The Effects of Inequality, Density, and Heterogeneous Residential Preferences on Urban Displacement and Metropolitan Structure: An Agent-Based Model

Geoff Boeing

doi:10.3390/urbansci2030076

Abstract

Urban displacement—when a household is forced to relocate due to conditions affecting its home or surroundings—often results from rising housing costs, particularly in wealthy, prosperous cities. However, its dynamics are complex and often difficult to understand. This paper presents an agent-based model of urban settlement, agglomeration, displacement, and sprawl. New settlements form around a spatial amenity that draws initial, poor settlers to subsist on the resource. As the settlement grows, subsequent settlers of varying income, skills, and interests are heterogeneously drawn to either the original amenity or to the emerging human agglomeration. As this agglomeration grows and densifies, land values increase, and the initial poor settlers are displaced from the spatial amenity on which they relied. Through path dependence, high-income residents remain clustered around this original amenity for which they have no direct use or interest. This toy model explores these dynamics, demonstrating a simplified mechanism of how urban displacement and gentrification can be sensitive to income inequality, density, and varied preferences for different types of amenities.

Highlights

Prosperous, affluent cities have become prominent battlegrounds in the public debate around gentrification and displacement of the poor [1,2]
The poor agents converge on the center to be near the natural amenity
This paper presented an agent-based model (ABM) of urban settlement, agglomeration, and displacement

Summary

Introduction

Prosperous, affluent cities have become prominent battlegrounds in the public debate around gentrification and displacement of the poor [1,2]. Subsequent newcomers might be attracted to this growing urban agglomeration, bringing to the city new skills, education, wealth, and higher land values that price out the poor, pushing them to the less accessible periphery. This paper presents an exploratory agent-based model (ABM) of urban settlement, agglomeration, and displacement It demonstrates a simplified conceptual mechanism by which the rich might displace the poor away from some spatial amenity on which the latter rely, despite the former having no direct interest in this amenity. In this model, settlements form around spatial amenities that draw initial settlers who subsist on this resource. As the agglomeration grows and densifies, land prices increase, and the initial poor settlers are displaced from the amenity on which they rely

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Conclusion