10 DECONSTRUCTING GENTRIFICATION

The Drivers of Gentrification

What exactly do we mean when we refer to gentrification? In its most well-known form, it is as Glass described: the movement of more affluent people into a less affluent residential neighborhood, resulting in upgrading of the housing stock and higher housing costs and potentially over time displacing those she referred to as the “original working-class occupiers.”⁹ Picking up on this theme, radical geographer Neil Smith, perhaps the most prominent writer on gentrification during the 1970s and 1980s, distinguished between gentrification and redevelopment, writing in 1982 that gentrification was “the process by which working class residential neighborhoods are rehabilitated by middle class homebuyers, landlords and professional developers, … [while] redevelopment involves not rehabilitation of old structures but the construction of new buildings on previously developed land.”¹⁰ Today, however, most people would probably agree that other forms of neighborhood change or neighborhood formation, including not only the conversion of downtown office buildings and industrial lofts to residential use but also what Mark Davidson and Loretta Lees have called “new-build” gentrification,¹¹ or the construction of new housing in previously vacant and underutilized urban areas, should also be considered forms of gentrification. The common denominator of all of these is the movement of a distinct “gentrifier” demographic into urban space, changing existing neighborhoods and forming new ones.

Thus, at one level the central driver of gentrification can be seen as the emergence of what can be considered a demographic of gentrifiers, a critical mass of people who share the desire, resources, and ability as well as a sense of what they are looking for in a neighborhood to gentrify urban space, that is, to transform it in the ways that have come to be known as gentrification. That is a critically important part of the picture but only one part. To understand how gentrification has become a significant phenomenon, it is necessary to understand how gentrifiers are formed, why their destination is the central city rather than elsewhere, and how gentrifiable housing and neighborhoods come into being.

As we examine these three questions, it is essential to keep the context in mind: neighborhood change is a constant, and gentrification is a form of neighborhood change. Gentrification is not a phenomenon that somehow exists outside the larger pattern of constant neighborhood flux. Neighborhoods move up, down, up and then down, or vice versa. Both the earlier downgrading of Glass’s large Victorian homes and their subsequent upgrading were part of that same fundamental flux. Within that framework, however, gentrification is a distinct and important form of neighborhood change, if not quite new at least new in its scope and significance. It would be well worth analyzing even if it played a far less important role in contemporary American urban life and neighborhood discourse than it does.

In some respects, the question of who are the gentrifiers is the simplest of the three. As we discussed in chapter 7, gentrification of American cities has been overwhelmingly driven by the influx of young well-educated adults, often referred to as the millennial generation. While much media attention has been given to the movement of older empty nester households to urban neighborhoods, there is little evidence that they make up more than a small part of the universe of gentrifiers, although their greater affluence makes them a popular media subject as well as highly attractive to developers. Canadian geographer Markus Moos has suggested that the phenomenon be renamed “youthification.”¹²

One factor that contributed to the higher rate of gentrification since 2000 than during the preceding decades was the extent to which the younger cohort grew nationally. While their numbers increased by less than two million from 1982 to 2000, they increased by over five million from 2000 to 2018. As the cohort grew, an increasing share of them moved to central cities. As both Pittsburgh’s and Baltimore’s total population continued to decline, the number of adults aged twenty-five to thirty-four with a BA or higher degree in both cities more than doubled. Today, one out of four adult residents in Boston and Washington, D.C., and nearly one out of five in Pittsburgh is twenty-five to thirty-four years old with a college degree.

Underlying the phenomenon of gentrification are the major transformations in the US economy that have taken place over the past fifty or more years. As many have written, the economic function of cities in the developed world has shifted from production to consumption, a change that was particularly jarring for cities that had historically been centers of industrial production. As they lost manufacturing jobs, cities grew jobs requiring education and specialized skills, most often concentrated in health care and higher education, the so-called eds and meds sector, although some cities developed distinct specializations in other sectors. Financial sector jobs grew in New York City, and tech jobs grew in Seattle, while in Washington, D.C., a large and highly diverse body of well-paid high-skill jobs grew in the myriad businesses, think tanks, and associations that sought to benefit from proximity to the federal government.

The shift from production to consumption and the growth in high-wage, high-skill employment at the same time as the cohorts of young educated adults were growing meant that their purchasing power was that much greater. This was also true of investment capital generally, the extent and availability of which grew steadily during the 1990s and early 2000s. While this purchasing power and capital needed an outlet, it was far from foreordained that so much of it should flow into the cities or take the forms it has taken.

Before exploring why it did so, it is important to reiterate a point made earlier; namely, far from all of the available capital and purchasing power that is being invested in growth and development is going into the cities. While more has gone into the cities since 2000 than in the two previous decades, as revival and gentrification take place in the cities, the suburban ring around those same cities continues to expand, and large numbers of working-class and middle-class people, today as often African American as white, continue to leave the central cities for suburbia. Gentrification is but one of many simultaneous processes of neighborhood change taking place in twenty-first-century America and, for all its political visibility, far from the most prevalent one, again outside a handful of highly visible magnet cities.

