Gentrification

Gentrification is an imprecise and elastic term referring to a wide range of processes associated with[Page 179] changes in land use and the built environment (especially in urban contexts). Typically, it refers to changes that are characterized by some combination of the following: attempts to increase the profitability (rent) of land through reinvestment and redevelopment; planning and economic development projects (both public and private) aimed at increasing tax bases through revitalization; renovation and/or rehabilitation of buildings and infrastructure; demographic changes in the direction of increased middle-to upper-class and often white populations; transformations in social and cultural practices oriented toward these same populations (especially leisure and consumer cultures); displacements or outright erasures of working-and lower-class businesses and residences; decreases in affordable housing and commercial opportunities; destruction of poor, minority, immigrant, and/or other marginalized communities; consumer landscapes full of symbols and images connoting cosmopolitan aesthetics, desires, and aspirations; antivagrancy and related campaigns to protect areas' images as safe and desirable; and fetishization of certain kinds of cultural difference and diversity (especially sexual).

First coined during the 1960s, the term gentrification referred specifically to the reclaiming of poor and working-class inner-city residential neighborhoods by more middle- and upper-class in-migrants (a new urban gentry) and the concomitant displacement of indigenous residents by higher rents and property taxes. The implicit theoretical imagination at work was one primarily of a demand- and consumption-driven process, although the reasons for the shifts in demand and consumption habits that supposedly explained gentrification were multiple and debated. Often artists, gays, and other supposed cultural nonconformists willing to expend considerable amounts of sweat equity in rehabilitating homes and small businesses—products of the social revolutions of the 1960s as well as changes in urban occupational structures, transportation costs, family structures, and political movements alleged to have shaped their consumer tastes and preferences—were seen as the initial risk takers in a process that proceeded through stages. The culmination of the process was seen as the (re)colonization of gentrifying areas by somewhat more risk-averse affluent consumers and the construction of a locally based landscape of consumption catering to them. Ironically, original risk takers themselves frequently were displaced in the process.

Subsequent empirical work, however, called into question not only the alleged sequence of events but also the typical characteristics of both areas that were ripe for gentrification and of gentrifying and displaced populations. Some areas, it seemed, never gentrified despite being ripe; New York City's South Bronx was an oft-cited example. Other areas, such as parts of New York City's Harlem, gentrified while still remaining solidly middle class, thereby stretching the definition of gentrification in ways that sometimes privileged racial transformations over class ones. Some instances entailed wholesale displacements of indigenous populations (e.g., San Francisco's Western Addition), whereas others seemed hardly to displace anybody (e.g., New Orleans's Marigny neighborhood). In such cases, gentrification seemed to be more about cross-class changes in cultures of consumption than about distinctively class-based or demographic transformations. Many instances, such as that of San Francisco's Castro District, did indeed involve early in-migrations by culturally nontraditional risk takers (frequently gays but also single women with children), whereas others immediately involved affluent, more culturally conservative groups right from the start (many European cases fit this description). And many seemed driven at least as much by processes influencing property developers (e.g., the availability and preferences of investment capital) as by those influencing consumers of land and housing (e.g., changing occupational structures, job locations, and transportation costs). Even transformations in rural contexts, such as the rise of affluent resort communities and exurban hobby farms, came to be referred to as gentrification.

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