Gentrification

D. J. Hammel, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA

& 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

GlossaryDevalorization In Marxist urban theory, it is the

destruction of a parcel of land’s ability to produce

increased return on capital invested in it.

Displacement The forced movement of a lower-

income individual out of a neighborhood usually due to

increasing rents or property taxes brought about by

gentrification.

Land Rent It is a form of economic rent accrued

through the control (or ownership) of land in productive

use.

Postindustrial City As it relates to gentrification, it is

the city created by the move away from a strong reliance

on manufacturing as an economic base, particularly

throughout the 1970s, and an increasing emphasis on

the provision of high-level business and financial

services as the basis for economic growth.

Revanchism It is a nineteenth-century French political

movement that attempted to take revenge on the

working classes for a series of perceived national

humiliations. As applied to gentrification, it describes the

series of neoliberal policies aimed at poor and minority

urbanites to ensure that central cities were more

palatable for middle-class habitation and consumption.

Definitions

Gentrification refers to a process of neighborhoodtransformation in which working class and poor residentsare displaced by an influx of middle class residents. Thischange results in improvements in the area’s privatehousing stock and public infrastructure with a concomitant increase in house values and contract rents.Gentrification, the processes that create it, its effects, andits political ramifications have been the focus of a largeamount of social science research and substantial politicalrhetoric. The importance of gentrification rests not onlyupon the dramatic effects it has upon both the residentsof a neighborhood and the neighborhood’s landscape, butalso upon the linkages that have been created betweengentrification and theories of urbanization.

Origins

Sociologist Ruth Glass originally used the term in 1964to describe a process of class based neighborhood changein a handful of London neighborhoods like Islington. The

process clearly predates the name and what might betermed as modern gentrification began in the mid 1950sas bohemian enclaves in sections of several global cities.The earliest identified gentrification in the United Stateswas the discovery of Georgetown in Washington, DC, bybureaucrats brought to the city to assist in the administration of New Deal programs of the 1930s – althoughthe process appeared contemporaneously in some Bostonneighborhoods as well. In Europe, the first significantevidence of gentrification was in 1860s Paris. ‘Embourgeoisment’, as it was termed, was one result of thewholesale destruction of neighborhoods inherent inHaussmann’s infamous modernization scheme. Despitethe precursors, the coining of the word gentrificationdoes represent an important watershed because it marksthe beginning of a period of cyclical but sustained gentrification activity in cities around the world.

Shifts in Meaning

The term ‘gentrification’ has been subject to shifts inmeaning over the four decades since it was first created,and debate about the meaning of the term has been a partof the process since the beginning. The gentrification thatGlass observed in London involved the basic upgradingof older homes and mews dispersed through severalinner city neighborhoods. As the process expanded inLondon and was identified in other advanced capitalistcities, it began to involve the redevelopment of retailproperties as well as residential ones. In addition, someareas experienced demolition and new construction.Little attention has been paid to retail redevelopment,but most scholars seem to acknowledge that it is part ofthe gentrification process, although clearly secondary tothe activity in the housing market. A more robust andlonger lasting debate developed around the legitimacy ofwhat is now termed new build gentrification. Some observers confine the use of the term gentrification to theprocess of rehabilitating old housing stock, or what issometimes termed traditional gentrification. This usage issomewhat more common in work emanating from thedesign fields, and despite the substantial limitations that itplaces on both the extent and impact of gentrification,there are still those who adhere to this traditional view.Very few areas, however, have been gentrified purelythrough the redevelopment of old housing stock, especially in the North American context. Even Society Hillin Philadelphia, the locus of some of the earliest and mosttheoretically significant work on gentrification, involved

360

both the redevelopment of historic structures, andclearance and construction of large condominium towers.

