Two cheers for the urban pioneers
Carole Singleton, 52, has lived in Harlem all her life. With the help of her pit bull terrier, Thor, she kept drug dealers at bay when her landlord refused to light the hallways. Over the holidays, when the landlord wouldn't heat the building, Singleton filled the boiler with oil herself. A few days later, the heat was shut down again, this time with a new padlock. "They want me out," Singleton says bluntly.
This is the classic scenario of gentrification. Affluent urban pioneers with $3 lattes invade working-class or decaying neighborhoods, build luxury condos, demand government services, and attract new business. Meanwhile, landlords push or price out the longtime residents who can't afford the high-rent improvements.
But is it true? New studies are raising questions about gentrification's untoward consequences. Certainly there are people like Singleton who are displaced when yuppies rediscover the inner city's virtues, but new research from Columbia University's Lance Freeman suggests that displacement is not all that widespread--and in fact may not disrupt many people's lives. Freeman and coauthor Frank Braconi set out to quantify the rate of displacement caused by gentrification in New York City in the 1990s. They discovered that poor residents in gentrifying neighborhoods were actually less likely to move than poor residents in nongentrifying neighborhoods. "About 1 in 5 renters moves every year regardless," says Freeman. "Neighborhoods are changing more as a result of replacement, where people who are leaving are being replaced by more-affluent neighbors."
Other studies support this optimistic view. Duke University Prof. Jacob Vigdor analyzed the gentrification process in Boston over the last 25 years. While landlord harassment and steeply rising rents do occur, he says, many original residents find ways to stay in their homes regardless of these changes. Indeed, they may prefer the changes. "Their neighborhoods become nicer places to live," says Vigdor. "Even if the rents are going up, they might be willing to pay the increase because crime could be going down." Vigdor also found that residents' incomes sometimes go up along with their rent, as they benefit from jobs created by gentrification.
These two studies together present such a break from conventional wisdom in the housing field that the Fannie Mae Foundation commissioned a follow-up study due out early this year. The report doesn't dispute Freeman's conclusions but argues that government subsidies and rent-control programs were key in preventing displacements in those New York neighborhoods. Many of these programs are being phased out in the next few years.
Low mobility. Not everyone accepts this new view of victimless gentrification at face value. "It flies into the face of all I've seen as a tenant organizer," says Terry Poe of the Goddard Riverside West Side SRO Law Project in New York. "People don't leave a neighborhood when it's improving. They're evicted."
Neil Smith, professor of anthropology and geography at the City University of New York, says that low mobility in gentrifying neighborhoods is to be expected. Low-income renters tend to move very short distances, and gentrification of one neighborhood also tends to raise rents in nearby neighborhoods. So residents struggle to stay put--even if it means families doubling and tripling up in an apartment.
One thing that everyone seems to agree on is that gentrification depletes a city's stock of affordable housing, which affects not only the poor but the middle class as well. Says Bruce Katz, director of the center on urban and metropolitan policy at the Brookings Institution: "When you need to make $150,000 to afford a home in a neighborhood with a decent school, then something is dramatically wrong with the housing market."
This story appears in the January 19, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
advertisement
