Is Gentrification Good?

Does gentrification hurt poor residents by forcing them out of their neighborhoods?

The tantalizing answer found by most researchers who study the question is no.

In fact, research suggests low-income residents of gentrifying neighborhoods benefit from the influx of higher-income neighbors through greater political clout, enhanced municipal services, new businesses, and safer streets. Such findings are enough to convince writers like Richard Cravatts, who claims gentrification to be good for “the poor and everyone else” in a recent article for the American Thinker. Dismissing opposition to a controversial Columbia University plan to expand into West Harlem, he concludes such a plan should be embraced by the community since it will bring economic activity to the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, the research he cites tells a more nuanced story. Although the revitalization of many urban neighborhoods is a positive trend, it is not without downsides. Furthermore, eminent domain, which Columbia has threatened to use to acquire property for their plan should owners refuse to sell, has an entirely different history.

A more balanced account of research on neighborhood change from USA Today reports that poor urban neighborhoods have plenty of vacant and abandoned housing, and already experience high turnover. According to findings by Lance Freeman and Jacob Vigdor, two university professors who have studied the process, gentrification usually works by creating new housing, and replacing the type of people who move into the neighborhood. So, as the poor move out for a variety of reasons not related to cost, higher-income folks move in. Also, vacant buildings are rehabbed and new housing is built. The researchers find that low income residents of gentrifying communities are actually less likely to move than other neighborhoods, and often go to great lengths to remain, such as doubling or tripling up, or spending as much as 60% of their income on rent. While not as many people are being directly displaced as some fear, it is not without an impact for the remaining poor. Furthermore, a variety of forces serve to slow gentrification in most neighborhoods, ranging from home ownership to Section 8 or public housing buildings.

Cravatts also overlooks the full history of eminent domain, which has featured prominently in the Columbia expansion debate in New York. During the years of large-scale renewal, eminent domain was used for highways and redevelopment schemes in cities across the nation. All too often, poor renters on condemned land were relocated with minimal or no assistance. Unlike gentrification, eminent domain has usually reduced the amount of housing in the neighborhood. Furthermore, as the Kelo experience showed clearly, the practice of taking private property for anything less than a direct government use simply rubs most Americans the wrong way. Although conflict may be inevitable when wealthy urban universities expand, the most savvy expand through gradual property acquisition and avoid invoking eminent domain.

Coined by a British academic in the 1960s, use of the term “gentrification” has increased in newspapers in recent years. It is a codeword for an emotionally charged set of stereotypes, which may or may not actually be born out in reality. This is something both activists and urban power brokers would do well to remember.

The photo shows new condos being constructed on 14th Street in Washington, D.C.

Comments

[Dale]

Freeman makes a distinction without a difference. If low income residents don't have the ability to move into a neighborhood that is gentrifying, it doesn't matter whether the process removing current residents is succession or displacement. It will become a wealthy community inaccessible to the poor (who often comprise the workforce of such neighborhoods).

Freeman, of course, also argues against rent control because of his faith in markets, leading me to think he is more of a neoclassical economist who does planning research than a planning researcher who sometimes finds utility in classical economic theory, which would contextualize his gentrification research.

[AC]

Of course it matters whether "the process removing current residents is succession or displacement." The objection to gentrification is that it is unfair -- the poor who worked to transform the neighborhood into a community, who did the hard work that made the neighborhood attractive to the wealthier, are run off as their reward. That objection doesn't apply to the poor who didn't live there when the neighborhood gentrified.

As for rent control, you hardly have to be a free marketeer to acknowledge its insidious effect on housing supply and housing quality, or that it redistributes wealth from the young to the old and from newcomers to incumbents. That's not neoclassical theory; that's the evidence, in every market where data have been collected.

[Dale]

AC, that is not the objection to gentrification in any discussion I have heard, simply because gentrification comes as a result of broader economic and demographic trends, not as a result of response to enterprising working class communities. If there are specific attractions, they are durable features such as location, accessibility, and historic architecture rather than to a community spirit.

Thus, the problem with gentrification is in the resulting spatial inequality and reduction of opportunity (for example access to jobs, services, local amenities) rather than the economic loss of any locally active individuals.