Where Do They Go?
The Destinations of Residents Moving from Gentrifying Neighborhoods
Lance Freeman (University of Pennsylvania), Jackelyn Hwang (Stanford University), Tyler Haupert (NYU Shanghai), and Iris Zhang (Stanford University)
Is gentrification pushing poor households to the fringes of our cities or to even more marginalized neighborhoods? As many of our nation’s cities increasingly attract young, highly educated professionals, a worrisome trend accompanying this influx is the increase in gentrification. Gentrification has sparked much concern because of the fear of low-income households being priced out of their neighborhoods and pushed into neighborhoods less advantageous than from which they are originating. To date, there has been relatively little research that examines the destinations of households moving from gentrifying neighborhoods. The research that has been done has produced conflicting results with some studies finding households from gentrifying neighborhoods moving to less advantaged neighborhoods and other studies finding no difference or residents from gentrifying neighborhoods moving to more advantaged neighborhoods. However, many of these studies are limited to trends in specific cities, or are only able to track residential mobility at intervals of 10 years. By using a national data set (described below) and examining mobility at 2-year intervals during the first decades of this century, our research adds another piece to the puzzle of understanding the fate of residents living in gentrifying neighborhoods.
We examine whether households living in gentrifying neighborhoods are more likely to move, whether such moves are more likely to be involuntary, and whether the destinations of their moves are worse than those moving from other poor neighborhoods that did not gentrify. We find that when compared to families living in non-gentrifying neighborhoods, families who live in gentrifying neighborhoods are no more likely to move, that their moves are not more likely to be involuntary, and that the destinations of their moves are not worse than those originating from non-gentrifying neighborhoods.
Our findings are based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)--a study that has been collecting data on the same families since 1968 and allows us to follow the same families overtime as they move or stay in place. We can also identify the specific neighborhood (measured as census tracts) that each family resided in, and we use that to classify neighborhoods as gentrifying, non-gentrifying (i.e., poorer central city neighborhoods that did not experience gentrification) and not gentrifiable (relatively affluent neighborhoods). Our analyses also focuses on families at the lower and of the income distribution, as they are especially vulnerable to displacement and lack the housing options that more affluent families have.
Because gentrification is such a charged topic, we would like to put these results in context. First, although we do not find higher rates of residential mobility in gentrifying neighborhoods compared to non-gentrifying neighborhoods, this does not mean that displacement is not a problem in many of our cities. Our results do show involuntary moves to be higher among lower income households. This suggests the problem of displacement is something that vexes many low-income families regardless of the type of neighborhood they're residing in. Second, our results that show that people originating in gentrifying neighborhoods are not moving to more disadvantaged neighborhoods than those from non-gentrifying neighborhoods does not mean that poor households are moving to neighborhoods full of opportunity. We also find evidence that lower income households were moving to poorer and lower income neighborhoods than their higher income counterparts. These results suggest that spatial inequality is being produced along class lines. That is, poor households regardless of whether their origin neighborhoods are gentrifying or not, are more likely than higher income households to move involuntarily and to move to poorer neighborhoods.
Lance Freeman is the James W. Effron University Professor of City and Regional Planning and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Neighborhoods are what fascinates him and motivates his research. He studies how neighborhoods change and evolve over time, the role neighborhoods play in people’s lives, and he is exploring how we can use social media and other new technologies as tools to study neighborhoods. His study of neighborhoods is motivated by an aim to learn how we can use this knowledge to plan and build better and more equitable places.
Tyler Haupert is an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at NYU Shanghai. His research focuses on the social, economic, technological, and regulatory mechanisms contributing to racial segregation and exclusion in advanced economies, with particular interests in mortgage lending, housing policy, neighborhood change, and homelessness. He strives to design studies that inform policy and produce actionable results for legislators, regulators, planners, and advocacy organizations.
Jackelyn Hwang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and the Director of the Changing Cities Research Lab. Her research interests span urban sociology, race and ethnicity, immigration, and inequality. Her current work draws on innovative data and methods to examine the causes and consequences of gentrification, racial and ethnic inequality, and residential segregation in the United States.
Iris H. Zhang is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at Stanford University. She studies neighborhood change, housing, and inequality using mixed methods, with additional interests in political boundaries and democracy.