The political context of gentrification has also createdsubstantial debate over the use and meaning of the term.While there was little early reaction to Glass’ usage, bythe mid 1970s the term had significant competition.Reinvestment, revitalization, renewal, and renaissancewere all preferred over gentrification. The authors of oneof the early scholarly collections on the topic chose touse the phrase ‘neighborhood renovation’ in the title, andthe special section of the Journal of the American PlanningAssociation appearing in 1979 used the title ‘Symposiumon neighborhood revitalization’. There has been no systematic investigation of the evident discomfort thatAmerican scholars had with the term, but the class relationships explicit in gentrification may have played arole. In addition, early North American research oftenviewed gentrification as a generally positive process, andalternate terms, particularly renaissance, may reflect thatbias. Throughout the 1980s, research on gentrificationtook a much more critical approach and organized resistance to gentrification became much more common.The term was increasingly used by academics in Europeand North America, but had acquired a strong enoughnegative connotation that policymakers, developers, andgentrifiers themselves actively avoided it. Perhaps themost acute example of this avoidance in the Urban WhitePaper completed in 2001 as a guide to the future ofthe cities of the United Kingdom. The term renaissanceappears in the subtitle of the implementation document,and regeneration is used commonly to describe the goalsof the policy. Some critics have pointed out that thedocument is one of the most comprehensive policystatements on gentrification ever written, but the termgentrification never appears in the hundreds of pages oftext. For many, the term gentrification is one to beavoided for fear of a political backlash. For others, itsexplicit class connotations make it the preferred label forthe process.

Urban scholars have also expressed some difficultywith the term on a conceptual level. Since the early1980s, there has been concern that gentrification has beena catch all term used to describe an increasingly chaoticconcept. In an attempt to introduce more specificity,various modifying phrases have been added. New buildand traditional gentrification have been joined by ruralgentrification and super gentrification as ways to describenewly theorized aspects of gentrification. Rural gentrification was first identified in the United Kingdom in theearly 1980s and most of the research on the topic hasbeen conducted there. The term is used to describe theclass transformation of large portions of small rural villages. New telecommunications technologies have madeit possible for a small portion of the urban middle class toleave the city and establish rural residences. The

transformation in some villages is similar to that ingentrifying urban neighborhoods and the concept of ruralgentrification has gained recognition as another form ofthe gentrification process. At the same time the process inurban areas has continued to develop, and after a historyof over four decades in some cities gentrification in someareas has intensified to the extent that a previous generation of gentrifiers has been displaced from their homesby a set of very wealthy gentrifiers who may have multiple residences and reside in the neighborhood on apart time basis. This super gentrification appears to beconfined to major global centers, and is yet another facetof the larger process of gentrification.

History of Gentrification

Gentrification Waves

Like most urban processes, gentrification is temporallyuneven. In the European and North American context ithas been closely linked with economic cycles, first as acounter cyclical process, and later as a cyclical one. Thefirst significant wave of gentrification appeared in the late1960s and early 1970s. Jason Hackworth and Neil Smithobserve that gentrification during this period was led bystate redevelopment efforts and was confined to major USand Western European cities. A second wave of gentrification began to gain momentum in the late 1970s. Atthis point, it became evident that gentrification was nolonger confined to global cities, but was present inmoderate amounts in cities well down the hierarchy.Although the state still was actively involved in promoting the process, the role of private actors, who hadbegun to see the market potential of gentrification, wasmore prominent in creating gentrification. This timeperiod, particularly in the mid 1980s also saw coalescence of organized resistance to gentrification, albeitmostly at the local levels. In the United States, this periodalso saw one of the largest office building booms in thecountry’s history due in part to tax policies of the Reaganadministration. Much of the new construction was focused on the core of major American cities and thecombination of public/private partnerships to createlarge gentrification projects and substantial office towerconstruction made a highly noticeable impact on thelandscape of the American downtown. The third wavebegan in the mid 1990s as the economies of the industrialized world began a long period of sustained economicgrowth that lasted throughout the decade and into 2001.Another mild recession slowed gentrification activity, butunusually low mortgage interest rates, especially in theUnited States, allowed urban housing markets to navigatethe recession with little difficulty. The result has beennearly a decade and a half of substantial growth andexpansion of gentrification. This wave of gentrification is

Gentrification 361

distinguished from prior bursts of activity not only by itsduration, but also by the expansion of the process tocities outside the industrialized world. Some research hasalso suggested that this new gentrification has been financed more by large, global sources of capital than inprevious periods.

