts with black displacement for long-term demographic shifts between 1990 and 2010 (Table 6). The 20-year study period was chosen to capture the impact of demographic changes unfolding over a longer time frame than gentrification, especially in instances where displacement actually preceded gentrification. In most cases, a pattern of decreasing percentages of black, and increasing percentages of white, residents occurred in gentrifying tracts. This tract-level pattern of black decreases and white increases in residents was especially prevalent in Washington, D.C., San Francisco-Oakland, Atlanta, New Orleans and Richmond. Many tracts also showed that there was long-term population loss, indicating abandonment of the area or reduced residential density before or during a demographic transition. This trend was apparent in Baltimore, but especially severe in New Orleans, where the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe forced widespread neighborhood abandonment. Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., had much lower levels of population loss in gentrifying tracts. The cities of Dallas, Richmond, New York City, and especially Atlanta and San Francisco, had high rates of population growth.

There were also notable declines in the Hispanic population and increases in white population in many cities between 1990 and 2010. The exceptions to this were in Los Angeles and San Diego (Table 7), where both white and Hispanic populations declined in gentrifying neighborhoods. Linkages between tract-level population loss and demographic change were evident in Denver, Dallas, San Diego and Chicago. Areas of Hispanic displacement in Denver, Houston, Austin and Dallas are shown in figures 8 a-d. All of these cities also contained tracts experiencing black displacement.

DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION

Past studies of gentrification and displacement have measured neighborhood change by assessing the rates of mobility of incumbent low-income residents in gentrifying areas. Generally, the results showed high but comparable rates of mobility for low-income residents in gentrifying and non-gentrifying tracts, but with low rates of low- income replacement in gentrifying tracts. Consequently, that method of analysis did not directly measure racial/ethnic displacement. This study used a different approach, examining shifts in the racial/ethnic composition of tracts in 2000 and 2010 in order to determine where gentrification and demographic changes were indicative of displacement. National rates of gentrification are low in towns and smaller cities, with 76 percent of urban areas not experiencing any gentrification under our criteria. This may be a conservative estimate due to the requirement of an absolute increase in household income. Another 13 percent experienced gentrification in only one neighborhood, while 8 percent of U.S. cities experienced moderate gentrification. However, the largest population centers experienced intensive gentrification with 3 percent of cities showing indications of gentrification in 10 or more tracts, and 79 percent of gentrifying tracts being within cities with one million or more residents. Though gentrification may be relatively rare at the national level, it can be intensive in the largest cities with dynamic economies. Coastal cities experienced the highest rates of gentrification, with seven out of the top 10 cities in total tracts gentrified being located on the East or West coast.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 created 8,000 Opportunity Zones throughout the country to lure investment to struggling neighborhoods. Although those Opportunity Zones were not defined when this study began, preliminary analysis indicates that 70 percent of gentrified neighborhoods are within or adjacent to an Opportunity Zone. However, most Opportunity Zones do not appear to have been gentrified during the study period.

Some questions to investigate in the future: Will Opportunity Zone investments concentrate mainly in booming areas, and skip many others, as we found for gentrification. Will investments flow primarily into Opportunity Zones that are already gentrified, or adjacent to gentrified neighborhoods?

This study indicates that minority displacement is indeed occurring in many cities, where it is often concentrated in areas near the central business district. Displacement of minority groups was high in gentrifying tracts, with 22 percent having indications of high levels of either black or Hispanic residential loss. While larger cities experienced higher levels of gentrification, displacement also seemed to correspond with regional location. Southern cities experienced greater intensity of black displacement, while western cities experienced greater intensity of Hispanic displacement. Additionally, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia were notable for their high levels of black displacement, while Denver and Austin had high levels of Hispanic displacement. These results indicate that gentrification is often accompanied by high levels of cultural displacement. Since the displacement portion of this study was limited to the decades before 2010, it is difficult to assess the proportion of minority neighborhoods which have indications of displacement that will lead to racial and ethnic integration, or resegregate and become white majority areas over time. It is essential to examine the economic and demographic changes which result from gentrification for their impact on equity at the neighborhood level.

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Cultural displacement results when the tastes, norms, and desires of newcomers supplant and replace those of the incumbent residents, and can also entail the loss of historically and culturally significant institutions for a community.

In this report we have used the words community, city, and metro area interchangeably. We have also used the census tract as a proxy for neighborhood in many cases and these words should be considered synonymous for our purposes.

See NCRC report on HOLC and redlining https://ncrc.org/holc/

https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/working-papers/2017/wp2017-12

Arna Valley Apartments https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/10/northern-virginia-diversity-race/18079525/

https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/city-desk/article/21023685/after-150-years-lincoln-temple-united-church-of-christ-has-held-its-last-service

https://s4.ad.brown.edu/projects/diversity/Researcher/Bridging.htm

Data on the following racial and ethnic subgroups was used; non-Hispanic White, Black, Hispanic and Asian. Only the decennial Census offers a low enough sampling error to be of use, limiting our study to data from the 2000 and 2010 Censuses.

The change in population at the census tract level is normally distributed.

Hyra, D., 2015. The back-to-the-city movement: Neighbourhood redevelopment and processes of political and cultural displacement. Urban Studies, 52(10), pp.1753-1773.
Photo by Jami via Wikicommons.

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Shifting Neighborhoods: Gentrification and Cultural Displacement in American Cities " NCRC

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NCRC found that many major American cities showed signs of gentrification and some racialized displacement between 2000 and 2013.

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The effects of gentrification range from the bad, including displacement of low income/POC residents, to the good, including new job opportunities and a reduction in crime

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The Effects of Gentrification in American Cities

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Defining gentrification as a whole and giving real world examples of how neighborhoods can be entirely changed with no bias whether good or bad

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"Was anyone really asking for a gentrified Gone Girl?" reads a one-line, half-star review of Promising Young Woman.

"Graphic Novels Are Comic Books, But Gentrified" one headline to a Jacobin article proclaims.

Gentrification appends so many words these days - " graffiti," " rock music," " font," " thrifting" - that it bears scant similarity to its original definition. In 1964, sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification. As Steven Thomson explained for Curbed, Glass was describing a "class phenomenon ... by adapting the British-ism 'gentry'" to describe the process of "middle class liberal arts intelligentsia" moving into her primarily working-class London neighborhood.

The term flew across the Atlantic and made its home in the United States, where similar trends would begin making their way through cities over the last few decades of the 20th century. Google Books data shows the term "gentrification" didn't really take off in the US until the late '90s and has been steadily growing in use ever since.

There isn't an agreed-upon empirical definition of gentrification among scholars, which makes it difficult to talk about it with any certainty. But talk we do: From Indianapolis to Austin, on a presidential debate stage and on a panel on bike lanes, and of course, on Twitter. Any time we talk about housing, the g-word inevitably pops up.

Our focus on gentrification might lead people to believe that it is the dominant form of inequality in American cities (our outsized focus on the phenomenon may be due in part to the fact that gentrification scholars, journalists, and consumers of digital media tend to live in gentrifying neighborhoods themselves). But the core rot in American cities is not the gentrifying neighborhoods: It is exclusion,segregation, and concentrated poverty.

White, wealthy neighborhoods that have refused class and racial integration have successfully avoided much scrutiny as gentrification has taken center stage in urban political fights. On the other hand, predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods often don'tgentrify due to disinvestment and centuries of racist and classist policies.

And yet, gentrification captures our imagination, providing the visual juxtaposition of inequality. While stagnant, segregated neighborhoods are an accepted backdrop of American life, fast-changing, diverse neighborhoods and the culture clash that accompanies gentrification are the battlefield where all the disagreements come to the forefront.

Gentrification as the juxtaposition of the haves and have-nots

In his 2019 paper " Hoboken Is Burning: Yuppies, Arson, and Displacement in the Postindustrial City," Princeton historian Dylan Gottlieb documented the violent displacement Puerto Rican residents faced between 1978 and 1983 as the city of Hoboken, New Jersey, gentrified. As thousands of young professionals flooded into Hoboken, the potential sale or rent price for converted units rose precipitously, and "property owners faced powerful incentives to displace low-income tenants."

As a result, "nearly five hundred fires ripped through tenements and rooming houses in the square-mile city," Gottlieb writes. "Most [displaced residents] never returned to Hoboken. Nearly every fire, investigators determined, had been the result of arson." In sum, 55 people died and over 8,000 were made homeless.

Today, this sort of violent displacement is not what most people mean when they talk about gentrification. But what, exactly, they're talking about is less clear, and the muddled debate often produces muddled policy goals.

A recent New York Times article features a Black Brooklyn homeowner who went to talk to a new white neighbor and was mistaken as a panhandler: "I went over to strike conversation and before I could finish a sentence, he told me that he didn't have any money," the man told the Times. Stories like this of Black homeowners watching their neighborhoods change around them abound, often with the earlier residents experiencing culture shock as the new entrants treat them or longstanding cultural markers with disdain.

In a Twitter thread about the article, educator and historian Erica Buddington recounted how when a package was mistakenly delivered to her new neighbor's house and she went to retrieve it, the neighbor immediately assumed she was a salesperson and shut the door in her face.

Beyond these frustrating and racist microaggressions is the concern about displacement and harms that might befall those who stay. A 2020 study by then-University of Florida sociologist Brenden Beck showed that "on average, calls to the police increased after a neighborhood's middle-class population grew." While Beck did not find that those calls translated into more stops or low-level arrests, he did find that "police made more order-maintenance and proactive arrests following real estate market growth."

This is absolutely the way my new neighbors are. My package was delivered to the wrong house, and a guy answered the door and said, "I don't want anything your selling."

When I told him that I was looking for a package, he said, "What the post office does isn't my problem." pic.twitter.com/Qtmm8OWdS2
- Erica Buddington (@ericabuddington) August 18, 2021

Yet while gentrifying neighborhoods create those types of interactions between neighbors or heavier "order maintenance" policing, the gentrification isn't the root issue. Segregating neighborhoods does not get rid of these sentiments or the harms they cause: it simply hides them. In a wealthy, white enclave like the Upper East Side, there aren't somehow fewer people who assume any Black person on their street is begging for money than there are in gentrifying neighborhoods. In fact, there are likely more. Gentrifying neighborhoods pull back the veil and allow for these worlds to collide, displaying the vast differences in income, access to education, and government protection and investment.

All of the problems people worry about when they invoke gentrification - displacement, police action against people of color, lack of investment, predatory landlords - are also present in segregated neighborhoods, often even more so.

As George Washington University professor Suleiman Osman wrote in his 2011 book The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: "Stories abounded of renters [in Brooklyn] being pressured by landlords to leave revitalizing areas. But non-revitalizing blocks with high rates of abandonment and demolition saw rates of displacement that were just as high."

What is gentrification?

Defining gentrification is hard, even for the experts.

The Urban Displacement Project, a research and policy group at the University of California Berkeley, defines it as:

a process of neighborhood change that includes economic change in a historically disinvested neighborhood - by means of real estate investment and new higher-income residents moving in - as well as demographic change - not only in terms of income level, but also in terms of changes in the education level or racial make-up of residents.

While this covers the conceptual ideas, determining which neighborhoods are gentrifying has been difficult for researchers. Not for lack of trying:MIT urban studies PhD candidate Benjamin Preis and his study co-authors compared four different models of gentrification and displacement risk and found "striking differences between the models." For instance, one weighted "access to public transit" as a gentrification risk factor while the others didn't, and another didn't include data on racial composition.

The researchers applied all of the models to Boston and found that there are "only seven [census] tracts that all four models agreed were either gentrifying or at risk of gentrification or displacement."

"[The models] disagree on the front end, they disagree on what we call gentrification, and then not surprisingly, they really disagree on the back end to actually map out what those neighborhoods are," Preis told Vox. "You end up with radical disagreement. One method identified nearly 120 tracts facing displacement pressure and another had just 39."

As Columbia University researcher Brett McMillan explains in the publication Shelterforce, while people often assume that gentrification happens predominantly in overwhelmingly Black or brown neighborhoods, that is not actually the case. He details research finding " Chicago neighborhoods with Black populations of greater than 40 percent experienced significantly lower rates of gentrification" and " white 'invasion' into census tracts with Black populations of 50 percent or more has been a relatively infrequent phenomenon."

The other big issue with defining gentrification is attempting to quantify physical displacement. Widely viewed as the most pernicious byproduct of gentrification, the evidence that gentrification causes physical displacement is a mixed bag.

Displacement is another phenomenon that is difficult to define. The reasons people move are not cataloged in any database, and poor Americans are notably transient due to financial insecurity.Additionally, defining "forced" displacement is difficult - if someone can afford a one-bedroom apartment in their community but not a larger home, are they being displaced if they have a kid and move to a more affordable neighborhood? People move for a variety of reasons: In 2015, FiveThirtyEight calculated that the average American moved more than 11 times in their lives, indicating that there are very few "longtime residents" of anywhere.

Importantly, research by preeminent eviction scholar Matthew Desmond "found no evidence that renters residing in gentrifying or in racially- and economically-integrated neighborhoods had a higher likelihood of eviction." But perhaps increasing rents can cause displacement without evictions. (The way to avoid that would be to keep rents low by building more housing and preserving existing affordable housing, but more on that later.)

While the arson in Hoboken was a clear-cut case of forced displacement, measuring the insidious ways that financially insecure Americans could be nudged out of their neighborhoods is extremely difficult.

The research literature in this space is mixed. Some researchers have found that "rather than rapid displacement, gentrification was associated with slower residential turnover among [disadvantaged] households." Other research, however, found that "between 8,300 and 11,600 households per year were displaced in New York City between 1989 and 2002 ... between 6.6 and 9.9 percent of all local moves among renter households."

Overall, the research literature leans toward the view that gentrifying neighborhoods can lead to displacement, but they don't have to. Gentrification canbring with it the promise of integration and sorely needed investment that can increase residents' quality of life - but only if disadvantaged residents are set up to take part in the benefits of increased investment.

Most urban dwellers live in poor neighborhoods that stay poor, or in higher-income neighborhoods doing their damnedest to stay that way

The cry of "fire, fire, gentrifier" spread through city neighborhoods last year during some of the racial justice protests. The battle lines in these neighborhoods are not clear but the anger directed at the yuppies brunching on the sidewalks was palpable. The group that conspicuously gets to avoid this conflict? Wealthy (often white) urban and suburban homeowners who have long refused to allow either integration or even yuppies to live in their segregated neighborhoods.

While there are very real harms that accompany gentrification, it's important not to lose the forest for the trees.

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.

When Chapple was doing her first map of the Bay Area in 2005, she says, "about 10 percent of the neighborhoods were gentrifying but about 40 percent were just getting poorer over time. And it wasn't the story that anybody wanted to hear. ... Systemic poverty and racism is so hard ... and [gentrification] is also much more visible."

