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Gentrification
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Gentrification, or urban gentrification, is the change in an urban area associated with the movement of more affluent individuals into a lower-class area. The area experiences demographic shifts, including an increase in the median income, a reduction in household size, and often a decline in the proportion of racial minorities (if such minorities are present). More households with higher incomes result in increased real estate values with higher associated rent, home prices, and property taxes.
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Encyclopedia
Gentrification, or urban gentrification, is the change in an urban area associated with the movement of more affluent individuals into a lower-class area. The area experiences demographic shifts, including an increase in the median income, a reduction in household size, and often a decline in the proportion of racial minorities (if such minorities are present). More households with higher incomes result in increased real estate values with higher associated rent, home prices, and property taxes. Industrial land use can decline with redevelopment bringing more commercial and residential use. Such changes often result in transformation of the neighborhood's character and culture.
Gentrification can result from urban reinvestment efforts by local governments or neighborhood groups, which directs money to invest in deteriorating city infrastructure, offer incentives for redevelopment, improve access to housing loans for low-income mortgage seekers, assist lending to first-time home purchasers, and improve rental properties. These efforts have been linked to reductions in local property crime rates, increased property prices, increased revenue to local governments from property taxes and increased tolerance of homosexuals. Grassroots efforts for existing residents to guide or oppose gentrification generates community activism.
The process has a human cost to the neighborhood's lower-income residents. The increases in rent often result in the dispersal of communities whose members find that housing in the area is no longer affordable. Additionally, the increase in property taxes (due to increased property values) may sometimes force or give incentive for homeowners to sell their homes and move to less expensive neighborhoods. While those who view gentrification positively cite local reductions in a neighborhood's property crime rate, its critics argue that overall crime rates have not actually been reduced, but merely shifted to different lower-income neighborhoods.
The concept of gentrification has received significant attention in a number of academic disciplines, most notably urban geography and urban sociology. Some academics argue that the concept has become so broad as to lose its applicability. Others, however, contend that it has become the fundamental idea for understanding market-driven urban class relations.
Origin
The root of gentrification, gentry, derives from the Old French word genterise (a variant of gentilise), meaning the people of noble birth. Sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term in 1964 to mean the influx of wealthier individuals into cities or neighborhoods who replace working or lower-classes already living there. She defined it by using London districts such as Islington as her example:
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines gentrification as "transformation of neighborhoods from low value to high value." Gentrification and neighborhood revitalization are often the same process.
Causes
Urban renewal
Increasingly, locations in city centers have attracted affluent post-baby boomer professionals, recent college graduates, and/or their empty nester parents. This New Urbanist movement may be more or less socially driven. If a depressed urban area has a transportation hub, pedestrian accessibility and social interaction, it may be considered more desirable than the sprawl and car-dependent lifestyle of the average suburban community.
Production-side theory
Early explanations of gentrification saw a conflict between production-side and consumption-side arguments. The production-side argument, which is associated primarily with the work of geographer Neil Smith, explains gentrification through economics and the relationships between flows of capital and the production of urban space. Smith argued that low rents on the urban periphery during the two decades after World War II led to a continuous movement of capital toward the development of suburban areas. This caused a "devaluation" of inner-city capital, resulting in the substantial abandonment of inner-city properties in favour of those in the periphery, and a consequent fall in the price of inner-city land relative to rising land prices in the suburbs. From this, Smith put forth his rent-gap theory, which describes the disparity between "the actual capitalized ground rent (land price) of a plot of land given its present use and the potential ground rent that might be gleaned under a 'higher and better' use".
Smith believed that the rent-gap theory was the fundamental explanation for the process of gentrification. He argued that when the rent-gap was wide enough, developers, landlords, and other people with a vested interest in the development of land would see the potential profit to be had in reinvesting in inner-city properties and redeveloping them for new inhabitants. Such redevelopment effectively closes the rent-gap and leads to higher rent, mortgage and lease rates.
