Word "stale" spray-painted on side of train car.

Communities

Oft-Quoted Studies Saying Gentrification Doesn’t Cause Displacement Are “Glaringly Stale”

Oft-cited study concerns 1990s renters already paying huge portions of their income on housing.

Photo credit: CadaverTeeth via flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Word "stale" spray-painted on side of train car.

Photo by CadaverTeeth via flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

It’s become common to argue that research undermines claims that gentrification leads to displacement. See, for example, November 2015 remarks by New York City housing official Vicki Been, in which she said, “Most of the more recent and more rigorous studies of gentrification find that, actually, poor residents and poor households—especially renters—do not move out of gentrifying neighborhoods at unusually high rates.” Or note mainstream press essays like “Does gentrification really displace New Yorkers?” in Crain’s New York Business this past August.

After all, who can argue with research? But at least two of the academic papers that are often quoted to make this point rely on glaringly stale data. Looked at in contemporary context, these studies, rather than dismiss the existence of displacement, actually suggest support for it, especially in New York City.

Gentrification and Displacement: New York City in the 1990s by Lance Freeman and Frank Braconi was published in 2004 by the Journal of the American Planning Association and was among the research relied on by Been. It analyzes seven neighborhoods that were considered to have gentrified from 1991 to 1999: Chelsea, Harlem, the Lower East Side, Morningside Heights, Fort Greene, Park Slope, and Williamsburg.

Freeman, of Columbia University, and Braconi, of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, found that poor people in those neighborhoods were displaced less than those in neighborhoods that weren’t gentrifying. They suggested that this was likely because these residents sought to take advantage of area improvements and were willing to sacrifice to do so. The eventual change in demographics in those neighborhoods, the authors posited, stemmed from typical residential succession, as better-off newcomers replaced the poor, rather than displacement of pre-existing residents.

Or, as City Limits‘ Jarrett Murphy summarized, “the issue isn’t displacement of the poor, but replacement.”

The Freeman/Braconi paper “has been roiling the debate ever since,” Kelefa Sanneh wrote in The New Yorker last year, and “came close to debunking the very idea of gentrification.”

However, skepticism soon surfaced within the community development field. In the July 2005 Shelterforce article, “Gentrification and Resistance in New York City,” Kathe Newman and Elvin Wyly point out that not only were such “subtle and ambiguous” studies distorted in pro-gentrification pieces, quantitative analysis had its limits, and was belied by their own fieldwork.

“The unfortunate paradox is that studies showing low mobility rates among the poor are being used to vindicate gentrification and to dismantle precisely those policies that help to cushion its worst impacts,” they wrote. 
And yet, the headlines continued. A 2010 NextCity article cited a defense of gentrification in New York Magazine that relied on Freeman. A 2015 Slate article, titled “The Myth of Gentrification,” also cited the Freeman/Braconi article, as did a Washington Post Wonkblog piece that year.

But few have looked under the hood. In the 1990s, Freeman and Braconi reported, the average rent burden for poor households in gentrifying neighborhoods was 61 percent of their income, while those outside the neighborhoods paid 52 percent.

Those are incredibly high figures. Remember, “affordable housing” is defined as costing 30 percent of household income.

Indeed, the authors referred to the 52 percent figure as “still problematic,” and at a panel discussion in 2006, Freeman called the 61 percent figure “astronomical.” (The transcript says 62 percent.)

Over the 8 years studied, ending in 1999, average monthly rents for unregulated units in gentrifying neighborhoods rose from just below $500 to slightly above $700. Given the boom in market-rate rents since then, that’s at least two generations past, probably more, in New York rental housing history. Does anyone think that poor people could just keep writing bigger rent checks to take advantage of cleaner streets and better schools?

Within gentrified neighborhoods, poor families faced an average rent increase, over 8 years, of 25.1 percent, according to Freeman and Braconi. Since then, surely, costs have gone up. “Since 1990, incomes have stagnated while the costs of housing—both rental housing and home sales prices—have skyrocketed,” stated Mark Willis, a NYU Furman Center Senior Policy Fellow when co-authoring a 2016 report on affordable home buying in New York.

The accelerated cost burden suggests a tipping point for poor households, after which greater financial sacrifice or doubling up with relatives becomes untenable. Ten years ago, I queried Freeman: did he think ever-increasing rents would provoke more displacement?

He responded, “I think there probably is some tipping point, although I’m not sure what it is.” Fair enough: he hadn’t been able to analyze more recent data.

But since we know how rents have dramatically outpaced incomes, that tipping point, at least in New York City, has often been reached—and surpassed. (Check out Neil deMause’s City Limits coverage of displacement in Brooklyn’s Bushwick, for example.)

A follow-up paper, written by Freeman himself and with a national focus, was published in 2005 by Urban Affairs Review: “Displacement Or Succession? Residential Mobility in Gentrifying Neighborhoods.” As the Washington Post put it in 2015, this study “concluded that a poor family in a gentrifying neighborhood had a 1.3 percent chance of being displaced.” CNN in 2015 cited it in “How Gentrification May Benefit the Poor.”

Are those conclusions still valid, given that Freeman analyzed neighborhoods starting more than two decades ago, from 1986 to 1999? The neighborhoods were in the central parts of cities, and featured a relatively low median income, an older housing stock, an increase in housing prices, and a disproportionate increase in educated residents.

In gentrifying tracts, rent rose barely 20 percent adjusting for inflation, from a base of $411 between 1980 to 1990, and actually declined in the following decade. The median rent in 2000, adjusted for inflation (presumably back to 1980), was reported at $450.

Any New Yorker can tell you: in recent years, market-rate rents in gentrifying neighborhoods have vastly outpaced inflation or, for that matter, the rise in regulated rents. That’s one reason why investors often derided as representing “predatory equity” develop business plans to move units out of rent regulation. And it’s why journalist Paul Moses, who attended the same panel discussion with Freeman cited above, observed in Commonweal in 2015 that “poor people paying exorbitant rents” would eventually have to move.

Even in his 2005 paper, Freeman cautioned against making too much of his research. “The results presented here might tempt one to conclude that the lack of widespread displacement means that concerns about the disappearance of affordable housing are overblown. But the fact that lower socioeconomic status households are no longer moving into these neighborhoods implies a diminishing of housing opportunities for some.”

In 2008 testimony to the National Commission on Housing and Fair Opportunity, he warned that rising housing prices meant that, over time, “gentrifying neighborhoods will either lose their poor and often minority residents or poorer residents will be forced to pay undue portions of their income for housing,” a trend that he said should drive more equitable policies.

That still focuses on replacement-driven gentrification. And yet, in a June 2016 essay for the Washington Post, Freeman said “gentrification causes widespread displacement” was a myth, and cited his own research as well as a more recent study from Philadelphia.

Yes, the conclusions in his papers deserve deference when applied to the time period studied, especially given the authors’ cautions. Today, however, their utility suffers, for New York and likely other cities. “New York City in the 1990s” is hardly the same as New York City in the present day. Given the lag between data collection and publication, gentrification studies—whatever their conclusion—deserve a careful look to see if the statistics still ring true.

Related Articles