Geographic Extent

Over the four decades that gentrification has become asignificant feature of the urban fabric, its extent and intensity have changed dramatically. By the late 1970sgentrification seems to have been identifiable in mostmajor cities in Western Europe, North America, andAustralia.

Throughout the 1980s published reports of gentrification in Johannesburg, Kyoto, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aries,and Tel Aviv appeared. Shortly after the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the gentrificationprocess began in earnest in cities such as Prague andBudapest. It was even identifiable in Warsaw whosehistoric core was almost completely destroyed in WorldWar II. By the late 1990s, gentrification was evident evenin Moscow. Given the strong movement toward a market based economy in East and South Asia it is unsurprising that gentrification and displacement becamemajor issues in Chinese and Indian cities, especially,Shanghai and more recently in Mumbai. While thespread of gentrification continued, its intensity in NorthAmerican and European cities increased. By 2001, largesections of London and New York were heavily gentrified. The processes had proceeded to the point thatlong standing areas of poverty were gentrifying: Harlemand the Lower East Side in New York, and sections ofBrixton and the East End in London. Manhattan hadbecome such a center of activity that gentrificationspilled over into substantial sections of Brooklyn andeven Hoboken, New Jersey. In Chicago, gentrificationreached deep into the south side, and northwest of theLoop has surrounded Cabrini Green, one of the largestpublic housing projects in the country. In several morespatially limited central cities like Boston and SanFrancisco, gentrification, combined with an overheatedhousing market, had almost eliminated any affordablehousing in the central city. Toronto, Vancouver, andSydney also faced similar issues.

At the same time, gentrification was moving down theurban hierarchy both in Europe and North America. By2000, urban programs explicitly designed to foster gentrification had created small but viable areas of redevelopment in the United Kingdom’s old industrialcenters. The remote Spanish city of Bilbao was selectedas the site for the European branch of the Guggenheimmuseum, the now famous structure helped start awave of gentrification that penetrated well away from the

city’s redeveloped waterfront. In the United States, gentrification has slowly begun to transform small areas ofcities near the bottom of the urban hierarchy with rowhouse redevelopments and warehouse conversions inplaces like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, or the creation oflofts in small downtowns like Bloomington, Illinois. Somecritics have cautioned that gentrification has been definedso broadly that if you look for it you can find it almostanywhere, and there are conceptual difficulties withconflating redeveloped houses in a city of 50 000 peoplewith the massive flows of capital that have rebuilt largeportions of a number of global cities. Nonetheless, thereis an identifiable trend toward both a spatial expansionand intensification of the gentrification over the last30 years of the 1900s, and the trend appears to be continuing into the new century.

Causes of Gentrification

Early Explanations

The emergence of gentrification throughout the 1960sand 1970s caught the attention of urban scholars forseveral reasons. It was evident on the urban landscape, itoffered some solution to the problems of urban decline,and it seemed to contradict nearly 50 years of urbantheory that focused upon the out movement and suburbanization of the middle class. This challenge to thetheoretical canon required serious consideration of thecauses of gentrification. While the early research ongentrification covered a range of issues from displacement to other social and policy considerations, it was theattempts to theorize gentrification that dominated thescholarly research throughout the 1980s.

The earliest explanations for gentrification developedout of a view that it was a temporary phenomenon rootedin demographic factors present in both North Americaand Europe. Brian Berry suggested the major recession ofthe early 1970s followed by large numbers of babyboomers entering the housing market created a significant shortage of housing, rapidly driving up housingprices beyond the means of many members of the largecohort of first time homebuyers. A few of these individuals turned to lower cost housing in declining areas ofcentral cities. These gentrifiers, Berry suggested, wouldsoon leave their central city location and move to moretypical suburban locales when their incomes rose, housing became more affordable, and they began to havechildren. This demographic explanation was echoed bymany others and established a general view of gentrification as a highly ephemeral event. As it became clearerthat gentrified areas were expanding throughout the1980s instead of contracting, Berry suggested that gentrification was more an issue of contagious abandonmentof inner city housing brought about by overbuilding in

362 Gentrification

suburban housing markets. This substantial shift from ademand side to a supply side explanation has beenlargely ignored because of Berry’s famous contention thatgentrified areas were ‘‘islands of renewal in seas of decay.’’