At the same time as they were growing high-skill white-collar jobs, however, the cities were becoming more attractive destinations for in-migrants in other ways. They were becoming safer. After peaking in the early 1990s, violent crime began to drop across the United States, a drop that was experienced in most major cities.¹³ From 1995 to 2018, the number of murders dropped by 56 percent in Washington, D.C., even as its population grew by over 20 percent. Urban amenities began to flourish, ranging from reclaimed waterfronts to music and theater venues and restaurants. More and more cities became, in sociologist Terry Nichols Clark’s phrase, “entertainment machines” or, in Michael Sorkin’s more dismissive phase, “theme parks.”¹⁴ Cities increasingly became places where wealth was spent rather than created, growing by providing the services and amenities sought by a consumption-oriented society. All of these trends were part of a single interactive process in which safety, amenities, job growth, investment, and the in-migration of young college graduates have built on one another in reinforcing causal loops.

Amenities, which can be a scenic waterfront or a cluster of theaters and restaurants such as Cleveland’s Playhouse Square, are not merely the product of consumption demand but are themselves generators of demand, drawing people with money to spend and wealth-creating skills to cities. A critical part of this is what Clark calls the “scene.”¹⁵ When enough amenities cluster in one area to form a critical mass, they create scenes. Scenes draw people together to share activities, participate in a distinctive shared atmosphere, and define their identities by sharing the scene with other like-minded people. Scenes also offer young unattached people the greatest opportunity to make friends and identify potential romantic partners.

Many factors contribute to drawing young people to these cities, but the presence of a “scene” is a critical element. Millennials, who set the pace for urban revival, cluster in areas that offer the amenities that most resonate with their interests and lifestyle. These areas have not only restaurants, cafés, and music venues but also greater transit accessibility and high density as well as lively mixtures of different activities on the same block or even in the same building. In that light, it is not surprising that the reinvention of historically nonresidential downtowns, with their high density and transit connectivity, as largely residential mixed-use areas is a prominent feature of the urban revival. While the underlying reasons for their preferences may be unclear, their desire for these amenities and the value of a critical mass of amenities in creating a mutually reinforcing cycle of amenity growth and in-migration are unquestionable.

The increased attractiveness of the cities paralleled and undoubtedly reinforced a growing tendency among educated young people to want to live in cities. While recent research found little difference in the 1980s between the migration patterns of people aged twenty-five to thirty-four compared to older age groups, those patterns began to shift significantly in the 1990s.¹⁶ Since 2000 the young grads have made up a disproportionate share of urban in-migrants, with their numbers in some cities outweighing the simultaneous out-migration of everybody else.

By highlighting the role of the educated young in-migrants in gentrification, we are taking sides in a debate that was triggered by Neil Smith in a 1979 article titled “A Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People,” which has since been frequently quoted and reprinted.¹⁷ The same article propounded the “rent gap” hypothesis, which we discuss below. Writing from a more or less classical Marxist perspective, Smith sees both the disinvestment in declining areas and the reinvestment in gentrifying ones as being driven by the flow of capital. The relationship between people and capital, however, is more complex and more interactive.

While such theoretical formulations tend to treat people as passive beings blindly following larger forces beyond their control or knowledge, individual agency needs to be taken far more seriously as a factor in gentrification. Indeed, the evidence on the ground suggests that most often people precede capital into a neighborhood; namely, the initial stages of gentrification are driven by a series of discrete individual decisions to buy or rent in a particular lower-income neighborhood, using modest financial resources cobbled together from various sources and often following on the emergence and diffusion of a narrative about the neighborhood.¹⁸ Creating an upscale neighborhood housing market is an incremental process, beginning slowly and, if successful, gradually gathering speed. Capital follows people, often first in the form of small developers, rehabbers, and flippers and only gradually later, typically after the newly upscale market character of the area has begun to solidify, by corporate and institutional investment in the form of large multifamily, commercial, or mixed-use developments.

Although a few early gentrification projects were fueled by public money, most prominently perhaps Philadelphia’s Society Hill, into which the city sunk millions in urban renewal funds, direct intervention by government today to initiate gentrification is rare. The initial stages of gentrification may indeed catch local planners by surprise. Once gentrification of a neighborhood has begun, however, local government may step in to help move it along by providing amenities such as park or streetscape improvements or selling city-owned land to developers; more rarely, cities may implement measures to discourage displacement or keep existing low-income housing from being lost.

