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| Gentrification boundary diagram John Donges/Flickr citylab.com |
Today we are going to return to one of our most talked about subjects, gentrification. Did you think Blogger would say Donald Trump? Tomorrow. For today's chat, yours truly reached into the the archives and pulled out an article by Ryan Biggs, for Citylab, titled "When 'Gentrification' Is Really a Shift in Racial Boundaries." It is an insightful analysis of a study conducted by Jonathan Tannen on how neighborhoods change in the one hundred largest American cities. As this blog has observed in the past, gentrification is an agent of change, for better or worse. The results of the study surprised Mr. Tannen.
As a boy growing up in the gentrifying Caucasian enclave of West Philadelphia, Mr. Tannen was aware that fellow Caucasians rarely crossed 49th Street. This was the invisible line that divided the neighborhood from the predominantly African-American areas in the eighties. Mr. Biggs writes, "The diverse coalition of delegates who attends the Democratic National Convention...may not have realized they were visiting one of the most segregated cities in the U.S." Mr. Tannen spent six years at the Princeton University Office of Population studying this phenomena. The result was his doctoral dissertation, Measuring Cities' Internal Demographic Change as the Movement of Emergent Boundaries. (opr.princeton.edu; date accessed Dec. 20, 2016) His dissertation revealed what he had long suspected: "...that the invisible line of segregation can be as real and hard as the bricks of any rowhome."
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| House on South 49th Street Philadelphia, Pennsylvania realtor.com |
I wanted to see if I could measure lines between regions with very different racial characteristics.
Mr. Tannen used a computer program to seek out racial borders, like 49th Street, the 100 largest cities in the United States. However during the course of his research, he discovers something else that surprised him: "As more suburban whites move back to urban areas, old racial lines were moving, and spreading outward. But the neighborhoods themselves weren't desegregating."
Just the opposite, they were resegregating. Mr. Tannen continues,
You're not seeing this historically black area becoming fiver percent white over ten years and then ten percent white over ten years...Philadelphia overall is becoming less white. But there are pockets of predominantly white regions that are expanding. And the blocks along those boundaries are flipping very quickly from a racial standpoint.
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| 49th Street streetscape Philadelphia, Pennsylvania truly.com |
These revelations about the characteristic of racial "boundary movement" could lead produce some stark conclusions, "...especially in the context of the limited body of academic research into the process behind neighborhood change." Mr. Tannen, now a researcher for the Philadelphia analytics firm Econsult, told CityLab:
One of the arguments is that gentrification can't be that bad if it serves to desegregate urban areas. And we have a lot of evidence that segregation is bad...But if gentrification continues to happen by boundary movements, then that means the block level is never going to desegregate
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| Philadelphia's gentrifying neighborhoods 2000-10 screen shot Jonathan Tannen Philly.curbed.com |
Gentrification by boundary movements really relies on a walkable city...It;s this idea that white households are moving in just on the other side of the boundary, to be able to walk across it and be part of the white already gentrified region.
Incoming white people in older cities are moving to areas that around other white people. They're saying "Oh, if I live here it's somewhere I can afford, but it's also close to [a bar] that I like." That process didn't exist in places like Los Angeles.
Ryan Biggs makes this disclaimer, "To be clear, his findings don't suggest that gentrification is making segregation worse." Mr. Tannen continues:
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| Daytime traffic in West Philadelphia phillyvoice.com |
Jonathan Tannen admits that his work is limited- it cannot quantify movement between an affluent neighborhood to a nearby work-class neighborhood. More important, it can deduce where the long term African American resident, who were living in the gentrifying neighborhoods, are going or the reason they are leaving. He said:
People start studying gentrification thinking they will be the ones to find the discrimination and the injustice in it. But these studies often end up complicating those ideas...Displacement largely doesn't happen.
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| Commuter train in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania upennimpact.org |
A recent study by the Pew Charitable Trust, Gentrification and Neighborhood Change in Philadelphia (http://www.pewtrusts.org; date accessed Dec. 20, 2016), supports "...that the type of gentrification or neighborhood change described in Tannen's work is actually rare." This analysis concluded that only fifteen of Philadelphia's 372 census tracts underwent gentrification over the same ten-year study period. A report issued by the Federal Reserve titled, What Have We Learned About The Causes of Recent Gentrification, also focused on Philadelphia, observing that "..displacement caused by gentrification is even rarer, and non-gentrifying neighborhoods often lost existing residents even more rapidly than gentrifying areas. (http://www.philadelphiafed.org; date accessed Dec. 20, 2016)
Jonathan Tannen believes that his findings are proof that "people are self-segregating and it's unclear what policy solutions could address their problems." Further, "Cities could start by being more mindful about the kinds of economic development projects they pursue along obvious racial borders,...due to their sensitivity to extreme racial change."
Ultimately, how cities can best approach the prickly issues of segregation and displacement cannot be remedied by on study. However, Jonathan Tannen's dissertation does, in part, answer the question of why gentrification can feel like a major issue even though it is not that common. Specifically, Mr. Tannen told CityLab:
My work speaks to why that disconnect exists. Why can it feel to residents of cities that gentrification is real and it is extreme, even as the pew study is correct in showing that the city as a whole is less white? How can those both be true?...The boundary movements are an important part of that story-that gentrification is extreme to very small parts of the city. And where it happens, it happens very sharply.
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