The de-industrialization of the inner-city is seen as a prerequisite, precipitating a decline in the number of blue-collar jobs available for the urban working class and thus a loss of investment capital available to maintain the physical stock of urban neighborhoods. De-industrialization is often coupled with the growth of a divided white collar employment sector, one part of which is engaged in professional/managerial positions which follow the spatial centralization of capital. This is a product of corporations requiring spatial proximity to reduce decision-making time.
Consumption-side theory
The consumption-side theory, on the other hand, has gained more force as an explanation for gentrification. Supporters of this argument generally view the characteristics of gentrifiers themselves to be of greater importance in the understanding of gentrification. The post-industrial city, as defined in the Dictionary of Human Geography, is one with an "employment profile focused on advanced services…, [with a] profile that is materialized in a downtown skyline of office towers, arts and leisure sites, and political institutions. Its middle-class ambiance may be reflected in a distinctive politics charged with a responsible social ethos…the demand for more amenities, for greater beauty and a better quality of life in the arrangement of our cities".
David Ley has been one of the foremost thinkers in purporting this idea of a city that is becoming more and more influenced by the emerging "new middle class". Ley defines as a subset of this sector a "cultural new class", made up of artists, cultural professionals, teachers, and other professionals outside of the private sector. And, although not particularly dwelt upon in Ley’s articles, these are the first stage gentrifiers who prepare the way for the embourgeoisment of the inner city (and, in effect, the more bourgeois politics) that often follows them—bourgeois politics which often lead to decreased funding for affordable housing, stricter laws dealing with the homeless and other people affected negatively by their original displacement by the creative class. This sentiment can also be found in Sharon Zukin’s "second-wave" observations in the artist’s lofts in Manhattan, who, when her building went "co-op" in 1979, "bade good-bye to the manufacturers, an artist, and several residents who could not afford the market prices at which our lofts were sold," residents who were replaced by lawyers and accountants, retailers and investment bankers. The process was repeated in Hell's Kitchen, in midtown New York and home to John Jay College, and is now taking place in Harlem, Washington Heights, Astoria and multiple areas of Brooklyn. This same process can be seen still today, as "artists move into otherwise undesirable buildings, usually make significant improvements to their spaces and their surrounding areas. Everyone benefits from these tenuous and uneasy…arrangements. Then landlords, becoming aware that they are sitting on gold mines, rush to cash in".
Whereas Smith and other Marxists often take a structural approach in their explanations of gentrification, Ley’s work instead frames gentrification as a natural outgrowth of the rise of professional employment in the central business district (CBD) and the predilection of the creative class to an urbane urban lifestyle. Ley, when studying this class through case studies of Canadian cities, concentrates instead on the diversity of this class, especially the liberal ideas that often find voice in its politic. Ley’s 1980 article "Liberal Ideology and the Post-Industrial City" describes and deconstructs the TEAM committee’s strive to make Vancouver a "livable city". Ley’s work, and that of Rose, Beauregard, Mullins, Moore, and others who have built upon Ley’s theories arguing that "gentrifiers and their social and cultural characteristics was of crucial importance for an understanding of gentrification," has been criticized by Chris Hamnett as not going far enough, and not incorporating the "supply of dwellings and the role of developers/speculators in the process".
Globalization
A concept that has received much consideration is the idea of globalization and the city’s role in this new economic environment, where urban centers are ranked by their ability to function in a climate where national borders are becoming less and less important. Some academics have theoretically and empirically studied the products of globalization such as de-industrialized global cities and economic restructuring. John Friedman, who laid down a hypothetical framework on which to build a study of global cities, used as one of the components to his seven part theory the emergence of a bifurcated service industry in major cities, which is composed of "one the one hand, a high percentage of professionals specialized in control functions and, on the other, a vast army of low-skilled workers engaged in … personal services … [that] cater to the privileged classes for those whose sake the world city primarily exists". That the last three components of his theory deals with the increased immigration to fill this demand, the class and spatial polarization that results from this, and the inability of the global city to deal with these rapidly growing "social costs" is no mistake. Friedman places his vision of the global city squarely in a class context, a context that has been expanded on by Sassen and others. This polarization inherent in increasingly global cities can illuminate the theory that concerns itself specifically with the causes of gentrification. Indeed, a 2006 analysis found increased spatial polarization (segregation) by income across U.S. metropolitan areas, with middle-income neighborhoods in decline relative to low- and high-income areas.
