What counts as gentrification?
In response to what I wrote about gentrification not driving low-income minorities from their neighborhoods, the reader tegwar raises a very good point: What exactly do we mean by "gentrification?" He writes:
I'm a touch underwhelmed on first glance. They define gentrifying neighborhoods as those which were in the bottom quintile by income in 1990 and experienced an increase of $10k in average income by 2000. That is an impressive step in income, but I'm not sure that's what we mean by gentrification. That increase would appear to have only moved a neighborhood up to somewhere near the 40th percentile of neighborhoods at best. My question: Do we think of gentrifying / gentrified neighborhoods as those still below the median income? Is that really when we see the white yuppie class flowing in?
I guess I'm just not sure they set their marks on gentrification quite right. Does gentrification involve the poorest neighborhoods simply becoming less poor or do we mean taking the neighborhood more toward 'upper middle class'?
It is a very sticky wicket, the business of defining gentrification. McKinnish, Walsh and White do use a pretty broad definition. I'd agree with that. Trying to narrow it down further, though, can raise other problems.
In Lance Freeman's 2005 study, a neighborhood had to meet the following criteria to be considered gentrifying:
1. Be located in the central city at the beginning of the intercensal period.
2. Have a median income less than the median (40th percentile) for that metropolitan area at the beginning of the intercensal period.
3. Have a proportion of housing built within the past 20 years lower than the proportion found at the median (40th percentile) for the respective metropolitan area.
4. Have a percentage increase in educational attainment greater than the median increase in educational attainment for that metropolitan area.
5. Have an increase in real housing prices during the intercensal period.
That combination of characteristics is definitely more thorough—and may better fit a gut understanding of gentrification—but the problem with it is that when you line everything up, "gentrifying" neighborhoods between 1990 and 2000 actually saw a slight decrease in median household income. That doesn't feel right either.
I think part of the issue is that we already have a vivid, anecdotal understanding of what gentrification is, and that every time we say that word we summon a host of politicized connotations. I wonder how the debate would change if we instead started calling it "localized economic betterment."
And in direct answer to your question, tegwar, yes, McKinnish, Walsh and White did see an inflow of white, college-educated people to the neighborhoods they defined as gentrifying. Three different cohorts—20-to-40-year-olds with no children, 20-to-40-year-olds with children, and 40-to-60-year-olds—all moved into gentrifying neighborhoods at significantly higher rates than they did into similar neighborhoods not considered to be gentrifying.
Barbara!
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1
I don't understand why one would need to define gentrification ex ante at all. Why not just take the neighborhoods we all know have gentrified, and look at what's happened to their demographics?
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2
How do we know that a neighborhood has gentrified? Because there's been a Metro story about people getting kicked out of their apartments? So we look at that sample and then confirm that gentrification does displace low-income minorities?
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3
I agree that defining gentrification is a "sticky wicket." However, I'm not sure I agree that our definition is overly broad. As you point out in your article, Barbara, we started with over 15,000 urban neighborhoods in 64 metropolitan areas. Using our definition of gentrification, only 457 of those neighborhoods are classified as gentrifying between 1990 and 2000. Among low-income neighborhoods in 1990, those gentrifying neighborhoods are in the 85th percentile in terms of income-change. We could probably slice the sample a little more thinly, and define gentrifying neighborhoods as, say, the 95th percentile of income-change in the low-income neighborhoods. We did play around with the definition a little before settling on the one we used. But keep in mind that we are further subdividing this gentrifying sample into 36 demographic groups (based on age, race/ethnicity, education, and the presence of children in the home). If we use a narrower definition of gentrification, we're less able to distinguish between what's happening to, for example, black households with a high school degree versus black households without a high school degree. That ability to distinguish finer demographic groups is one of the main innovations of the study.
-Kirk White
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4
One other wrinkle in Prof. White et. al's work- they are looking at two discrete images, 1990 and 2000. Nothing guarantees this captures neighborhoods at their nadir in 1990 nor their fully gentrified (apex seems the wrong word) state in 2000. In that sense, this definition may well capture areas in a state of 'mid-gentrification', for instance. There are surely other textures and complications... it's a big country and all of that. Gentrification seems difficult not only to define (like pornography do we only know it when we see it?) but possibly also to glimpse in the data.
It would be interesting to see some of what Felix Salmon is talking about- find areas which match our (whoever our is) sense of gentrification, quantify their qualities and changes. This seems like a useful way to specify gentrification- and that screen could then be applied to the census, etc data. But who knows, maybe those results would be just as conflicting as the others Barbara documents.
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5
One other wrinkle in Prof. White et. al's work- they are looking at two discrete images, 1990 and 2000. Nothing guarantees this captures neighborhoods at their nadir in 1990 nor their fully gentrified (apex seems the wrong word) state in 2000. In that sense, this definition may well capture areas in a state of 'mid-gentrification', for instance. There are surely other textures and complications... it's a big country and all of that. Gentrification seems difficult not only to define (like pornography do we only know it when we see it?) but possibly also to glimpse in the data.
It would be interesting to see some of what Felix Salmon is talking about- find areas which match our (whoever our is) sense of gentrification, quantify their qualities and changes. This seems like a useful way to specify gentrification- and that screen could then be applied to the census, etc data. But who knows, maybe those results would be just as conflicting as the others Barbara documents.
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6
Barbara, that was exactly the point I was making. An article in the metro section is not a scientific demographic survey. If you take the areas which the metro section deems to have gentrified, complete with anecdotal evidence of people getting kicked out of their apartments, and see whether, in fact, lower-income people are leaving the neighborhood at a higher rate than other neighborhoods, or than they used to pre-gentrification. My hunch is that the answer will be that no, they're not -- and that the people who do leave do so not because they're priced out, but rather because they own their own homes and are therefore essentially being offered about ten times their annual salary to move.
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7
Gotcha, Felix. Before his look at the national picture, Lance Freeman did a study right along those lines, focusing on New York City in the 1990s. He basically used our Metro-section test: "Based on our familiarity with recent trends in neighborhood change, we classified the subboroughs of Chelsea, Harlem, the Lower East Side, and Morningside Heights in Manhattan and Fort Greene, Park Slope, and Williamsburg in Brooklyn as gentrifying neighborhoods."
He and his co-author Frank Braconi from NYC's Citizen Housing and Planning Council came to the same conclusion as the national studies: "Our analysis indicates that rather than speeding up the departure of low-income residents through displacement, neighborhood gentrification in New York City was actually associated with a lower propensity of disadvantaged households to move. These findings suggest that normal housing succession is the primary channel through which neighborhood change occurs. Indeed, housing turnover may actually be slowed by the reduced mobility rates of lower-income and less-educated households. The most plausible explanation for this surprising finding is that gentrification brings with it neighborhood improvements that are valued by disadvantaged households, and they consequently make greater efforts to remain in their dwelling units, even if the proportion of their income devoted to rent rises."
(I typed all that in by hand, so if there are any mistakes that's my bad.)
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