That leaves perhaps the most complex question of all: why certain neighborhoods gentrify while others do not. Here, much of the scholarly literature is not only not helpful but even misleading, most notably Smith’s well-known rent gap hypothesis, which has become a staple of academic analysis of gentrification. The rent gap hypothesis begins with the incontrovertible proposition that the capital initially invested in many neighborhoods, principally in the form of the neighborhood’s housing stock, is often devalued over time by a series of forces, some arguably neutral but others malign, such as landlord milking, redlining, and abandonment. Smith then argues that

as filtering and neighborhood decline proceed, the rent gap widens. Gentrification occurs when the gap is wide enough that developers can purchase shells cheaply, can pay the builders’ costs and profit for rehabilitation, can pay interest on mortgage and construction loans, and can then sell the end product for a sale price that leaves a satisfactory return to the developer. The entire ground rent, or a large portion of it, is now capitalized; the neighborhood has been “recycled” and begins a new cycle of use.¹⁹

Reduced to its essence, this is a roundabout restatement of the obvious proposition that in a market economy such as the United States, property is only redeveloped, reused, or recycled when someone has a good financial reason for doing so, period. As an explanation for gentrification, however, it is worthless, as numerous scholars have pointed out again and again, including Robert Beauregard, who wrote in 1986 that “the ‘rent gap’ argument provides only one of the necessary conditions for gentrification and none of the sufficient ones.”²⁰ Subsequent critiques by other scholars have been far more devastating.²¹

We would not mention the rent gap hypothesis were it not for its continued prominence in the literature and even more for the fact that it has led, in ways perhaps not necessarily intended by Smith, to two widely held but fundamentally erroneous ideas about why and how places gentrify. The first fallacy is that the greater the rent gap, the more likely gentrification is to happen, and the second is that gentrification is an inevitable outcome of decline. While neither proposition is remotely supported by evidence on the ground, both are alive and well in the popular literature and in the politics of gentrification.

To be sure, it is reasonable to assume that for gentrification to take place somebody has to believe that the potential value of a property is or will become greater than its current value, though even that proposition is far from universally true, as witnessed by the restoration of lofts and industrial buildings by artists driven by lifestyle rather than economic reasons. But even assuming that it is usually true, it is not a sufficient condition, as Beauregard points out. As we noted earlier, the great majority of urban neighborhoods have not gentrified; moreover, the neighborhoods that have been most devalued, and thus in theory have the greatest hypothetical rent gaps, are usually the last to gentrify if they ever do.

Gentrification is not a random phenomenon, landing anywhere property values are low enough. Moreover, while the extent of gentrification in any one city may depend on the size of demand in that city, which corresponds to the influx of wealth we discussed in chapter 5, aggregate demand tells us nothing about where within the city gentrification will take place. In cities other than a handful of particularly hot markets, gentrification is both limited and selective. A few neighborhoods gentrify, but most do not.

In contrast to gauzy theoretical formulations, solid empirical research can help identify which neighborhoods are more likely and which less likely to gentrify. Research has identified three features of urban neighborhoods that appear to be most important in establishing the likelihood of them gentrifying. All are logical enough, although one may initially appear to be counterintuitive.

The first and most powerful factor is location. Simply stated, an area that is adjacent to a strong high-value neighborhood or to a particular amenity or center of activity such as a body of water or major university is more likely to gentrify than one that is not. Indeed, that proposition can be put more strongly in the reverse: if an area is not close to such a neighborhood, amenity, or center of activity its likelihood of gentrifying is extremely small, not zero perhaps, but exceptions are vanishingly few. Two rigorous studies have found that location in this sense is the single strongest predictor of whether a neighborhood will gentrify.²²

In Philadelphia, gentrification moved in linear fashion from Society Hill southward into Queen Village and Bella Vista, northeast from Old City into Northern Liberties and Fishtown, and from the University of Pennsylvania into West Philadelphia. In Baltimore, it has pushed eastward along the Inner Harbor from areas first redeveloped in the 1970s and 1980s into Canton, Fells Point, and Patterson Park as well as south and northwest from downtown and south and west from the Johns Hopkins University campus into Remington, Hampden, and Woodberry and east into Charles Village.

The second factor is a largely intact neighborhood fabric, that is, that the original built texture of homes and other structures that make up the neighborhood is still largely intact even though much of it may be deteriorated and in need of repair or rehabilitation. This is in contrast to heavily disinvested urban neighborhoods, where abandonment and demolition have replaced the traditional neighborhood fabric with a “perforated” one characterized more by vacant lots and abandoned buildings. This distinction is harder to quantify than location but not difficult to identify. Figures 10.1 and 10.2 show streets in two Baltimore neighborhoods, both initially developed with all but identical row houses but with vastly different textures today.

The precise nature of the fabric is less important. Location and cost factors being equal, it is more likely that a neighborhood of historic houses with superb architectural details will gentrify than one with more ordinary houses, but architectural or historic distinction are not conditions of gentrification. All of Baltimore’s gentrifying neighborhoods are row house neighborhoods, but some are grand and historically or architecturally significant, while others are more modest and of no particular distinction, such as the Hampden neighborhood shown in figure 10.1. As distinct from large-scale redevelopment, where large numbers of vacancies are an opportunity, large numbers of vacant buildings and vacant lots are a deterrent to small-scale individual rehabilitation and home-buying efforts by individuals who by and large want to become part of a neighborhood—at least as an intact physical entity—rather than a patchy, fragmented environment.

