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Gentrification has become a functionally useless term.
I don’t know when exactly I reached my breaking point on this issue, though I have been gradually phasing it out over four-plus years of studying neighborhood change. My guess is that it came somewhere between a ridiculous 2019 Jacobin article that claimed that graphic novels “are comic books, but gentrified,” or the turn in this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests when I started watching white people my age parade through Brooklyn screaming “fire, fire, gentrifier.” Whether they arrived here by birth or migration was impossible to tell, but at any rate it would have been impossible for them not to have ridden here on the ongoing “gentrification” wave that originated in the 1980s. If only we millennials had the ability to own our glass houses like so many NIMBY boomers did.
This is all to say that we have a major problem with how we talk about gentrification in this country, a fact true for people all across the political spectrum. First, because the conversation continually repackages a set of debunked theories as reality, and second, because it obscures a set of real crises that need fixing, namely, neighborhood-level inequality, the disappearance of affordable housing, and wages that have lagged behind the rising cost of shelter.
Let’s start by separating gentrification theory from reality. I’ll begin with the common narrative of gentrification, in which wealthy white people and developers move into poor neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color, directly displacing residents with the erection of new, fabulous apartments. This theory was introduced to the U.S. in the 1970s by geographer Neil Smith, but again it was a theory for explaining a new demographic pattern of people moving back to the city from suburbs—a hypothesis unconfirmed, something to be tested. Study after study that has tested it since, the best among them coming from scholars like Lance Freeman and Ingrid Gould Ellen (also, the Federal Reserve) find the theory insufficient.
[RELATED ARTICLE: What Does ‘Gentrification’ Really Mean?]
Beginning with displacement, in a 2005 study covering over 31,000 households from 1980 to 2000, Freeman found that “mobility out of gentrifying neighborhoods is not necessarily dramatically different from mobility out of other neighborhoods.”
A little over a decade later, Ellen also found no significant differences in mobility among low-income residents who lived in gentrifying neighborhoods when tracking over 35,000 New York City children enrolled in Medicaid and who lived in market-rate apartments from 2009 to 2015.
Lastly, Quentin Brummet and Davin Reed, writing in 2019 for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, found “moderate,” 4-6 percentage-point increases in mobility rates among less advantaged residents of gentrifying neighborhoods from 2000-2014 (the baseline mobility rate among all renters in the study was 70-80 percent), using a sample population of over 170,000 adults and children and a definition of gentrification based on educational attainment. Rather optimistically, their study also suggested that people who did move from gentrifying neighborhoods seldom ended up in worse-off locations, and that gentrification “creates some important benefits for original resident adults and children and few observable harms.” I’ll offer more on the half-truthfulness of this statement later on.
Next I’ll tackle race, where data along the Black-white fault line of urban segregation runs almost exactly counter to Smith’s theory: It has been the rare exception, and not the rule, to find white people moving into majority-Black neighborhoods. A 2014 mixed-methods study by Jackelyn Hwang and Robert Sampson found that Chicago neighborhoods with Black populations of greater than 40 percent experienced significantly lower rates of gentrification. (They also found that substantial Hispanic populations in neighborhoods that were less than 40 percent Black adversely affected gentrification’s likelihood, too.) In 2015 Lance Freeman and Tiancheng Cai observed that white “invasion” into Census tracts with Black populations of 50 percent or more has been a relatively infrequent phenomenon going back to 1980, though they also observed a slight recent uptick in its occurrence: Per their analysis of thousands of Census tracts across the country, 5.49 percent of tracts that were at least 90 percent Black and 10.44 percent of tracts that were at least 50 percent Black experienced an influx of white residents from 2000 to 2010, compared to 0.39 percent and 4.71 percent, respectively, from 1990-2000.