Looking at UDP's work in Southern California, they find that in San Diego County only "7 percent of tracts experienced risk of or ongoing gentrification/displacement." In Chicago, they find that only 18 percent of low-income households "live in low-income neighborhoods at risk of, or already experiencing gentrification and/or displacement."

What's happening in the rest of the neighborhoods? Segregation and/or concentrated poverty, which have been constant companions to disadvantaged communities.

In Denver, Colorado, they find that only "17 percent of neighborhoods were at risk of gentrification," and "45 percent of Denver's moderate-to-high-income neighborhoods demonstrated risk of or ongoing exclusion of lower-income households."

Racial and income segregation locks low-income people in a trap of concentrated poverty. The best schools are relegated to the highest-income neighborhoods, good jobs often exist in either exclusive or gentrifying neighborhoods, and businesses are less willing to take root in an area of concentrated poverty because there are fewer customers. All of this is a vicious cycle that traps low-income Americans. It also hinders their ability to foster growth on their own because financial insecurity makes people transient and lacking in time and energy to build community.

Meanwhile, homeowners in well-off neighborhoods have cemented systems of local control through rules like exclusionary zoning to keep their neighborhoods prohibitively expensive for lower-income Americans, including many Black and brown Americans.

Zoning laws are the rules and regulations that decide what types of homes can be built where. While this can sound innocuous, exclusionary zoning is anything but. These rules have a dark history in the United States as a tool of racial and economic segregation, used explicitly to keep certain races, religions, and nationalities out of certain neighborhoods. And while the explicit racism has been wiped from the legal text, the effect of many of these rules remains the same: keeping affordable housing and the people who need it away from the wealthiest Americans.

City by city, the message is clear: Segregation and concentrated poverty are the true blights of urban life, despite our fascination with gentrification.

How to ethically create integrated neighborhoods

Gentrification does carry with it real harms, but there are ways to reduce those and to provide a pathway for integrated, equitable cities.

Integration is not a panacea, but research shows that following gentrification, "children benefit from increased exposure to higher-opportunity neighborhoods, and some are more likely to attend and complete college." Further, gentrification can allow existing homeowners in a community to benefit from the rising property values, as long as anti-displacement policies exist to ensure property tax payments don't price people out.

There are a few other policies the US could pursue to mitigate the harms that accrue to disadvantaged communities.

First, the economic literature is clear that increased housing production reduces rents. It also ensuresthat new entrants don't bid up the price of existing homes but rather turn to new construction for their housing needs. The evidence that does exist showing that modern-day gentrification leads to displacement links that displacement to rising rents. Reducing that pressure is paramount to stopping unwanted displacement. In Hoboken, New Jersey, during the violent evictions and arsons, the vacancy rate fell below 1 percent by the start of the 1980s. This supply crunch contributes to the incentive for property owners to push out lower-income tenants.

Second, tenant protection policies could help forestall some evictions. A right to counsel in housing proceedings, for example, would rebalance power between low-income tenants and property owners seeking to evict due to potential profits from selling or converting the property for higher-income use. It's also important for cities to work to preserve existing affordable housing, especially as new housing gets built.

Third, rezoning of wealthy white segregated neighborhoods could slow the speed at which gentrifying neighborhoods change, and help tackle segregation. Slowing gentrification can ensure that local officials can respond to protect existing residents while also allowing the benefits of the phenomenon to accrue.

These types of interventions can provide a roadmap for how to ethically integrate urban neighborhoods.

None of this is to undermine the very real cultural conflict that gentrification brings. Even if you're able to stay in your neighborhood and your home, watching store after store pop up that doesn't serve your community or isn't available to you at your income level can be deeply alienating. It's no wonder that people who have faced centuries of disinvestment grow angry as public and private money flows into their neighborhoods only after high-income, college-educated people choose to move there. Even if those people are not wholly responsible for the inequality, the blatant injustice is hard to ignore.

Taken all together, it becomes clear why we focus on gentrification while the unseen culprits (segregated enclaves) are able to avoid controversy: Gentrification is the most visual manifestation of inequality in urban life.

"Gentrification is a cultural sphere to work out feelings of resentment around inequality. ... Those feelings aren't to be discounted," Gottlieb argues. "This is a manifestation of a long-running sense of 'I am not welcomed in the city, I don't have a right to the city.' Sometimes those feelings can be worked out in the cultural terrain of gentrification, even indeed if the people moving in aren't the proximate cause for them leaving."

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What we talk about when we talk about gentrification

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The worst problems are in the neighborhoods that aren't gentrifying.

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The complex balance between the benefits and pitfalls of gentrification (can be used for counter argument)

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The world is turning digital and technology reliant faster than ever before. High school students are using technology more than ever, from texting, calling, watching TV shows, social media, homework, and more. It's necessary to accomplish a vast majority of complex...

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With the introduction of the Weird Wave Cafe, the rise in rent prices have skyrocketed this past year. As it stands now, deciding whether to be for or against gentrification is challenging. There are always two sides to an issue and gentrification is no exception. It's important to refrain from absentmindedly following common trends in...

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Economic consequences of gentrification/displacement

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[1] Most people, when strolling through a city, will know if they are walking in a gentrifying neighborhood. Despite the "I know it when I see it" nature of gentrification, it is surprisingly difficult to define, to identify and measure its effects, and to reach a judgment about whether it is good or bad. This is, of course, partially because gentrification is not categorically good or bad. The answer to this normative question is contextual, and it is extremely difficult to parse the pros and cons of gentrification for a given neighborhood. There are undoubtedly people who are better off after gentrification just as there are undoubtedly people who are worse off. The heated debates surrounding gentrification arise, in part, because of the difficulty identifying affected parties and assessing their relative well-being. This article summarizes the current thinking of economists and other social scientists about the causes and effects of gentrification, with special attention to the areas where there is disagreement or where additional research is needed.
What is "Gentrification?"
[2] The term "gentrification" is usually attributed to the sociologist Ruth Glass who used it to describe the transformation that took place in London in the early 1960's. Glass described how,

One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes - upper and lower.... Once this process of 'gentrification' starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced and the social character of the district is changed.[1]

Today, the term "gentrification" continues to connote many of the same ideas- migration, wealth and class, social change, and a strong undercurrent of social justice.

[3] There is no generally accepted definition of "gentrification" and this creates challenges for those trying to better understand it. Many definitions focus on one or more of gentrification's effects, but there is no consensus about which effects are the defining ones. For example, some definitions emphasize the displacement of existing residents. Others characterize gentrification as a process of renewal or revitalization. Some definitions point to the change in a neighborhood's character. Still others see changes in property values as an essential element of gentrification.[2]

[4] Definitions that make assumptions about the impact of gentrification can be troublesome because the choice of definition will go a long way toward determining whether gentrification is good or bad. If, for example, we accept a definition that describes gentrification as a process of displacement, we would limit our review to those cases where an influx of middle class migrants causes lower income residents to leave, increasing the likelihood that we conclude gentrification is bad. To overcome this, some researchers use definitions that are agnostic about the impact of gentrification and simply study "neighborhood change."[3]

[5] I prefer a middle ground because gentrification, as most people understand it, can be distinguished from other demographic changes to a neighborhood by the migration of people into a neighborhood who are wealthier than the existing residents. Gentrification, then, is simply the process by which lower income neighborhoods are changed when large numbers of higher income residents move in. This definition stresses that gentrification is a process and sufficiently distinguishes it from other forms of neighborhood demographic shifts without making assumptions about the nature of its effects.
The Causes of Gentrification
[6] Most attention is paid to the effects of gentrification, but these effects are easier to understand through the lens of gentrification's root causes. Most scholars group the drivers of gentrification into three general, and sometimes overlapping, categories. The first two, supply-side factors and demand-side factors, might be roughly described as the different sorts of demographic and market forces that push or pull wealthier residents into lower income neighborhoods. The third category, public policy, is the set of rules designed by urban policymakers that make gentrification more or less likely to occur.
Supply-Side Factors
[7] The so-called "supply-side" theories of gentrification rely on some version of the premise that various forces cause the price of inner-city housing to decline to the point where it becomes desirable for outsiders to buy it and convert it to a higher value use. While the gentrification process varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, the pattern often goes something like this[4]:

In the early life of a city, employment tends to be located near its center. Since people want to live near their work, they buy property near the central city and build houses. As more people choose to live near the central city, the value of this housing increases.

As housing prices increase near the city center, more people become willing to accept a longer commute in exchange for less expensive and larger houses and begin buying property on the periphery of the city.

Property values begin to take on a conical pattern[5] with the highest values closest to the central city and values decreasing (toward the base of the cone) as one moves further from the city center.

At some point, something changes this pattern so that housing values near the city center begin to fall. For example, the housing stock near the city center may grow older and become less desirable. Or perhaps businesses move to the suburbs where more people are now located. Whatever the reason (and this is the subject to much dispute), houses near the central city fall into disrepair and their value falls. The conical pattern of housing values begins to sag near the center.

Just as lower prices once drew people to the periphery of the city, now lower prices begin to draw them back toward the center. The combination of lower cost and proximity to the central city makes certain central neighborhoods more desirable than the suburbs, especially for people with high incomes and access to credit who are most able to convert central city housing to higher priced rental property or single-family homes.

Once this happens, gentrification has begun.
Demand-Side Factors
[8] The demand-side theories complement the supply-side theories and focus on the demographic, employment and cultural shifts that explain why people move into gentrifying neighborhoods.

[9] Changing demographics may be increasing the number of people interested in moving toward the central city. Demographers tell us there are a growing number of double income couples having children at an older age. Gentrification scholars, on the other hand, point out that young, wealthy, childless people - exactly those in the growing demographic - are more likely to move into gentrified neighborhoods.[6] There are two theories for why this demographic group prefers gentrified neighborhoods.

[10] First, the jobs young, wealthy workers want are more likely to be located in central cities. When manufacturing jobs left the central city in the 1960's and 70's, living near the city center became less important. However, in the last several decades central cities have become service centers - high rises filled with law firms, financial businesses, insurance companies, and high-tech employers. Since these are typically white-collar jobs that offer higher pay, neighborhoods near the city center now offer wealthier people shorter commutes and the aging housing stock offers lower prices.[7]

[11] Changes in attitudes, preferences, and culture also play a prominent role in explaining gentrification. For example, it is suggested that a rise in anti-suburban attitudes feeds the demand for central city housing.[8] Stronger preferences for older houses with "character" and "charm" are also likely reasons for increased migration toward central cities. Certain neighborhood characteristics (such as older houses) might make gentrification more likely, but once gentrification begins it is likely to accelerate and reinforce itself. For example, as wealthier homeowners move in, old houses get fixed up, the aesthetics of the neighborhood improve, and more businesses spring up to serve the new residents. All of this makes the neighborhood even more attractive to potential (wealthy) buyers. Once a neighborhood begins to gentrify, it can take on a new character that attracts like-minded people. As an example, Lees points to the spatial concentration of wealthy gay people in certain neighborhoods in San Francisco.[9] Gentrified areas often take on the identity of being "gay," "artsy," "family-friendly," or some other identifier that attracts similar people and accelerates the process of gentrification.
Policy Factors
[12] Demographic and market forces cannot, however, entirely explain gentrification. Government policies that cause housing values to fall in pockets of a city or policies that create incentives (financial or otherwise) for high-income people to purchase homes in lower income neighborhoods also play a role.

[13] Kennedy and Leonard[10] identify four types of policies that can encourage gentrification. The most direct are tax incentives. Policies that offer tax breaks for historic preservation or for first-time homebuyers, for example, make migration toward affordable, architecturally valuable housing stock more likely. Similarly, federal policies such as mortgage programs meant to encourage more lending in "under-served areas" can make purchasing a home in a gentrifying neighborhood very attractive. Local economic development tools, such as the construction of public transportation or convention centers, have also been shown to trigger the gentrification process. Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, programs to rehabilitate public housing - such as the HOPE VI program that encourages replacing aging, dense public housing with new, less dense, more income-diverse housing - has shown to encourage gentrification in the neighborhoods where traditional public housing once stood.
The Effects of Gentrification
[14] The effects of gentrification are even more complicated than its causes. It is impossible to say whether gentrification is good or bad. It is undoubtedly bad for some, but it is also likely to be good for others. And sorting out who gains and who loses often depends on questions such as who moves out, where do they go, and why? This is difficult because if someone moves out of a gentrifying neighborhood we may never know whether the move would have occurred anyway or whether it was caused by the gentrification of the neighborhood. Researchers seeking answers to these questions are often frustrated by scarce evidence.

[15] There are three groups of people affected by gentrification, although there is often an enormous diversity of interests within each group. The first group is those who leave a gentrifying neighborhood. Most of the concern about gentrification focuses on this group and it is, therefore, the most studied. The second group is those who now live in the gentrified neighborhood. This group includes both new residents - the gentrifiers - and the original residents who did not leave. The final group includes the people who have never lived in the neighborhood but may nonetheless be affected by changes in its character. We need to consider the effects on all of these groups if we want a comprehensive understanding of the impact of gentrification.
The Effects on Those Who Leave the Gentrified Neighborhood
[16] The most common critique of gentrification, going back to Glass' original description, is that low-income residents will be involuntarily displaced. The concern is that many of the neighborhood's original residents - usually low-income renters - will be forced out by higher rents or evicted as rental housing is upgraded, converted to condos, or turned into single-family homes. Others, who may be able to afford the higher cost of living in the gentrified neighborhood, may leave anyway because their family and friends have moved, because familiar merchants or services have disappeared, or because the character of the neighborhood has changed so much that they no longer want to stay.

[17] Determining how much displacement actually occurs is challenging. Researchers can often see how many people migrate in and out of neighborhoods but it is difficult to identify gentrification as the cause. The normal approach is to determine if displacement rates are higher in gentrifying neighborhoods than they are in other places, and the weight of empirical research using these methods suggests displacement rates are no higher in gentrifying neighborhoods than they are elsewhere.[11] Gentrification, it seems, does not typically push the poor out of their neighborhoods. Instead, it seems the poor leave gentrified neighborhoods at normal rates but are then replaced almost exclusively by the wealthy. It is also possible that some gentrifying neighborhoods have enough vacant housing to allow the wealthy to move in without requiring the poor to move out.

[18] This does not mean that involuntary displacement of low-income residents never occurs. It clearly does. And when it does, it can have very negative consequences. The Center for Disease Control, for example, even put out a warning on the health effects of gentrification.[12] It notes that changes in residence can impede access to healthy food, health care, recreation, and social networks. This can cause stress and have mental health implications for those affected.