Gentrification cannot be separated from the economic climate in which it occurs. The advent of the new economy outlined above has led to substantial growth and centralization of high-level work in producer services: a "new urban economic core of banking and service activities that comes to replace the older, typically manufacturing oriented, core". This new core sees older, middle-class retailers "replaced by upmarket boutiques and restaurants catering to new high-income urban elites".
Demographic shifts
Demographic changes associated with gentrification in addition to a significant rise in average incomes in such neighborhoods include a decline in the proportion of ethnic minorities, a reduction in the size of the households, and the replacement of low-income families by singles and childless couples. In American cities, the new, wealthier demographic of the neighborhood can sometimes resemble the original populace for which the neighborhood was constructed. In these cases, gentrification represents the reversal of the white flight phenomenon.
The emergence of a "service sector" class, that is, a group of people—generally between the ages of 25 and 45—with a high disposable income and post-graduate education with professions in fields such as law, medicine, engineering, finance, media and the arts in the urban core that they want to be close to, is one of the primary tenets of the consumption-side theory of gentrification. This is not to be confused, however, with service jobs such as being a janitor, day-laborer, housekeeper, nanny, or working in a fast food business, which are also technically services, but require few skills and little education, and get paid low wages. This emergence is partly a manifestation of the shift in much of the Western world from a manufacturing-based economy to a post-industrial, service-based economy.
Demographically speaking, Western cities are seeing a growing percentage of 25–45 year-olds in the inner-city (urban) core. Other demographic shifts are occurring as well; there is a lessening of gendered divisions of labour, and people are waiting longer to get married and have children (c.f., the Double Income No Kids syndrome). Additionally, urban researchers are seeing an increase in the number of single women professionals living alone in gentrified areas.
This also leads to the lack of affordable housing in these areas for residents who are not in a high-income bracket, and leads to several generations of a low-income family living in the same dwelling because youths, who would have moved out upon graduating high-school, can't afford to live on their own because the market only offers luxury condominiums. See the Freeter phenomena.
Gentrification, as an aspect of gender studies discourse, has not been studied extensively, but researchers have discovered that women and gay men have had at least some impact on the gentrifying process in older, inner-city neighborhoods. Moreover, women are seen to be gentrifying in response to different patriarchal structures; they are seen as being potentially forced by oppressive class relations related to their gender into moving into the inner-city, as opposed to deciding on moving there as a result of locational preference. The breakdown of traditional gender roles as higher education becomes more accessible to women has also contributed to the movement of single women into the inner-city.
Gentrification usually increases property value in an area. This is a positive development for city officials (by raising tax revenue, which is often dependent on property values) and existing resident owner-occupiers.
Property owners can, however, feel the effects of gentrification through increases in property taxes. Property taxes are typically based on a percentage of a property's assessed value. As property values increase in a given neighborhood, municipalities will typically reassess the values of properties within gentrifying communities resulting in higher property taxes for the neighborhood's long-term owners. Owners who do not wish to pay the tax increases often sell or pass the increases on to tenants in the form of higher rent.
Unfortunately this same rise in property value can be devastating to those in lower income groups, who are more likely to rent and thus have little benefit in rising property values. In areas without strong rent control, they are often forced to move because they cannot afford the increased rent demanded by their landlords. As a result, there tend to be very strongly opposed views on gentrification, with some seeing it leading to healthier, more vibrant cities, and others seeing it as destroying poor communities.
Recent research has also pointed to the negative effects that gentrification can have on political participation. For example, a drop in voter turnout has been observed in areas of American and Canadian cities which have experienced gentrification.
Role of social groups
The urban middle-class typically does not begin to occupy new neighborhoods all at once. In many cases, more economically marginal subgroups of "trend-setters"—often referred to in popular literature as "urban pioneers" although that term carries with it racist aspersions—are the first to arrive in gentrifying areas. Although these groups may not have high incomes, their high educational or occupational status (i.e., high cultural capital) qualify them as marginally bourgeois. In many cases, these individuals are young and live in non-family households, and thus have a higher tolerance for perceived urban ills (such as crime, poor-quality schools, lack of amenities like shops and parks, and the presence of disadvantaged racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic groups) that may dissuade middle-class families.
