ABSTRACT
U.S. gentrification first appeared a century ago in a few cities, offering a paradigm to counter urban decline. At its heart was the gradual renovation of older urban housing and rising socioeconomic indicators such as education and income. From the 1930s to the 1950s however, policymakers rejected the gentrification paradigm and adopted the redevelopment paradigm. The latter sought to reverse decline by relocating existing households and rebuilding neighborhoods. This policy ultimately failed and was gradually replaced by those supporting the gentrification paradigm, which has predominated since then.
Several issues have complicated gentrification research and policy development. First, over the past 40 years gentrification’s definition has expanded to encompass almost all forms of urban reinvestment, thereby losing utility as a focus of empirical research. Second, scholars disagree about the extent to which gentrification’s causal roots reside in concepts relating to demand-side (consumption) versus supply-side (production) explanations. Third, although in most cases private market dynamics appear to predominate in advancing gentrification, the degree to which public agency catalyzes or reinforces the process is not well understood. Fourth, the tendency of critics to blame gentrification for household displacement obscures the intervening role played by neighborhood succession in driving household occupancy turnovers. Fifth, these narratives may overestimate the social costs of displacement and underestimate the social benefits resulting from the substantial financial gains realized by many property-owning residents, including working-class families. Last, while gentrification has contributed to substantially transforming some cities worldwide, others have attracted relatively little private or government capital investment. This has created a Hobson’s choice: Cities in the first group must accept the inevitable result―a gradual shrinkage in the supply of affordable housing. Cities in the second group are better able to maintain their affordable housing stocks although suffering insufficient capital investment citywide to offset urban decline. Thus, cities that fall between these extremes of reinvestment and disinvestment may have the best opportunity to achieve a balanced socioeconomic population profile.
