New Faces, Changing Spaces
How Gentrification Shapes Household Demand for Policing
Allison Verrilli (University of Texas-Austin)
Every Sunday, Chicano Park, on the historically Black and Latino east side of Austin, TX, transforms into a hub for brightly-colored lowriders and vintage cars blasting music out of their stereos. These Car Club gatherings have been taking place every Sunday since the nineties, but recently, they’ve received a dramatic in increase in complaints from residents of the Weaver, a new luxury apartment near the park. These complaints are wide-ranging, some highlighting noise, others increased traffic, and still others arguing that the pollution from the cars is harmful to the trees. While the Weaver’s website promises renters access to a “community that is rich in history and tradition,” at a recent gathering, a white Weaver tenant pleaded with police officers to disband the celebration, calling it scary. This tension between long-term residents and newer residents over the use of neighborhood space is not unique to Austin. In gentrifying cities across the country, newer residents are increasingly turning to police to lodge complaints about public space.
The relationship between gentrification and policing is not new. Prior research has demonstrated increased policing in gentrifying neighborhoods, at times, driven by citizen demand. But data constraints have limited the ability to determine the source and characteristics of citizen calls to the police. Moreover, there are many important debates around what explains this increased demand. Conventional wisdom argues that increased demand by gentrifiers is simply a response to their exposure to greater crime when moving into previously disinvested spaces. However, substantial qualitative evidence finds that this demand is often a response by gentrifiers’ to perceived disorder in their new neighborhoods, and in particular, privileged whites’ response to more ethno-racial diversity within neighborhoods. My article evaluates these explanations and more broadly, the nature of demand for policing in gentrifying contexts in order to understand how privileged citizens wield power in gentrifying areas and how this shapes their interactions with local government.
Figure 1: Austin Census Tracts, 2021
To explore the relationship between gentrification and demand for policing, my article focuses on the case of Austin, Texas, a southern city that has experienced explosive growth and gentrification over the past decade. I first identify gentrifying tracts within the city, those that were below city-wide median income and rent in 2014 and saw the largest increases in these metrics by 2021. Figure 1 plots these gentrifying tracts alongside lower socio-economic status tracts and higher socio-economic status tracts that were never eligible to gentrify. As the map shows, many gentrifying tracts are concentrated on the eastern side of the city, areas that were historically segregated and disinvested resulting in lower-quality services for Black and Latino communities. This previous disinvestment created the conditions for the now ongoing gentrification in these spaces.
To create a measure of gentrifiers, I leverage yearly snapshots of voter file records from 2014- 2021 on over 300,000 unique voters and use household addresses to identify types of within-city movers. This novel approach helps me to capture gentrifier households, those that move from higher status tracts into gentrifying ones and other types of urban households. In order to calculate each household’s demand for policing, I match their addresses to the location of over two million 911 calls and 311 requests from the same time period.
The paper’s first key finding is that gentrifier households make more calls to the police relative to long-term residents (non-mover households) within gentrifying tracts. This aligns with previous research suggesting that increased calls to the police in gentrifying areas often originate from newer residents. However, it does not clarify whether the act of moving into a gentrifying area itself is associated with greater demand for policing. To explore this further, I conduct a second analysis revealing that gentrifiers increase their calls to the police after moving into a gentrifying tract even when compared to other types of urban movers (See Figure 2). Not only does this indicate that increased call volume is linked to the act of moving, but it also highlights its unique association with moving into a gentrifying neighborhood. Importantly, this increase persists even when accounting for changes in crime between gentrifiers’ original neighborhoods and their new ones. These findings build on the work of sociologists, in demonstrating that increased demand for policing by gentrifiers is not fully explained by changes in crime, but rather it may stem from a discomfort with living among greater poverty and perceived neighborhood disorder.
Figure 2: Predicted change in annual calls to police by households type
Figure 3: Predicted change in annual calls to police by percent population Black or Latino
A final key finding is that the relationship between gentrification and policing is racialized as gentrifiers display heightened demand for policing after moving into predominantly non-white spaces. Since racial demographic change is not a component of my gentrification measure, I test how the racial composition of gentrifying tracts interacts with demand for policing across household types. Specifically, I show that gentrifiers demand more policing when they move into spaces with larger Black and Latino populations compared to other urban movers and to non-movers in tracts that see an increase in the Black and Latino population (See Figure 3). This suggests that gentrifiers’ entry into more non-white spaces activates racial biases, increasing perceptions of danger and disorder. The increased demand for policing reflects an attempt to remedy this fear and establish control. Moreover, to the extent that police respond to these heightened demands, they may increase the risk of police encounters for long-term residents, particularly Black and Latino residents, who already face greater risks of police use-of-force.
The main findings from this paper are relevant for social scientists, community members, and policymakers who seek to understand the implications of gentrification for policing. For social scientists, this paper provides an approach to identifying and quantifying patterns of gentrification and policing at a highly granular level. It also provides large-scale quantitative evidence to support on-the-ground patterns long-recognized by community members and advocacy groups worried about the negative consequences of gentrification. For policymakers, it demonstrates that there is sub-neighborhood variation in citizen demand for policing and that the factors driving increased demand are not limited to changes in crime, crucial information that can be used to inform policy responses.
Allison Verrilli is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research centers on the politics of spatial inequality, with a particular focus on gentrification, race, housing and policing.