Gentrification

Gentrification refers to residential change that brings new residents who are disproportionately young, well educated, salaried, and professional into urban neighborhoods where poor people live. Gentrification has been occurring in cities throughout the world since the 1970s. The change in an urban population can be dramatic. For example, in Ottawa, Canada, in 1971, 10 percent of downtown residents held university degrees and 42 percent worked in white-collar jobs.

New York, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Toronto, London, Berlin, Sydney, and Washington, D.C., are some of the cities where gentrification has been dramatic and controversial. Some cities welcome gentrification as a revitalization of neighborhoods mired in poverty. They argue that it boosts the urban tax base while reducing blight and density. For example, between 1971 and 1996, Canada's four major cities experienced a loss in population density of 25 percent because only some people were welcome. Hotels and businesses in San Francisco have actively supported gentrification and promoted policies to push homeless people out of downtown areas in order to make tourists and businesspeople feel more welcome and safe. In many cities, however, community activists argue that gentrification disrupts traditional neighborhood life, displaces vulnerable residents, and causes homelessness.

Urban scholars debate the causes of gentrification. Some stress the cultural or individual inclinations of the newer residents to experience the excitement and diversity of urban life. Some scholars liken the new residents to pioneers braving a challenging, changing urban frontier. Others explain gentrification by a rent gap between the potential and current value of the land, which grows when older urban housing deteriorates and becomes devalued and thereby a good investment. By purchasing properties cheaply, investors can renovate them and take advantage of a changing real estate market to sell them for a handsome profit. These scholars link gentrification to the cycling of capital investment in and out of cities and to recurrent processes of decline and regrowth in urban neighborhoods. Gentrification also reflects larger processes of changing employment structures and opportunities and public policies for redesigning cities.

The simplest way to visualize gentrification is in its residential form. Older houses are rehabilitated and resold; inexpensive apartment buildings are converted to condominiums; old warehouses are transformed into lofts. Affordable multifamily rental dwellings are converted and “restored” into upscale single-family homes. Single-room occupancy hotels (SROs), which often house poor, homeless men, are torn down or remodeled. Toronto lost 300 SROs since 1986, and in Sydney, Australia, between 1992 [Page 176]and 2000, 340 boarding houses were demolished, renovated into expensive apartments, or turned into backpackers' hostels. Commercial life also changes, because shops that serve the poor, such as thrift stores or carry-outs, give way to boutiques and antique stores.

Sometimes homeless shelters themselves are removed from gentrifying neighborhoods. In Cincinnati, for example, the Drop Inn Center Shelterhouse in the Over the Rhine community was removed to make way for a Fine Arts and Education Center linked to Cincinnati's historic Music Hall. The shelter was considered a danger to the children using the new facility, although it housed 16,000 people, some of them children. In downtown Cincinnati, the Salvation Army Hostel building was sold to the Senator Steakhouse chain, where a retail/restaurant/loft complex is planned.

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