How Do You Identify Gentrification?

http://www.citylab.com/2014/12/no-one-very-good-at-correctly-identifying-gentrification/183723/

Construction workers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com

Hello Everyone:

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

The new study was conducted by sociologist Michael Barton of Louisiana State University and looks at the "differences between the neighborhood that the Times had identified as 'gentrified' or 'gentrifying' in the past three decades, and those identified by Census data and major academic studies."  Mr. Barton found chasm between neighborhoods identified by social scientists as "gentrified"and those the newspaper attached the moniker.  Mr. Barton posed two related questions:

"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

Mr. Barton used the LexisNexis database to uncover which New York City neighborhoods labeled by the newspaper as having under gone the process between 1980 and 2009.  Next, he compared those communities to the ones labeled as "gentrified" based on two classic quantitative studies: a 2003 study published by Raphael Bostic and Richard Martin and a 2005 study by Lance Freeman.  The first study "identified gentrified neighborhoods as those that saw their median incomes grow from less than 50 percent of the metro median to more than 50 percent of it."  In the second study, Mr. Freeman defined gentrified neighborhoods as, " those that started with median income levels below those for the city as a whole but then where educational levels and housing prices rose to be greater than the city's."  The Barton study focused on those neighborhoods identified by the New York City Department of Planning as having gentrified.

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

The maps shown also appear in the Barton and present the New York Times strategy with the Bostic and Martin, then Freeman method.  Mr. Florida observes, "What jumps out here are the large swathes of the city in which significant neighborhood changes goes ignored by the Times."  The venerable newspaper was more likely to affix the gentrification label to "hip" communities in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn (eg. Williamsburg) than in the less glamourous boroughs of Queens and the Bronx, which showed signs of gentrification in the nineties and 2000s.  In general, "the gentrifying neighborhoods discussed in the Times lined up more neatly with the restrictive method used by Bostic and Martin than it did with Freeman."  Michael Barton concludes, "the association of both census-based strategies with the New York Times were moderate at best."

Cheese shop on Bedford Avenue

In his study, Mr. Barton argues, "these results suggest that the media should take better care to develop encompassing strategies to identify pressing social problems like gentrification so they do not focus on some communities at the expense of others."  Good point, gentrification does not exclusively affect one neighborhood, rather, it impacts the surrounding communities for better or worse.  Mr. Florida is pleased to report, "...with the rise of more large-scale sample data-driven journalism in places like the Times own Upshot, this shift may already be occurring."  Data-driven analysis is good, numbers do not lie, however, let us hope respected newspapers like the Times do not use the data to make broad generalizations of communities.

"Pin Williamsburg"
gopixpic.com

Richard Florida writes, "It's important to point out that gentrification is a problem mainly in global superstar cities like New York and tech hubs like San Francisco, Boston, D.C., and Seattle."  Citing research conducted by Daniel Hartley of the Cleveland Federal Reserve, "...40 percent of the top 55 largest cities in the U.S. did not see significant, gentrification-like jumps in the distribution of their home prices between 2000 and 2007."  Mr. Florida's own team's analysis revealed that gentrification is present in wealthier and education metropolitan areas.

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."