[19] There is a sense among those who witness gentrification that it has a significant racial element, but the research on this question is also mixed. A study of mortgage lending in large U.S. cities found evidence of racial discrimination and increased segregation in gentrifying neighborhoods.[13] Other research has concluded much of gentrification is driven by an influx of black homeowners.[14] Most recently, Freeman has suggested gentrifying neighborhoods often start out more diverse than other neighborhoods and tend to remain so through the process of gentrification. [15] Still other research has found that even when gentrification does not cause displacement, it may result in a diminished sense of community and cause important social networks to disintegrate.[16] Race is clearly an element of gentrification but, at this point, is still poorly understood.

[20] Gentrification may also cause harm that is subtler than direct displacement. For example, gentrification could reduce the overall availability of affordable housing.[17] When gentrification causes housing prices to rise, it affects low-income residents in two ways: it raises the rent on the place an individual is currently living and it raises the rent on many of the places the person might otherwise live. In other words, gentrification-induced rent increases make both staying and leaving more difficult for low-income residents. Low-income residents of gentrified neighborhoods, faced with limited housing options, may be forced to stay where they are and figure out a way to pay their higher rent. Researchers looking for displacement in situations like this would not find it, but there would likely be very real hardship for some residents nonetheless.
The Effects on Those Who Now Live in Gentrified Neighborhoods
[21] Most residents of gentrifying neighborhoods do not move. Is this because they cannot or is it because there are offsetting benefits from a neighborhood's gentrification that make it desirable for them to stay? The answer to this question obviously varies from person to person, but it suggests a need to understand how changes in a neighborhood impact existing residents.

[22] First, gentrification can alter city services. If gentrification increases property values, city governments should collect more tax revenue, and city services should increase. However, research suggests the nature of these services often shift with the demographic make-up of a neighborhood to reflect the needs and preferences of new residents.[18] For example, if gentrifiers tend to work more and have fewer children, we might expect increased spending on roads and public transportation and reduced spending on schools. Existing residents, especially groups like elderly homeowners, may have very different needs than the new residents and thus end up paying higher property taxes without a corresponding increase in the public services they require. Unfortunately, empirical evidence of whether city services disproportionately benefit the gentrifiers is extremely limited.

[23] Similarly, it is difficult to measure "quality of life" changes to a neighborhood. For instance, gentrification could be correlated with an increase in neighborhood jobs[19] but it is not clear whether businesses are attracted to gentrifying neighborhoods or vice versa, and it is also unclear whether any new jobs benefit low-income residents of the neighborhood. Scholars are also unsure of the effects of crime. Some studies have found gentrification to reduce crime rates while others have found it to increase crime.[20]
The Effects on Others
[24] The gentrification of a neighborhood takes place in the context of a larger city, so it is reasonable to expect that other residents of the city could also be affected. Many of the effects of gentrification already identified will also apply to this group, such as the possible reduction in the supply of affordable housing; changes in city services that can spill over into the rest of the city (such as improved transportation systems); a possible effect on crime rates; and a shuffling of city residents that can influence economic and racial diversity. The big question, which remains unanswered, is whether gentrification is a zero-sum game (e.g., do increased city services for gentrifiers imply reduced services for the poor?) or does it increase the overall health and well-being of the entire city.
Conclusion
[25] There is much disagreement over the effects of gentrification. The proponents of gentrification usually focus on aggregate effects, which, on balance, seem to be positive. Opponents of gentrification typically focus on the distributional impact and point out how the negative effects are likely to fall disproportionately on the poor. They may both be right, but progress on the debate is hindered by a shortage of good empirical evidence. Gentrification, then, seems to pose the common political problem of balancing a modest benefit to many against the significant burden imposed on a small, often vulnerable, few. How we sort this out will have significant implications for our cities and urban neighborhoods.

[1] Ruth Glass, "Introduction: Aspects of Change" in London: Aspects of Change, ed. Centre for Urban Studies (London: McKibbon and Kee, 1964).

[2] For a good summary, see Ingrid Gould Ellen and Katherine O'Regan, "Gentrification: Perspectives of Economists and Planners," in The Oxford handbook of urban economics and planning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[4] Neil Smith, "Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital not People," Journal of the American Planners Association, 45 (1979): 538-48.

[6] Ellen and O'Regan, "Gentrification," 381.

[7] Jacob Vigdor, "Does Gentrification Harm the Poor?" Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002), 133-182.

[8] Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly, Gentrification (New York: Routledge, 2008).

[10] Maureen Kennedy and Paul Leonard, "Dealing with Neighborhood Change: A Primer on Gentrification and Policy Choices" (Discussion paper prepared for The Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, 2001).

[11] See, for example: Ingrid Gould Ellen and Katherine O'Regan, "How Low Income Neighborhoods Change: Entry, Exit and Enhancement." Regional Science and Urban Economics 41(2011): 89-97; Lance Freeman, "Neighbourhood Diversity, Metropolitan Segregation and Gentrification: What Are the Links in the US?" Urban Studies 46(2009): 2079-2101; Terra McKinnish, Randall Walsh and T. Kirk White, "Who Gentrifies Low Income Neighborhoods?" Journal of Urban Economics 67(2010): 180-93.

[12] Center for Disease Control. "Health Effects of Gentrification." http://www.cdc.gov/healthyplaces/healthtopics/gentrification.htm (accessed December 7, 2015).

[13] Elvin Wyly and Daniel Hammel, "Gentrification, segregation, and discrimination in the American urban system." Environment and Planning, 36 (2004): 15-41.

[14] Raphael Bostic and Richard Martin, "Black Homeowners as a Gentrifying Force? Neighborhood Dynamics in the Context of Minority Homeownership." Urban Studies 40 (2003): 2427-49.

[15] Freeman, "Neighbourhood Diversity."

[16] John Betancur, "Gentrification and Community Fabric in Chicago." Urban Studies 48 (2011):383-406.

[17] Peter Marcuse, "Abandonment, Gentrification, and Displacement: The Linkages in New York City." In Gentrification of the City, ed. Neil Smith and Peter Williams, (Boston: Allen and Unwin), 153-177.

[18] Vigdor, "Does Gentrification Harm the Poor?" 146

[20] Ellen and O'Regan, "How Low Income Neighborhoods Change," 385.

Steve Holland
Steve Holland is Associate Professor of Economics and the Dahl Chair in Economics and Business at Luther College.

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Gentrification: Causes and Consequences - Journal of Lutheran Ethics

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Holland explores the concept of gentrification from an academic standpoint. What is gentrification? How can we talk about something that resists being defined?​ Holland examines the factors of supply, demand, and policy that feed gentrification along with its effects on the people who leave, the people who live there, and the neighborhood itself.

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Pros and cons and financial aspects

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The Pros and Cons of Gentrification Among Communities - Thrive Global

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Jimmy Lustig discusses some of the pros and cons of gentrification among communities.

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Once again, another look at how long time residents (aka the poor) can see gentrification as a good thing, less crime more jobs, you get the point.

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To many "gentrification" is intrinsically negative. When wealthier, whiter people move into the neighborhood, it must necessarily mean that lower income people of color are either driven away (to even worse neighborhoods) or suffer from higher rents and loss of community if they stay.

A new study from Quentin Brummet of the University of Chicago and and Davin Reed of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank, is the best evidence yet that this view of gentrification is fundamentally wrong. Gentrification creates substantial benefits for long time residents of low income neighborhoods, and causes little displacement. The study shows:

There are very small differences in out-migration rates between gentrifying neighborhoods and otherwise similar neighborhoods that don't gentrify. Over ten years, we would expect about 60 percent of less educated renters to move out of non-gentrifying low income neighborhoods, compared to about 66 percent of less educated renters in gentrifying neighborhoods.

Those who leave gentrifying neighborhoods do not end up moving to destination neighborhoods that are measurably worse than the destination neighborhoods of households moving out of poor but not gentrifying neighborhoods

The demographic composition of gentrifying neighborhoods, post-gentrification, remains highly mixed, with many less educated renters and homeowners

Less educated renters that remain in gentrifying neighborhood don't see significant increases in rents: There's no appreciable difference in rent increases between less educated living in gentrifying and non-gentrifying neighborhoods

Demographic changes in gentrifying neighborhoods are those that are generally associated with better outcomes for low income children growing up in these neighborhoods.

Poor neighborhoods that don't gentrify, don't state the same, they decline: non-gentrifying neighborhoods lose population and experience declining incomes.

Many existing studies of gentrifying neighborhoods that don't account for high levels of migration even in non-gentrifying neighborhoods, that don't disaggregate effects by socioeconomic status, and that rely primarily on median rent statistics can produce misleading pictures of neighborhood change.

The Brummet and Reed study focuses on the 100 largest US metro areas, and measures change key neighborhood characteristics between 2000 and 2010-14, using Census data. An important innovation of their work is linking data for individuals across the two time periods, to measure in detail what happened to a neighborhood's original residents. The study uses a definition based on changes in the relative educational attainment of adults in Census tracts; gentrifying neighborhoods are the low income census tracts in central cities of the nation's 100 largest metro areas that recorded the highest rates of increase in adult educational attainment over the past decade or so. They use educational attainment as their key metric for sorting households by socioeconomic status, comparing results for more-educated (college and higher) and less educated households.

Displacement is negligible

The most common critique of gentrification is the notion that it forces long-term residents, especially low income renters, out of the neighborhood. Brummet and Reed stratify households by education level (which is a good proxy for income levels). They find that gentrification has a very small impact on the tendency of less educated renter households to move away from the neighborhood. Over a ten-year period, about 60 percent of less educated renters moved out of their neighborhood, regardless of whether it gentrified. The author's estimate that for gentrifying neighborhoods, for less educated renter households, the rate is about 6 percentage points higher (66 percent vs 60 percent) over the period of a decade.

Another common concern about those who migrate out of gentrifying neighborhoods is that somehow they are forced to live in locations that are measurably worse than the gentrifying neighborhood they left. Brummet and Reed compare the characteristics of the destination neighborhoods of those who left gentrifying and non-gentrifying tracts, and found no significant differences:

. . . for all types of individuals, movers from gentrifying neighborhoods do not experience worse changes in observable outcomes than movers from non-gentrifying neighborhoods. That is, they are not more likely to end up in a higher poverty neighborhood, to become unemployed, or to commute farther than individuals moving from non-gentrifying neighborhoods

To the extent that there is demographic change in gentrifying neighborhoods, it is a product of the different characteristics of people who move in to a neighborhood, and not due to an increase in the number of people who move out.

Exposure to poverty declines

The benefit of gentrification is that these more mixed income neighborhoods lower the exposure to poverty for all residents. Brummet and Reed estimate the average poverty rate of neighborhoods that gentrified declined by 3 percentage points. As a wide body of research has shown, the poverty rate of one's neighborhoods tends to aggravate all of the negative effects of poverty, so reductions in poverty improve living conditions and opportunity for residents who remain. The key question is whether many long-term residents of these neighborhoods are able to remain and enjoy these benefits.

The archetypal description of gentrification, from Ruth Glass, who coined the term in the 1960s, is that persons from an upper class totally replace the original lower class residents of a neighborhood. Brummet and Reed show that even in the most gentrified neighborhoods, the amount of demographic change over a decade and a half is relatively small, and gentrified neighborhoods have a high degree of income diversity, with 30 to 60 percent of long term residents remaining, post-gentrification (about the same amount as in non-gentrifying neighobrhoods). They conclude:

. . . less-educated renters and less-educated homeowners each make up close to 25 percent of the population in gentrifiable neighborhoods, and 30 percent and 60 percent, respectively, stay even in gentrifying neighborhoods. Thus, the benefits experienced by these groups are quantitatively large . . .

Rents for less educated are unaffected by gentrification

After displacement, perhaps the second most commonly cited harm of gentrification is the notion that long term residents are forced to pay higher rents. Brummet and Reed look at the actual levels of rents paid by less educated residents both pre- and post-gentrification. Contrary to the received wisdom on the topic, they find that rents did not increase for less-educated long-term residents:

. . . somewhat surprisingly, gentrification has no effect on reported monthly rents paid by original resident less-educated renters.

The reason likely has to do with the variation in rental unit size and quality within gentrified neighborhoods. If many housing units remain smaller, with fewer amenities, less favorably located, they may rent for lesser amounts. It's fully possible for median rents to increase in a neighborhood, and for the rents for some other segment of less desirable housing to not increase, or not increase as much. As we've noted at City Observatory, it may be more appropriate to look at the 25th percentile of rents to judge affordability for lower income households. As Brummet and Reed conclude:

These results caution against using simple neighborhood median rents when studying gentrification, as is almost always done. Changes in median rents can miss important segmentation and heterogeneity, leading to incorrect conclusions about how the housing costs paid by different types of households are actually affected.

The dynamics of neighborhood change

Implicitly, much of the discussion of gentrification takes a highly static view of neighborhoods. It assumes, that somehow, in the absence of gentrification, and neighborhood will somehow stay just as it is. As Brummet and Reed show, all neighborhoods, including both gentrifying and non-gentrifying lower income neighborhoods, experience substantial turnover in population over the course of a decade or so.

Neighborhoods are always changing, and the low income neighborhoods that don't gentrify don't somehow stay the same: they lose population, and experience declines in income. The average low income neighborhood that didn't gentrify between 2000 and 2012 lost 8 percent of its population, and saw a decline in average incomes of 21 percent (Tables 4 and A5). Also: change in gentrifying neighborhoods is not a zero sum game, with each new resident replacing, one-for-one, a previous resident: Gentrifying neighborhoods saw their total population increase 21 percent. These results parallel closely the findings from City Observatory's own Lost in Place study of neighborhood change from 1970 to 2010 that showed that high poverty neighborhoods that didn't gentrify lost 40 percent of their population over four decades, while gentrifying neighborhoods recorded increases in population. This underscores why adding new housing in gentrifying neighborhoods can be an important ingredient in assuring they remain diverse and equitable.

Are these results really surprising?

While the Detroit Free Press labeled these results "surprising", - "Study reveals surprising results about Detroit gentrification," - they actually fit the pattern of a growing body of careful studies of neighborhood change. Martin and Beck found that there was almost no difference in out-migration between gentrifying and non-gentrifying poor neighborhoods. Ingrid Gould Ellen and her colleagues, using data on kids born to families receiving Medicaid benefits showed virtually no displacement due to gentrification, and also showed that residents who moved generally relocated to similar neighborhoods. Lance Freeman's work has shown that displacement rare, Jacob Vigdor has shown that long-time residents are somewhat more likely to stay in gentrifying neighborhoods than non-gentrifying ones.

