Finally, the methods used are determined by the quality and availability of the data. At its most basic level, gentrification occurs when neighbourhoods receive a sudden influx of investment and changes to the built environment. These changes can include a growing presence of new locally owned or corporate businesses or the development of popular attractions, and they lead to rising property values over several years.
- A fundamental reconfiguration in lifestyle preferences has also been under way in recent decades, contributing to the growing desirability of living in urban centres.
- We aimed to discuss the implications of specific types of gentrification, by driver, for health equity.
- Because of these factors, low-income Black families in major cities often live in isolated neighbourhoods with fewer resources, fewer opportunities, and comparatively inexpensive housing.
- Looking at the city of Philadelphia, Hwang and Ding found that financially disadvantaged residents who moved from neighborhoods that were not predominantly Black benefitted from gentrification by moving to more advantaged locations, but those moving from once predominantly Black areas did not.
In this way, predictive analytics would let residents and city officials take steps to keep these at-risk neighborhoods healthy through early intervention in the availability of services or policing. Despite its high homeownership rate compared to other US cities and a relatively stable housing market, Philadelphia has experienced intense gentrification in recent years in some areas of the city [66]. Philadelphia is known for having several strong academic anchor institutions (e.g., University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and Drexel University). These educational institutions are expanding their activities to participate in neighborhood revitalization processes; however, the question is how these efforts might be contributing to gentrification in these areas. For instance, since 1996, the University of Pennsylvania has been investing in the West Philadelphia Initiatives (WPI) to address safety, vacancy, and disinvestment concerns in West Philadelphia, where most of the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University campuses are located [67].
Gentrification may lead to the displacement of long-term—usually underprivileged—residents when they are unable to keep up with rising costs of housing and other costs of living, and it may lead to social or cultural exclusion as the population changes, shifting toward one that is wealthier, and more privileged. The increasing costs of living may be linked to heightened fear, anxiety, stress, and sleep deprivation for underprivileged residents [5]. Health care gentrification is the process by which shifts in the type of and spatial distribution of health care favor wealthier residents while potentially excluding more vulnerable residents, leading to inequitable access to quality health care services. Apart from the changes within health care systems themselves, health care gentrification also refers to the new challenges that health care providers face in meeting the health care needs of patients. These include challenges treating patients who are themselves experiencing complex social environments and threats of displacement or exclusion and the challenge of providing follow-up care to patients who are physically displaced from their neighborhoods. For instance, one study showed increased hospitalization for mental health problems and use of the emergency department for mental health care among residents displaced from gentrifying neighborhoods in New York City [70].
Disruption of Social Networks
Gentrification appends so many words these days — “graffiti,” “rock music,” “font,” “thrifting” — that it bears scant similarity to its original definition. As Steven Thomson explained for Curbed, Glass was describing a “class phenomenon … by adapting the British-ism ‘gentry’” to describe the process of “middle class liberal arts intelligentsia” moving into her primarily working-class London neighborhood. One way to combat pricing people out of affordable housing, a form of housing discrimination, is a community land trust (CLT). These are private, non-profit organizations that own land on behalf of a community, promoting housing affordability and sustainable development and mitigating historical inequities in homeownership and wealth-building. The FHA’s primary function was to insure home mortgage loans made by banks and other private lenders, thereby encouraging them to make more loans to prospective home buyers. Its support was focused on the creation of new homes and conditioned by its caution against insuring loans in racially mixed neighbourhoods.
First, the economic literature is clear that increased housing production reduces rents. It also ensures that new entrants don’t bid up the price of existing homes but rather turn to new construction for their housing needs. The evidence that does exist showing that modern-day gentrification leads to displacement links that displacement to rising rents.
Wages for high-skilled knowledge workers in these places have soared, but pay for the low-skilled service workers supporting them has languished, a gulf that is compounded by the rapidly rising cost of living in these cities. The difficulties in these tools limited earlier heroic attempts at building a neighborhood early warning system. Rather than asking a handful of people a few direct questions about their lives, these days we’re all leaving volumes of answers about ourselves in the data we generate just, for example, by using our phones. But even if it works, this kind of “predictive analytics” for housing prices is too blunt an instrument to predict which neighborhoods might gentrify. To really develop an early warning system, data scientists need to go deeper into human behavior.
Generally, studies show that gentrification may be beneficial for the health of more privileged residents while harming or not benefiting the health of underprivileged residents. Very recent articles have begun to test hypothesized pathways by which urban renewal indicators, gentrification, and health equity are linked. Few public health articles to date are designed to detect distinct impacts of specific drivers of gentrification. Young families welcome the opportunity to buy reasonably priced homes in a safe community with sound infrastructure, and a wide choice of amenities and services. Local municipalities and governments also benefit from collecting higher taxes on rising property values and increased economic activity. However, the neighborhoods’ original inhabitants—also families, as well as singles of various ages—are often displaced from the very community that they helped build because of rising rents and a higher cost of living.
