Gentrification and the suburbanization of poverty: evidence from a highly regulated housing system

Abstract

ABSTRACT There is growing evidence of a suburbanization of poverty in the context of accelerating gentrification, particularly in liberal housing systems. To what extent are similar processes occurring in highly regulated housing systems that undergo gentrification? To scrutinize this, we use a novel dataset covering all 997,497 residential relocations differentiated by household income and household type in the period between 2011 and 2018 for the case of Vienna, Austria. Drawing on GIS mapping and descriptive statistics, we find limited evidence of a systematic relocation of low-income households from gentrifying central areas or even to the suburbs, yet significantly higher mobility rates among this group. We argue, based on policy analysis and multivariate statistics, that this is a product of Vienna’s tenure segmented housing system. While the gentrifying private rental sector in the urban core is characterized by high levels of precarity, regularly pushing low-income residents to move house, entry barriers to other market segments “trap” many of them in this sector under insecure conditions. Our results raise broader questions about the context in the debate around gentrification and suburbanizing poverty and call for greater attention to detrimental impacts of gentrification on housing and life course trajectories of low-income residents without pronounced spatial displacement.