The third factor is possibly counterintuitive. In much of the popular discourse, gentrification is seen as targeting African American neighborhoods, as exemplified in one blogger’s comment: “This definition [of gentrification] says nothing about skin color but the overwhelming majority of the time, this plays out along the lines of white and black. The white people move in, and the Black people are moved out.”²³ In fact, gentrification on the ground tends to avoid such areas. This proposition has been well documented by research in cities as diverse as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Baltimore.²⁴ A recent study of Baltimore found 110 “gentrifiable” (that is, not upper income to begin with) predominantly Black census tracts in 2000, of which only 4 had gentrified by 2017; by contrast, 18, or nearly half of the 40 predominantly white gentrifiable tracts, were gentrifying.²⁵

This does not mean that no gentrification of Black neighborhoods is taking place in those cities or elsewhere. Black neighborhoods are gentrifying, but their numbers are small compared to the effect of gentrification on white—and, in Chicago, Latinx—working-class neighborhoods, at least until the latter neighborhoods have been “used up.” The perception that gentrification targets Black neighborhoods has been fostered by the fact that in a few highly visible cities, most notably Washington, D.C., the only “gentrifiable” neighborhoods were Black ones, while in New York City gentrification in a small number of Black neighborhoods such as Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant has been most visible, notwithstanding the evidence mustered by Timberlake and Johns-Wolfe that gentrification in New York has been more extensive in white working-class neighborhoods.²⁶

This phenomenon also undercuts the widely expressed belief—a fundamental part of Smith’s rent gap hypothesis—that neighborhoods need to decline greatly before they can be gentrified. While it may be true of some gentrifying neighborhoods, it is not usually true; the most common gentrifying area is a white working-class neighborhood, which may at one point have been a more affluent area but may have long been a more or less stable, albeit modest and low-priced, neighborhood. The late nineteenth-century tenements of Hoboken, New Jersey, which are today condominium apartments selling for upwards of $500,000, were built for and remained rudimentary housing for working-class immigrants and their descendants until that small city’s proximity to Manhattan led to its gentrification beginning in the 1970s. Similarly, Hampden in Baltimore was another long-standing white working-class neighborhood until its proximity to Johns Hopkins University made its modest row houses attractive to people with ties to the university.

Given that gentrifiers for the most part are likely to be white, the pattern of racial avoidance is sadly predictable from the racialized history of America’s neighborhoods and white home buyer behavior. As we discussed in chapter 8 on race, white home buyers are significantly less likely to buy—or even look at—homes in predominantly Black neighborhoods, and whites are more likely to perceive a neighborhood as being dangerous if it is predominantly African American. Behavioral economists have found that people consistently place a greater premium on avoiding risk than on pursuing gain. Thus, from the perception of the initial group of white gentrifiers, who are already accepting what they consider to be not insignificant risks by moving into a neighborhood that has been devalued by the market, race becomes an added risk factor they could be expected to avoid if possible. While this reasoning is speculative, it is a credible explanation for a well-documented and widespread phenomenon.

The foregoing discussion has illuminated why and to some extent how gentrification happens. It leads to the even more complex question of what gentrification means; what it means in the larger context of neighborhood change and what it means for both the gentrifiers and particularly for the people who live in a neighborhood that is undergoing gentrification. That in turn raises further questions about gentrification as a social and political issue, questions that transcend the spatial frame of the gentrifying neighborhood. Much of this, however, begins with the question of the relationship between gentrification and displacement.

Gentrification and Displacement

Much of the opposition to gentrification has centered around the issue of displacement of longtime residents by more affluent newcomers. The idea of people being pushed out of communities that they and people like them may have occupied for years through no fault of their own except for not having enough money is understandably distasteful to any reasonable person. Reports of landlords in rapidly gentrifying areas in New York City and San Francisco forcing longtime tenants out of their apartments through unethical or illegal means are even more abhorrent.

Beyond the visceral, anecdotal level, however, there are many questions about the actual relationship between gentrification and displacement, beginning with what we mean by the term “displacement.” The term has many meanings, fraught with implications for our understanding both of gentrification and its social effects. Dissecting the different forms of what may be considered from various perspectives to be displacement is not an effort to downplay the human distress and conflict associated with gentrification; instead, understanding the differences may help us think of better ways to minimize that distress.

Even as one attempts to dissect these terms, it is important to keep in mind the extent to which they are seen through the lens of not merely today’s events but also history. In that respect, the most important history is that of the federal urban renewal and interstate highway construction programs, which displaced—in the starkest, most literal sense of the term—well over half a million American households during the 1950s and 1960s. As discussed in chapter 4, a disproportionate share of these households were people of color, largely African Americans. Hundreds of Black neighborhoods were eradicated or eviscerated.