As the number of "trend-setters" grows, they create amenities valued by the bourgeoisie, particularly service establishments such as new bars, restaurants, and art galleries that serve the gentrifying group's demographic. Residents with a similar outlook and greater amounts of capital may then follow. This group, in turn, further adds amenities and investment to the area, increases local property values, and paves the way for more risk-averse investors and residents. The first newcomers, priced out of their newly fashionable neighborhood, move on to adjacent areas, where the process often begins anew. In this theory, the classic sector model of urban residential succession—essentially that neighborhoods "trickle down" from one socioeconomic group to another, with the wealthiest residents moving linearly outward from the central business district—works in reverse, but the "invasion-succession" process proceeds in a remarkably similar fashion.
Gentrification does not require these intermediary steps, but such a succession greatly facilitates the process. In other instances, as with the London Docklands and other CBD-adjacent urban renewal projects, or in instances of comprehensive public housing redevelopment (as at Cabrini-Green in Chicago), government and large developers can invade the area with sufficient capital to attempt to skip the steps entirely. In still other recent instances, a Community Development Corporation has been so successful at stabilizing an urban neighborhood that it becomes desirable for the middle class; examples include Roxbury, Massachusetts; Near South Side, Chicago; and Harlem, New York City, and, in Europe Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin; Altona, Hamburg; Ferencváros, Budapest; Islington, London.
Artists, bohemians, hipsters
The method by which an urban "artist colony" is transformed into an affluent neighborhood has been well documented for many years. Artists and subcultural students (later nicknamed "hipsters", but also including the hippies of earlier years) often seek out devaluated urban neighborhoods for their low prices, central location and for their sense of authenticity or "grit". As the bohemian character of the area grows, it appeals "not only to committed participants but also to sporadic consumers"; eventually, those "sporadic" consumers edge out the earlier arrivals. Christopher Mele described the process with hippies in New York City's East Village in the 1960s:
Through the 1960s and 1970s, lofts in SoHo were converted en masse to housing for artists, hippies, (and their followers, the hipsters) and others. As those neighborhoods continued to escalate in price and social status, the artists moved on to Park Slope, Brooklyn and Hoboken, New Jersey, and today to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Emerging areas where hipsters are being displaced to run along the BMT Canarsie Line and IND Crosstown Line of the New York City Subway system due in large part to their proximity to Williamsburg. Similar gentrification patterns have been evident through the 1990s and 2000s in the East Village and now the Lower East Side of New York City, driving out dozens of theaters and performance art spaces such as Collective:Unconscious, Surf Reality, House of Candles, Piano's (Theater), The Present Company.
Similar examples can be found in many cities around the world with large numbers of jobs in media, fashion, and other creative trades.
Gay men
Manuel Castells's seminal work on gay men as "gentrifiers" in San Francisco has revealed a pattern replicated, to some degree, in other North American cities, as "many [gays] were single men, did not have to raise a family, were young, and connected to a relatively prosperous service economy" (Castells, 1983, p. 160). Many gay and lesbian people leave their towns and neighborhoods of origin to start a new life and form a new community after coming out.
The PBS documentary Flag Wars outlined the tension between an urban African-American community in the old silk stocking district of Columbus, Ohio, and the mainly white gays and lesbians moving in, who were accused of gentrification and racism. The new residents, in turn, accused the existing community residents of homophobia.
In 2006, a Washington, D.C. church congregation in the historically black neighborhood of Shaw opposed the granting of a liquor license to a gay bar that was about to open across the street.
Real estate trends can push out poorer gay people, as in San Francisco's Polk District; radical queer activists saw the value of an impoverished neighborhood as a refuge for the economically, sexually and socially marginalized, while others saw renovations and increased real estate values as signs of improvement in the neighborhood.