While early explanations of gentrification emphasizeddemographic factors, many also noticed the correlationbetween gentrification and emerging high order servicecenters. Starting in the mid 1970s numerous scholarslinked gentrification with an increasing concentration ofwhite collar jobs in the central business district. By thelate 1970s, some were trying to empirically evaluate thislink. At the same time, a number of other suggestionswere made about the root causes of gentrification: highfuel prices, increasing numbers of women in the workforce, etc. While all these factors probably played a rolein bringing about gentrification, they were frequentlyoffered in an ad hoc fashion. Critics of this early phase ofexplanation accurately pointed to the lack of coherenttheories to contextualize the process. However, it issomewhat inaccurate to refer to the explanations as adhoc. Both of the Berry’s explanations of gentrification,although mutually exclusive, were consistent with andlinked to prevailing neoclassical theories of urbanization(although he claims to have challenged these same theories). It is accurate, however, that most of the early research on the causes of gentrification failed to makeexplicit links to established urban theory. This situationchanged dramatically in 1979 and 1980.

Capital and Culture

With the publication of a short paper dedicated tomoving toward a theory of gentrification, Neil Smithintroduced what has become known as the rent gap hypothesis. In doing so, he identified gentrification as theleading edge of a process of urban restructuring driven bythe demands of advanced capitalism. He suggested linksbetween the rent gap and Marxist theories of urbanization being honed by Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, and cemented those links in his later work on unevendevelopment. The rent gap hypothesis emphasized thesupply side causes of gentrification and focused onmovements of capital in the gentrification process. Thesubtitle of Smith’s paper was ‘A back to the city movement by capital and not people’. The rent gap theoryfocused on a cycle of devalorization, or destruction ofvalue, that all urban land is subject to. The five stagecycle suggests that while some land maintains its value,other land proceeds through phases of devalorization,perhaps eventually to abandonment. As devalorizationoccurs, the actual land rent (termed capitalized land rent)declines as less and less value can be extracted from theland given its current use. At the same time, in a metropolitan area with continued investment in the builtenvironment, or valorization, the potential land rent of

the devalorized parcel remains high because of their highlevels of accessibility. This difference in capitalized andpotential land rent is the rent gap. In land rent terms,gentrification represents the closing of the gap. The rentgap hypothesis stood in stark contrast to the demographicexplanations of gentrification because it emphasized thesupply of gentrifiable land and housing and not the demand for gentrification growing out of the rise of aparticular cohort of urbanites.

The postindustrial city hypothesis formed anothernew strand in gentrification theory, emerging at the sametime as the rent gap. David Ley was the first to fullyelaborate the impact of this hypothesis on gentrificationin a seminal paper in 1980. Ley emphasized the effect of anew liberal ideology in changing the inner city landscapein Vancouver, British Columbia. As the city’s economywas transformed by the increase in high level servicefunctions, a growing group of elite white collar professionals began to assert power in local politics, adoptinga liberal ideology that Ley suggests was characterized bya concern with humane governance and emphasizedissues involved with the urban esthetic. As this politicaltransition played itself out, it became clear that the newliberal elite were not terribly concerned with issues ofsocial justice, but instead, placed issues of urban livabilityabove all other concerns. The urban orientation of thisnew class was in part a result of their employment in theurban core and in part a function of the liberal ideology.Ley outlines many of the emphases of Vancouver’s liberalmovement in a case study of False Creek, an old industrial area that was the subject of city led redevelopment.Ley never used the term gentrification in the 1980 paper,but it was clear that he was outlining a different view ofthe process of gentrification. He explicitly links gentrification to larger political and economic forces that helpcreate a new class of potential gentrifiers. He also suggestthat liberal ideology was so focused upon livability andesthetics that some of its results, including the FalseCreek, project were uneconomical. In this sense, theliberal ideology explanation of gentrification would seemto be in direct opposition to the rent gap hypothesis, andin some respects, it is.