The urban renewal wave ebbed during the late 1960s. The program itself was abolished in 1974, by which time the interstate highway system was largely in place, but the memory of displacement and destruction of neighborhoods remained present, as it does today. As psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove writes in her book Root Shock, “the howl of pain that went up with the first bulldozers has grown and deepened.”²⁷ Those memories, layered over with decades of further indignities, make up the collective memory of America’s urban Black population and are an ever-present subtext to any discussion of gentrification. As we look at displacement, we recognize that while it is important to interrogate the term critically, it is equally important to understand the social and historical context in which it exists and that the dispute over displacement is far more than a technical one.

Displacement as used in media and political discourse is (at least) three distinct and often conflated phenomena. We will refer to them as physical displacement, replacement, and dislocation, or cultural (and political) displacement. Physical displacement and replacement are most often conflated. It is not unusual to find studies that measure the change in a particular group’s population before and after a neighborhood has been gentrified and define any decline in that population as displacement; thus, if there were one hundred Black renter households in an area in 2000 and fifty in 2018, they conclude that fifty were “displaced.”²⁸ We find that assumption questionable. We have no idea why they left. If a family leaves a house or apartment for personal reasons—job change, desire for a larger (or smaller) dwelling, and so on—unrelated to changes in neighborhood conditions and is replaced by a different type of family, however defined, is that displacement?

In 1978, Grier and Grier laid out a more rigorous definition of physical displacement. Displacement occurs “when any household is forced to move from its residence by conditions … which (1) are beyond the household’s reasonable ability to control or prevent; (2) occur despite the household’s having met all previously imposed conditions of occupancy; and (3) make continued occupancy by that household impossible, hazardous or unaffordable.”²⁹

Thus, if a tenant has been paying rent reliably but the landlord raises it to a level where she can no longer afford to do so and subsequently evicts her for nonpayment of rent, that is displacement and, depending on the circumstances, may be attributable to gentrification. We also argue, although the Griers would disagree, that if a poor tenant paying over half of her income to rent a house in a low-income neighborhood loses her job, cannot pay her rent, and is evicted as a result, that too is displacement. Her poverty and the low wages she is earning are both conditions beyond her control. That type of displacement, however, has everything to do with poverty and a great deal to do with the structural cost of even modest housing but rarely anything to do with gentrification.

While it is easy to measure gross demographic change over time, it is far more difficult to measure physical displacement in the sense used by Grier and Grier, or any similar definition, and determine how much of it to attribute to gentrification. Thus, much of the research is based on more or less crude proxies or anecdotes, usually with ambiguous or misleading results. Pulling together what we can say about this, the evidence suggests that in most places, physical displacement is not widespread. The principal exceptions may be hot neighborhoods in hot market cities, such as parts of Brooklyn and San Francisco, where both the pressure and the pace of gentrification are unusual by comparison to most cities and where the economic rewards to unscrupulous landlords, developers, and others from pushing people out may be considerable. By contrast, little evidence of systemic displacement in this sense has been found in connection with gentrification in other cities.³⁰

Whether widespread or sporadic, displacement in the sense of deliberate practices that unjustly and adversely affect the well-being of vulnerable families and individuals should not be acceptable. State and local governments should take action to minimize displacement and hold anyone acting inappropriately to account.³¹ Replacement, on the other hand, is much more ambiguous and complex.

While physical displacement results from an intentional action, replacement, which is much more common in gentrifying neighborhoods, is often a facially neutral, impersonal market outcome. Assume that a low-income Black tenant moves out of a house in a gentrifying neighborhood for reasons unrelated to gentrification. Once the house is vacant, the landlord rents it to a more affluent white tenant or sells it to a white home buyer. This is in fact a process that often takes place in gentrifying neighborhoods, reflecting the reality that renters in the United States turn over exceptionally often. In many cities, the average length of a tenant’s tenure is only around two years.

This process will result over time in a significant decline in the number of low-income tenants in a gentrifying neighborhood and, if it is a largely Black neighborhood with mostly white gentrifiers, in a significant decline in the number of low-income Black tenants without anyone directly displaced, solely as an outcome of market forces. If all of those seeking rental housing in a neighborhood are low-income Black households, the number of low-income Black tenants in that neighborhood will remain the same or grow. If the pool of prospective tenants changes and gradually includes more households who are white, the number of Black tenants will gradually decline. If, as is likely, some landlords may prefer to rent to white rather than economically similar Black tenants or, worse, actively discriminate against prospective Black tenants, the number of Black tenants may decline even faster. But their number will decline even with no disproportionate rent increases and no racially discriminatory or preferential behavior by landlords.³² In a study of gentrification in Baltimore, Mallach found that although the number of Black households in gentrifying neighborhoods declined, the number of white low-income households declined far more; for every Black household replaced, five low-income white households were replaced.³³ The underlying dynamic of change can be racially neutral.

