gentrification

occurring in some neighborhoods of Boston, Seattle, Chicago and Portland. Less rapid, butsignificant, levels of gentrification are occurring in Atlanta, Washington, D.C. and Denver. Othercities like Cleveland and Detroit are attracting some higher income residents into their cities andexperiencing modest levels of community revitalization, though they have not yet begun toexperience displacement, and therefore do not meet the definition of gentrification set forth in thispaper.While gentrification’s scale and pace may vary across the country, it is re-emerging for threebasic reasons. First, the nation’s strong economy creates great demand for labor and housing at theregional level, and in some cases this makes the housing in central cities and some inner suburbsnewly attractive to more higher income newcomers. Second, the federal government, states, citiesand non-profit organizations increasingly have the motivation, the resources and the specific policylevers and the overall strategies to direct revitalization efforts in targeted parts of central cities.Under some circumstances, these revitalization efforts can lead to gentrification. Third, in responseto the increased concentration of poverty in the urban core of our nation’s cities, public officials seekto reduce these concentrations by attracting higher income families into high-poverty neighborhoodsor by helping some poor residents to move to other portions of the metropolis where poverty is lessconcentrated. Either way, these place-based and people-based strategies can result ingentrification.The issue of gentrification has historically included a strong racial component—lower incomeAfrican American residents are replaced by higher income white residents. In fact, in most (but notall) gentrifying neighborhoods examined in the case studies, minority households (African Americanas well as Latino) have predominated in recent decades, and some argue that this residentialsegregation occurs with the tacit support of public and private sector institutions and traditions. As aresult, an influx of higher income households inevitably will put pressure primarily on historicallyminority communities.Based on our interviews in the four case study cities included in this paper, however, thestory gets more complex. The case studies suggest that higher income newcomers are raciallyvaried. They include white households in all cases, but can also include large proportions of Asianhouseholds (for instance, in the case of Bayview/Hunters Point in the San Francisco Bay area), andof African American households (for instance, in Atlanta, Washington, D.C. and Cleveland). While,gentrification’s adverse effects may fall predominantly on minority households, and as a result areimportant to resolve equitably, those moving into these neighborhoods may be minoritiesthemselves.In cities hit by gentrification pressures, residents, city officials and other interests frequentlydescend into rhetoric and factional fighting. This often occurs because different parties definegentrification differently, see different parts of the issue, or otherwise talk past each other.Moreover, the political focus is often on gentrification’s character and consequences without linkingthese more pragmatically to its “end game,” its causes and solutions. Our goal in this paper is tohelp all stakeholders—policymakers, neighborhood residents and community groups, business2