Gentrifying Area Research Articles

Returning from Prison to a Changed City: How Does Gentrification Shape the Employment and Housing Opportunities of Returning Citizens?

Studies of returning citizens have found they benefit from living in well-resourced neighborhoods, yet they face obstacles to securing housing in these communities. Insofar as gentrification involves investing more public and private resources into communities, this raises the question of how this investment affects returning citizens whose former homes are in gentrifying neighborhoods—a common circumstance in Washington, DC. Based on 37 in-depth interviews with returning citizens from Washington DC, this study explores the impact of gentrification. We find that the increased housing prices associated with gentrification make it difficult for returning citizens to move to gentrified areas; that gentrification exacerbates the barriers they face to accessing employment opportunities; and that gentrifiers often make returning citizens feel unwelcome in the communities where they were raised. In sum, we find that returning citizens, like other long-term residents of gentrifying neighborhoods, face structural barriers both to living in gentrified neighborhoods and to accessing available resources.

Whose sidewalk is it? Street vendors and the battle for San Diego’s foodscape

ABSTRACT Urban governments have become increasingly involved in gastrodevelopment, managing and monitoring foodscapes to stimulate growth. In that context, sidewalk vendors’ access to urban space has been fiercely debated in many cities. Stressing their informality, some argue that vendors activate public space, provide valuable services, and encourage entrepreneurship, while others emphasize the threats they pose to public safety, health, and competing businesses. This paper examines the motives behind San Diego’s restrictive sidewalk vending ordinance and assesses its impact on different types of vendors and neighborhoods across the city. Using mixed methods, including analyses of city records, census and online data, stakeholder interviews, and a 2022 survey of sidewalk and food truck vendors, we map the social geographies of street vending in San Diego and analyze their unevenness in the context of neoliberal urbanism, manifested in state-sanctioned gentrification, gastrodevelopment, increased policing of public space, and racial exclusion. Our findings show that instead of improving community food security and supporting immigrant microentrepreneurs, San Diego’s sidewalk vending ordinance privileges the demands of affluent and primarily white residents, resulting in an uneven street foodscape in which vending is mostly prohibited in exclusive areas, heavily managed in gentrifying areas, and merely tolerated in low-income areas.

Participatory evaluation: Generating community in a gentrified territory

ABSTRACT The process of gentrification encompasses numerous social, demographic, urbanistic, and economic consequences, among others. The majority of these outcomes are negative and demonstrate little consideration for the community and the territory in which they transpire. This paper presents a case study of a community project in a gentrified area of Palma (Balearic Islands – Spain), aimed at mitigating these consequences through community organization and empowerment. The article seeks to assess the subjective impact of the Intercultural Community Intervention Project and explore barriers to promoting participatory community development in gentrified locales. Findings indicate improvements incommunity networks and its responsiveness to social challenges, yet underscore difficulties in engaging the higher socio-economic status population . Another concern is the need for a technical team to sustain the community-driven process. In conclusion, community policies are recommended to empower the populace in addressing the social repercussions of gentrification by fostering spaces for participation and facilitating shared decision-making.

A double-edged sword: Residents’ views on the health consequences of gentrification in Porto, Portugal

Gentrification is currently shaping the urban environment in important ways. It also contributes to shaping the health of the inhabitants of gentrifying cities, although it is still unclear how. Gentrification processes are often linked to different drivers and have specific local translations, further complicating the study of the relationship between gentrification and health. We investigated this relationship in Porto, Portugal, a southern European city undergoing rampant transnational gentrification. In order to study how gentrification impacts health from the point of view of that city's residents, we conducted a study using photovoice with a sample of participants recruited from a population-based cohort, which was divided into three different groups: one from gentrifying areas of Porto, another from deprived non-gentrifying areas, and the other from affluent areas. The thematic analysis of data generated six themes, each referring to a change, or a set of connected changes, related to gentrification: increasing floating population, lack of housing access and displacement, construction and rehabilitation, changing local commerce, loss of place, and broader socioeconomic change. According to the accounts from participants, these changes affect health in different ways, both beneficial and harmful. Participants also reflected on how to act on this issue. This research adds to the knowledge about the relationship between gentrification and health by providing detailed and nuanced views about this relationship considering its city-wide impacts.