The debate surrounding these explanations of gentrification continued through the 1980s, and included alively exchange between Smith and Ley in the Annals ofthe Association of American Geographers. Other gentrificationtheorists began to portray these explanations of gentrification as being based either in capital or culture. In thissense, the theories surrounding gentrification became amicrocosm of larger debates and theorization in geography and other social sciences. Indeed, much of theattention that gentrification received was not due to itsempirical extent, or even its effects on working class andpoor neighborhoods. Gentrification was understood as asymbolic process representative of sweeping changes in

Gentrification 363

industrialized cities. Theorizing gentrification was a keycomponent in rejecting positivist theories of urbanizationand supplanting them with alternative theories. However,the capital and culture debates were not actually aboutcapital and culture. The rent gap hypothesis was oftensimplified to a deterministic diagram representing thegap between potential and capitalized land rent, but ignoring the politics of neighborhood change and classconstitution that drove land rent changes. Conversely,while the liberal ideology explanation certainly contained a cultural component, it also relied heavily uponconcepts common in political economy. Both Smith andLey seemed to move in this direction in later work, andmost scholars who wrote about gentrification theoryseemed to suggest the need for some combination of bothexplanations, but often with the clear intent of privilegingone of them.

Revanchism and Neoliberalism

By the early 1990s, the so called capital and culturedebates had run their course, and gentrification itself wasslowed by a recession in Europe and North America.Given the culmination of these two events, it is unsurprising that several scholars began to speculateabout the end of gentrification, and processes of degentrification. Once again they raised questions about itsusefulness as a concept. The rapid reappearance ofgentrification in many global centers, however, silencedmany of those questions (even when they raised important and difficult issues). As academic interestrenewed in gentrification, the focus changed. Jan VanWeesep suggested that after the experiences in gentrifiedareas during the 1980s more attention needed to be paidto issues of displacement and the inequalities that gentrification was inscribing in the landscape. The researchthat followed focused initially upon documenting andeventually upon understanding and theorizing processesof gentrification as they unfolded after the recession ofthe early 1990s.

Gentrification in the 1990s can be differentiated fromearly processes in several ways. Oddly, there appeared tobe less political resistance to the process in gentrifiedareas, especially in contrast to the sharp and sometimesviolent conflicts of the 1980s. In the United States, part ofthis difference may be explained by shifts in a range ofhousing policies. Throughout the 1980s the residentiallending industry was deregulated in ways that allowed anincrease in both the products that mortgage lenderscould offer and the type and characteristics of the lendersthemselves. A secondary mortgage market had existed inthe United States for decades, and had expanded massively in the 1970s, but in the 1980s private secondarymarket added to the growth. Historic discrimination inlending had been addressed in a series of legislation

throughout the 1970s, which the Clinton administrationbegan to enforce with some vigor. These developments,combined with market pressures, began to open up innercity neighborhoods to mainstream mortgage capital forthe first time. The intended result was that low andmoderate income individuals would have increased access to mortgages, and this did occur, but these shifts alsomade gentrifying areas the target of increased mortgagelending. Home buying and renovations in gentrifyingareas had traditionally been funded through processes ofsweat equity, personal savings, and informal loan networks. While mortgages were made in gentrifying areas,they were difficult to obtain, and were often at unfavorable rates. Access to mainstream mortgage capital,initially in the 1980s and in massively increasing amountsthroughout the 1990s helped finance gentrification at apace that had not been experienced previously. Resistance to gentrification at the local level was handicappedby an increasingly direct link between the process andglobal capital markets.

The extent of gentrification in many major US citieswas significant enough that David Ley’s suggestion, madein the early 1980s, that gentrification may one day turnNorth American cities inside out creating a morphologymuch more similar to other cities around the globe,seemed plausible. The amount of gentrification in placeslike Manhattan, Chicago, Boston, Washington, DC, andSan Francisco made a significant mark on local politics.Neil Smith borrowed the term revanchism to outline atheory of middle class revenge upon the poor in an attempt to take back the city and make it more palatablefor middle class consumption habits. The vigorous policing championed in New York, with its occasional overtviolence inflicted upon marginalized groups, effectivelypushed the poor and dispossessed out of Manhattan. Italso served as a model for other US cities. Similar tacticswere adopted in European cities, although initially theywere somewhat less aggressive.