There's a decided "man-bites-dog" character to media reporting on this paper. The Detroit Free Press summarizes the findings as "challenging the notion than gentrification is as harmful as many believe." The Philadelphia Inquirer headlined its story, "Effects of gentrification on long time residents are not as negative as typically perceived, Philly Fed study says." CityLab talks about the "Hidden Winners" from gentrification; apparently, gentrification is so widely known to be A BAD THING, that it's counter-intuitive to think that existing residents might benefit. For example, Kriston Capps of CityLab writes:

Often it goes without saying that the drawbacks of neighborhood change-above all the displacement of existing lower-income residents, but also increases in rents and upticks in cultural conflicts-greatly outweigh any benefits.

It is probably too much to ask, but what the data show, is that for many residents and neighborhoods, gentrification is a good thing. It raises property values for long-time homeowners, increasing their wealth. It doesn't appear to be associated with rent increases for less educated renters who remain. Poverty rates decline, and objective changes in neighborhood characteristics-notably greater income mixing-are associated with higher levels of inter-generational mobility for kids growing up in such neighborhoods. In addition, the data show that poor neighborhoods that don't gentrify steadily deteriorate on these measures. Implicit in much of the popular discussion and press coverage of gentrification is the assumption that neighborhoods that don't gentrify will stay the same-but they don't. Things get worse. That's the relevant story for many places, and its simply not reported.

Methodology and definitions

What makes this study special is that it tracks residents over time as they move in and out of different neighborhoods. The bugbear of most displacement studies is that they rely on comparing one-time snapshots of neighborhood composition, and don't track individuals. There's also an implicit assumption in much work in the field that any time someone moves out of a neighborhood that's evidence of displacement. But as Brummet and Reed painstakingly illustrate, population dynamics in urban neighborhoods are far more dynamic that usually thought. As we've noted at City Observatory, the average tenure for renters in the US is less than two years. With their longitudinal tracking of individual households, Brummet and Reed estimate that about three-fifths to three -quarters of all renters and a third to forty percent percent of all homeowners will move away from their low income neighborhood over a-ten year period (Table 1). Failing to control for this background of steady change biases many gentrification studies.

Brummet and Reed use confidential and anonymized census data from 2000 and the 2014 American Community Survey to track the residential location of individuals over time. This connected, longitudinal data series is a gold standard of measuring neighborhood change. Snapshot comparison studies can't tell whether a decline in the number of households with incomes below the poverty line is due to such households enjoying higher incomes, are is due to lower income households moving out of the neighborhood.

One critical ingredient in any study of neighborhood change is the definition of gentrification. Brummet and Reed develop two measures: one is a continuous measure of demographic change that examines the degree to which a neighborhood gentrifies, the second is a more commonly used-binary measure that divides all lower income, central city neighborhoods into two categories, gentrifying and non-gentrifying, based on whether they are in the top 10 percent of such neighborhoods nationally on this index.
Policy Implications: Leverage gentrification for good
Change of all kinds is hard, and for residents of low income communities, there's a long and sad history of most changes, many of them promised to make things better, only making things worse. So its little surprise that their should be skepticism about gentrification. But unfortunately, the knee-jerk reaction to the perception of negative effects from gentrification has generally been a series of policies that promise to only make the problem worse: rent control, NIMBY development restrictions, and inclusionary housing requirements. As Brummet and Reed write:

. . . concern that gentrification displaces or otherwise harms original neighborhood residents has featured prominently in the rise of urban NIMBYism and the return of rent control as a major policy option.

The fact that gentrification is mostly benign, and in many respects beneficial to long-term residents should change the policy calculus. Rather than blocking growth and development in gentrifying neighborhoods, cities should recognize that gentrification creates benefits and also leverage this investment to provide more opportunities for less-well off households to live in great urban neighborhoods

This could provide new options for policies designed to increase children's exposure to high-opportunity neighborhoods, for example by targeting subsidies to help them stay in neighborhoods that are improving around them. . . . Accommodating rising demand for central urban neighborhoods, such as through building more housing, could maximize the integrative benefits we find, minimize the out-migration effects we find, minimize gentrification pressures in nearby neighborhoods, and minimize

As we've argued at City Observatory, using tax increment financing to subsidize affordable housing in neighborhoods experiencing rapid change. Tapping the property appreciation in gentrifying neighborhoods leverages increased wealth to assure that a neighborhood is inclusive.

This study is perhaps the best evidence we have yet of the nature and extent of gentrification in US cities. It should dispel many of the widely repeated myths and misunderstandings about neighborhood change. If we better understand the dynamics of urban neighborhoods, we'll view gentrification not as a scourge, but as an opportunity to use the growing demand for urban living to build cities that are more diverse and inclusive.

Quentin Brummet and Davin Reed, The Effects of Gentrification on the Well-Being and Opportunity of Original Resident Adults and Children, Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank Working Paper 19-30, , July 2019.

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How gentrification benefits long-time residents of low income neighborhoods

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To many "gentrification" is intrinsically negative. When wealthier, whiter people move into the neighborhood, it must necessarily mean that lower income people of color are either driven away (to even worse neighborhoods) or suffer from higher rents and loss of community if they stay.

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Gentrification and Neighborhood Revitalization: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

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The main difference between gentrification and neighborhood revitalization is that gentrification creates exclusive communities by raising values at the expense of existing residents, while revitalization involves reinvesting in the neighborhood, diversifying yet maintaining the neighborhood's character and ensuring affordable housing.

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Gentrification and Neighborhood Revitalization: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

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Renovated former tobacco warehouses near downtown Durham, North Carolina There are many definitions for gentrification, which can make discussions about development and displacement confusing.

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Examining the Negative Impacts of Gentrification

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How gentrification left negative impacts on loss of culture, loss of boobies, what's the insiders perspective on what happens to those who experience gentrification

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Examining the Negative Impacts of Gentrification

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Definitions, causes, and health effects of gentrification

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The Healthy Community Design Initiative, also known as the Built Environment and Health Initiative, is no longer a funded program and the information on this website is not being reviewed and updated on a regular basis.

Definitions

Gentrification is often defined as the transformation of neighborhoods from low value to high value. This change has the potential to cause displacement of long-time residents and businesses. Displacement happens when long-time or original neighborhood residents move from a gentrified area because of higher rents, mortgages, and property taxes.

Gentrification is a housing, economic, and health issue that affects a community's history and culture and reduces social capital. It often shifts a neighborhood's characteristics (e.g., racial/ethnic composition and household income) by adding new stores and resources in previously run-down neighborhoods.

Causes of Gentrification

The causes of gentrification are debatable. Some literature suggests that it is caused by social and cultural factors such as family structure, rapid job growth, lack of housing, traffic congestion, and public-sector policies ( Kennedy, 2001). Gentrification can occur on a small or large scale. For example, individual newcomers can slowly populate an area because of renovations. Conversely, large-scale redevelopment and the accompanying regeneration can cause an immediate shift in neighborhood residents.

Health Effects

Where people live, work, and play has an impact on their health. Several factors create disparities in a community's health. Examples include socioeconomic status, land use/the built environment, race/ethnicity, and environmental injustice. In addition, displacement has many health implications that contribute to disparities among special populations, including the poor, women, children, the elderly, and members of racial/ethnic minority groups.

These special populations are at increased risk for the negative consequences of gentrification. Studies indicate that vulnerable populations typically have shorter life expectancy; higher cancer rates; more birth defects; greater infant mortality; and higher incidence of asthma, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. In addition, increasing evidence shows that these populations have an unequal share of residential exposure to hazardous substances such as lead paint.

Other health effects include limited access to or availability of the following:

affordable healthy housing

healthy food choices

transportation choices

quality schools

bicycle and walking paths, exercise facilities, etc.

social networks

Changes can also occur in:

stress levels

injuries

violence and crime

mental health

social and environmental justice

Gentrification and Environmental Justice Resources:

Federal

Nonfederal

References:

Dealing with Neighborhood Change: A Primer on Gentrification and Policy Choices ( http://www.policylink.org/sites/default/files/DealingWithGentrification_final.pdf [PDF - 209 KB]) Maureen Kennedy and Paul Leonard. Discussion Paper prepared for the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy and PolicyLink. April 2001.

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The Healthy Community Design Initiative, also known as the Built Environment and Health Initiative, is no longer a funded program and the information on this website is not being reviewed and updated on a regular basis. Gentrification is often defined as the transformation of neighborhoods from low value to high value.

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The stripping of culture/Plain America

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New York has been my home for more than forty years, from the year after the city's supposed nadir in 1975, when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the periods of boom and bust since, almost all of them related to the "paper economy" of finance and real estate speculation that took over the city long before it did the rest of the nation. But I have never seen what is going on now: the systematic, wholesale transformation of New York into a reserve of the obscenely wealthy and the barely here-a place increasingly devoid of the idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the opportunity, and the roiling excitement that make a city great.

As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world's largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there. For the first time in its history, New York is, well, boring.

This is not some new phenomenon but a cancer that's been metastasizing on the city for decades now. And what's happening to New York now-what's already happened to most of Manhattan, its core-is happening in every affluent American city. San Francisco is overrun by tech conjurers who are rapidly annihilating its remarkable diversity; they swarm in and out of the metropolis in specially chartered buses to work in Silicon Valley, using the city itself as a gigantic bed-and-breakfast. Boston, which used to be a city of a thousand nooks and crannies, back-alley restaurants and shops, dive bars and ice cream parlors hidden under its elevated, is now one long, monotonous wall of modern skyscraper. In Washington, an army of cranes has transformed the city in recent years, smoothing out all that was real and organic into a town of mausoleums for the Trump crowd to revel in.

By trying to improve our cities, we have only succeeded in making them empty simulacra of what was. To bring this about we have signed on to political scams and mindless development schemes that are so exclusive they are more destructive than all they were supposed to improve. The urban crisis of affluence exemplifies our wider crisis: we now live in an America where we believe that we no longer have any ability to control the systems we live under.

Those of us who have been in New York for any amount of time are immediately suspected of nostalgia if we dare to compare our shiny city of today unfavorably, in any way, with what came before. So let me make one thing perfectly clear, as that old New Yorker Dick Nixon used to say, and list right now all the things I hated about the New York of the Seventies: crime, dirt, days-old garbage left on the street, cockroaches, the Bronx burning, homelessness, discarded hypodermic needles on my building's stoop, discarded crack vials-and packs of burned-out matches-on my building's stoop, cockroaches that scattered everywhere when you turned on the light, entire Brooklyn neighborhoods looking like a bombed-out Dresden, subway cars on which only one door-or no door-opened when the train came in, subway cars cooled in summer rush hours only by a single fan that swung slowly around and around, deindustrialization, those really big cockroaches that we called water bugs for some reason and that crunched under your feet.

New York today-in the aggregate-is probably a wealthier, healthier, cleaner, safer, less corrupt, and better-run city than it has ever been. The same can be said for most of those other cities seen as recent urban success stories, from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, Atlanta to Portland, Oregon. But we don't live in the aggregate. For all of New York's shiny new skin and shiny new numbers, what's most amazing is how little of its social dysfunction the city has managed to eliminate over the past four decades. Homelessness is at or near record levels. The Bronx, poster child for the bleakness of the city in the Seventies, remains the poorest urban county in the country, with almost 40 percent of the South Bronx, or more than a quarter-million people, still living below the poverty line. Bus-stop ads all over New York urge everyone to carry the emergency medication naloxone so that they can reverse some of the overdoses that kill nearly four New Yorkers every day.

The average New Yorker now works harder than ever, for less and less. Poverty in the city has lessened somewhat in the past few years, but in 2016 the official poverty rate was still 19.5 percent, or nearly one in every five New Yorkers. When the "near poverty" rate-those making up to $47,634 a year for a family of four-is thrown in, it means that almost half the city is living what has become a marginal existence, just one paycheck away from disaster. By comparison, the city's poverty rate in 1970-in the wake of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty-was just 11.5 percent. By 1975, during the supposed collapse of New York, it had increased to 15 percent, a figure lower than it has ever been since then.

The immediate cause of the increase in poverty doesn't require much investigation. The landlords are killing the town. Long ago, the idea that "rent is too damn high" in New York was so thoroughly inculcated into the city's consciousness that it became a one-man political party and a Saturday Night Live sketch. But the rent is too damn high, and getting higher all the time. Whereas the old rule of thumb was that your rent should be one paycheck a month, or about 25 percent of your income, the typical New York household now spends at least one third of its income on rent, and three in ten renter households pay 50 percent or more, according to the latest New York Housing and Vacancy Survey.

And the situation is getting rapidly worse. According to the same survey, the price New York landlords wanted for vacant apartments from 2014 to 2017 increased by 30 percent, while the median household income for all renting families from 2013 to 2016 went up by 10 percent. The burden has fallen hardest on those who can least afford it, according to the real estate database StreetEasy, with rents rising fastest on the lowest wage earners in the city.

1 Although New York hosts what is estimated to be the largest population of homeless people in the United States, it is no coincidence that the other cities in the top ten are also generally seen as "success stories." Tracking total numbers of the homeless has never been an exact science, but other cities that have some of the largest homeless populations include Los Angeles, Seattle, San Diego, Washington, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Boston, and Philadelphia.

The result has been predictable enough. Homelessness in the city has reached a level not seen here in decades, if ever. Today, an average of 60,000 people are provided shelter every night, in 547 buildings, by the city's Department of Homeless Services. Most of the newly homeless are not derelicts or the mentally ill. Of these people 70 percent are families with children, and at least one third of the families include a working adult. They were simply priced out of a market that seems to have no ceiling, victims of the "ownership society" that is modern New York. ¹ Whereas most New Yorkers used to rent apartments of all sizes, more and more of the buildings their families made home for generations have been either torn down and replaced or "converted" to condominiums or "cooperative apartments," which sound like something socialistic but are not. The average condo and co-op sale prices in Manhattan shot up past the $2 million mark for the first time ever last year, while a townhouse will cost you $6.28 million.

One common belief, even in many liberal circles, is that the cause of these outrageous rents and prices is the very government intervention that was intended to ameliorate them: rent regulation. This notion might have some validity if, say, rent regulations in New York stifled construction. But they don't. New buildings in the city are not subject to rent control and never have been. More than 40,000 new buildings went up during Michael Bloomberg's twelve years as mayor (2002-13), and another 25,000 buildings were demolished. The city continues to furiously tear itself down and build itself back up again. New buildings are spiked into every available lot, and they rise higher than ever before.

Far from discouraging new construction, New York's housing policies encourage and subsidize it at every turn-and, in doing so, have only made the city less affordable than ever. New York has had some sort of rent regulation continuously since 1943, and today nearly half of its apartments-966,000 in all, containing around 2.5 million people-are what is called rent-stabilized; that is, they are in buildings of six or more units, and are occupied by tenants who cannot be evicted or denied a lease renewal without due cause, and whose rents cannot be raised by more than a set amount determined every year by a government-appointed panel. This does not mean the rent doesn't go up. The rent on the rent-stabilized apartment that I've leased since 1980 has more than tripled in that time. Rents can also be raised when apartments are vacated, or when landlords make improvements to the building or to individual apartments.

