The great hope of urban advocates is to democratize data and its analysis tools, allowing residents and other stakeholders to see more clearly how a neighborhood is changing. In the Bay Area of California—the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose—the rapid replacement of old blue-collar industries and jobs with technology, medical, and financial services firms has largely displaced the pre-existing residents. To maximize their profits, developers built ever more units on ever less property to the point that the Bay Area is now the second densest urban area in America after Los Angeles. As the original lower-income population is replaced by upper- and middle-income residents, the political power structure of the gentrifying neighborhood can also change. As the long-time residents sense their political influence evaporating, they further withdraw from public participation and become more likely to physically leave the neighborhood.
- Big data is a shorthand term for the insane amounts of information being generated by human beings in our digital world.
- The process should value longtime residents’ visions of neighborhood change and give the power of decision-making to community residents.
- There are several other consequences that occur as a result of gentrification, including but not limited to a loss of culture and the displacement of crime to surrounding areas.[68] In addition, the loss of culture directly affects small businesses as corporate businesses take over with gentrification.
- Despite its high homeownership rate compared to other US cities and a relatively stable housing market, Philadelphia has experienced intense gentrification in recent years in some areas of the city [66].
Gentrification of Black neighborhoods
Stage one began with various architects and architectural students who were attracted to the affordability of the neighborhood. The renovations efforts these “marginal” gentrifiers undertook seemed to spark a new interest in the area, perhaps as word of the cheap land spread to the wider student community. In the early 1960s, Boston’s South End had a great many characteristics of a neighborhood that is prime for gentrification. The available housing was architecturally sound and unique row houses in a location with high accessibility to urban transport services, while surrounded by small squares and parks. “Even if people are moving by choice, white people have more advantage when they go into the housing market,” she said.
Displacement
As a result, “nearly five hundred fires ripped through tenements and rooming houses in the square-mile city,” Gottlieb writes. Nearly every fire, investigators determined, had been the result of arson.” In sum, 55 people died and over 8,000 were made homeless. And yet, gentrification captures our imagination, providing the visual juxtaposition of inequality. While stagnant, segregated neighborhoods are an accepted backdrop of American life, fast-changing, diverse neighborhoods and the culture clash that accompanies gentrification are the battlefield where all the disagreements come to the forefront.
Small Area Fair Market Rents Can Help Minimize Harm Due to Gentrification
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https://www.1investing.in/ affects different racial groups is particularly relevant right now in light of the increased instability people are facing due to the pandemic and incidents bringing attention to the unnecessary use of policing against people of color in the United States, Hwang said. Looking at the city of Philadelphia, Hwang and Ding found that financially disadvantaged residents who moved from neighborhoods that were not predominantly Black benefitted from gentrification by moving to more advantaged locations, but those moving from once predominantly Black areas did not. Hwang and co-author Lei Ding of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia conducted one of the first studies to examine empirically where disadvantaged residents move as a result of gentrification and how a neighborhood’s racial context affects those moves. Some research challenges certain long-held views about the negative effects of gentrification.
Hwang and Ding analyzed a consumer credit database of more than 50,000 adult residents with financial credit records in Philadelphia. An oft-cited study by the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy highlights some of the factors that contribute to gentrification. Gentrification has become controversial because, historically, it has come with a significant component of discrimination against racial minorities, women and children, the poor, and older adults.
One way to prevent future losses of affordable homes is to extend affordability requirements. SAFMRs base the value of a Housing Choice Voucher to a landlord on rents in a ZIP Code. Without SAFMRs, the value of a voucher is based on Fair Market Rent (FMR), which is based on rents in an entire metro area. A voucher pays the difference between 30% of a household’s income and the voucher “payment standard.” Public housing agencies (PHAs) set a payment standard (the amount a landlord gets from a voucher) at 90% to 110% of the FMR. As a result, the FMR voucher value is often not enough for rents in gentrifying neighborhoods.
Where SAFMRs are available, long-time residents with vouchers (or voucher applicants) living in gentrifying neighborhoods might be able to remain in their homes, avoiding displacement as landlords attempt to cash in on rising demand for rental housing. Use of SAFMRs before a neighborhood fully gentrifies can help new income-eligible households move into a neighborhood to take advantage of the improving community features and provide a healthy mixed-income area. Although gentrification can bring about racial diversity, integration, neighborhood improvements, and greater access to services, advocates need to actively promote policies that protect tenants from displacement.