These results corroborate Stacey Sutton’s findings in a 2020 paper focused on New York City, a place that she acknowledges as exceptional for the tightness of its housing market. Her paper suggested that in 2010, for the first time, the average gentrifying neighborhood in New York City was not majority white but instead 52 percent Black and Latino. The next question that logically follows is whether this signals potential racial transition, or the substitution of White neighborhoods in the place of formerly Black ones, in gentrifying areas. So far, research indicates that in New York City—an outlier when it comes to whites moving into Black neighborhoods—stable integration has been a much more likely result. (Of course, New York also has some of the most robust affordable housing programs in the country, meaning that a free market does not guarantee these outcomes alone.)
Finally, a lack of new construction—not an excess of it—in places like New York and San Francisco drives up housing prices. A 2019 review of the research on supply-side skepticism offers a thorough refutation of many of points held up by anti-development advocates. As Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen, and Katherine O’Regan write, “new construction is crucial for keeping housing affordable, even in markets where much of the new construction is itself high-end housing that most people can’t afford.” Most evidence suggesting differently, they continue, is anecdotal rather than causal, and frequently fails to take in account decades of backlog in the construction of new housing supply: A new building will not immediately lower prices if a city is already thousands of housing units behind projected demand. A paper published last month tried to finally put a number on the effect that new construction has on local housing prices using data from 11 major cities that included Atlanta, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. The researchers found that new market-rate buildings in low-income neighborhoods decrease local rents by 5-7 percent.
The adamant refusal to readjust gentrification theory to accommodate these studies only furthers the disconnect between those who use the term and the issues they mean to highlight and solve. In her 2010 book Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, for instance, sociologist Sharon Zukin claimed that “in the early years of the twenty-first century, New York City lost its soul,” relinquishing to gentrification “the expectation that neighbors and buildings that are here today will be here tomorrow.” A brief glance at Census and American Community Survey data would have put the claim to rest, since at least from 1990 to 2015 New York City housing units have gotten older, and residents’ median length of tenure longer (meaning the number of years they’ve been in their current dwelling unit has increased) in all five boroughs. In 2020, a paper in the high-ranking academic journal Urban Studies criticized statistical analyses that showed limited displacement because their “progress in identifying [displacement’s] extent has been remarkably slow,” meaning, as I take it, that we ought to reverse the scientific method. Which is to say, rather than forming a hypothesis, rigorously testing it, and adjusting it in light of studies’ results in order to better understand problems motivating the analysis, such claims suggest we ought to make results conform to a pre-determined outcome. A 2009 paper from the journal City basically argued a similar point, casting the “methodological sophistication and nuanced reasoning” of studies like Freeman’s and Ellen’s as the stuff of shills.
A fair critique exists in that such studies are time-lagged (which they should be if we are trying to understand a causal relationship between gentrification and displacement with good data), that they still indicate rising costs of shelter, and that we could well reach a tipping point that would usurp such studies’ conclusions about neighborhood change. The need for ongoing study, however, does not nullify those studies’ observations or absolve gentrification theory of the need for rigorous empirical engagement. Nor does it legitimate the conclusions of theoreticians in regard to what we ought to do about neighborhood change and housing costs now.
Make no mistake, you will not see me in the streets cheerleading the latest luxury apartment building, angry though I am with the current state of gentrification debates. Sparse evidence of short-term gentrification-induced displacement does not erase the problems of dwindling affordable housing, neighborhood inequality, and people struggling to make ends meet. Neither does it prove, as Brummet and Reed’s study and others seem to assume, that the migration of middle- and upper-income residents to different city neighborhoods causally benefits poor, nonwhite, or long-time residents overall. Instead, the research urges us to refocus our energies, and, also, our discussion: away from stopping gentrification, to solving broader issues regarding the need for affordable housing and the reduction of inequality. We have to obviate the false competition for limited, valuable space that current conflicts over gentrification take for granted. We need to shift from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance.
