gentrification

3. ConclusionOptimism about the city’s future, District and federal policies designed to attract higherincome residents into the city, and a very hot housing market are creating substantial gentrificationpressures in a number of close-in city neighborhoods. While little data are available to measure theamount of displacement that has yet occurred, lower income residents, particularly minority rentersexpress concern that new revitalization efforts will lead to rent increases which they will not be ableto afford. Conscious efforts must be undertaken now by residents, city officials and otherstakeholders to ensure that lower-income original residents retain a foothold in their neighborhoodsand enjoy benefits from revitalization efforts.D. ClevelandCleveland represents a vivid contrast to gentrification occurring in Atlanta, the Bay Area andWashington, D.C. Cleveland has experienced modest but significant economic revitalization, but thishas not resulted in the kind of gentrification pressures seen in the other cities studied. Only a fewneighborhoods have experienced an inflow of higher-income households, with no noticeabledisplacement yet occurring. Cleveland’s newcomers, middle-income whites and blacks, are primarilymoving into new housing built on previously vacant land. But rather than posing a problem andinciting opposition to community revitalization, the slow influx of newcomers seems a welcomechange from decades of population loss and concentrated poverty. A community developmentdirector in the city summarized the state of gentrification in Cleveland best, noting, “I know it’s notpolitically correct, but with an average poverty rate of 42 percent, what my target neighborhoodsneed is a little gentrification.”1. Development Trends: From Decay to RevitalizationFor years, the city of Cleveland was a powerful corporate-headquarter town, third in thecountry after New York City and Chicago. That corporate largesse enabled the city to build itsstrong university infrastructure, unparalleled cultural institutions, classic downtown, extensive stockof working-class housing, and beautiful upper income neighborhoods to the east. Beginning in the‘50s, however, the city began to unravel. A city of nearly one million in the ‘50s, Cleveland lost halfits population by 1970, and remains at the half million mark today. As with many other Americancities, Cleveland’s middle class and white population left for the surrounding suburbs or for otherparts of the country, leaving its disadvantaged and African American citizens behind. 98The city of Cleveland is struggling to create jobs. Only 28 percent of the Clevelandmetropolitan area’s jobs are in the city proper, putting it in the bottom quarter of metropolitan areas98 The city’s poverty rate stood at 22 percent in 1979 and 29 percent in 1989, while about 45 percent of the citypopulation was African American during that period. 98 By one estimate, 75 percent of Cleveland’s residentswould live in impoverished neighborhoods by 2000. (Coulton, Claudia, Julian Chow and Shanta Pandey, AnAnalysis of Poverty and Related Conditions in Cleveland Area Neighborhoods. Cleveland, Case WesternReserve University, January, 1990)60