Revanchism was quickly linked to a political andeconomic movement in advanced capitalism, termedneoliberalism. A number of scholars have argued thatgentrification is a clear example of neoliberal policiesand its expansion during the 1990s was brought about bythose policies. Philosophically neoliberalism is a returnto a deeply held belief in the efficacy of the free market,albeit with substantial assistance from the public sectorthat is typically used to guarantee a high return onprivate investment. Gentrification throughout the 1990swas often aided by local neoliberal regimes that saw it asa free market solution to urban problems. There arenumerous examples in the United States, but the UnitedKingdom may offer the single most sweeping example ofneoliberal gentrification policy in the Blair administration’s plan for regenerating the country’s centralcities.

364 Gentrification

The Process of Gentrification

Stage Theories

There has been significant investigation into the processof gentrification, and a few useful generalizations havebeen made. Early work suggested a first group of gentrifiers who were risk oblivious and thus were willing tolive in neighborhoods that probably lacked many of thetypical amenities they would expect, and from a realestate perspective posed significant investment risks.These early gentrifiers often had specific reasons, frequently economic constraints, that moved them towardgentrification. College students have been identified inthis group, but the arts community is often seen as themost prominent participants in the early stages of thegentrification process. Artists’ need for studio space, theirlow incomes, and their counter cultural outlook led themto neighborhoods that were, in real estate terms, off themap. Some research has suggested that gay men andlesbians have also been key actors early in the gentrification process. During the earliest waves of gentrification,the social barriers to living openly as homosexuals inmany parts of the city made economically marginal areasattractive as safe havens. In addition, single workingmothers, another group with limited housing choices,may have chosen gentrified areas because of their proximity to the workplace, which helped them maintain thedifficult balance between domestic and professional responsibilities. Discussion and theorization about the roleof these groups introduced an important gender component into gentrification and while it has never been theprimary concern of most research on the topic, theoriesexplicating processes of gendering space have been present in work on gentrification for several decades.

These early gentrifiers have often been the subject ofdebate about their role in the gentrification process. Ifthese groups manage to start the process of gentrification,do they bear some responsibility for the resulting displacement from later, more intense gentrification? Thesubject has received much discussion on web forum andelectronic mail lists, and the issue has received seriousconsideration by some members of the subject communities that are often characterized by progressive politics. However, from a policy standpoint, it may be myopicto lay blame on socially marginalized groups for a processthat other research has clearly indicated is largely drivenby mainstream economic and cultural forces.

Gentrification in the second stage is characterized byrisk prone or risk aware in movers. These individuals areattracted to gentrifying areas because of the social diversityand the counter culture trendiness that result from the firststage of activity. The gentrifiers may be professionals withsomewhat limited financial resources, but are well aware ofthe investment risks of purchasing in areas in early stagesof the gentrification process. On the other hand, they are

just as aware of the potential financial benefits, althoughmost work focusing on stages of gentrification typicallyemphasizes the cultural aspects of gentrification in its earlystages. It is also in this risk aware stage that investors anddevelopers begin to pay attention to the area.

The final stage of gentrification is often referred to asthe risk adverse stage. At this point a neighborhood isheavily gentrified and will likely have many of the typicalamenities upper middle class urbanites expect in theirneighborhoods. In movers, at this point, will pay substantial prices for homes and expect that investment to besafe. Gentrified neighborhoods at this point have takenon a particular economic profile and may be solidlymiddle class, or in some cases an elite urban enclave thatis comparable to some of the traditional outposts of urbanwealth.