Let’s talk about the broader issues that discussion of gentrification obscures instead. Here’s why: Gentrification, or the influx of wealthy and upper-middle-class residents into formerly working-class neighborhoods (as I’ll use the term abstractly here though it has no exact definition), affects a select group of neighborhoods. A dominant number of neighborhoods across the country face decline. Neighborhood-level inequality, on the other hand, affects all neighborhoods. You have probably heard it mentioned in some form of parlor talk: someone moves to one neighborhood for its better schools; someone else moves from another neighborhood due to its high-crime and limited public transport. These neighborhood-level inequalities are real, they are systemic, and they are stubbornly and durably spatial. Living in an under-resourced neighborhood affects one’s life outcomes in fields from health to education to family stability, and even in this age of gentrification, as sociologists Robert J. Sampson and Jackelyn Hwang have found, people are not moving to historically disadvantaged neighborhoods.
No, what’s happening in Chicago, and Baltimore, and many other cities for that matter, is something far more insidious than what the word “gentrification” accurately portrays: Working- and middle-class people of all races are fleeing disadvantaged urban areas or paying more for their housing as wealthier residents trickle back into a select group of desirable, higher-opportunity neighborhoods. This stresses housing supply and disproportionately increases housing costs in those select few neighborhoods, making it so that people living in disadvantaged areas—many of whom are poor and/or people of color—then stand a diminishing shot at accessing them. Working- and middle-class homeowners who happened to live in those neighborhoods before their influxes reap windfalls if they have the ability to stay put; renters, already typically disadvantaged by comparison, face the choice of leaving or paying an unsustainable percentage of their income toward housing to remain. The attraction to these neighborhoods siphons away investment and interest from other parts of the city, concentrating resources. Thus, for people who happen to own homes outside gentrifying or gentrified areas, and especially in cities’ Black middle neighborhoods, their home equity often lags behind the growth of other neighborhoods’ or falls.
The result: Cities’ most vulnerable residents face heightened disinvestment in neighborhoods that become harder and harder to leave. Middle neighborhoods exist in an uneasy state of precarity. And those neighborhoods that do draw investment pull farther and farther away in terms of their costs, amenities, resources, and accessibility. Gentrification, or wealthier people moving into and driving up costs in particular urban neighborhoods, is a symptom of the array of problems related to urban inequality. Not the problem that people using the term want to name.
For further proof of my point, the most pressing and widespread form of displacement, eviction, is an epidemic plaguing the entirety of the country. Eviction rates, according to a paper authored by Matthew Desmond and Carl Gershenson, are not higher in gentrifying neighborhoods. Further, while skyrocketing housing prices completely untethered from new construction or building upgrades have mostly occurred in a few select areas of the country, median rents have risen in nearly every state since 2001 while median renter income has stagnated in comparison. Yes, people are feeling “pushed out” of the places where they live, especially if those places are one of urbanist Richard Florida’s “superstar” cities, and they feel desperate to hold onto whatever they can while squeezed by the pressures of an increasing unequal society. The solution to that anxiety, however, is not to tear at each other’s throats, screaming “gentrifier!” or blaming “gentrification.” The fix is to aggressively and accurately study the problems we are trying to name when we draw on the imprecise language of gentrification, and to propose solutions that actually and directly address those problems’ systemic roots. For starters: an increased housing supply, the elimination of exclusionary zoning, and an expanded voucher program that would allow people to better afford their current shelter and/or the chance—if they want to—to move to places they judge to have better opportunity. And, speaking of opportunity, we cannot accept a status quo in which a select few neighborhoods hoard all the avenues to opportunity that make places desirable. Especially when those neighborhoods tend to be whiter and wealthier than most. (On place-based opportunity hoarding, see Sheryll Cashin’s work).
Naming a problem does not solve a problem, and while theories are good at identifying major issues and their potential solutions, they become an obstruction to progress when they don’t shift according to new information. That’s why I am moving away from using the word “gentrification.” We have far better ways of describing the problems we’re trying to refer to, and what we ought to do about them, when drawing on this over-used and ill-defined term.
