Gentrification

Few who use the term gentrification agree completely on its meaning. As applied loosely in the popular press, it refers to the movement of new middle-class residents into poor and working-class inner city neighborhoods, spurring the rehabilitation of a district's previously abandoned or neglected housing stock and the revitalization of its commercial life. Even that simple definition, however, is controversial, to the extent that it neglects the broad economic repercussions and remote historical origins of a much more complex process. Most critics of gentrification, for instance, insist that it involves as well the displacement of existing residents, usually with some experience of economic hardship or disadvantage.

If we think of the process as having a historical beginning, it would be with the collapse of urban industrial economies after World War II, leading to the structural unemployment of urban working-class populations and the economic and physical decline of their residential and commercial environments. But there are even earlier precedents. The grand reconstructions of medieval European (and some Latin American) cities at the turn of the century, led by Baron George-Eugene Haussmann's “boulevardization” of Paris and Ildefons Cerda's planned rebuilding of Barcelona, created early geographical examples of what the French called embourgeoisement, which in the English-speaking world we would later term revitalization and, eventually, gentrification.

When British sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term in 1964, the postwar trend toward gentrification was already well under way in several major American and European cities. In the United States, downtown investment was encouraged by public redevelopment projects in the hope of reshaping the built environment to accommodate an emerging shift from the manufacturing of goods in urban factories to the production of services in offices, schools, and hospitals. In Philadelphia, which saw the departure of its textile industry begin in the 1920s, political reformers were already discussing downtown revitalization on the foundations of a new kind of urban economy before the war was over. The work of progressive planner Edmund Bacon on the systematic rebuilding of the city's transportation infrastructure and reinvestment in downtown historic districts (displayed in Bacon's famous 1947 Better Philadelphia exhibit) contributed directly to the resettling of the middle [Page 303]class in that city's central business district beginning in 1955. What Glass witnessed in infant stages in London had already advanced somewhat further in Philadelphia's Society Hill under the auspices of a federally subsidized public-private partnership for urban “revitalization” spearheaded by Bacon's Planning Commission, financial leaders with stakes in the downtown real estate, and the city's recently elected reform government. By the mid-1960s, the Society Hill project set a standard by which downtown revitalization in other American cities would be measured.

In the 1970s, increasingly conservative American policymakers cut public housing, welfare, and other redistributive subsidies to the inner city poor. Gentrification became one desperate hope of urban regimes eroded by collapsing tax bases and inner city impoverishment and rocked by a recent history of social and political upheaval. Advocates of gentrification viewed the trend as a process of revitalization or an “urban renaissance,” a healthy middle-class movement from the suburbs “back to the city” that would solve many of the financial and social problems of urban disinvestment. Indeed, that was how downtown residential investment by the American middle class was promoted in the late 1970s and 1980s, as the sort of business revitalization and urban “pioneering” or “homesteading” that could still attract private investment and federal subsidies in the prevailing economic and political climates.

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