Controlling gentrification
Community organizing
In many cases, existing residents of gentrifying neighborhoods have organized into grassroots groups to develop political and social strategies to retain affordable housing in their communities. Many such organizations arose in the 1960s, particularly using tactics inspired by Saul Alinsky. Some, like the Young Lords street gang active in Chicago's then-heavily Puerto Rican neighborhood of Lincoln Park, used direct action techniques like sit-ins and occupation of vacant land. In the Liberty City section of Miami, Florida, the local organization Take Back the Land seized control over land and built rustic dwellings for the homeless in a shantytown which became known as Umoja Village. In many other neighborhoods, neighborhood institutions have founded community development corporations to give the community an active role in neighborhood development. In many cases, though, even a well-organized community cannot muster enough resources to counter gentrification.
Direct action and sabotage
When wealthy people move into working class or low income neighborhoods, class conflicts can result. Vandalism and even arson attacks against the property of new arrivals sometimes occurs. During the late 1990s, during the dot-com boom gentrification of San Francisco's predominantly working class Mission District, an effort called the 'Mission Yuppie Eradication Project' allegedly engaged in various forms of widespread property destruction as part of a strategy against gentrification. This drew a hostile response from the San Francisco Police Department, from real estate interests, and from work-within-the-system housing activists.
Inclusionary zoning
Gentrification often brings to the fore issues of housing affordability. Cities have responded to gentrification in different ways. Inclusionary zoning is an increasingly popular method of stemming gentrification, employed by cities, in an attempt to create affordable housing units in urban areas. Through inclusionary zoning, developers are either required or provided with incentives (such as higher build-outs) to develop a certain percentage of affordable housing units. Because inclusionary zoning is relatively new concept, there have been few studies regarding its effect on limiting gentrification. In Los Angeles, inclusionary zoning seems to have accelerated the pace of gentrification as older, lower rent buildings have been torn down and replaced with higher rent buildings tempered by a small percentage of "affordable housing" resulting in a net loss of affordable units.
Zoning ordinances
In addition to the gradual exclusion of poorer residents from gentrifying neighborhoods, another detrimental aspect of gentrification can be the impact on non-residential uses, such as entertainment and industrial uses with effects contrary to the expectations of upmarket residents moving in. Often a neighborhood will become popular because of its nightlife and live music scene, or because of the presence of light industrial or arts and crafts activities. But newer residents may complain about levels of noise from such activities. Planning authorities then make noise mitigation or operational requirements that can place severe limitations or financial burdens that force such uses to move out. In New Zealand, this issue is referred to as reverse sensitivity, and a novel approach has been developed whereby the land use zones can be used to identify likely reverse sensitivity issues. The onus is then placed on developers wishing to build projects in such areas to construct dwellings in such a way to mitigate the impacts of new uses on existing residents.
Community land trusts
Since gentrification is exacerbated by speculation in land prices, removing land from the open market can effectively keep property prices from rising and thereby prevent displacement. The most common formal mechanism for doing so is a community land trust; many inclusionary zoning ordinances are now written to place the "inclusionary" units into a land trust. Many linguistically isolated urban neighborhoods are able to keep out speculators informally, simply by not advertising available properties on the open (primary language) market and instead trading properties only by word of mouth.
Rent control
In response to gentrification pressure, some cities pass rent control ordinances. Rent control restricts the rent charged to tenants; this allows existing tenants to remain in place, reduces resident turnover, reduces the number of available apartments for newly arriving residents, and reduces landlords' incentive to speculate on land values.
However, few rent control laws are able to achieve all of these aims. Since the laws do not impact owner-occupied properties, a neighborhood's owner-occupied units may still gentrify; southwestern Santa Monica, California and eastern West Hollywood, California gentrified despite rent control, possibly due to a shift toward owner occupancy. There may develop black market for housing, in which units are withdrawn from the market and made available only upon payment of additional fees or bribes to landlords, undermining rent control. Many rent control laws allow for "vacancy decontrol", which releases an apartment from control upon tenant turnover; this results in a steady loss of controlled units and can ultimately render rent control ineffective in areas with high resident turnover. Vacancy decontrol encourages landlords to find ways of shortening their residents' tenure, most aggressively through landlord harassment. To strengthen its rent control laws, housing advocates in New York City are attempting to repeal vacancy decontrol.