How common is greening in gentrifying areas?

ABSTRACT Green gentrification occurs when urban greening/sustainability interventions become implicated in neighbourhood upgrading and displacement of existing residents. However, current emphasis on urban sustainability in planning/policy agendas, coupled with political-economic factors producing uneven development, lead us to ask whether all gentrifying areas experience greening. Our descriptive analysis identified gentrifying areas in Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto (Canada), from 1996–2006 and 2006–2016, and determined the extent to which various greening interventions (parks, cycle lanes, community gardens, LEED-certified buildings, and rapid-rail transit) were introduced before, during, and after gentrification. Greening frequently occurred before and/or during, and after, gentrification. Our results indicate greening is common in gentrifying areas throughout the gentrification process, suggesting the need for a broader understanding of the relationship(s) between urban greening and gentrification. We outline a future research agenda to examine greening across gentrifying areas and further understand how these two processes shape each other in the remaking of neighborhoods/cities.

"The trauma machine expands faster than our services": Health risks for unhoused people in an early-stage gentrifying area.

While homelessness continues to be a prevalent problem throughout the United States, many urban neighborhoods are also concurrently experiencing an influx of affluent neighbors through gentrification, exposing the stark inequalities in housing access nationwide. Gentrification-induced changes in neighborhood dynamics have also been shown to affect the health of low-income and non-white groups, with high risks of trauma from displacement and exposure to violent crime and criminalization. This study addresses risk factors for health among the most vulnerable, unhoused individuals, and provides a detailed case study on the potential exposures to emotional and physical traumas for unhoused people in early-stage gentrifying areas. By conducting 17 semi-structured interviews with people who work with the unhoused community - health providers, nonprofit employees, neighborhood representatives, and developers - in Kensington, Philadelphia, we analyze how early-stage gentrification impacts the risks for negative health consequences among unhoused groups. Results show that gentrification impacts the health of unhoused people in four main areas that, all together, create what we identify as a "trauma machine" - that is compounding traumas for unhoused residents by 1) reducing and compromising spaces of safety from violent crime, 2) decreasing public services, 3) threatening the quality of healthcare, and 4) increasing the likelihood of displacement and associated trauma.

Neighborhood gentrification, wealth, and co-ethnic density associations with acculturation stressors among Chinese immigrants

ObjectiveThis study examined the cross-sectional relationships between neighborhood social composition and gentrification, and acculturation stressors. MethodsPerson-level data came from first-generation Chinese immigrants enrolled in the Immigrant Enclaves Study (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, baseline 2018–2020, N = 512). A validated scale was used to assess 22 stressors associated with migration or acculturation. Neighborhood characteristics from the American Community Survey 2015–2019 and 2008–2012 included: tract proportion of foreign born Chinese, neighborhood wealth, and past decade gentrification. Most neighborhood exposures were modeled as continuous as well as binary variables (intended to represent highest level of neighborhood exposure). Multivariable negative binomial regression adjusted for age, gender, income, education, employment, language, years in the U.S., and neighborhood variables (proportion co-ethnic, and neighborhood per capita income). ResultsThe majority of participants spoke Mandarin (68% vs Cantonese 32%), mean participant age was 52.7 years old, years in the US was 18, and nearly one-half of the sample had less than 8 years of education. Mean number of stressors was 5.9 with nearly 20% of participants reporting 11 or more stressors. Multivariable results found the number of acculturation stressors was 18% lower for residents in the highest co-ethnic density neighborhoods and 13% lower for residents in the highest wealth areas, compared to other areas (expβ 0.82, 95% CI [CI] 0.69, 0.98; expβ 0.87, CI 0.75, 1.01, respectively). Stressors were no different whether participants lived in gentrified areas or not. ConclusionsAmong middle-aged Chinese immigrants, acculturation stress was lower for residents in neighborhoods with higher proportion of Chinese immigrants and for residents in neighborhoods with higher wealth, whereas gentrification had no influence on acculturation stress. More work on this topic is needed with vulnerable populations such as this one, informed by local context.