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16 thoughts on “‘Gentrification’ Is Not the Real Problem”
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I’d love to chat sometime. You brought some good empirical data. I also would like to discuss the definition and connotation of gentrification. I believe the word itself is nuanced, and the problems with urban inequality are encapsulated in gentrification when defined by people experiencing directly.
Brett,
This is a click-baity article – every conversaion about gentrification I’ve had in Brooklyn used the very description of the “more insidious” dynamics you have as the definition of gentrification. This is my sense of what’s really frustrating about the debate – all these studies “disprove” gentrification by using an unnaturally narrow, straw man definition. It’s the same displacement of the argument that has become comically standard in neoclassical economics – re-define a social problem in a narrow and self-serving way, justified on the grounds that this narrow interpretation is the only one that can be tested using available data (itself a self-serving proposition given who typically owns and publicizes data production) and, using that available data, proving that, in fact!, the narrow interpretation doesn’t fit the data. It doesn’t help that most of these studies also seem to be produced by pro-development groups, showing the lack of a genuine desire to engage with criticisms of gentrification by its defenders.
The solutions you highlight are also staid and premised upon market urbanist assumptions about the nature of development that, while still mainstream, and beginning to crack as a relic of neoliberal ideology – “getting out of the way” of development is not a solution to the “insidious”/real-world definition of gentrification. We need rent control, federal support of genuine, permanently affordable public and other forms of social housing (well-funded CLTs), and experimentation with other, broader reaching policy solutions (is it time to start a debate around the “single” land value tax?).
Because the debate is so fierce, I don’t think you needed to resort to distorting the debate to fit your narrative and that promoted by these studies. We all would have read this if you simply spun this as “new data on ‘gentrification'”.
Please do better next time.
Hi Todd, I’m sorry if you’ve interpreted my argument as lying in the pro-market camp of housing. I explicitly reject this premise in the article when talking about the fact that affordable housing policies have mitigated displacement, and do not believe it in any way. I suppose I could have emphasized it more, but thought this was clear throughout the article. Also, as I repeat multiple times, the solutions I proposed are *starters* for fixing a problematic housing system: They are the interventions that I think are most immediately attainable in the world we might not like, but live in. As my other work attests (for instance: https://www.publicbooks.org/the-false-hopes-of-homeownership/), I would prefer we had shared-equity and cooperative homeownership on a much wider scale in this country as well as a fairer system of taxation. How we get there is a much harder and longer question for another article, probably more fit to a book. The folks at Grounded Solutions Network have done great work to these ends (see this Shelterforce piece: https://shelterforce.org/2018/05/07/shared-equity/) if you’re interested in the subject. Thanks for the feedback!
Todd,
I think you’ve missed Brett’s point. I’m not that familiar with the market dynamics of New York City neighborhoods but, in a place like Baltimore where I’m from, the data seems pretty compelling that the gentrification narrative is counter productive to addressing the real issues facing distressed neighborhoods.
Jim
Jim – (and I’m assuming you are the same Jim French with whom I’ve worked in affordable housing development in Baltimore both as former employees of the City’s public housing and state-funded LIHTC efforts). I want to salute your comments to Todd’s article. The market is soft enough in Baltimore to have removed any action to create new market rate housing in almost any area of the City other than already successful white neighborhoods. If you subtract race as an issue, those neighborhoods that have increased in value are already successful and white, but have few development opportunities because they lack the empty land or distressed housing stock that could be “reverse-gentrified” through the moves of Black, lower-income families into these areas. Black families with higher incomes are moving out of the City to nearby areas where they see their neighbors moving. I would like to remove our talk of whites moving into “communities of color” as a negative trend. But the Baltimore market generally shows few examples of those moves anyway. And, as the City’s highest-ranking housing official expressed in discussing the lawsuit settlement that gave mobility opportunities to tenants of the City’s Public Housing, “Black people and white people don’t want to live together.”