Massachusetts abolished rent control in 1994. Rents rose afterward, affecting the pace of gentrification around Boston; however, the laws protected relatively few apartments, and confounding factors like a strong economy were already raising housing prices.
Promoting gentrification
Sharon Zukin refers to a somewhat contradictory "Artistic Mode of Production" wherein patrician capitalists seek to increase the property values of (that is, gentrify) urban space through the recruitment and retention of artists; that is, by subtle or overt means of encouraging artists to occupy, say, former industrial facilities. This has become public policy in some cities. In UK cities like Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Liverpool, the actions of regional development agencies, in tandem with private speculators, have attempted to artificially stimulate the process of gentrification. In Jackson, Michigan, the city council has approved the redevelopment of a long-closed 19th century state prison by approving the construction of low rent housing within its walls and making artists loft space available in adjacent abandoned industrial buildings. Property developers have noticed that taking a building they eventually wish to re-develop and offering it cheaply to artists for a few years can impart a 'hip' feel to the surrounding area.
In the US, municipal governments tend to use tax incentives such as "tax increment financing" (TIF), or – such as in the Paducah Artist Relocation Program of Paducah, Kentucky – municipal governments will partner with non-profit organizations and public-private partnership to offer to artists subsidized home loans at a discounted interest rate if they move into gentrifying neighborhoods. Under a TIF program, economic activity in a target blighted area will be jump started with government spending, usually on physical infrastructure. Property values, and therefore property tax revenues, are then expected to rise. Under TIFs, all increased tax revenues, for a set number of years, go to the TIF administration entity, and can only be spent on additional improvements within the TIF district. Often TIF funds will be provided as direct subsidies to private sector developers. Infrastructure improvements, subsidies, and rising property values all combine to encourage additional private sector investment.
Positive aspects of gentrification
- The original property owners profit from rising home prices.
- When people own the home they live in, instead of rent, it creates greater stability for the local area. Poor residential areas in large cities tend to have a high turnover rate of tenants.
- When an area is gentrified, the number of vacant houses is drastically reduced because of the increased demand for housing. Rising rents and property values make repairing abandoned buildings more profitable. This reduces crime by reducing the number of drug dealers and squatters.
- With a greater number of people living in the area, there are greater amounts of currency being circulated locally. The increase in spending encourages further growth of both businesses and residential areas. These new local businesses may provide local jobs for the working class.
- "High-school-educated blacks are more likely to stay in a gentrifying neighborhood than in a similar neighborhood that does not gentrify. They would also make larger than expected gains in income."
Negative aspects of gentrification
- The cost of renting a residence in the area increases significantly, resulting in a displacement of local residents and in a reduction of affordable housing.
- Families that cannot afford the increased price of housing in the gentrifying neighborhood may move to surrounding areas, which puts pressure on affordable housing supply across the region.
- Some previous residents may be unable to obtain housing at a price that they can afford and thus become homeless.
- Certain businesses catering to a particular segment of population may shut down once that population is displaced.
- The increase in the property values of a neighborhood rarely increases the living standards of the low-income residents of the area.
- There can be tension between newer and older residents.
Case studies of gentrification
Darien Street, Philadelphia
There are several case studies done on areas undergoing gentrification. Gentrification Amid Urban Decline: Strategies for America's Older Cities, by Michael Lang, contains a story about Darien Street. This case study is done to show the process and impacts of gentrification.
Darien Street is a small alley street in Bella Vista, a densely populated neighborhood in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Most of the houses on the street date back to 1885 and were built for artisans, or craftsmen, that lived in the area. Darien Street was considered a “back street,” because it did not (and still does not) connect to any main streets in the city, and it was not even paved for most of its existence.