The Peri-Urban Gentrification Process in Cisauk Subdistrict, Tangerang Regency, Indonesia

Gentrification is a phenomenon that occurs in many regions. Gentrification is characterized by the influx of more affluent residents into initially low-value areas. This influx increases the value of these areas, potentially leading to the displacement of people who cannot afford to remain in the neighborhood. This study aims to examine the cause and impacts of peri-urban gentrification in Cisauk District, Tangerang Regency. This study uses qualitative and remote sensing-based analysis to investigate gentrification's impact on six Cisauk sub-district villages. We used primary and secondary data for the analysis. The primary data was collected from observations, interviews, questionnaires, and Google Earth Engine data catalog to get Landsat 7 and 8 image-ries. The secondary was collected from the Central Bureau of Statistics. The Landsat data was used to identi-fy the change on the physical aspect, while the others were used to analyze the non-physical aspect. After-ward, positive and negative effects were explored, emphasizing residents' responses and adaptations. The re-sults showed that Cisauk Subdistrict faced a gentrification process driven by locational factors (i.e., proximity to toll road) and local government policies (i.e., spatial planning policy designating it as a high-density residential area). The positive impact of the gentrified area is that the region is developing economically much better, and many areas function better economically and so benefit the region and its people. On the other hand, the negative impacts of gentrified areas are that indigenous people are threatened with being forced to leave their villages, there are significant increases in land prices, and changes in people's social lives occur. To minimize the negative impact of gentrification, the government should promote the capacity of low-income households to access its benefits.

Gentrification and Air Quality in a Large Urban County in the United States

Introduction: Increases in industrialization and manufacturing have led to worsening pollution in some components of air quality. In addition, gentrification is occurring in large cities throughout the world. As these socioeconomic and demographic changes occur, there have been no studies examining the association of gentrification with air quality. To investigate this association, we studied the trends of gentrification, changes in racial distribution and changes in air quality in each zip code of a large urban county over a 40-year period. Methods: We conducted a retrospective longitudinal study over 40 years in Wayne County, Michigan using socioeconomic and demographic data from the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) and air quality data from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). To assess gentrification, longitudinal analyses were performed to examine median household income, percentage with a college education, median housing value, median gross rent and employment level. The racial distribution was evaluated in each zip code during the time period. Gentrification was studied in relation to air quality using nonparametric 2-sample Wilcon-Mann-Whitney tests and Binomial Generalized Linear Regression models. Results: Although air quality improved overall over the 40-year period, there was a lesser rate of improvement in gentrified areas. Furthermore, gentrification was strongly associated with racial distribution. The most substantial gentrification occurred from 2010 to 2020, in which a specific cluster of adjacent zip codes in downtown Detroit experienced intense gentrification and a drop in the percentage of African-American residents. Conclusions: Gentrified areas seem to have a less pronounced improvement in air quality over time. This reduction in air quality improvement is likely associated with demolitions and the construction of new buildings, such as sporting arenas and accompanying traffic density. Gentrification is also strongly associated with an increase in non-minority residents in an area. Although previous definitions of gentrification in the literature have not included racial distribution, we suggest that future definitions should include this metric given the strong association. Minority residents who are displaced as a result of gentrification do not experience the improvements in housing quality, accessibility to healthy foods and other associations of gentrification.

