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作者

Lance Freeman

来源

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW,Vol.60,Issue1,P.

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

摘要

IntroductionGentrification, or the process by which central urban neighborhoods that have undergone disinvestments and economic decline experience a reversal, reinvestment, and the in-migration of a relatively well-off, middle- and upper-middle-class population (Smith and van Vliet 1998), has proven to be one of the most controversial topics amongst urbanists.1 Despite the massive ink spilled on this topic, our understanding of the dynamics of residential turnover accompanying gentrification remains limited. We know little about the destinations of those moving out of gentrifying neighborhoods and whether trends are distinct in recent decades when gentrification became more widespread. Some urbanists have speculated that with successive periods of gentrification, American cities will come to resemble European cities, with the poor relegated to the urban periphery (The Economist 2019). Understanding these dynamics are crucial for both our theoretical understanding of gentrification and its consequences, as well as for policymakers who often act to promote gentrification and/or dampen some of the consequences associated with gentrification.In this article, we utilize the panel study of income dynamics (PSID) to analyze mobility out of gentrifying neighborhoods as well as the destinations of those leaving gentrifying neighborhoods. We find little evidence of elevated mobility rates in gentrifying neighborhoods, on average, across multiple measures of gentrification. Our findings, along with other studies that also fail to find elevated mobility rates in gentrifying neighborhoods, suggest that the demographic changes that occur in gentrifying neighborhoods are not due to elevated mobility rates, relative to nongentrifying neighborhoods, of poor residents moving out. We find some evidence to suggest that those moving out of gentrifying neighborhoods move to somewhat poorer neighborhoods, but our estimates are not precise enough to reject the null hypothesis of no difference in destination neighborhoods between those leaving gentrifying versus nongentrifying neighborhoods. We suspect that these findings are largely explained by heterogeneity across metropolitan areas. Our article also considers if the destinations of those moving from gentrifying neighborhoods are different along spatial dimensions, including distance from origin neighborhood and moves out of central cities, but we fail to detect any differences.In sum, our results are consistent with the strand of research that fails to find elevated rates of mobility among residents of gentrifying neighborhoods. Our paper expands the extant literature by shedding additional light on the destinations of movers from gentrifying neighborhoods, including the first we are aware of that utilizes a national dataset with relatively frequent observations.2 Here, our findings show that household-level factors seem to determine destinations instead of the gentrification status of the origin neighborhoods. Our research thus broadens and deepens our understanding of how household mobility is influenced by neighborhood context.