Once the monthly rent hits $2,700, if an apartment is vacated, or if the total household income exceeds $200,000 for two consecutive years, the unit can pass out of rent stabilization. Forever. From 2006 to 2016, at least 139,000 apartments were deregulated, a number that includes an estimated one quarter of all apartments on the increasingly wealthy Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I live.

This is due to rising incomes at some addresses. But driving deregulation as well is the fact that private equity funds see great possibilities in your neighborhood. Your landlord is now much less likely to be a family or an individual who has owned one or two buildings for years, depending on them for a safe and steady income, and much more likely to be a faceless, massively financed international firm that is highly incentivized to force you out on the street and keep its investors happy. "Not long ago a rent-stabilized building would sell for ten or at most twelve times its rent roll-the amount of money, before expenses, that it generates in a year," wrote journalist Michael Greenberg in a meticulous analysis that appeared in last August's New York Review of Books. "Today it sells for perhaps thirty or forty times that amount, or ten times what the rent roll would be after regulated tenants have been dislodged."

What plagues New York, though, is not only the astounding rise in housing prices, disruptive as that is. It is also the wholesale destruction of the public city. Many of the city's most treasured amenities, essential to its middle-class character and built up for decades through the painstaking labors of so many dedicated individuals-working people and philanthropists, labor leaders and social workers, reformers and politicians-have now been torn away. Look at almost any public service or space in New York, and you will see that it has been diminished, degraded, appropriated.

The change in their day-to-day lives that has probably delighted New Yorkers the most over the past forty years has been the improvement in the city's vast subway system. Ridership has approached record levels in recent years, and on the first day of 2017, Governor Andrew Cuomo led a giddy celebration to mark the opening of three new stations on the fabled Second Avenue subway, which finally became a (partial) reality after first being proposed in 1920.

The self-congratulations were short-lived, as service on the remainder of the system began to decline precipitously. An antiquated and misconfigured train-signaling system-one that, at the rate the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is working on it, will be fully replaced sometime in the late 2060s, by which time nanobots will likely have been doing the job for a generation-began causing longer and longer delays, with both cars and platforms filling up with frustrated, angry passengers. The system's welcome new electronic scheduling signs began to report delays of such length-next train: 22 minutes-that they now produced only a Godot-like depression among riders.

In one of the many byzantine quirks of how we are governed in New York, the trains and buses are part of the MTA, which is controlled by Governor Cuomo. But the governor-allegedly a Democrat-rejected out of hand a proposal by New York mayor Bill de Blasio for a special "millionaires' tax" to fix the transit system, offering instead a "genius transit challenge" wherein anyone who came up with a great idea to make the trains run on time could win a million dollars.

The reasons for the subway's breakdown are legion. But the more telling lesson here is that a tax on the wealthiest New Yorkers to restore even the most vital public good cannot be so much as entertained.

The decline of the subways is just the latest diminution of public life in New York. Over the past few decades, what used to be regarded as inviolable public space has been systematically rolled up and surrendered to unelected private authorities. Starting with Central Park in 1980, much of New York's park system has been handed over to privately funded "conservancies," supposedly subordinate to the city government but in truth all-powerful, and quite determined to put everything on a paying basis. A visit to the Central Park Zoo, once free, now costs $18 per adult, $13 per child. A "total experience" ticket for the world-renowned Bronx Zoo costs $36.95 for all "adults" over the age of twelve, $26.95 for younger children, and $31.95 for seniors-in a borough where the median yearly household income is $37,525. (Rental of a single-seat stroller at the zoo will cost you $10. A wheelchair is free but requires a $20 deposit, lest you try to scoot off with it.)

Even the streets are no longer fully under public control. Starting in 1984, New York created seventy-five "business improvement districts," more than any other city in the country-though BIDs are now common in nearly every one of the nation's largest metropolitan areas. BIDs are supposed to be self-taxing coalitions of businesses, often employing the homeless and destitute to pick up trash, prettify the streets, and organize security patrols. But as the New York Times reported, one of the very first New York BIDs instead "organized the workers into what were called 'goon squads' to use force to chase homeless people out of bank lobbies with A.T.M.s."

In 2000, the Grand Central Partnership and the 34th Street Partnership BIDs finally settled a seven-year lawsuit charging that they had routinely paid their employees just $1 an hour to walk security patrols and clean toilets. The BIDs had dragged out the suit in the hope that their often homeless workers would simply give up and go away. But before that could happen, Sonia Sotomayor, then a federal district court judge in Manhattan, found the business districts guilty of breaking minimum-wage laws, using their newfound source of almost free labor to undercut competition-and handing the money they made as a result to their already well-paid executives.

"You say you're doing so much for the city, but you're making that money off the backs of the homeless," Tommy Washington, then a forty-one-year-old former BID worker and plaintiff pointed out. "You donate lampposts, flower beds, Bryant Park. How are you going to represent beautify if you're doing ugly behind that?"

Washington's question goes to the heart of the new New York, whom it's for, and what it means. Everywhere now, private institutions have largely taken over the neighborhoods around them, repurposing them solely to meet their own needs.

Our tax-free universities have been among the most shameless offenders. Cooper Union-a cultural landmark founded in 1859 as a night school of the arts and sciences for working men and women-abolished its legacy of free tuition after clotting the Astor Place area with disturbing glass boxes and nearly driving itself into bankruptcy. Fumihiko Maki's 400,000 square foot, $300 million black monolith at 51 Astor Place-nicknamed the Death Star by local residents-may well be the single worst act of vandalism in New York since the original Pennsylvania Station was torn down more than fifty years before, a looming wall that effectively obliterates what was one of the oldest and most vital public places in New York.

Cooper Union may be the most egregious defacer of its own neighborhood, but it's far from the only one. New York University has torn down much of the historic West Village, including most of what was the landmark Provincetown Playhouse and a home that Edgar Allan Poe once lived in. (NYU partially re-created the facade of the Poe house. Quoth the raven: Fuck you.) Columbia University used (and abused) the power of eminent domain to kick out residents and small businesses at the western end of 125th Street, and is now stuffing that street with the huge, glassy, dreadful buildings of its new Manhattanville campus, courtesy of its own international vandal, sorry, starchitect, Renzo Piano.

This has become an accepted way of proceeding in New York, even for subsidized institutions that are supposed to serve a public purpose. Barclays Center at Atlantic Yards, in downtown Brooklyn, was sold to the public in an elaborate bait-and-switch scheme as part of a spectacular "urban utopia" complex to be designed by Frank Gehry. It ended up instead as an arena with all the charm of your basic bus terminal, home to an unwanted basketball team owned by a Russian oligarch. But then, as with any major New York development today, some form of deception is requisite. The Atlantic Yards scam was bankrolled with hundreds of millions in public funding-though the chicanery here is so involved that no one can even say for sure what the final public subsidy figures will be. The project includes at least $100 million forfeited when the MTA, which has a subterranean train-marshaling yard there, sold its lucrative aboveground rights to the site to the developer Forest City Ratner, which was the low bidder for them. Hundreds of local residents have already been relocated, and before the whole charade is over, thousands more may be displaced from their homes, dozens of longtime neighborhood businesses will have been shuttered, and community leaders will have been shamefully compromised with emoluments ranging from a luxury-box giveaway to an on-site basketball arena "meditation room." But in a brilliant piece of political legerdemain, no elected official was forced to actually vote for the project.

Sports stadiums long ago became a preferred method of legalized graft in America, with even such struggling cities as Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, and Oakland, California, willingly shelling out hundreds of millions apiece to retain or attract major-league franchises. But New York has taken the practice to stygian depths. The two major-league stadiums opened in 2009 were far from the first or the only large public subsidies the city has given to the Yankees and the Mets. New York had already spent more than $100 million building free minor-league parks for both teams' farm clubs, in Staten Island and Coney Island, respectively. The current Yankee Stadium, erected on the site of what had been two beloved public parks, cost $2.3 billion, according to journalist Neil deMause, making it one of the most expensive stadiums ever built anywhere in the world. Construction was helped along with federal, state, and local government subsidies totaling $1.2 billion. Nonetheless, the Yankees reduced the number of seats available to the general public by more than 9,000 so that the team could make room for thirty-seven additional luxury suites in its ballpark.

It was much the same with the Mets' new park, out in Flushing's Willets Point, which hoovered up $614 million in public subsidies but nonetheless reduced the new ballpark's seating capacity from 57,354 to a mere 41,800 in order to increase its luxury suites from forty-five to fifty-four. But here the new stadium was intended only as the anchor of a grand plan by Michael Bloomberg to transform the entire area around it-one terminus of an axis of redevelopment set to run across the entire width of the city, on a scale that only Robert Moses might have attempted.

Willets Point, once the site of a monumental municipal dump, the "valley of ashes" in The Great Gatsby, had evolved into a happy jumble of some 250 small industrial shops, most of them specializing in auto parts and repairs in an area known as the Iron Triangle. There they had thrived and prospered for more than eighty years, despite the city's refusal to build them sidewalks, paved roads, or even sewers. Once the Mets had their new park, though, Bloomberg pushed through a $3 billion development plan, with the Iron Triangle to become Willets West, mostly a gigantic shopping mall with 200 stores and what was planned to be 1.7 million square feet of retail space, surrounded by 5,500 market-rate and affordable apartments and other amenities.

2 A more human-size new plan, including 1,100 apartments for low-income New Yorkers, has since been announced by Mayor de Blasio, which is a welcome development-but still not one that will resurrect hundreds of bulldozed family businesses.

To facilitate this process, writes the impassioned social advocate Jeremiah Moss in his wrathful howl Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, $1 billion worth of public land was transferred, gratis, to two developers, including Sterling Equities, controlled by Mets owner Fred Wilpon and his brother-in-law, Saul Katz. The whole scheme was ultimately blocked in court-it's illegal to give away public land in New York State without a specific act of the legislature-but the Iron Triangle was gone, its shops intimidated into closing by the threat of eminent domain, and then demolished by the city. ²

Queens had long remained unscathed by development on this scale. More than anyplace else in New York, the borough retains some of the flavor of what the city was like in the Seventies, minus the crime and the decay. Almost one in every two residents is foreign-born, creating wonderful ethnic mixes in nearly all of its low-lying residential and industrial neighborhoods. But this cityscape is changing, too.

Much like the Martian spaceships from The War of the Worlds in both appearance and annihilating intent, the glass skyscrapers that now dominate Manhattan have in recent years jumped the East River. The first one, a 658-foot Citicorp office building, arrived in Long Island City in 1989. For years it stood alone, an awkward sentinel among the neighborhood's eclectic mix of row houses, auto shops, and manufacturers. As many of those businesses moved out for parts of the globe that don't pay a living wage, their emptying factory floors and warehouses were at least replaced by droves of art, movie, and television studios.

Then, in 1997, came the first residential towers, the forty-two-story Citylights residence, followed nine years later by the five apartment buildings of the East Coast LIC complex. By 2015, the land rush was on. Twenty-nine new buildings were added last year alone, according to New York magazine, with at least twenty-eight more "on tap" for 2018-2020. The tallest building of all was announced last November, a $3 billion project with a luxury condo towering 700 feet high.

Yet even this level of development is dwarfed by what is going on at the western anchor of Bloomberg's great crosstown axis. Hudson Yards, now approaching completion, is a project of staggering size, encompassing some sixty blocks along Manhattan's West Side-"the largest private real estate development in the history of the United States and the largest development in New York City since Rockefeller Center," boasts its primary developer, Related Companies. Its immense glass skyscrapers are overwhelming. From some angles, they look like battling Transformers; from other perspectives, they seem, aptly enough, more like the smokestacks of an impossibly large steamship, about to shove off from the rest of the city altogether.

The projected figures are numbing, almost too big to digest. By the time it's finished, Hudson Yards will encompass at least sixteen major buildings, with 18 million square feet of commercial and residential space, 1 million square feet of retail and "mixed-use space," a public school, at least one major hotel, and a five-acre public plaza. The ninety-two-story tower at 30 Hudson will, the developers say, boast the first open-air observation deck in New York higher than that on the Empire State Building. Its tenants will include a host of major corporations, while a seven-story shopping mall will include a Neiman Marcus department store, the likes of Dior and Chanel on the upper floors, and what they call a "Fifth Avenue mix" of shops such as H&M, Zara, and Sephora on the lower floors. (There will also be "seven destination restaurants.")

Things I liked about that old New York, now vanished?

My neighbors.

Most of them are gone or going now, after decades in the same visibly slouching, century-old apartment house where I live. In the apartment below ours, from the day I moved in back in 1980 with three friends from college, was Mercedes, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, with her extended family of three generations. When her mother, Anna, a sunny, religious, and unfailingly kind woman, began to decline with the years, Mercedes tended to her devotedly at home, bringing a hospital bed into their living room. But their rent-controlled apartment was in Anna's name, and when she died, Mercedes and her husband could no longer afford even the stabilized rent and decided to move back to the Dominican Republic. After all those years, they were just gone, almost overnight.

Across the hall from me was Raymond, a self-destructive but amiable drunk who fell completely apart when his mother died. He could not keep up the rent, or himself, and was finally evicted and then banned from the block after several loud arguments with the super. He came back anyway and lay down in the middle of the street one afternoon-a small Irish-Latino man, in his perpetual baseball cap and scraggly beard, insisting in his gravelly, whiskey-soaked voice that they should just go ahead and run him over. Artie and James, our constant eyes on the street, who spend much of their time sitting out on the stoop trying to convince me that the Mets are a major-league ball team, waved off the traffic and persuaded him to get up out of the street. Forgiven by the super, Raymond now comes back to sit on the stoop with his old friends, a living ghost haunting the block where he was born.

We have been almost a parody of multiculturalism on our little street. Black and white, Hispanic and Asian; straight, gay, and transgender; families of all kinds-extended, adopted, arranged by convenience or design. Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist. I would come home and see the daughters of our Sikh mailman, before they grew up, playing baseball in the halls. In the evening, I sat at my desk in a little space, in this building cubbyholed with other little spaces and held together by what was once described as "a hundred years of spit and dust," and felt as though I were poised over the center of the world. Beneath me I could hear a hive of dinnertime conversations carried on in half a dozen languages, smell cooking that came from all over the world, hear someone ringing a gong and repeating a Buddhist chant.

It is through all these interactions, multiplied a million times, that a truly great city is made. The street life-the warrens of little shops and businesses that once sustained our neighborhood in the sort of "exuberant diversity" that Jane Jacobs considered a prerequisite for a successful city-is being eradicated as well: the botanica on 96th Street that Susan, my sister-in-law, always visited to buy her healing herbs when she was in town; the Indian spice shop next to it, with the protective elephant-headed idol of Ganesh mounted outside.

