Gentrification

Gentrification is a process in which low-cost, deteriorated neighborhoods experience urban restoration and an increase in property values, along with an influx of wealthier residents. Gentrification can sometimes change the demographics of neighborhoods, and can include the displacement of low-income and working-class residents.

The results of gentrification are a source of academic and political contention. Rising property values can be a major benefit to landowners. They can also boost local tax property revenue, which can improve services for all residents. This, along with the related boost to the local economy, can improve crime rates, reduce unemployment, and clean up blighted regions. Resulting rent increases and reduced supply of low-cost rental housing can displace lower-income and working class residents—often including members of minority groups. The extent of this displacement is often disputed, as is the offset of benefits like new jobs and expanded public services.

Etymology

Sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term in 1964, which she defined using London districts such as Islington as her example:

One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle-classes—upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages—two rooms up and two down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences ^*. Once this process of 'gentrification' starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.

Phenomenon

Gentrification can be a politically contentious issue. It highlights the instability of renting: people might be forced to move away from newly-desirable areas because the landlords increase rents. Usually this conflict is limited to the local level; many who live outside urban areas may not be aware of it.

Property owners can also 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. If the owner cannot afford the tax increases, they are forced to sell (or, if they own a multi-family dwelling, they may pass the increases on to tenants in the form of higher rents). When the owner sells, it is at a large premium to the buying price if gentrification has occurred, so the phenomenon generally enriches the previous inhabitants.

Gentrification can integrate the positives of the old neighborhood with the positives of the new residents of the area. Positive gentrification is a precarious balance between the newer wealthier residents and the older, poorer residents of the neighborhood. Utilizing many community revitalization tools such as community input, community engagement, and interaction during the revitalization process can minimize many of the negative effects of gentrification.

Theories on gentrification

Urban renewal

The most simplistic reasons for gentrification may be that post-baby boomer professionals and/or their empty nester parents, having realized the business potential, beauty, and convenience of centralized locales in city centers, re-awaken to the reason they were built in the first place. A river, a lake, important architecture, or some historical significance spurs the draw. Many times choosing to "reclaim" the neighborhood of their youth, the romanticism of the New Urbanist may be more or less socially driven.

If a depressed urban area has a bustling transportation hub, pedestrian accessibility and social interaction may be considered more desirable than the sprawl of the average suburban community. Meant primarily to discourage "undesirable elements," suburbs have in most cases produced a car-dependent lifestyle (since nothing except other houses are within easy walking distance.) This encourages more energy consumption, social isolationism, and physical inactivity.

For the average urban working-class renter, buses and trains are vital to their livelihood. The ideal is different for the urban pioneers, who like the advantage of a car for longer commutes, but walk or use public transportation when travelling to the closer shops, cafes, and boutiques.

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. Academics have studied these “global cities,” trying to both characterize them theoretically and empirically. 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 cites, which is comprised of “on 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 … ^* cater to the privileged classes for those whose sake the world city primarily exists” (1986, 322). 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 (1986, 323-328). 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.

Gentrification cannot be separated from the economic climate in which it occurs. The advent of the new economy, with its phenomenal rise in service sector jobs (both high and low-paying) and its new, more educated and more prosperous middle class, has taken center stage in the gentrification discussion, especially as their jobs move more and more from the suburbs and the outer periphery to the “new urban economic core of banking and service activities that comes to replace the older, typically manufacturing oriented, core” (Sassen 1995, 65). This has changed the city’s very economic scope, with old retailers who resided in this urban core and supplied goods to the traditional, yet now more scarce, blue-collar middle class being “replaced by upmarket boutiques and restaurants catering to new high-income urban elites” (Sassen 1995, 66).

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 value) 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, 1987b, p. 462).

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 abandoned inner-city properties and redeveloping them for new inhabitants. Such redevelopment effectively closes the rent-gap and leads to a higher and better use of the land.

The de-industrialization of the inner-city is seen as a prerequisite, which 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…, 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” (616). 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 (1994, 56). 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 conservative politics) that often follows them—conservative 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 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 (1982, x). 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, suddenly aware that they are sitting on gold mines, rush to cash in” (Cash 2001, 39).

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 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 politics (see Ley’s 1980 article “Liberal Ideology and the Post-Industrial City” which describes then 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 by arguing that “gentrifiers and their social and cultural characteristics was of crucial importance for an understanding of gentrification,” has been criticized by Hamnett, however, as not going far enough, and not incorporating the “supply of dwellings and the role of developers/speculators in the process” (Hamnett 1991, 186, 187).

