gentrification

A. How Big a Trend Is Gentrification?From most accounts, gentrification is occurring in a limited number of American cities and ina limited number of neighborhoods within those cities. This conclusion is tempered by severalcaveats, however. First, good data are very hard to find. This paper relies more on anecdotalevidence and less on hard data than the authors would like. Second, gentrification in cityneighborhoods needs to be understood in the context of dramatically larger expansions of populationand neighborhoods in the suburban rings. And third, whatever its scale, gentrification can havesignificant positive or negative effects for impacted neighborhoods and households, and this is whycity officials and supporters need to understand and act on it.1. Data on GentrificationEfforts to characterize the gentrification trend are severely hampered by a dearth of harddata and a heavy reliance on anecdotal information. High quality data at the neighborhood level aregenerally only available at the time of the decennial census, meaning that change in interveningyears is difficult to measure. Moreover, it is difficult to isolate the impacts of gentrification apart froma myriad of other factors that might contribute to observed changes in the census data. Forexample, in Ohio City, a Cleveland neighborhood commonly understood to have gentrified during the1980s, close examination of the 1980 and 1990 census data at the tract level does not uncover theconsistent changes one might expect. Changes in median income, racial makeup, education levels,vacant units, and poverty rates defy expectations.Because gentrification occurs at such a localized level, it is often hard to detect by relying oncity-level data sources. For example, the City and County of San Francisco do not collect businesschangeover, commercial vacancy and rent increase data at the neighborhood level; instead, theMission Economic Development Association collects these data by hand in the rapidly gentrifyingMission neighborhood of San Francisco.It is a significant challenge to determine which data are truly useful in predicting and actingon gentrification trends. For example, regional data on pressures that seem to spur gentrification,such as tightening and imbalanced labor and housing markets, may suggest the likelihood ofgentrification in the future, but one runs the risk that no gentrification actually occurs despite theimbalance. Alternatively, local data that provide leading indicators of gentrification at theneighborhood level, such as ease of access to transit systems, relative housing prices, downpayment levels, and housing tenure may be more useful in predicting gentrification, although someneighborhoods have exhibited these characteristics for years, and only now experiencegentrification. Finally, descriptive data measuring gentrification largely after it occurs, such asincreasing average incomes, a high rate of property turnovers, increasing housing values, decliningminority populations, and displacement of original residents, could be useful in assessinggentrification but does little to aid policymakers and others as they attempt to address gentrificationin progress. Even if good data at the census tract level were available, these data do not alwaysunambiguously reflect the impacts of gentrification. For example, increasing average incomes does7