These stores, like so many others in my neighborhood, have not been replaced. They are simply . . . gone. In an informal survey of Broadway, from 93rd Street to 103rd, I recently counted twenty-four vacant storefronts-many of them very large spaces, enough to account for roughly one third of the street frontage. Nearly all of them have been empty now for months or even years.

Almost everything of use has gone. There was Oppenheimer Meats, a butcher shop whose founder had reportedly fled Nazi Germany and, I was told, brought his business down to our neighborhood from Washington Heights sometime in the Forties. A large, imposing man with a bristling mustache, he would strut behind his counter like a Prussian field marshal, but he hired people of every color from the neighborhood and left them to run the shop when he retired. Then, a few years ago, according to its new owner, Oppenheimer's rent was tripled. Out it went. Over on Amsterdam, between 97th and 98th Streets, was a whole row of enterprises: an excellent fish store, a pet shop, a Mexican restaurant named for Frida Kahlo, and a laundromat we used to call the St. Launder Center, thanks to how part of its name had been torn out of its awning. Then they were all gone, too, without warning. Soon after, I ran into Shirley, doughty little Asian abbess of the St. Launder Center. She said the landlord had upped the rent from a hefty $7,000 a month to $21,000, which is a hell of a lot of laundry.

On the corner of 98th and Broadway is the shell of what was once RCI, an independent appliance store founded in 1934 as Radio Clinic. It was one of the oldest surviving businesses on the Upper West Side. RCI's proprietor, Leon Rubin, left the Pale of Russia after his father was murdered there during the civil war that followed the revolution, when Leon was just twelve years old. In his shop, he used to sit in the front window in a white doctor's smock, pretending to "operate" on malfunctioning radios. RCI was passed down to Leon's son, Alan, and changed with the times, stocking up on appliances and electronics of all sorts. Alan's daughter, Jen, would demonstrate primitive Atari games in the same window where her grandfather had fiddled with radios. "This was his family's business, and my dad wasn't budging," Jen Rubin would recall, in a book she's written about the family business.

RCI survived being looted and vandalized during the blackout rioting in the summer of 1977, but it couldn't withstand today's Manhattan rents. The little shop lost its lease in 2014, the business chased off after eighty years in the neighborhood. Today, more than three years later, its storefront remains empty. Like so many other abandoned spaces along Broadway, its doorway has become a refuge for the homeless and the mentally ill, supposedly purged from our city streets.

A couple of blocks up Broadway from RCI was the old Metro Theater, originally the Midtown, an aging art house that dated back to 1933 and survived long enough to become one of the oldest cinemas operating in New York. It had fallen on hard times and was showing pornos when I first moved into the neighborhood. Then it was bought and restored by a repertory-cinema impresario, Dan Talbot, who renamed it the Metro, burnished and restored its elegant Art Deco interior, and started showing old movies and then first- and second-run releases.

The Metro was shuttered in 2005. (Talbot died late last year, just a month before another of his marvelous reclamations, Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, an Upper West Side institution and still extremely popular, was shuttered for who-knows-what real estate fast shuffle.) Already struggling, the Metro was all but enveloped by an outsized construction project, the Ariel East and Ariel West, two more multimillion-dollar condo giants built directly across Broadway from each other. Rising to thirty-seven and thirty-one stories respectively, they are related in size and style to nothing else in the neighborhood. Their existence was enabled by the fact that St. Michael's, a charming Episcopal church on the corner of 99th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, sold its air rights to developers. In New York today, survival for any older, underpatronized institution often involves cannibalizing the neighborhood it has pledged to serve.

The Metro never reopened. Its gorgeous marquee and purple-and-white terra-cotta tile work depicting the figures of comedy and tragedy had been landmarked, but there was no such protection for the interior. The developers ripped it all out, gutted it too quickly for anyone to object. It has remained empty and moldering for thirteen years now, the letters of its name and other parts of the facade left to slowly drop off, piece by piece, until there will be nothing left to landmark. Online neighborhood news sites constantly pass on rumors about what the Metro is likely to become, but nothing has materialized.

"I was really hoping for another bank or chain drug store, or a combination bank/chain drug store," read one reply to the latest conjecture.

These are the choices we are left with now. If a movie theater you can duck into in the middle of the day was one of the small raptures of the modern urban landscape, all around us were the same sorts of existential conveniences. Those corner bakeries with the string-wrapped boxes where you could get a respectable layer cake on the way to someone's dinner party. A kosher butcher where you could pick up the lamb shank you realized you forgot just minutes before the family was due for Passover dinner. Decent Chinese food for a Friday night at home in front of the television.

We worry now in my neighborhood that the cobbler's shop across Broadway will be the next store priced out of business. The proprietor proudly displays calendar photos of erupting volcanoes from his native Ecuador in his shopwindows alongside pictures of his grandchildren at their confirmations. His grandson used to store his toys and coloring books in the boxes under the unused shoeshine chairs. When you walk in, there is always the sound of classical music on the radio, and the smell of something very elemental and raw, leather and polish, the scent of a real place serving a real purpose.

It is almost the only store around that sells anything of use anymore. There are a few small hardware shops left still, some dry cleaners, a large grocery store, and a couple of bodegas. But otherwise, Jane Jacobs's "intricate ballet" of the streets is being rapidly eradicated by a predatory monoculture. Everywhere, that which is universal and uniform prevails. Chain stores, of a type once unknown in New York, now abound. On those same ten blocks of my neighborhood where so many stores have been emptied out, I count three pharmacies, six bank branches, seven nail-and-beauty salons, three Starbucks, two Dunkin' Donuts and three 7-Elevens, five phone-and-cable stores, four eyewear shops. The coming growth industry seems to be in urgent care facilities, of which there are already two, to serve our ridiculously underinsured population.

This is not an anomaly; the problem is pervasive. There are so many empty shops now that the issue has even begun to slip out from under the official doctrine that the city has never been better than it is now. In true samizdat style, an informal but growing network of dissident government officials, journalists, angry and frustrated private citizens, and even real estate developers began to force the problem into 2017's generally somnolent municipal elections. Last June, the office of Manhattan borough president Gale Brewer found 188 vacant storefronts along Broadway from Battery Park to Inwood-this on a main commercial avenue in an incredibly wealthy city, in the eighth year of an economic expansion.

Saddest of all is the planned demolition of the Essex Street Market. It was one of several indoor markets built by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in 1940, back when the city endeavored to serve its people instead of just weed them out if they didn't make enough money. Built to house the myriad Jewish pushcart vendors of the chazzer mark, the legendary outdoor marketplace along Hester Street, it provided them with a safe, sanitary place to peddle their wares, protected from the elements and criminal shakedowns. Over the years, it came to house a wonderfully diverse collection of food stands, shops, and miniature restaurants, representing many of New York's different cultures. But it is scheduled to be razed before this year is out, its vendors grudgingly relocated to Essex Crossing-another gigantically ugly "mixed-use development" going up on a wide stretch of land across Delancey Street, a space that had been kept vacant for decades as part of a corrupt political deal to keep more non-whites out of the neighborhood. And so we have come full circle, from a city that tried to help along its poor and embattled strivers to one that would rather keep the land barren until only the very richest are available.

3 When he said this, and before he was rewarded for his outspoken racism with endless magazine assignments and book contracts, Roger Starr was New York's housing commissioner.

The great threat to the New York of the Sixties and Seventies-and many other cities in the Northeast and Midwest-was considered to be the flood of largely unskilled, uneducated African Americans from the South and Hispanics from the islands. "Stop the Puerto Ricans and the rural blacks from living in the city . . . reverse the role of the city. . . . It can no longer be the place of opportunity," the racist apparatchik Roger Starr implored back in the day. "Our urban system is based on the theory of taking the peasant and turning him into an industrial worker. Now there are no industrial jobs. Why not keep him a peasant?" ³

This sentiment was articulated, over and over again, by many of the would-be gentrifiers. But the "peasants" poured in just as the hopeful and the desperate had always come, though they encountered, for the first time in New York's history, a city that no longer had many entry-level industrial jobs to offer them. The result was perverse, a New York that was home to more than a million welfare recipients and featured almost full employment for everyone else; a city where 7 million to 14 million square feet of office space-the size of the entire downtown of a metropolis such as Kansas City or Pittsburgh-was built in New York every year from 1967 to 1970, as Ric Burns and James Sanders noted in their history of the city.

In the success story that New York is considered today, the situation is just as perverse: the rents are driving people and commerce away, but some of the tallest residential towers ever built sit all but empty. The cause is once again a flood of outsiders, though this time they are not poor but among the richest people in the world. They have already proved themselves more destructive to the health of the city than the least-skilled poor, and their depredations will do incalculably more damage to New York over the decades and even the centuries ahead.

In the brutally Darwinian world of the poor, they usually got jobs, started families, became useful and productive citizens, or failed and were pushed back out of New York-back home or to another place-or ended up incarcerated or even dead. The rich, though, are with us always, and now for the first time as a purely rapacious force, consuming the city's most valuable assets and contributing almost nothing in return. "If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend," Bloomberg, the city's billionaire mayor, said in a moment of typical frankness back in 2013. But these are not your grandfather's billionaires.

New York has always attracted the wealthy and predatory, dating back at least to our most famous pirate, Captain Kidd. Coming here was seen as a sort of arrival, for individuals and businesses alike. Long a "headquarters town," as early as 1901 New York was home to sixty-nine of the nation's two hundred largest corporations. Their owners lined Fifth Avenue with their fairy-tale mansions-some of them later converted into museums or elegant stores-or filled luxury apartment houses such as the Dakota. They hired the most renowned architects to erect gigantic advertisements for their transformative, world-conquering enterprises, including many of the most memorable structures ever built in the city: Grand Central Terminal; the Chrysler, Woolworth, Empire State, and Seagram buildings, among others. Noxious as the old robber barons could be, they at least dropped vast amounts of money into the local economy in the form of property taxes and purchases in elite shops. They employed people in droves-small armies of domestics, vendors, and workers at all levels-to service their needs and businesses. They contributed to the city through their building and philanthropy-Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, the Morgan Library, and the Frick Collection, to name just a few examples.

The new rich infesting the city, by contrast, are barely here. They keep a low profile, often for good reason, and rarely stick around. They manufacture nothing and run nothing, for the most part, but live off fortunes either made by or purloined from other people-sometimes from entire nations. The New Yorker noted in 2016 that there is now a huge swath of Midtown Manhattan, from Fifth Avenue to Park Avenue, from 49th Street to 70th Street, where almost one apartment in three sits empty for at least ten months a year. New York today is not at home. Instead, it has joined London and Hong Kong as one of the most desirable cities in the world for "land banking," where wealthy individuals from all over the planet scoop up prime real estate to hold as an investment, a pied-à-terre, a bolt-hole, a strongbox.

For most of a decade now, like lava flowing inexorably from some deadly volcano, the residences of the superrich have moved east from the Time Warner Center to create Billionaires' Row, the array of buildings on 57th Street and several adjoining streets and avenues that is already dominating much of the Manhattan skyline. These "supertall" skyscrapers are defined as buildings taller than 984 feet: One57, at 157 West 57th Street (1,004 feet); 432 Park Avenue (1,396 feet). Well on their way to being built: 53 West 53rd Street (1,050 feet), 111 West 57th Street (1,428 feet), and 217 West 57th Street (1,550 feet). Finished or not, many of the apartments were-at first-snapped up as soon as they went on the market. The Times used to tick off their record-setting sales in its Sunday real estate section, down to the absurdly exact dollar and cent: one recent lower-end example, $47,782,186.53! Nor are the records these sales set likely to remain for long. A triplex at the forthcoming 220 Central Park South will reportedly be sold for $200 million, and a four-story apartment at the same address is priced to move at $250 million. These would be the largest home sales ever recorded anywhere in the United States.

Who spends this sort of money for an apartment? The buyers are listed as hedge fund managers, foreign and domestic; Russian oligarchs; Chinese apparel and airline magnates. And increasingly, to use a repeated Times term, a "mystery buyer," often shielded by a limited liability company.

This is not the benevolent "gentrification" that Michael Bloomberg seemed to have had in mind but something more in the tradition of the king's hunting preserves, from which local peasants were banned even if they were starving and the king was far away. Or, to use a more urgent analogy, these areas are now the dead zones of New York, much like the growing oxygen-depleted dead zones of our oceans and lakes, polluted with pesticide runoff and deadly algae blooms.

Already, Billionaires' Row has throttled what used to be one of the more eclectic and delightful avenues in Manhattan. Along with Carnegie Hall, 57th Street boasted the graceful Art Deco Fuller Building, Steinway Hall, with its piano showroom; the Art Students League, the Russian Tea Room; the gorgeous little gem of a bookstore that was Rizzoli's, already a refugee from its old stand on Fifth Avenue; the marvelous ramble of Coliseum Books. A steamship company office, where my wife and I once booked a trip to Europe. A diverse array of movie houses, including, once upon a time, the Bombay Cinema, New York's only Hindi-language theater. Countless little restaurants, churches, coffee shops, art-supply stores, studios, and galleries. High culture and little hideaways, together they made up a stretch of Manhattan at its most alluring, a boulevard that was at one and the same time touristy and tony, a place to browse and to slip inside, both European and unmistakably New York.

Now the Steinway showroom has been banished to 43rd and 6th. The Coliseum was chased away and died. Rizzoli's lived to sell books another day, but its irreplaceable store and entire building were demolished. The Art Students League, where many of America's finest visual artists learned and taught, and which proved a refuge for countless more fleeing Europe in the Thirties and Forties, was bound up like a kidnapped heiress in protective scaffolding, while the Nordstrom Tower at 225 West 57th Street was allowed to build a cantilevered segment over it, hanging there like a permanent sword of Damocles.

The superexpensive apartments along Billionaires' Row will include not only many of the priciest domiciles ever purchased in the United States but also the highest places anyone has ever lived in this country, more than eighty and ninety stories in the air. Super tall, they are also super skinny, like 1,500-foot embodiments of the rich themselves. The Steinway Tower-minus Steinway-at 111 West 57th Street even has an 800-ton "tuned mass damper" at the top of its 1,428-foot height, to keep it from moving so much in the wind that it will nauseate its residents.

Together, these buildings perch over Central Park like a row of gigantic predatory birds. There are now so many of the supertalls gathered so closely together that they threaten to leave the lower sections of Central Park, the only true architectural marvel to be seen here, in shadow for much of the year. One simulation found that the shadows of the highest towers may knife a mile into the park on the winter solstice.

When the journalist Warren St. John protested against these towers that block the sun and literally leave children shivering in the park, he pointed out that the highest supertall apartments-when they are occupied at all-house maybe a few hundred people, as opposed to the 40 million individuals who use Central Park every year. But this seems to be the calculation on which New York now operates.