At its most fundamental level, this process of replacement is an inevitable product of not only neighborhood change but also the larger processes of demographic and social change. Just as neighborhood change is a constant, the process of replacement—economic, demographic, social, racial, ethnic, lifestyle, and so on—is the principal means by which all neighborhood change, not just gentrification, takes place.

Replacement may be inevitable, but that does not mean it is painless. Many forms of neighborhood change involve pain or loss to varying degrees. In gentrifying neighborhoods, the pain of replacement, with the pain of past displacements always present, may be compounded by the fact that some families who may have hoped to find a new dwelling within the same neighborhood are forced to move to an unfamiliar neighborhood. While in some cities—St. Louis being one—they may find no less affordable housing a few blocks away, in others such as Seattle and Washington, D.C., they may have to move a considerable distance, ending up with higher housing costs compounded by higher commuting costs. That, of course, is not as much about their neighborhood’s gentrification as it is about the lack of affordable housing in the city and its region.

Paralleling replacement is the effect of gentrification on those who remain in the gentrifying neighborhood, a phenomenon often referred to as cultural displacement. A household in a gentrifying neighborhood may still be living in the same house or apartment in the physical sense, but as the neighborhood changes around them, the familiar place they know is being replaced with something different, perhaps even alien or hostile, with different faces, values, stores, sounds, and smells. A place that people once thought of as their territory is no longer theirs.

This can take many forms. It can be the shock of seeing a familiar barbershop or bodega turn into a wine bar or bicycle repair shop or experiencing social pressure from new residents with new norms of neighborhood behavior. As one longtime resident of a changing St. Louis neighborhood plaintively asked an interviewer, “Why can’t we do what we do? Why can’t we put chairs outside our houses?”³⁴ Changing norms and standards can lead to conflict, which can escalate when governmental authority enters the picture as when police are called over noise issues or an elderly longtime homeowner’s sagging porch becomes the subject of a code enforcement complaint by the new neighbor in the expensively restored house next door.

At one level, it can reasonably be argued that all nontrivial neighborhood change may create some degree of cultural displacement. Rachel Woldoff, in her ethnographic study White Flight, Black Flight, poignantly describes the sense of cultural displacement experienced by middle-class Black homeowners as their neighborhood became increasingly populated by lower-income Black tenants and the neighborhood’s culture changed.³⁵ The juxtaposition of two or more groups of people in the same neighborhood with significantly different norms for appropriate neighboring activity and public behavior, unless mediated through mutually agreed-upon guidelines for coexistence, can be profoundly destabilizing to both the neighborhood as an entity and the individuals who make up that neighborhood. The particular ways in which different groups may vary—race, ethnicity, income, age, and many other factors—are likely in the final analysis to be less significant than the mere fact of difference.

That said, there is a profound difference between cultural displacement as a generic reality of neighborhood change and that experienced or feared by lower-income Black residents in neighborhoods currently or potentially affected by the influx of affluent white households. When race and income are juxtaposed in the context of gentrification, they combine the two most pervasive fault lines in American society: the economic gap between haves and have-nots and, even more, our culture’s Black-white racial divide. Those fault lines are also about power, not so much political power in the conventional sense, although that is also true, but rather about the power to influence one’s environment. For that reason, cultural displacement, as has been expressed by many African American observers, is far from a trivial concern.³⁶ Moreover, it reflects the extent to which gentrification, while at one level simply another form of neighborhood change, is also about power and its antithesis, powerlessness.

Gentrification and Power(lessness)

While gentrification is one of many forms that neighborhood change can take, it differs fundamentally from other forms of change in that it is also implicitly about power, about the imbalance of power between those with more and those with less money, particularly when that imbalance is also racial, between Black and white. While the inoffensive white couple that buys a row house north of Patterson Park in Baltimore may not think of themselves as wielding power, their power is embodied in their greater income or wealth than that of their neighbors. While that is true up to a point under any circumstances, it is greatly magnified by the white-Black imbalance of power and status that pervades American society.

