Gentrification

Introduction

Have you ever been in a city that has experienced redevelopment? Have you noticed the flow of population in your neighborhood? Have you found that there is segregation between the rich and the poor? These questions all lead to the discussion of gentrification.

Literature Review

Gentrification is the process to help central urban neighborhoods that experienced disinvestments and depression to have a reconstruction, redevelopment, and an in-migration of a relatively well-off population (Freeman 463). Even though gentrification can provide opportunities for the city to redevelop, attract new populations, and increase the diversity of populations, it also brings many problems at the same time. This paper reviews literature in these areas and focus on the negative effects of gentrification.

Gentrification and Housing

In her paper “Mixing it Up: Public Housing Redevelopment in Chicago,” Janet L. Smith talks about how the gentrification policy aims to help redevelopment by providing replacement housing and how tenants responded to it. She shows that the gentrification program did not provide enough public housing; therefore, a particular result was harming the poor (2). Smith extended that, “The evidence to date in Chicago suggests that the proportion of permanent housing for very low-income renters is going to decrease” (2). Additionally, in a study called “Islands of Affordability in a Sea of Gentrification: Lessons Learned from the D.C. Housing Authority's HOPE VI Projects”, Lynn E. Cunningham examines the DCHA HOPE VI projects, which gentrified Washington City by replacing depressed public housing, to show that gentrification actually reduces the affordability of low-cost housing and forces people to relocate (356-59). The projects were aimed to deconcentrate the poor residents and help the economy to revitalize, but as Cunningham said, “The neighborhood around the project has undergone substantial gentrification over the past twenty years, and house prices are generally well above what a public housing tenant could afford to buy or rent” (357). She states that the project did not lead the area’s redevelopment but even reduced the number of low-cost housing that people can afford (358). Moreover, another expert, Rowland Atkinson, discusses the effects of gentrification in “The evidence on the impact of gentrification: new lessons for the urban renaissance?” Atkinson admits that there are benefits such as renewal, property values, tax revenues, and local services, but he also shows that there were also lots of costs of gentrification: displacement, loss of affordable housing, homelessness, community conflict, eviction, and crime (111-19). Similar to Smith and Cunningham, Atkinson investigates the housing affordability that he provides a table that summarized the displacement flows in United States to show that most of those cities observed great flows of residents (114). Indeed, Atkinson even found the displacement flows in those areas were not voluntary and the poor people were forced to move because they could not afford the housing. He also points out that the agenda of gentrification did not look at the full impact. Atkinson said, “However, it is perhaps said that approaches to housing renewal and urban policy in this context are not being thought through in a more holistic way in order to encompass rather than displace lower-income households” (125).