In its early days, Darien Street housed only Italian families. After World War II however, there was talk of a crosstown expressway, and the Italian families moved out. These low-rent homes then were inhabited by poor African American families. By the early 1970s, Darien Street was at its lowest point, and the houses were worth hardly anything. Many of the houses were abandoned, because of broken heaters and caved-in roofs. The houses on Darien Street were very small—about wide and deep. Each home was three stories tall, with one room on each floor. The largest yard is deep. Even with its decay, Darien Street held a unique charm with European echoes. The houses all had some different features to give the street more character. The street was also safe for children to play on, since there were no passing cars. The nearness of all the homes made for a potentially close-knit atmosphere. Darien Street was located just south of the center of the city, giving it great location; it was also inexpensive and would not have been hard to renovate.
Thus, the first home was rehabilitated in 1977; it was a corner home and was sold to a school teacher. He completely redid the home and moved in. In the next few years, mostly white middle-class men began to move into the abandoned houses. In 1979, the first displacement occurred. Two years later, five of seven families had been displaced. The two remaining families were renting their homes, and they expected to be displaced soon.
Gentrification Amid Urban Decline went in to great detail about Darien Street, but it was published in 1982, so that is where Darien Street’s story ends. Lang gives statistics to show his final findings on Darien Street: in five years, the street changed from seven black households and one white household to two black households and eleven white households. The average rent increased 488%—from $85 to $500 a month. Homes previously sold for $5,000 were sold in 1981 for $35,000. Of the five black households displaced, Lang informs his readers that three families found better houses within two blocks, one family left the state, and one family moved five blocks away into a public-housing project.
The benefits of the gentrification of Darien Street include increased tax flow and improved housing. The drawback of gentrification was the worry of the displaced.
Barnsbury, London
Barnsbury, about two miles north of the centre of London, was built around 1820 as a middle-class suburb, but after World War II people moved to the suburbs. The upper and middle class wanted to get away from the working class, and advancements in railroad technology allowed them to do so. When the war ended there was a large demand for housing, and the Barnsbury area became a place of cheap housing where most lived in shared accommodations. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, gentrifiers moving into the area had to finance renovations with their own money, because banks rarely financed loans them for the area they were moving into. But the main spark was caused by a bill named The 1959 Housing Purchase and Housing Act, which allowed £100 million to be used for investing and revitalizing old properties. As a direct result, the main influx of people occurred between 1961 and 1975. According to the UK Census, "[Between the years of 1961 and 1981,] owner-occupation increased from 7% to 19%, furnished rentals declined from 14 to 7% and unfurnished rentals from 61% to 6%."
Park Slope, New York City
Park Slope, a neighborhood in Brooklyn located between Sunset Park and Downtown Brooklyn, was built at the end of the nineteenth century for the wealthy, who commuted to work over the newly built Brooklyn Bridge. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the wealthy began moving further from the city and the working class started moving in. When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, Park Slope became an area for the extremely poor and most landlords let their properties slip into a state of disrepair. In the 1950s and 1960s, the middle and upper classes moved even further away because of the construction of highways and federal mortgage programs that were made available. In 1966, the Park Slope Betterment Committee formed, and began buying up houses and advertising them to people that they thought would be interested. In the mid-1970s, the middle class began moving back to Park Slope. By the mid-1980s, most houses had been gentrified, and by the mid-1990s gentrification was overflowing into the surrounding areas. Park Slope is currently one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
See also
External links
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- from the City of Port Phillip (Victoria, Australia) website
- - documentary about Ohio gentrification in Columbus, detailing conflicts of race and homophobia
- – official site for Christopher Mele's book, includes full text of Chapters 2–9.
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San Francisco Bay Guardian, October 7, 1998. - Series of articles on the gentrification of San Francisco during the dot com boom. by Carol Lloyd, Salon.com, October 29, 1999. by Cassi Feldman, San Francisco Bay Guardian, October 18, 2000. by J.A. Lobbia, Village Voice, July 4, 2001. by Dan Knauss, Riverwest Currents, July 2002. by Rivka Gewirtz Little, Village Voice, September 18, 2002. by Chanel Lee, Village Voice, November 13, 2002. by Sarah Ferguson, Village Voice, April 3, 2005. by Tim Kingston, San Francisco Bay Guardian, August 18, 2006. by David Downs, East Bay Express, August 30, 2006. October 20, 2007
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