Gentrification, Health, and Intermediate Pathways: How Distinct Inequality Mechanisms Impact Health Disparities

Gentrification yields a variety of effects, yet the mechanisms linking gentrification to health are unclear. Although quantitative research has helped to identify some patterns, the processes whereby neighborhood dynamics impact health are layered and span multiple levels of health—individual, family, and community. According to research describing large-scale drivers of health, inequality (e.g., income and social) is a significant risk factor for worse health, morbidity, and mortality. Drawing from an inequality-health framework, this paper explores how inequality created by gentrification (e.g., segregated pockets of wealth alongside relative deprivation) harms health and well-being. The current study presents findings from lower-income African American women across 20 U.S. cities, and examines pathways by which gentrification increases inequality and stress for residents living in gentrifying areas. Results indicate that gentrification contributes to both direct (e.g., material scarcity) and indirect (e.g., displacement, distrust, lack of belonging) pathways that impact health, supporting mediation via four major pathways. Implications for further research, theorization, and policy are discussed.

Urban Revitalization and the Policing of Racial Territoriality

The results from several recent studies suggest that police stop rates are elevated in neighborhoods that are gentrified or undergoing gentrification. However, it remains unclear how these findings fit into the well-documented pattern of racialized proactive policing practices, often interpreted through a racial-threat lens. To further our understanding of how of law enforcement relates to gentrification as a racialized institution, I utilize pedestrian stop data from eight cities to analyze the interconnected relationships between neighborhood-level police stops, temporal changes in racial and ethnic composition, and gentrification processes. Results from negative binomial spatial-durbin models reveal that, controlling for local crime levels and other covariates, police stops are more prevalent in neighborhoods that have experienced decreases in black and Latinx populations and in those surrounding gentrified areas. However, because gentrified and gentrifying neighborhoods have experienced relatively larger losses of these minority residents, this relationship appears to be intertwined with processes of urban revitalization. Based on these results, I argue that the geographic concentration of proactive police stops operates as an instrument of urban social transformation, shaped by racial territoriality – the implicit and explicit claims of whites to urban spaces.

Behind Gentrification’s Gloss

Policy and scholarly debates on gentrification have mainly focused on displacement or improvements to neighborhood amenities. Less attention has been paid to actively worsening conditions for residents who don’t leave and for whom poor housing conditions are a perverse consequence of gentrification. Mapping city data on apartment code violations, we find that substandard housing conditions are surprisingly concentrated in gentrifying areas and not just low-income neighborhoods. Drawing on ethnographic observations our research finds that in gentrification while bringing new amenities to neighborhoods, can also give strong incentives to landlords to mistreat tenants in an attempt to drive them out intentionally.

Urban gentrification, social vulnerability, and environmental (in) justice: Perspectives from gentrifying metropolitan cities in Korea

By integrating urban gentrification dynamics with nexus of social vulnerability and environmental (in)justice, this study explores gentrification processes and community perceptions of gentrification outcomes across gentrifying areas within metropolitan areas corresponding to seven selected cities within South Korea. Combined with redefined urban gentrification drivers, mediators (or control variables), and outcomes, correlation analysis was undertaken using longitudinal secondary data and cross-sectional survey data. Such case study-based empirical approaches in a non-western context were applied to measure social vulnerability and environmental (in)justice index, map spatial distribution of the index, and address the relationships among the gentrification processes in the context of social vulnerability and environmental (in)justice. Our results suggest that a positive correlation between social vulnerability to gentrification and environmental (in)justice exists particularly in urban core areas. Gentrification outcomes by community perceptions exhibited increases in house sale price and household displacement. Our attempts can provide policymakers, planners, practitioners, and residents with a better understanding of social and environmental constraints or benefits of gentrification along with the important concepts of social vulnerability and environmental justice as solutions to urban regeneration challenges.