Social scientists also have what is called the American Community Survey, which is done every year. But it’s a fraction of the size of the census and, like a bad cellphone camera, it doesn’t have the resolution scientists need to see the spatial details of how neighborhoods change. Cities are constantly changing, both in their physical and demographic characteristics as well as the socio-spatial distribution of these.
And while increasingly unaffordable housing in cities such as London is now pushing out a growing number of young people, many would rather stay. In recent decades, however, the process has accelerated and extended into many neighbourhoods that once provided affordable homes to those on lower incomes, leaving large parts of the city out of their reach. We cannot let our cities descend into islands of privilege https://1investing.in/ amid seas of disadvantage. Thankfully, with the right policies and investments, a better, more inclusive and sustainable future is possible. To be clear, the growth in the population size of inner cities has been modest compared to suburbanisation. Whereas once the well-off fled for suburbia, today in many cities they are heading back to the urban core, while poverty is increasingly moving out to the suburbs.
Examples of gentrification in a Sentence
To encourage people to move into suburbs, real estate brokers practiced something called blockbusting. They encouraged Black families to pay a premium to move into particular urban neighborhoods so that white families would sell their houses at a low price to move out to the suburbs. After this process was complete, the new minority communities were denied the money they needed to invest in improvements to their neighborhoods through a practice called redlining. Capital investment shifted away from cities and segregated communities into predominantly white communities.
Life & Arts
For urban planners, affordable housing is not only hard to create, but it is also hard to preserve. Often hoping to encourage gentrification, local governments sometimes allow subsidies and other incentives for affordable housing construction to expire. Once they expire, owners are free to convert their affordable housing units to more expensive market-rate housing. On a positive note, many cities are now requiring developers to build a specified percentage of affordable housing units along with their market-rate units. Indirect residential racial displacement occurs when older housing units being vacated by low-income residents cannot be afforded by other low-income individuals.
Indirect displacement can also occur due to government actions, such as discriminatory “exclusionary” zoning laws that ban low-income residential development. The first of these, supply and demand, consists of demographic and economic factors that attract higher-income residents to move into lower-income neighborhoods. The second cause, public policy, describes rules and programs designed by urban policymakers to encourage gentrification as a means of achieving “urban renewal” initiatives. Access to cheap transportation has long been essential in giving the disadvantaged inhabitants of cities the means to access gainful employment. Yet the systems of public transport that exist in many major cities were often designed and built more than a century ago, at a time when the geography of poverty was very different.
Therefore, researchers have to take into account the dynamism of cities and the challenges that this poses to scientific research on cities, gentrification, and health equity. In order to combat the likelihood of gentrification increasing socioeconomic and racial segregation within cities, the authors note the need for policies like Philadelphia’s recently implemented property tax relief program, which prohibits increases in property taxes for long-time low- and middle-income homeowners. Recognizing that a primary cause of gentrification-related displacement is increased costs for current residents, the authors looked at individuals with low or missing credit scores who might be more vulnerable to displacement and at the same time might face limitations in housing searches if they did move. A new study by a Stanford sociologist has determined that the negative effects of gentrification are felt disproportionately by minority communities, whose residents have fewer options of neighborhoods they can move to compared to their white counterparts.
There are a few other policies the US could pursue to mitigate the harms that accrue to disadvantaged communities. Today, this sort of violent displacement is not what most people mean when they talk about gentrification. But what, exactly, they’re talking about is less clear, and the muddled debate often produces muddled policy goals. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word ‘gentrification.’ Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors.
Dunkin’ faces a moo-ving class-action suit from the lactose intolerant
A monthly travel pass in London for zones 1 to 3 – which loosely corresponds to the inner boroughs – at the time of writing costs £184 (or €211). That compares to just €84 (£73) in Paris for an all-zones metro system pass that covers a similar distance. We can see this lifecycle pattern clearly in the net migration flows in and out of the inner boroughs of London.
Gentrification is a demographic and economic shift that displaces established working-class communities and communities of color in favor of wealthier newcomers and real estate development companies. Heavy private investment in target neighborhoods causes price to rise sharply, and amenities enjoyed by the new residents, such as more expensive shopping and dining, drive out businesses that were supported by the established community. The process can leave neighborhoods that generations have called home transformed in just a few years. This change is especially favorable for those who can sell their homes for a high price. When an area goes through gentrification, older buildings are updated, which causes property values to rise. As property values increase, higher-income residents are more likely to move into the area, which causes values to grow even higher.