This power imbalance underlying gentrification has become a flashpoint for people in urban Black neighborhoods, whether or not their neighborhood is undergoing gentrification today or may do so in the future. It reflects, as reporter Jake Flanagin writes, “the utter and complete lack of control the poor and the nonwhite have in where they are permitted to live.”³⁷ Thus, any thoughtful Black advocate understands that if their neighborhood were to be targeted by gentrification, they would be faced with a force they would be largely powerless to influence. Even if the likelihood of gentrification in a particular African American neighborhood may be remote, the fear is magnified many times over by the underlying powerlessness of its residents. This was brought home by an anecdote told to one of the authors by our colleague Paul Brophy, who was teaching a graduate seminar at Washington University in St. Louis. A young African American student in the class was clearly unhappy with much of Brophy’s presentation and finally made his point directly. “Listen, professor. When you talk about gentrification, you talk about numbers, about incomes and house prices and such. When we talk about gentrification, it’s about powerlessness.”³⁸

The rent gap hypothesis, which can be read to assert that disinvestment is a preamble to gentrification, provides intellectual ballast for these fears. While far more African American neighborhoods in the United States have declined or remained poor and disinvested in recent decades than have gentrified, the gentrification discourse has become as much or more about the lack of investment in distressed African American neighborhoods as it is about investment or displacement in those neighborhoods. Along those lines, one of the authors reported from a focus group on gentrification he and his colleagues organized in St. Louis that “when [asked to talk] about economically improving neighborhoods, [Black] participants repeatedly pivoted to talk about economically declining neighborhoods.”³⁹ Or as Stephen Danley and Rasheeda Weaver put it in a recent study of Camden, New Jersey, “residents fear gentrification in part because they have been physically excluded from development.”⁴⁰

At some point, however, the rhetoric of gentrification disconnects from spatial change and connects instead to the continuing economic and political dispossession of urban African American communities. That shift is encouraged by the increasingly explicit racialization of the popular gentrification discourse, as reflected in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blunt language: “ ‘gentrification’ is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy, is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years, and these new urbanites living off of that interest are, all of them, exulting in a crime.”⁴¹ Black blogger Hopewell puts it even more strongly. “Gentrification is a battle for physical spaces in cities but in the ultimate sense, a fight to maintain white power and dominance in America.… To control cities is to maintain white power, even in an emerging majority-minority America. Gentrification is war and black people sit in the crosshairs.”⁴² To these and other writers, the term “gentrification” has gone far beyond Ruth Glass’s initial definition in order to stand for the larger ways in which the racial power imbalance operates, or is perceived to operate, in contemporary America.

The imbalance of power is a pervasive facet of urban reality, disproportionately affecting those marginalized by both their race and their social class. Its role in gentrifying lower-income neighborhoods is only one of the ways in which it operates. Thus, it seems logical to extend the use of the term “gentrification” to the ways in which those power imbalances perpetuate the disadvantages of those cities’ heavily disinvested communities—few of which in cities such as Detroit and St. Louis have any likelihood of undergoing spatial gentrification—and blight the dreams of those cities’ low-income residents, particularly those marginalized by both race and class. This is true whether or not they live in neighborhoods that are being gentrified, in the classical use of the term.

While the power imbalance is real and the outrage justified, there is danger in layering so much additional meaning onto the term “gentrification.” First, it obscures other neighborhood changes taking place in the same cities, particularly neighborhood decline, affecting the lives of far more low-income and working-class Black families than gentrification, as we discuss in chapter 11. Second, it can lead to opposition to almost any kind of investment designed to revive or stabilize struggling and disinvested neighborhoods and improve living conditions for the families living there. As progressive housing advocate Rick Jacobus has written, “The way most people talk and think about [gentrification] seems to create a black hole of self-doubt from which no realistic strategy for neighborhood improvement can escape.”⁴³ Since it is unlikely that a new term will be coined in the foreseeable future to distinguish between the many things that currently coexist uneasily under the gentrification umbrella, local leaders need to be aware of the paralyzing and polarizing effects of the “g-word” and find other ways to talk about neighborhood change.

The Meaning and Sustainability of Gentrification as Neighborhood Change

Looking at gentrification in the context of change over time, it can be understood as a distinct version of neighborhood change simultaneously incorporating economic change, generational change, lifestyle or cultural change, and sometimes, although less often, racial transition. While most other neighborhood change processes may embody one or two of these changes, few if any represent such a wholesale change in a neighborhood’s social configuration. These shifts are shown graphically in figure 10.3.

Philadelphia’s Fishtown and Northern Liberties neighborhoods are historically white working-class neighborhoods northeast of Center City that have largely gentrified since 2000. From 2000 to 2018, the share of adults with college degrees in the census tract straddling the two neighborhoods grew from 31 percent to 65 percent, from roughly equal to the national share to well above it.⁴⁴ The share of adults aged twenty-five to thirty-four increased from 18 percent to 49 percent, more than triple the national share. The tract median household income more than tripled. Over the same period, the share of children under age eighteen dropped from 21 percent to 11 percent.

The phenomenon of gentrification, with its simultaneous juxtaposition of youth, affluence, education, and childlessness and their attendant lifestyle, has spawned a strikingly new type of neighborhood with no real precedent in urban history.⁴⁵ As such, it forms a rich and still largely untapped area for research into the distinct dynamics of the gentrified neighborhood, but its distinctiveness also reflects its inherently problematic nature over and above the vexatious issues of displacement and power discussed earlier in this chapter.