Gentrification effects on housing prices in neighbouring areas

PurposeThis study aims to measure the occurrence of gentrification and to relate gentrification with housing values.Design/methodology/approachThe authors have used Getis-Ord statistics to identify and quantify gentrification in different residential areas in a case study of Stockholm, Sweden. Gentrification will be measured in two dimensions, namely, income and population. In step two, this measure is included in a traditional hedonic pricing model where the intention is to explain future housing prices.FindingsThe results indicate that the parameter estimate is statistically significant, suggesting that gentrification contributes to higher housing values in gentrified areas and near gentrified neighbourhoods. This latter possible spillover effect of house prices due to gentrification by income and population was similar in both the hedonic price and treatment effect models. According to the hedonic price model, proximity to the gentrified area increases housing value by around 6%–8%. The spillover effect on price distribution seems to be consistent and stable in gentrified areas.Originality/valueA few studies estimate the effect of gentrification on property values. Those studies focussed on analysing the impacts of gentrification in higher rents and increasing house prices within the gentrifying areas, not gentrification on property prices in neighbouring areas. Hence, one of the paper’s contributions is to bridge the gap in previous studies by measuring gentrification’s impact on neighbouring housing prices.

Engineering gentrification: urban redevelopment, sustainability policy, and green stormwater infrastructure in Minneapolis

ABSTRACT Cities increasingly turn to green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) to improve water quality and mitigate flooding risk, yet like other forms of green infrastructure, early research suggests GSI may contribute to ‘green gentrification,’ in which greening increases housing costs, drives gentrification and displacement, and deepens inequalities. Using a spatially explicit mixed-methods approach, I interrogate the relationship between GSI and gentrification in Minneapolis, MN, a city characterized by deep racial inequalities potentially exacerbated by green gentrification. From 2000-2015, census tracts that gentrified received, on average, more GSI projects, more funding per project, and more funding overall. Gentrified tracts received five times more GSI funding than low-income tracts that did not gentrify. Buffer analysis reveals that, adjacent to GSI, rent prices and the college-educated share of the population increased at rates significantly higher than the city average. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of institutions providing and receiving GSI funding indicates that inter-governmental collaborations between watershed governing bodies and city government direct GSI funding to gentrifying areas, where GSI aid in and legitimize the aesthetic transformation of gentrifying neighborhoods. When enmeshed in neighborhood recapitalization via green gentrification, GSI may ultimately deepen environmental inequalities, highlighting the need for planning and policies that proactively mitigate gentrification risks.

What’s better than a biscuit?: Gourmetization and the transformation of a Southern food staple

In this article, we applied Wendy Griswold’s concepts of cultural objects and the cultural diamond to examine how a specific food—Southern style biscuits—underwent gourmetization. We provide evidence from observations of seven well-known gourmet biscuit restaurants, as well as a content analysis of their websites, Instagram accounts, and media coverage to understand how some establishments were able to position biscuits as a new gourmet food. We found that food producers combined upscale and exotic ingredients and recipes to create new ways of enjoying biscuits, as well as harnessed the power of social media to create excitement for their products. Simultaneously, the association of biscuits with the home and family recipes provided a form of cultural legitimacy and helped set these restaurants apart from fast food and its unhealthy, placeless reputation. Cultural tastemakers, including food writers and journalists, have aided in the rise of Modern Southern cuisine, which allows traditional Southern foods like biscuits to be viewed as higher in status. Customers, particularly those engaged in food-based tourism and those living in gentrifying areas have also helped encourage gourmetization through their willingness to pay higher prices and to embrace food as spectacle.

Housing Prices and the Skills Composition of Neighborhoods.

In the United States (US), low-income workers are being pushed away from city centers where the cost of living is high. The effects of such changes on labor mobility and housing price have been explored in the literature. However, few studies have focused on the occupations and specific skills that identify the most susceptible workers. For example, it has become increasingly challenging to fill the service sector jobs in the San Francisco (SF) Bay Area because appropriately skilled workers cannot afford the growing cost of living within commuting distance. With this example in mind, how does a neighborhood's skill composition change as a result of higher housing prices? Are there certain skill sets that are being pushed to the geographical periphery of a city despite their essentialness to the city's economy? Our study focuses on the impact of housing prices with a granular view of skills compositions to answer the following question: Has the density of cognitive skill workers been increasing in a gentrified area? We hypothesize that, over time, low-skilled workers are pushed away from downtown or areas where high-skill establishments thrive. Our preliminary results show that high-level cognitive skills are getting closer to the city center indicating adaptation to the increase of median housing prices as opposed to low-level physical skills that got further away. We examined tracts that the literature indicates as gentrified areas and found a pattern in which there is a temporal increase in median housing prices and the number of business establishments coupled with an increase in the percentage of skilled cognitive workers.