Demographic shifts

The emergence of a 'service-class', that is, a group of people—generally between the ages of 25 and 35—with a high disposable income and service-oriented jobs 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 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 25–35 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 DINK—Double Income No Kids—syndrome). Additionally, urban researchers are seeing an increase in the number of single women professionals living alone in gentrified areas.

In the UK, ever-rising house prices have meant that many middle-class people under age 40 either inherit or can be gifted a substantial amount from a parent – enough to buy a house outright in the sort of area traditionally vulnerable to gentrification. 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 neighbourhoods. 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 the notion of male as breadwinner/female as domestic, as higher education becomes more accessible to women, has also contributed to the movement of single women into the inner-city.

In London, a large proportion of gentrified housing was originally built for middle class occupants, and if it was ever occupied by working class people, this mainly came about when the middle classes left for more distant suburbs between the two World Wars. In Islington, four storey houses are much more common than two storey cottages.

Gentrification usually increases the property value of an area. This is a positive development for city officials (by raising tax revenue, which is often dependent on property values), the middle class, as well as existing resident owner-occupiers. Unfortunately this same rise in property value can be devastating to those in lower income groups, when children of such residents find they can no longer afford to live in certain neighborhoods. 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. Both views would seem to be correct.

Hipsters as a factor

In the case of cities like New York City, groups of "pioneers" moved out to areas such as Park Slope or Williamsburg (in Brooklyn) or Hoboken, New Jersey, which were once run-down, inner-city neighborhoods, because Manhattan had become prohibitively expensive to live in. These areas then became desirable to hipsters because many saw them to have a bohemian atmosphere, thus beginning gentrification and increasing property values and rents. This often forced the original residents to move out to adjacent areas (such as Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn or Jersey City, New Jersey), where the process may start again. A similar phenomenon can be seen in Los Angeles. Adjacent to Hollywood is an area called Los Feliz, which for the last decade or so has been seen as a desirable area for its hipster community. As gentrification has occurred there with property prices rising, there has been a migration out to other adjacent areas, such as Silverlake, Eagle Rock and Highland Park. In many cases, a prominent early sign that the migration is occurring is that owners of popular hipster hangouts will start opening new establishments in these areas.

Yet another example would be the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago, which is currently still becoming gentrified. The effect is now spreading to other neighborhoods in Chicago, such as the Pilsen and Logan Square neighborhoods.

In London, the now extremely upmarket areas of Chelsea and Notting Hill developed in a similar manner during the 1960's and 1980's respectively. More recently, Camden Town, Islington and Hoxton/Shoreditch in the London Borough of Hackney have followed suit.

Gay men as a factor

Manuel Castells's seminal work on gays as "gentrifiers" in San Francisco has revealed a pattern replicated, to some degree, in other North American cities, as "many ^* were single men, did not have to sustain a family, were young, and connected to a relatively prosperous service economy" (Castells, 1983, p. 160). Additionally, gay men (sometimes called "guppies" — Gay Urban Professionals) tend to choose inner-city neighbourhoods as places to live because of the lower cost of housing in these areas, their accessibility to jobs in the downtown core, and their proximity to gay social networks and acceptance (which are generally found in inner-city cores) that may not be found in more conservative (and in some cases homophobic) suburbs, but their larger disposable incomes allow for them to "fix up" their homes and increase property values. Gay men are often seen as "pioneers" in gentrification, along with artists. In Detroit and its suburbs, this process has occurred over the last few years. The old, working class downtowns of suburbs such as Royal Oak and Ferndale have been replaced with vibrant, hip downtowns. Leading this charge have been gay-owned businesses, such as Pronto!, a popular restaurant/bar that caters to the gay community. Shortly after the gay community moved into downtown Royal Oak, so did the young, urban professionals that cities covet: in Royal Oak, after the gay bars went in, so did many "hip" straight bars. Today, formalizing what started in the early 1990s, Royal Oak's Downtown Development Association advertises the neighborhood as "trendy" ^*.

The PBS documentary Flag Wars outlined the tension between an urban African-American community in the old silk stocking district of Columbus, Ohio and a flock of gay pioneers moving in, who were accused of gentrification and racism. However, it's important to note that there is a problematic tendency (rooted in both racism and homophobia) to think of "gay" and "black" as being mutually exclusive. This ignores the realities of many gay black people's lives. The "there goes the neighborhood" response to gentrification is often amplified by prejudice against gays, therefore singling out gays as responsible for larger economic trends.

