Construction workers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com |
Do you what gentrification looks like? Is it the appearance of a yoga studio, artisanal food place, a Whole Foods, or coffee emporium? Richard Florida reports in his recent article for CityLab titled, "No One's Very Good at Correctly Identifying Gentrification," that "A new study suggests there's a gap between how researchers think about gentrification and what journalists are telling the public." That is usually the case is it not? The study, published in the current issue of Urban Studies takes the hallowed New York Times to task for not using the g-word (gentrification) properly. This leaves us to ponder if the average person knows what gentrification looks like.
Williamsburg brownstones highbrownmagazine.com |
"First, to what extent do neighborhoods identified as gentrified by qualitative measure used by the New York Times differ from those identified by more systemic quantitative research?" Mr. Barton distinguishes quantitative studies as those based on a single neighborhood, while qualitative research is a comparative study of different neighborhoods. Mr. Florida adds, "Despite that limitation, he also points out that large national newspapers, especially the Times, are much more likely to cover issues of neighborhood change than smaller, local papers, even sizable metros." Second, Mr. Barton asks, "How does the way gentrification is measured affected which neighborhoods are identified as 'gentrified?'" Properly identifying which neighborhoods are gentrified versus gentrifying is difficult for even the most detailed oriented academic, since the word was first introduced by sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964.
Bedford Avenue Williamsburg, Brooklyn nypost.com |
Number of neighborhoods identified as gentrified drhiphop85.com and citylab.com |
Mr. Barton concluded that there were considerable differences between the neighborhoods identified by the Times as having gentrified and those indicated by quantitative studies. The table at the left, taken from the Barton study, is a comparative look at the number of neighborhoods identified as as gentrified by each study and the Times over three time periods. Richard Florida observes that the differences between the three methodologies is obvious, demonstrating how identifying gentrification is based on how the data is captured.
Bostic and Martin compared with NYT c.2000s citylab,com |
Freeman compared with NYT c.2000s citylab.com |
Cheese shop on Bedford Avenue |
"Pin Williamsburg" gopixpic.com |
In the overwhelming majority of cities, the problem of concentrated urban poverty remains a larger, yet more persistent problem. In a report authored by Joe Cortright and Dillion Mahmoudi released in December show that "...three-quarter of neighborhoods that suffered from high poverty levels in the 1970s were still high-poverty in 2010. And 3.2 million poor Americans currently live in neighborhoods that were not high-poverty in 1970, meaning that the number of high-poverty census tracts nearly tripled by 2010." Quoting Messrs. Cortright and Mahmoudi:
Concentrated poverty is a particular concern because all the negative effects of poverty appear to be amplified in neighborhoods composed primarily of poor people. Poverty anywhere an in any amount is a problem; but concentrated poverty is often intractable and self-reinforcing.
The takeaway from Richard Florida's article, "No One's Very Good at Correctly Identifying Gentrification," is that gentrification is "...a vague, imprecise and politically loaded term." Blogger agrees with Mr. Florida that there needs to be better, more objective way to define it and record it, Blogger also agrees that we need to assess how the greater process changing neighborhoods and the "...juxtaposition of concentrated advantage and disadvantage in the modern metropolis."
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