Even for those who can afford the new New York, it is unclear how much they actually like it or maintain any ability to shape it to their tastes. What is the point, after all, of paying a fortune to live in a city that is more and more like everywhere else? New York is now jammed with some 62 million tourists every year, flocking to Disneyfied Broadway that is a pathetic imitation of what it once was. At the same time, its favorite nooks and crannies are being annihilated, even the more upscale ones. Bill Moyers, a longtime local resident, reports the same fate for all of his family's favorite neighborhood eateries, including Scaletta's, on West 77th Street. Moyers expects "something upscale and fancy" to replace it, but, he laments, "today's prices can only guarantee something worse."

Perhaps because they have done so much to annihilate the New York around them, every luxury of the new buildings is designed to pull its residents inward, away from the rest of us-the very antithesis of urban life. This is another way in which the rich and their real estate brokers have made essential changes to the nature of New York.

The latest and greatest condo amenities now include an "adult tree house" and a "sumac meander." The "grand-scale residences" at 70 Vestry Street, in TriBeCa, entice with "warm-hued Beaumaniere limestone quarried from the banks of the Seine River in France" (not to be confused with the Seine River in Dumont, New Jersey). The duplex penthouse at 50 United Nations Plaza "comes with its own infinity-edge pool" (judging by the proliferation of pools and billiards rooms, the average luxury condo owner in Manhattan is a combination of Esther Williams and Minnesota Fats); other "focal points" include "the 10,000-pound handcrafted stainless steel staircase," in case you have a hankering to drive your Sherman tank up and down the steps.

"Private outdoor space" is the true goal, and never have so many buildings been constructed in such an insular fashion in New York. Want a drink or a meal, a swim or a game of pool at the end of the day, a yoga class or a good book? There's no need to step out into the city. Something to do with the kids? Don't worry, there's no reason for them to go outside, either. All the best new buildings offer playrooms; the "grand-scale" 70 Vestry adds an "art area, climbing structure, ball pit, slide, magnetic wall and faux farmers' market."

The emphasis on privacy is constantly stressed. There is no need to expose even one's automobile to the prying eyes of the hoi polloi. My favorite fringe benefit, a luxury that has been steadily gaining favor not only in New York but also in such other favorite hangouts of the superrich as Miami and Singapore, according to the Wall Street Journal, is "en suite parking." Over in Chelsea, 200 Eleventh Avenue was offering a separate elevator for your car, which could be taken directly up to your floor, with "no senses of fumes, or sound, and it can burn for three-to-four hours before it imposes any risk on the building."

New York's great buildings used to be chockablock with beacons, crowns, ornamentation, friezes, and statues, pointing the way to the future. We did not always like what they were selling, but they made a public argument; for example, the Chrysler Building, with its brilliant Art Deco diadem and silver hood-ornament gargoyles; the Woolworth Building "cathedral of commerce," with its terra-cotta tiling, glittering mosaic and stained glass, and magnificent carvings; Grand Central Terminal, with its paeans to the history of transportation, celestial map, and statue of a glowering Vanderbilt; even the wonderfully gaudy, gold-frosted American Radiator Building, intriguing enough to become a major painting by Georgia O'Keeffe.

By contrast, Rafael Viñoly's new supertall 1,396-foot-high residential tower at 432 Park Avenue, which is taller than the Empire State Building (excluding its antenna-cum-zeppelin mooring) and now dominates the Manhattan skyline from many viewpoints, was inspired by . . . a designer trash can, according to its architect. It comes from nothing and nowhere, just an extension of an empty, overpriced receptacle, and it means every bit as much to the people and the city that it lords itself over.

Hudson Yards, meanwhile, features the $455 million Shed, formerly the Culture Shed, no twenty-first-century Carnegie Hall but a six-story performance and exhibition space that is supposed to lend some cultural dimension to the vast development. The leading feature of its design is its "retractable outer shell" made up mostly of highly durable plastic; planned events include "Fashion Week, TED Talks, and concerts"-a virtual compendium of the banal and pretentious.

Next to the Shed, in Hudson Yards' Public Square, will be Vessel, the development's $200 million interactive, artistic centerpiece. This is a fifteen-story collection of 154 connected staircases, which thousands of visitors can climb at the same time, continually passing one another. Not even its developer is able to take it seriously. Related Companies chairman Stephen Ross jokingly called it "the social climber."

It must be admitted that in the new city, the values of our public authorities seem just as misplaced. Those three new stations of the Second Avenue subway that New York finally managed to produce last year, after nearly a century of effort, are devoid of anything connecting them to the city that has awaited them for so long. In his fervent celebration of what is, in the life of the city, a minuscule accomplishment, Governor Cuomo praised the design of the broad, bland new stations to the New York Times as "a public space where community can gather and where culture and shared civic values are celebrated," and, at a news conference, predicted that "this is just the beginning of a new period of rebirth."

What actually happened was that the design of the new subway stations was outsourced to assorted stars of the modern art world, most of whom not one New Yorker in ten thousand would likely recognize by name or achievement. One of them, Chuck Close, filled his station with mosaic portraits of "New York artists who have formed Mr. Close's wide circle," which includes Lou Reed and Kara Walker along with Cecily Brown, Philip Glass, Alex Katz, several younger artists he favored, and two self-portraits.

The artist Vik Muniz did Close one better, providing three dozen images of various friends, relatives, and cultural celebrities dressed up, reported the Times, like "normal people," including "the restaurateur Daniel Boulud holding a bag with a fish tail sticking out; the designer, actor, and man-about-town Waris Ahluwalia"; and Mr. Muniz himself, "in a Rockwell-esque scene of him tripping, spilling papers from his briefcase," as well as his son, dressed "in a tiger suit, like a Times Square mascot on lunch break." Isn't it marvelous? The artists are depicting themselves and their celebrity friends imitating us, waiting for a train and doing all the perfectly ordinary things that we ordinary people do!

It is one thing to replace some of the more offensive monuments and messages from the past, quite another to simply blank out everything with the generic and the tragically hip. Our buildings and our public art today are not a corrective but the easy disengagement of the developer. The void in our art reflects the sensory deprivation of our neighborhoods, where the complex and varied city has also been wiped out. Once the iconography of New York honored ideas, enterprises, achievers, and heroes, but today's public spaces speak a secret language of the cool and knowing, an inside joke that is lost on the rest of us. The things we have lost will never be found again, and the new things we have received are literally empty and spiritually devoid of meaning.

"What are you going to do about it?" Boss Tweed, the corrupt sachem of Tammany Hall, allegedly sneered when confronted about the nineteenth-century New York that he and his confederates so ruthlessly plundered. What are we going to do about a New York that is, right now, being plundered not only of its treasure but also of its heart, and soul, and purpose?

Bill de Blasio, our current mayor and previously an obscure local politician, was first elected in 2013, running against Republican Joe Lhota, a longtime state and city bureaucrat under the old regime and its ethos of development first, now, and always. Lhota ran a scorched-earth campaign, warning New Yorkers in commercial after commercial that a vote for some fuzzy liberal like De Blasio meant regression, meant going back to the bad old days of runaway crime, bankruptcy, and disorder. When all the votes were counted, Lhota had lost by nearly 50 points.

Vowing to be the mayor of "the other New York," De Blasio announced his intention to go after the threat looming over so many voters: the cost of living here. The new mayor promised to "build or preserve" 200,000 affordable rental units over the next ten years, something that sounded like a good start.

Of those 200,000 units, it developed, 120,000 were to be "preserved," mostly by negotiating with landlords to rehabilitate buildings that had fallen into extreme disrepair or were seized by the city for back taxes. Crucial as this sort of work is, it only stanched the bleeding. The remaining 80,000 new units of affordable housing would start to materialize with De Blasio rezoning fifteen neighborhoods for higher-density habitation. The Bloomberg Administration had taken another approach, rezoning more than a third of the city but more often "downzoning" neighborhoods to limit housing capacity and preserve their "character." Unsurprisingly, the downzoned neighborhoods tended to be whiter and more well-off than those that were upzoned, but ultimately a net of 15,000 buildings and 170,000 housing units were added during Bloomberg's three terms. This approach, as well, did absolutely nothing to contain rents.

Worse still was the other tool that De Blasio would use to coax the developers into building in these newly rezoned hot spots: article 421-a of the property tax code. This has been the leading means by which New York has built new housing since 1971, when the federal government largely dropped out of the business. It works like this: developers get massive tax breaks on new buildings for up to thirty-five years as long as they rent 25 to 30 percent of the units in said buildings below market rates. The developers are taxed only at what the property-often a vacant lot-was valued at to begin with, excluding all the value their new building adds to the property.

No one could ever accuse this provision of discouraging new building. But in recent years, 421-a has become most famous for leading landlords to add separate "poor doors" for their less wealthy tenants, as Extell announced it would do for its new tower at 40 Riverside Boulevard, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. (One is tempted to ask if the front entrance will be known as the "ghost door" for all those foreign investors who never show up.)

The greater problem, as Michael Greenberg spelled out in his New York Review of Books analysis, is that by its very definition new housing that is 25 to 30 percent "affordable" still means huge numbers of high-cost new rentals. It is, in other words, mass gentrification locked in for many years to come, while the city is further starved of tax dollars needed to maintain and improve its public services.

The 421-a tax break is an anachronistic tool left over from the Seventies, when both landlords and the middle class were abandoning the city in droves. Nothing could be further from the case today, and the recent evidence is abundant that continuing to use it is a counterproductive strategy, one that is subsidizing the wealthy while diminishing the amount of affordable housing available.

Not so coincidentally, as Greenberg reports, landlords have redoubled their efforts-often illegal-to bribe or intimidate their less affluent tenants into moving out. Some of the more egregious examples he cites are in Brooklyn: landlords cutting off heat and hot water, inviting belligerent homeless men to defecate and hold drug parties in the halls, not fixing collapsing walls and ceilings, nailing up plywood over doors, locking tenants out and getting them arrested, and, in one instance, even bearing false witness to get a tenant committed, temporarily, to a psych ward. The neighborhoods themselves look much improved; it's just the people that were lost.

In my part of the forest, thank goodness, the process is (a little) more civilized, a sort of soft, running eviction. The large rental company that now owns every building on my side of the block (and much of the next block as well) brought in crews of what obviously seemed to be undocumented workers to repoint the brickwork, and thus drive up the rent for all of us by a couple of hundred dollars each month. Working out on precarious scaffolding in winter weather, these men were forbidden to talk to us, even when we tried to offer them water. As the older families move out, more crews descend on their apartments, tearing them apart, right down to the brick, in storms of noise and dust that go on for months.

They cut through electrical cables and crash through ceilings and walls too. An overly zealous smash that shattered our bathroom ceiling, in the workers' rush to get things done, led to that room being redone for the first time in thirty years. What we got was the same "deluxe" treatment that the new tenants receive: cheap linoleum tile made to look as close as possible to actual ceramic, cheap wooden shelving, and furnishings built to last a fortnight. All to lure the next tenants into accepting three times what my wife and I now pay. And there are rumors that next our perfectly adequate lobbies will be soon be "redone," which will no doubt raise our rents more.

I like my new neighbors. They're terrific people, just like the old ones, and drawn from nearly as many different places. Better educated, usually, with better jobs, but just as friendly and helpful. They tend to be younger, with younger families, and it's nice to hear and see so many kids in the building again. On the surface, this would seem to be what New York-and America-is all about: everyone moving on up another rung on the socioeconomic ladder, the city filling again with the next extraordinary group of people who will cherish and enhance it.

But I try not to get too attached, for I know that their time here is limited. It couldn't help but be, paying as much as $5,000 a month, as they do, to squeeze growing families into 700 square feet. They are transient, here only for a few years at most, until the next child or the next job-until they can buy a place of their own, or the home company in France or California decides to stop subsidizing such outrageous rents.

We are becoming a city of transients. Already, there are at least two apartments in my building operating as Airbnbs, an increasingly popular practice in many New York buildings; the only question is whether they are being run by the tenants or by the landlord. The potential safety or comfort of the rest of us, now living with night-to-night tenants who could be anybody, is not their concern.

The very idea of permanence is anathema to our landlords, just as it is to most employers in this city and in cities all over the country. It is the same thing for commercial spaces. Rather than drop their rent demands even now, landlords are often simply switching to short-term tenancies, better known as pop-ups. As Dennis Lynch detailed in The Real Deal, the real estate industry magazine, this can mean "experiential activation" renters "looking to penetrate a conference or event crowd-occupy a space for four days out of a month," on average. Or a "brand launch" that might last six weeks. Or a "target market launch" that averages three months. Anything from a day to a year, with the landlords reportedly enjoying the fact that such temporary clients don't require a long lease and are very easy to evict if anything goes wrong.

Between 2010 and 2014, Lynch writes, the rents in sixteen Manhattan retail corridors tracked by CBRE Group, the self-described largest commercial real estate services and investment firm in the world,

skyrocketed by a whopping 89.1 percent while total retail sales for the borough grew by only 31.9 percent, creating what the commercial brokerage firm called "an unsustainable situation for some tenants as rents surpassed what their sales growth could support."

What's more, this price gouging continued even as vacancies multiplied, a supposed impossibility under classical capitalist economics. The better business got, the more stores went under and were abandoned. The more storefronts went vacant, the higher rents kept going.

In some of the swankier districts of Manhattan, this can lead to the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Kanye West, or Tommy Hilfiger "popping up." In less glamorous neighborhoods, such as my own, it's more likely to mean the headquarters of a political campaign, or the ubiquitous Halloween costume stores that open now in mid-September. But wherever and whatever they are, the lesson is the same: everything is temporary. The whole idea of a permanent community is fading away.

So what are we going to do about it?

Some practical reforms might start with ending 421-a and other subsidies for wealthy developers, thereby bringing the city tens of billions of additional tax dollars over the next few years and eliminating a major incentive for those who would build primarily for the rich. With that money, or at least some percentage of it, New York City could then build its own affordable housing-affordable for actual working-class people-without worrying about support from the federal government or 80 percent of the apartments going to more of the rich, absent or otherwise. And, as Greenberg suggests, an additional, dedicated half cent in sales tax, say-akin to how Los Angeles taxed itself recently to expand its mass transit system-could provide a permanent funding source to build and rehabilitate housing.

When it comes to the retailers, others have dared to suggest reinstituting commercial rent control. David Dinkins even made that idea part of his winning mayoral platform back in 1989, though-as happens with so many winning Democratic Party campaign promises-once he was elected, Dinkins quickly made it clear that he had no intention of seriously pursuing any such popular measure.