And gay men are in some senses a special case in a discussion of gentrification. Many are forced to avoid their towns and neighborhoods of origin because of the need to start a new life and form a new community after coming out. Further, the observation that many gay men are single and childless should be viewed in the light of social policy (like adoption and marriage restrictions) that intends to keep it that way. So while economics and a desire to make good real estate investments drive some of the association of gay men with urban gentrification, so too do homophobia and social stigma.

Attempts to control gentrification

Affordable housing

In many cases, existing residents of gentrifying neighborhoods have organized into grassroots groups to develop new strategies to retain affordable housing in their communities. In New York City, this has met with limited success, primarily because property values and rents have soared exponentially in most parts of that city's metropolitan area. In the London Borough of Hackney in December 2005, residents occupied a local café on Broadway Market to stop it being demolished and turned into luxury flats.

Because gentrification is such a contentious issue, it often creates a variety of sides and stakeholders that are often at odds with one another. On the one hand, gentrification helps to revitalize distressed urban communities that have experienced disinvestment and abandonment, and can often be beneficial to long-time residents of these areas. It can result in the opening of grocery stores and other services that may not have existed there previously. However, it has the added side-effect of displacement, particularly for renters.

Inclusionary zoning

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 such a relatively new concept, there have been few studies regarding its effect on limiting gentrification.

Rent control

In response to gentrification pressure, some cities pass rent control ordinances. While rent control allows existing tenants to remain, it doesn't directly affect the overall increase in underlying property prices. For example, the formerly downscale southwestern section of Santa Monica, California and the eastern section of West Hollywood, California became more gentrified despite rent control. Since many forms of rent control allow landlords to have high prices for newer residents while forcing them to keep prices low for long-time residents, this may have the unintended consequence of actually providing a policy incentive for gentrification, and for landlords to rent to residents they hope will leave sooner. On the other hand, without rent control, a neighborhood undergoing gentrification might change even more rapidly because landlords could quickly raise rents on long-time residents and thereby displace them from the neighborhood. Some evidence exists to demonstrate that the 1994 abolition of rent control in Boston, Massachusetts and some surrounding suburbs (via statewide ballot) sped up gentrification in that area, although strong economic growth in the following years is probably a larger factor.

Attempts to amplify gentrification

In some cities in the UK such as 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. Property developers have also 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.

References

Cash, Stephanie. “Landlords put a squeeze on Brooklyn artists.” Art in America v. 89 (3), pp. 39-40.
Castells, M. (1983) "Cultural identity, sexual liberation and urban structure: the gay community in San Francisco" in M. Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Edward Arnold, London) pp. 138–170.
Friedman, John. “The world-city hypothesis.” From World Cities in a World-System, Paul L. Knox and Peter J. Taylor (eds), Cambridge UP, 1995, pp. 317-331. (originally published 1986)
Hamnett, Chris. “The blind men and the elephant: the explanation of gentrification.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 1991, v. 16, pp. 173-189.
Hamnett, Chris. "Gentrifiers or lemmings? A response to Neil Smith.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 1992, v. 17, pp 116-119.
Knox, Paul L. “The restless urban landscape: Economic and Sociocultural change and the transformation of metropolitan Washington, DC.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 1991, v. 81, pp. 181-209.
Ley, David. “Alternative explanations for inner-city gentrification: a Canadian assessment.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 1986, v. 76, pp. 521-535.
Ley, David. “Gentrification and the politics of the new middle class.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1994, v. 12, pp. 53-74.
Ley, David. “Reply: the rent-gap revisited.” Annals of the Association of the American Geographers 1987, v. 77, pp. 465-468.
Moore, Keith. “From redline to renaissance.” Salon.com, August 2, 1999. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/08/02/harlem/print.html.
Papayis, Marilyn Adler. “Sex and the revanchist city: zoning out pornography in New York.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2000, v. 18, pp. 341-353.
Rose, Demaris. “Rethinking gentrification: beyond the uneven development of marxist theory.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1984, v. 2, pp. 47-74.
Sassen, Saskia. “On concentration and centrality in the global city.” From World Cities in a World-System, Paul L. Knox and Peter J. Taylor (eds), Cambridge UP, 1995 pp. 63-75.
Smith, N. (1987) "Gentrification and the rent-gap", Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77 (3) pp. 462–465.
Smith, N. (1996) The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. (Routledge, London)
Zukin, Sharon. Loft Living. John Hopkins UP, Baltimore, 1982.

External links

Understanding Gentrification from the City of Port Phillip official website

Website for the community occupation of Francesca's Café 34 Broadway Market fighting gentrification in South Hackney

Flag Wars Detailed documentary about Ohio gentrification in Columbus, detailing conflicts of race and homophobia

Gentrification Web - very detailed resource from which a lot of this discussion about gentrification seems to have been taken!

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