While stage theories of gentrification are useful inunderstanding the potential forms that gentrification maytake, it is difficult to effectively apply them to individualneighborhoods due to the diverse forms that gentrification may take and the incredible range of urbancontexts that occurs within. There has been some investigation into various types of gentrified areas, but ithas typically been constrained to neighborhoods within asingle city, or at most selected neighborhoods in citiesfrom one country. The diversity of international contextsposes a significant challenge to anyone attempting tocreate some form of classification of gentrified neighborhoods, but the task might provide an entree into morefully understanding the multitude of processes that create and maintain gentrified areas.

Profile of Gentrifiers

Questions about the identity of gentrifiers and their motivations have been addressed in a wide array of researchprojects. The initial view of gentrifiers as a ‘back to thecity’ group was shown to be inaccurate by early empiricalstudies. By and large, gentrifiers lived in households thatwere either new, or that had moved from other areas of thecity. A more sophisticated picture began to emerge in the1980s that tied gentrifiers to both liberal ideology and aculture of consumption. More recently, some have arguedthat gentrifiers should be understood as part of a transformed middle class who seek to identify themselvesthrough the process of gentrification. Theorists in this veinhave invoked Bourdieu’s concept of habitus in an attemptto link the structural aspects of gentrification to individualbeliefs and dispositions.

Consequences of Gentrification

Displacement

The potential of gentrification to displace lower incomeresidents from a neighborhood seemed obvious very

Gentrification 365

early after the identification of the process. Some of theearliest research focused on displacement, and whilethe findings were based on relatively small scale studies,the general consensus was that gentrification in a traditional neighborhood setting would result in the displacement of many of the original residents of theneighborhood. Most of the displacement was the directresult of economic issues, but the stress and strain of classdifferences and neighborhood change were also identifiedas factors.

More recently, some controversy has arisen over theissue of displacement, as part of a larger movement thatseeks to suggest that gentrification is a largely positivephenomenon and the only realistic way of revitalizingmany inner city areas. Several studies conducted byLance Freeman have indicated that gentrificationdoes not directly contribute to displacement of lowincome individuals. There is a high degree of residentialmobility in poorer households and the background ratesof mobility are high enough and the typical process ofgentrification slow enough that it is impossible to attribute the out movement of low income individuals directly to gentrification. On the other hand, thereare a number of case studies that clearly identify incidences of displacement directly caused by gentrification.In addition, there can be little doubt that gentrificationcan dramatically reduce the housing options for lowincome people, forcing them to direct their searchelsewhere.

Displacement is an on going concern with gentrification and is likely to be the source of a great deal ofdebate. The debate, however, has tended to focus on thelink between gentrification and displacement. In academic research, at least, there is little argument about theseverity of the process and the difficulties displacementcreates for low income people.

Policy Consequences

The consequences of gentrification reach beyond theneighborhoods in which the process is operating, becauseit has become the centerpiece of a range of urban policyinitiatives. In much of the industrialized world, gentrification has been seen as a possible solution to a range ofurban problems. There is little doubt that the massivegentrification of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn contributed to the strong fiscal position that New York Cityenjoyed throughout the 1990s and was in strong contrastto the debt ridded metropolis of the 1970s. In the US, thepurported fiscal benefits have provided a justification formany cities to subsidize gentrification. While the processhas long been subsidized and even initiated by the statein myriad ways, it was not until the 1990s that gentrification became fully linked with large scale redevelopment policies and theories.

In the United States, ideas surrounding the importance of a so called creative class in initiating and expanding economic development enmeshed gentrificationand development policies. In the creative class hypothesis, it is the educated, urbane, and highly skilled workforce that drives the postindustrial economy. Thiscreative class is often also a gentrifying class and this linkhas driven a set of neoliberal policies that have attemptedto attract the creative class through subsidizing developments and projects that would improve the lifestyle ofthe urban middle class and attract members of the creative class. It has also driven a series of revanchist policiesaimed at removing the poor from the areas that are likelyto be most attractive to the creative class. The hypothesisdoes emphasize the importance of diversity and tolerancein local governance, but this emphasis is rarely translatedto policy.

