Gentrification

Gentrification refers to the process in which members of a highly educated, professional class move into formerly working- or lower-class city districts, populated largely by members of minority groups. The term gentrification derives from the European concept of “gentry” and the “gentry class” and suggests, historically, a class whose manners, tastes, and sense of leisure, refinement, and gentility mirrored and emulated the values and habits of the aristocracy.

Contemporary discussions of gentrification take on added importance because of the American ambivalence toward cities as centers of cultural, political, and economic life. If, as Georg Simmel suggests, cities are the greatest representation of societal culture and civilization, they also represent heightened diversity, crowds, noises, anonymity, and a loss of privacy. For these reasons, members of the middle and upper classes have historically sought refuge beyond city boundaries for more space and to engage in activities with members of their own class. However, in the 1950s and 1960s, a series of political, educational, and economic changes occurred that significantly affected the health and prosperity of many U.S. cities. These changes would play a dramatic role in urban gentrification.

First were the government programs in the post-World War II era to address the housing shortage created by returning veterans and the resultant baby boom. These set in motion a suburban building boom that enabled builders to construct housing developments on vacant land outside the cities and hundreds of thousands of families to buy an affordable home of their own. In the years to follow, shopping centers, office parks, and industrial parks would move outward also, all of which would have a negative impact on most cities.

Next came the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, initially directed toward the South, but which, under the efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr. and others, applied likewise to northern schools. This increased the outflow of white middle-class residents who sought refuge outside city limits where integration was not mandated. In the 1960s a series of urban riots further accelerated a white exodus and led to the growth of series of satellite suburbs encircling cities and towns. As “white flight” occurred, a simultaneous inflow of blacks came into many U.S. cities, as well as tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans into the New York metropolitan region. This demographic shift had an almost revolutionary impact on the political, economic, and cultural landscape of U.S. cities.

Cities faced several problems. As homes and apartment buildings built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries began to age and deteriorate, cities were losing their tax base: the white middle class. The influx of mostly rural blacks and Puerto Ricans, and the existence of the small, black middle class in most U.S. cities, could not offset the lost tax revenues caused by white flight. Furthermore, President Eisenhower's massive highway construction program made it possible, and easier, for whites to move back and forth between their residence in suburbia and their workplace in the cities from which they had exited.

Urban politicians and businessmen appealed to the federal government for assistance in reshaping their cities and for relieving the traffic jams that resulted from suburbanites (many ex-city dwellers) traveling back and forth between work and home. As a result, in the 1960s and 1970s, cities across the country initiated massive urban renewal programs and built intra-city expressways that destroyed historic and long-existing neighborhoods and communities, homes, churches, community centers, and schools. Some areas not in the path of renewal and expressways were also affected, as cities sought to upgrade building codes, [Page 404]especially those concerned with plumbing and electrical wiring. This became an expensive venture, especially for apartment building landlords or working-class people who had inherited the family home and could not afford the expenses of bringing their properties up to contemporary code standards.

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