One problematic issue, of which gentrification can be seen as both symptom and cause, is the increasing spatial, economic, and racial polarization of cities and their neighborhoods. As we discussed in chapter 7, for many decades the United States has been characterized by not only a diminishing middle class but also increasing social and economic sorting. Over these years people have organized themselves into increasingly homogenous neighborhoods, of which gentrification may be the most visible manifestation. As a result, gentrification also has become the most potent symbol of the growing polarization of the cities. As the number of middle-class neighborhoods shrinks, cities are characterized by increasing disparities of wealth and poverty, investment and neglect. While affluent young people move into some neighborhoods with distinct locational or other assets, both Black and white working-class and middle-class people continue to leave the cities for the suburbs.

For all the controversy over how gentrified neighborhoods come into being, they can make a credible case for being good neighborhoods, as we have defined the term earlier. But many do so at a price of being “good” solely for a population that is so highly stratified at so many levels that it excludes the great majority of the city’s population from effectively sharing in its benefits. That said, it must be recognized that there are pronounced variations among gentrifying neighborhoods. The trajectory of gentrification in still-struggling, slow-growth cities—such as St. Louis where, as one of the authors has shown, substantial lower-income populations continue to live in gentrifying neighborhoods long after the process of change has taken place—is a world apart from that in hot markets where the influx of youth and wealth is far greater.⁴⁶ In the former, a not unreasonable case can be made that the remaining less affluent residents of these neighborhoods benefit from the change in their neighborhood’s economic and social environment, offsetting whatever cultural displacement they may also feel. This is particularly true if they are homeowners and able to gain significant equity from their home’s appreciation. The extent to which those gains offset the losses is likely to be a matter for each individual to assess rather than something that can readily be generalized.

A second issue has to do with the sustainability of the gentrified neighborhood. Young people invariably grow older. Not quite as invariably but generally, young people also partner one another and often have children, which they raise together or separately. In the course of these changes, their behavioral preferences often shift. What then happens to neighborhoods whose existence is predicated on so many factors that are distinct to a particular moment in an individual’s life cycle? Are these neighborhoods sustainable, or do they carry within them the seeds of future decline?

Obviously no one knows, and the answer is likely to vary from city to city and neighborhood to neighborhood. The answer seems to hinge, however, on two critical variables: the extent to which neighborhoods see an ongoing influx of young grads to replace those who age out, as it were, from these neighborhoods and the extent to which gentrified neighborhoods evolve toward a broader demographic mix over time.

Regarding the former, demographer Dowell Myers has argued that the cities are at what he calls “peak millennial” and that the demand for urban living by this demographic will decline over the coming decades.⁴⁷ While Myers’s thesis received a good deal of media attention, it has been heatedly contested by others particularly Joe Cortright of City Observatory, who argues the contrary, concluding that “the urban wave we’ve experienced starting in the 1990s and accelerating in the past decade wasn’t propelled by generational growth so much as by a growing preference for urban living by young adults.”⁴⁸ Even assuming Cortright to be accurate in the near term, however, the pronounced decline in fertility and child-rearing in the United States over the past decade or more, coupled with possible shifts in urban preferences perhaps affected by the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, could validate Myers’s thesis in the longer term.

An alternative future for gentrifying neighborhoods is to evolve into neighborhoods that come to resemble other neighborhoods in having greater household diversity in terms of age and household characteristics, particularly with respect to child-rearing. A good example of such a neighborhood is Brooklyn’s Park Slope, one of the handful of 1970s gentrifying neighborhoods that has become increasingly diverse in terms of age and household type over time, albeit still overwhelmingly white and wealthy. In essence, from a demographic and economic standpoint, Park Slope has evolved to become a typical upscale neighborhood, while retaining a few vestiges of a onetime radical counterculture such as the famous Park Slope Food Coop. The likelihood of gentrifying neighborhoods evolving in similar manner is likely to be a product of how much they offer amenities that are perceived as desirable by households at different life cycle stages, especially attractive school options for child-rearing families, and how much the current generation of gentrifiers retain their preference for higher-density urban living as they age.

In the end, over the coming decades any given neighborhood could move in any direction, remaining a youth-oriented neighborhood, evolving into a more conventional upscale neighborhood, or falling backward and declining economically. How those three options are distributed across American cities will be affected by not only neighborhood conditions and characteristics but also large-scale economic, demographic, and cultural trends. At the same time, more neighborhoods are likely to experience gentrification pressures. How many more, however, is an open question. Although to some gentrification may appear to be a wave of seemingly infinite scale, it is inherently limited by economic and demographic constraints. The number of young people as well as empty nesters and others with both the resources and the inclination to gentrify neighborhoods is not infinite. When we look back at the period from 2009 to 2019, it is important to remember that this was a decade of both sustained overall economic growth and equally sustained disproportionate income growth in the upper segments of the distribution, both factors conducive to gentrification. The future may be very different.