Brett, I commend you for exploring this “third rail” of housing policy debates. I wish your article had a different title. For many if not most housing activists, gentrification is the major problem. In Generation Priced Out I describe ongoing gentrification threats in nearly all of our major “progressive” cities. What I think you are saying correctly is that gentrification is not the only problem. And that progressives need to understand that neighborhood improvement is not the same as gentrification.
Absolutely what I was going for here! I guess that I’m less enthused about the term because of the way it has been manipulated by the types of folks described in Generation Priced Out who seek to preserve cities against gentrification…in their own favor as single-family homeowners. (It does a lot of bait-and-switch work to obscure who fuels unaffordable cities, by placing the burden on the ever-enigmatic ‘gentrifier.’) But I entirely hear what you’re saying, and appreciate your critique. Also, thank you for the excellent book you wrote!
I guess Baltimore does not meet the definition of a “progressive city”. That is reflected in our consistent loss of population – Black and white – as each census is take, We have slipped below 600,000 residents for the first time since World War II.
“Gentrification, or wealthier people moving into and driving up costs in particular urban neighborhoods, is a symptom of the array of problems related to urban inequality. Not the problem that people using the term want to name.”
It’s been my observation over 45+ years in fair housing that many wealthier people moving in are BOTH a symptom and part of the problem. In some of Washington, DC’s SE neighborhoods, they run the ANCs to control types of Black businesses and development allowed, restrict parking accessibility for the many Black churches. Some push zoning changes to restrict long time Black businesses, w/hold approval for community programs supporting Black low/mod renters/homeowners, target and report minor repairs needed to force sale of homes, complain about and block homeless shelters and get the Mayor to move homeless ppl to Prince George’s County. Many exercise their white power with precision against Black homeowners, renters, churches and businesses.
Others have a positive impact by supporting local schools, libraries, playgrounds, speaking up to support HO and vouchers, daycare programs, local markets, and he
The author, Brett McMillan, cites and attempts to summarize Neil Smith’s 1979 classic “Towards a theory of gentrification: A back to the city movement by capital, not people”.
McMillan writes “I’ll begin with the common narrative of gentrification, in which wealthy white people and developers move into poor neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color, directly displacing residents with the erection of new, fabulous apartments. This theory was introduced to the U.S. in the 1970s by geographer Neil Smith, ….” (with a link to a copy of the classic paper).
The difficulty with McMillan’s claim is that not only does Smith’s paper not claim that narrative to be true, it spends the first several pages of the paper explicitly and overtly critiquing and rejecting it (see the paper’s rejection both of theories of “consumer sovereignty” and “producer sovereignty”). That is precisely why the paper is regarded as a classic. McMillan has not merely misrepresented Smith, he has nearly slandered him.
I would also call McMillan’s attention to the critique of filtering theory (PDF page 9, print page 545). It provides a refreshing detailed and holistic account of what we often call “filtering” and why the underlying dynamic of it prefigures imminent gentrification by creating some of the conditions that trigger a return of capital to a neighborhood. “YIMBY”s and “urbanists”s often appeal to filtering as a cure for gentrification when, in combination with other factors, it is a potent enabler of gentrification and displacement. In the SF Bay Area, we can see clear recent decades examples of what Smith describes here still playing in the East Bay in West Oakland (and increasing Deep East Oakland) and Richmond.
If neighborhood gentrification were to be understood in a parallel way commercial gentrification occurs, this conversation could be more insightful and constructive. Nothing is said here about the transformative impacts and outcomes stemming from adopted long-term “visions” (economic policy) which heavily subsidizes an “urban planning”, built environment agenda favoring the commercial real estate industry. This old mindset defines civic success in these terms, rather than in socioeconomic terms. Unless & until we understand these realities, nothing of substance will ever change.
This is not a helpful piece in my opinion. It feeds into the now-well-worn “gentrification isn’t a problem” rhetoric common in the twittersphere and the like.