Gentrification, Urban Interventions and Equity (GENUINE): A map-based gentrification tool for Canadian metropolitan areas.

Researchers, policy makers, and urban planners require tools to better understand the complex relationship between gentrification and health. The Gentrification, Urban Interventions and Equity (GENUINE) tool is an open-access, map-based tool that allows users to explore measures of gentrification for Canadian cities and incorporate them into their work. The phenomenon of gentrification has manifested differently across cities. The GENUINE tool was developed to include four distinct gentrification measures that have been used in the United States and Canada and that rely on different combinations of change in census indicators related to income, housing, occupation, education and age. The measures were computed for all census tracts within the 36 Canadian census metropolitan areas to identify gentrifiable areas in 2006 and those that gentrified between 2006 and 2016. Depending on the measure, by 2016, 2% to 20% of census tracts had experienced gentrification, corresponding to between 2% (418,065 people) and 17% (4,266,434) of the Canadian population living in gentrified areas. Generally, metropolitan areas with populations over 1 million people had a greater proportion of their population living in gentrified areas (2% to 18%) compared with metropolitan areas with fewer than 250,000 residents (1% to 14%). With attention on healthy cities only expanding, GENUINE provides pan-Canadian indicators of gentrification, which can be an integral part of solution-oriented research and advancing cities toward designing healthy and equitable communities.

Policing gentrification or policing displacement? Testing the relationship between order maintenance policing and neighbourhood change in Los Angeles

Urban scholars increasingly contend that local police departments play a central role in facilitating neighbourhood change. Recent critics warn that ‘order maintenance’ policing and other low-level law enforcement tactics are deployed in gentrifying areas to displace ‘disorderly’ populations. Despite influential qualitative case studies, there remains scant quantitative research testing this relationship, and few studies that evaluate the link between policing, displacement and gentrification. We address this lacuna, drawing on new citation data from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and employing a measure of neighbourhood change that focuses on the displacement of low-income residents. Examining policing patterns in 978 US Census tracts in Los Angeles over four years, our analysis reveals that tracts experiencing gentrification – defined as the simultaneous increase in non-poor residents and decrease in the number of people in poverty – experience a greater number of citations compared with other tract types. Similar patterns emerge in our analysis of citations that explicitly target homelessness and extreme poverty. In post-hoc analyses, we found that Census tracts characterised by a decrease in the number of people in poverty experienced greater numbers of total police citations and of citations targeting homeless individuals, compared with other tract types. These findings carry important theoretical implications for understanding the divergent manifestations of, and potential mechanisms driving, order maintenance policing. Methodologically, we contend that police citations provide a more precise measure of order maintenance policing compared with previous studies, and that classifying neighbourhoods in terms of relative displacement of residents in poverty provides much-needed interpretive clarity.

State-Led Gentrification and Self-Respect

Gentrification is a global and highly controversial issue. This article develops an account of what can be troubling, specifically, about state support for gentrification processes. Recent research points to the fact that gentrification processes are being used by policy-makers in many parts of the world as tools for urban ‘renewal’ or transformation. However, it is claimed that this is often at the cost of badly off residents of these areas. I argue that where the state supports or encourages gentrification processes that either (a) impose non-trivial costs on badly off residents of gentrifying areas or (b) fail to benefit these residents in certain ways, the state disrespects these residents by failing to show due regard for their interests. In doing so, it threatens their self-respect. Having made this argument, I also consider how certain kinds of state investment once gentrification processes have occurred can threaten the self-respect of original residents.