One of the most direct links between gentrificationand public policy is the Urban White paper issued by theUK government in 2002. Formally titled, ‘Our towns andcities – The future: Delivering an urban renaissance’, thepaper was based on a government commissioned studyof urban problems, ‘Towards an urban renaissance’. Boththe report and the ensuing policy recommendationsplace heavy emphasis on the need for the regeneration ofthe urban core, particularly in the country’s regionalmetropolises. The document places emphasis on public/private partnerships in creating gentrification and makesscant mention of a range of social issues that plague theurban cores of the country’s most troubled cities. In short,the document poses gentrification and commercial redevelopment as a solution to a vast range of urban issues.As Loretta Lees has observed, however, the term is notused and renaissance, regeneration, and sustainability aresubstituted, thus avoiding the deeply imbedded classconstitution of the gentrification process. The discoursemakes the intent clear. The new urban core will be aplace for the British middle classes. Given the influenceof the central government in the United Kingdom, theimplementation of these policies, as was intended, hastriggered gentrification often as a major facet of centralcity or waterfront redevelopment.

Perhaps, one of the more unusual effects of gentrification has been its influence on public housing policy inthe United States. In the early 1990s, after a report on thetroubling conditions in many of the country’s publichousing projects, the HOPE VI program was launched toimprove the conditions in the nation’s worst publichousing. HOPE VI was a multidimensional program andits origins were complex, but there is a distinct link withseveral major aspects of the program and the intensegentrification of many American inner cities. There hadbeen a growing concern about the effects of concentratedpoverty in American cities and public housing was seenas one of the greatest contributors to the issue of

366 Gentrification

concentration. The results of several decades of gentrification had led to situations in some US cities wherepublic housing projects and gentrified neighborhoodswere sitting side by side. The HOPE VI program hadadopted a policy of encouraging income mixing whenpossible, and the presence of gentrification in some locales made it possible. Chicago provides one of the moststunning examples, where several of the country’s largestprojects were slated for demolition and replacement witha mix of as much as 50% market rate housing, and onlyvague plans for relocating a majority of public housingresidents. Gentrification then has created a new andtroubling option for policymakers who seek to create anew form of urbanization that excludes all but theprivileged.

See also: Gentrification, Rural; Habitus; Housing; Land

Rent Theory; Ley, D.; Neoliberalism, Urban; Regeneration

to Renaissance; Smith, N.; Uneven Development; Urban

Policy; Waterfront Development.

Further Reading

Atkinson, A. and Bridge, G. (2005). The New Urban Colonialism.London: Routledge.

Butler, T. and Lees, L. (2006). Super gentrification in Barnsbury,London: Globalisation and gentrifying global elites at theneighbourhood level. Transactions of the Institute of BritishGeographers 31, 467 487.

Duany, A. (2001). Three cheers for gentrification. The AmericanEnterprise 12, 36 39.

Freeman, L. (2006). There Goes the ‘Hood’: Views of Gentrificationfrom the Ground Up. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UniversityPress.

Hackworth, J. and Smith, N. (2001). The changing state ofgentrification. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie92, 464 477.

Lees, L., Slater, T. and Wyly, E. (2007). Gentrification. New York:Routledge.

Ley, D. (1980). Liberal ideology and the post industrial city. Annals ofthe Association of American Geographers 70, 238 258.

Ley, D. (1996). The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the CentralCity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rose, D. (1989). A feminist perspective on employment restructuringand gentrification: The case of Montreal. In Wolch, J. & Dear, M.(eds.) The Power of Geography, pp 18 138. Winchester, MA: UnwinHyman.

Smith, N. (1979). Toward a theory of gentrification: A back to the citymovement by capital not people. Journal of the American PlanningAssociation 45, 538 548.

Smith, N. and Williams, P. (eds.) (1986). Gentrification of the City.Boston, MA: Allen and Unwin.

Smith, N. (1996). The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and theRevanchist City. London: Routledge.

Wyly, E. and Hammel, D. (1999). Islands of decay in seas of renewal:Urban policy and the resurgence of gentrification. Housing PolicyDebate 10, 711 771.

Zukin, S. (1989). Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (2ndedn.). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Relevant Website

http://members.lycos.co.uk/gentrifications/Gentrification Web maintained by Tom Slater, Lycos.

Gentrification 367