Of course the term gentrification has been expanded, contorted, and sometimes abused. So many terms in urban studies do: sustainability, resilience, etc. This simply means that folks should be careful in defining the term when they use it, and understand that the definitions are contested. It doesn’t mean the concept is not of concern.
The author will want to update their review of the research on gentrification (or gentrification-related processes) and evictions. The forthcoming special issue on evictions from Housing Policy Debate includes at least three articles (that I can recall right now) that document such relationships, including articles by Raymond et al, Sims, and Mah.
Also, the notion that Black neighborhoods aren’t subject to gentrification will come as news to those who have studied the process in Atlanta, New Orleans and Washington, DC, and other cities with that have larger Black-white dominance (in the city proper). The obsession with research on Chicago and New York is a bit myopic, as is common. The literature is far broader than what is cited.
I hear everything here, and am sorry if the piece didn’t fully communicate that the process of cities becoming unaffordable and unequal is indeed a major problem. I only meant to highlight a problem in discussions because they aren’t becoming unaffordable and unequal in the way that many assume because – as you said – of the popular manipulation and contestation of “gentrification” as a term. If anything, I hope people will start being careful when using “gentrification” after reading this piece. I will also have to catch up on the Housing Policy Debate articles, and appreciate the recommendation. (I’ve been a little over-burdened lately between non-academic job searches and dissertation writing, and have not had quite as much time as I’d like to stay as up-to-date as possible on the research.)
I also favor New York and Chicago because they are the subjects of my dissertation, and because so much contestation over neighborhood change gets captured in the last century and change of cultural expression that comes out of both those places (Harlem Renaissance, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jane Addams, Gloria Naylor, etc.). In this way, I certainly re-inscribe some of the problematic geographic myopia you talked about. If I had more time to do so, I would love to be able to move beyond Baltimore, Chicago, and NYC using the interdisciplinary analysis I used in my graduate work. But, unfortunately, time and resource restrictions have not been there for me to do so at the current moment.
I am a real estate investor focused on multifamily properties. Significant time is spent determining whether an area has ‘high barriers to entry’ that is, whether new supply is limited. In areas where this is the case, property owners have additional market power, allowing them to raise rents. Entire investment theses follow from the idea that everyone, homeowners, community development advocates etc, all pretty much oppose new housing construction.
Upton Sinclair has pointed to the frequent disconnect between ones salary and their understanding of certain facts. If community development groups oppose new construction, affordability worsens, and their raison d’etre persists. Conversely, If I propose investments in areas where new supply is weakening market power, those ventures underperform, and I am out of a job.
More construction does not mean all people will suddenly be able to afford housing where they want to live, but no viable long-term housing affordability strategy can exist without more construction. Wipe the stupid grin off my ‘neoliberal’ face by reconsidering when to oppose new construction in the name of fighting ‘gentrification’.
This neo-liberal apologia cherry-picks data and analyses to avoid discussing the two basic driving forces of the urban social/economic change commonly called “gentrification”:
– Contemporary capitalism that relentlessly exploits property (and people) to make the rich richer … especially housing, because it’s a human necessity.
– Class dominance by the mostly (not entirely) White professional class whose economic privilege enables it use buying power to buy/rent-up newly desirable central city neighborhoods – class conquest, basically – re-making them into bourgeois lifestyle enclaves to suit their own tastes (but let’s keep the cool relic ethnic restaurants and murals from the now-gone community of before).
Supply-side market-profit housing strategies, as the author proffers, have conclusively failed and can never provide housing for much of America. Just like health care, education, and much more, that must now be assured by the public sector, a Social Democracy. That was the premise and goal in fact of the 1937 National Housing Act. We just got lost along the way …
Brett- I’m the Commentary Editor at The Dallas Morning News. I’d like to talk with you about adapting this for publication in our newspaper. Please email me at [email protected]
thanks
-ryan