Unbeknownst to most New Yorkers today-so thoroughly has even the rumor of it been stomped out-the city did have commercial rent control for eighteen years, from 1945 to 1963. This was the most widely prosperous time in New York's history, and an era that many New Yorkers still remember as the city's golden age. How much that was because of commercial rent control is probably unquantifiable, but obviously it didn't hurt.

Another good idea would be to restrain ourselves. For some sixty-five years, from 1942 to 2007, New York co-ops were forbidden from gleaning more than 20 percent of their building revenues from storefront rents, under the IRS's so-called 80/20 rule. Co-ops, then more collectivist enterprises, were originally encouraged as a way by which working- and middle-class tenants could save buildings for themselves that had been neglected or abandoned by landlords. In time, though, they became one more preserve of the wealthy, and in December 2007 their lobbyists managed to get Congress to repeal the 80/20 rule and let co-ops charge stores whatever they wanted. Since then, New York homeowners have been able to join the ranks of the biggest landlords, running longtime small businesses out of their stores with extortionate rent increases while reducing or eliminating their own monthly maintenance fees and other assessments. In other words, we have met the landlords, and they are us.

Actually instituting these reforms, though, or pushing through any number of other good legislative fixes, comes up against New York's dysfunctional political system. Because of archaic rules designed mostly to suppress Tweed's Tammany Hall and other long-vanished political machines, the city's ability to alter its own rental and tax laws is largely subject to approval from Albany, with predictable results. As Greenberg reported, state legislators from outside the city-many of them Republicans-are routinely given enormous contributions from developers, and subsequently thwart pro-tenant bills of any sort; from 2000 to 2016, city developers poured $83 million into legislative races, "more than any other economic group."

The prevailing idea that we now live in the best of all possible New Yorks remains a powerful one. A rationalization, perhaps, to compensate for the frustration we experience living in a system that no one really likes but that we feel helpless to alter. In a recent history-memoir titled St. Marks Is Dead, the journalist Ada Calhoun laid on another such coat of Pangloss with her entertaining narrative of one of New York's most fabled streets and neighborhoods. She concedes that the apartment she grew up in now would cost $5,000 a month but insists,

Who understands the soul of any place? Who deserves to be here? Who is the interloper and who the interloped-upon? Who can say which drunk NYU student stumbling down St. Marks Place will wind up writing the next classic novel or making the next great album?

Well, it will have to be a drunk NYU student who can afford $5,000 a month in rent. What Calhoun and the other adamant Pollyannas refuse to understand is that a bar is one thing, a dance hall is one thing, and even a Gap or a Starbucks is one thing, but a bank branch is another. It is a carpet and a machine from which one extracts money, then leaves. No one is writing a novel or an album about it. Those things that we do not value, that we do not actively protect, fade away and die.

I used to hang out on St. Marks Place, back when Calhoun was a girl. I was seeing a dancer from Waycross, Georgia, and we would go drink seventy-five-cent shots at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge, and talk with old Ukrainian men about the great middleweights they had seen fight, and watch the punks out from the dance clubs play pool. Afterward, we would go back to her place in Brooklyn, where she turned me on to the joys of homemade curry and Patti Smith's Horses album, among other delights. Walking back from her place to Manhattan one day, in the midst of a transit strike, I crossed the Manhattan Bridge with a couple of winos, with whom I stopped to watch the sun set over the Statue of Liberty, a moment I will remember for the rest of my life.

I did not believe that I was living in a utopia, or through the only possible iteration of St. Marks Place or New York City. But I defy anyone to have that experience in a bank branch, no matter how drunk they are.

Cities are all about loss. I get that. Intrinsically dynamic, cities have to change, or they end up like Venice, preserved in amber for the tourists. New York City, for all its might, is no more immune to economic sea changes than anyplace else-maybe less so.

It could be said that New York has been gentrifying ever since a lack of space started to push its dozens of shipbuilding yards off the East Side and over to Greenpoint in the years just before the Civil War. Many other industries followed, rarely to the city's disadvantage, unless you pine for the open-air rendering plants and stockyards that also proliferated along the Manhattan waterfront. Just, I suppose, as residents of Pittsburgh or Detroit don't miss the choking haze at noon that meant "prosperity" back in the day.

New Yorkers, over time, made just about anything and everything, from chemicals to bread, metal parts to chocolates, furniture to crates for shipping fine art, toys, and clothes of every description. Moreover, as the busiest harbor in the world for most of a century, it moved things. These industries were constantly in flux, and by the end of World War II, as the only great world city that remained unbloodied and unbowed, New York still had more than a million manufacturing jobs, more than any other city on the planet.

These numbers declined slowly at first, then more rapidly, with about half of the old manufacturing base gone by the Seventies. Deindustrialization continued rapidly in the Eighties, until today there are estimated to be fewer than 80,000 manufacturing jobs, in 6,000 companies. Some of the last and most integral parts of the city's working culture are now finally fading away altogether. The Meatpacking District is a euphemism for drunken club-hopping and shopping. The Garment District, caught between Madison Square Garden and the Hudson Yards excrescence, is dissolving into still more trendy bars and restaurants. The rag trade, so instrumental in shaping the very nature of New York, has been steadily pulled overseas for years. The same thing has happened to the makers of clothing throughout America. The advent of container ships would have spelled the end of New York's hundreds of miles of working waterfront and the tens of thousands of jobs it provided no matter how much the city tried to keep them. For a generation, the piers rotted down to the pilings, while the waterfront crumbled into a drugs and sex bazaar. Things change, people go. Favorite stores and bars close. The owner of that deli you love gets tired of carving cold cuts all day and decides to retire to Florida. So what?

The trouble lies not in the inexorable fact that cities change but in our failure to deal with that. Since the Seventies, all that our urban leaders, in New York and elsewhere, Democratic as well as Republican, have been able to come up with is one scheme after another to invite the rich in.

The prevailing critique of American cities from the right, dating back to the Sixties, was that our existing social welfare state was unsustainable. The question haunting our urban success stories today is whether the prevailing conservative addiction to privately owned, government-subsidized mega-development is sustainable. Already, there are indications that the whole gimcrack structure is starting to give way. Before the end of last summer, The Real Deal was reporting a significant softening of the Manhattan condo market, with inventory up a hefty 35 percent from the year before.

With many of their buildings still just half-full or less, even after the initial rush to buy into them, developers are scrambling now, trying to encourage brokers with higher commissions; offering to pay for buyers' closing costs, storage units, and parking spaces; and shaving as much as 10 percent off the prices. The Madison Square Park Tower, an eighty-three-unit condo at 45 East 22nd Street, was offering, The Real Deal reports, "to throw in two studio apartments and two parking spots for any buyer willing to shell out $48 million for the building's 7,000-square foot penthouse."

This weakness has even begun to spread to Billionaires' Row. The majority investor at 111 West 57th Street claimed in court that the building is facing a $100 million shortfall. All those sumac meanders don't grow on trees. Extell's One57 suffered the Row's first two foreclosures in 2017, including a possibly record-setting $50.9 million foreclosure on a condo contracted by one of its "mystery buyers." (The New York Post later identified him as a Nigerian oil tycoon.) Extell even failed to rent out thirty-eight lower-floor units at One57, opting instead to list them for sale at a discounted price.

The danger of a city economy based on little more than these oversized piles of Jenga blocks should be obvious. The Real Deal demurred from trying to quantify just what the outstanding-and the soon-to-be outstanding-debt is on New York condos, but claimed, "It's undoubtedly in the billions."

More disturbing than any potential fiscal or physical collapse, though, is the moral collapse that New York has suffered. "Too often, life in New York is merely a squalid succession of days, whereas in fact it can be a great, living, thrilling adventure," Fiorello La Guardia told New Yorkers during his 1933 mayoral campaign. Today, life in New York too often seems like a sci-fi version of itself in which we barely notice as our fellow human beings are picked off by the monsters living among us.

A little-noticed but quietly magnificent exhibition at Hunter College's Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute this past year, "The New Deal in New York City"-part of the nationwide Living New Deal history project-put on display a vision for another way of life, a way of life that Mayor La Guardia was instrumental in building. The exhibit featured images of the first public housing in the United States, built by New York City from 1935 to 1937 with funds provided by the federal Works Progress Administration and Public Works Administration.

These projects-the First Houses, Ten Eyck (now Williamsburg) Houses, and Harlem River Houses-were built on a human scale, just four to five stories high. At First Houses, the spaces formerly occupied by one out of every three of the rotting tenements they replaced were left vacant, to let in air and light and provide room for children's playgrounds and places where their parents could sit and talk. The buildings were small, and they, too, were no utopia-though they remain much-sought-after homes to this day. By 1941, according to the exhibit, a total of nine such projects had been built in New York, with 11,570 units, and more than 500 of these developments had gone up around the United States.

Unlike so much later public housing, they were not envisioned or designed as projects simply to store the poor but as integral parts of a new community. Their residents could take advantage of any number of other government-funded community projects all around them, from beautiful new swimming pools to refurbished-and free-schools and colleges. They could find work rebuilding their own city's infrastructure or writing guidebooks to New York. They could attend plays and concerts of all sorts.

Their buildings and the public institutions around them were adorned by murals, painted not by art-scene stars imitating them but by artists who lived among them and depicted the histories of their place and their own lives. This, again, was not utopia. Marion Greenwood, painting her murals for the Red Hook Houses, groused about how she had to endure the criticisms of both bureaucrats and tenants regarding her work, both classes of people she felt had a much lower appreciation of art than the Mexican peasants she had formerly worked with. But this was America, too-and especially New York.

"I hope the day is dawning when private capital will devote itself to better and cheaper housing, but we know that the government will have to continue to build for the low-income groups," Eleanor Roosevelt asserted matter-of-factly at the opening of the appropriately named First Houses. "That is a departure for us, but other governments have done it. Low-cost housing must go on in the United States." Getting back to these first principles, to a city and a society that are committed to providing a decent life for all its citizens, is the only way we can regain "the great, living, thrilling adventure" that La Guardia envisioned.

New York has been-and should be-a city of ambition and contentment. Of the getting-there and the got, with plenty of room carved out for those whose desires do not include that deluxe apartment in the sky but simply making a living and raising a family by doing something useful, or not doing anything especially useful at all but existing, living, appreciating the vast urban swirl around them.

Yes, the rich will be with us always. But New York should be a city of workers and eccentrics as well as visionaries and billionaires; a place of schoolteachers and garbagemen and janitors, or people who wear buttons reading is it fascism yet?-as one woman in my neighborhood has for decades, even as she grows steadily grayer and more stooped. A city of people who sell books on the street-and in their own shops. A city of street photographers, and immigrant vendors, and bus drivers with attitudes, and even driven businessmen and hedge fund operators. All helped to get along a little better, out of gratitude for all that they do to keep everything running, and to keep New York remarkable.

Instead, our leaders seem hopelessly invested in importing a race of supermen for the supercity, living high above the clouds. Jetting about the world so swiftly and silently, they are barely visible. A city of glass houses where no one's ever home. A city of tourists. An empty city.

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The Death of a Once Great City | Harper's Magazine

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New York has been my home for more than forty years, from the year after the city's supposed nadir in 1975, when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the periods of boom and bust since, almost all of them related to the "paper economy" of finance and real estate speculation that took over the city long before it did the rest of the nation.

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A new study by a Stanford sociologist has determined that the negative effects of gentrification are felt disproportionately by minority communities, whose residents have fewer options of neighborhoods they can move to compared to their white counterparts.

"If we look at where people end up if they move, poor residents moving from historically Black gentrifying neighborhoods tend to move to poorer non-gentrifying neighborhoods within the city, while residents moving from other gentrifying neighborhoods tend to move to wealthier neighborhoods in the city and in the suburbs," said study co-author Jackelyn Hwang, assistant professor of sociology in Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences.

Hwang and co-author Lei Ding of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia conducted one of the first studies to examine empirically where disadvantaged residents move as a result of gentrification and how a neighborhood's racial context affects those moves.

Looking at the city of Philadelphia, Hwang and Ding found that financially disadvantaged residents who moved from neighborhoods that were not predominantly Black benefitted from gentrification by moving to more advantaged locations, but those moving from once predominantly Black areas did not. The research is published in the American Journal of Sociology.

"As neighborhoods gentrify, when poor people can no longer remain in their neighborhoods and move, there are fewer affordable neighborhoods," Hwang said. "Our findings suggest that, for the Black community, there are additional constraints when they move, leading them to move to a shrinking set of affordable yet disadvantaged neighborhoods within the city."

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.

The issue of how gentrification affects different racial groups is particularly relevant right now in light of the increased instability people are facing due to the pandemic and incidents bringing attention to the unnecessary use of policing against people of color in the United States, Hwang said.

Fewer options

Hwang and Ding analyzed a consumer credit database of more than 50,000 adult residents with financial credit records in Philadelphia.

Recognizing that a primary cause of gentrification-related displacement is increased costs for current residents, the authors looked at individuals with low or missing credit scores who might be more vulnerable to displacement and at the same time might face limitations in housing searches if they did move.

The study found that residents in predominately non-Black gentrifying neighborhoods have a broader set of neighborhoods they moved to, while those from Black gentrifying areas were relegated to less advantaged neighborhoods and faced fewer options. These options included other largely Black neighborhoods or immigrant-populated neighborhoods, exacerbating neighborhood inequality by race and class.

"Gentrification is reconfiguring the urban landscape by shrinking residential options within cities for disadvantaged residents and expanding them for more advantaged residents," the authors write.

Reasons for this discrepancy in Philadelphia and other major cities, Hwang said, include racially stratified housing markets and discriminatory lending practices that have long disadvantaged Black people.

The researchers found that the patterns exhibited by poorer residents moving out of largely Black gentrifying neighborhoods were similar to those of other disadvantaged residents who moved from non-gentrifying neighborhoods.

"Even if people are moving by choice, white people have more advantage when they go into the housing market," she said.

Combatting inequities

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.

While the authors consider this a step in the right direction, they also would like to see more cities adopt policies that ensure residential stability for renters. Efforts to address racial discrimination in the housing market and overall racial wealth disparities also require attention, they write.

The authors note that as cities continue to transform, a sustained investment in non-gentrifying neighborhoods is needed to attract racial and socioeconomic diversity. At the same time, policies must be in place that allow disadvantaged residents to stay and that connect them to resources and opportunities.

This greater investment in non-gentrifying neighborhoods would, Hwang and Ding write, "ensure that disadvantaged movers are not limited to neighborhoods with high levels of disadvantage, high crime and low-quality schools."
The study, titled "Unequal Displacement: Gentrification, Racial Stratification, and Residential Destinations in Philadelphia," was supported in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

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Gentrification disproportionately affects minorities | Stanford News

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Disadvantaged residents from predominately Black neighborhoods have fewer options in face of gentrification.