[M II A II R II K]

New Studies Say Gentrification Doesn’t Really Force Out Low-Income Residents


AUG. 5, 2019

By Justin Davidson

Read More: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/...residents.html

.....

Gentrification’s status as a great urban evil, a ravager of lives and destroyer of communities, is based as much on faith as on fact. Most scholarly research on the topic compares snapshots of cities and neighborhoods at different times but loses track of what happens to the actual people who live there.

- Now, a pair of studies has used Census micro-data and Medicaid records to track specific residents of both gentrifying and non-gentrifying neighborhoods, where they live, where their children go to school, when they move, and where they go. The researchers come up with some startling findings. — In a paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Quentin Brummet and Davin Reed say that urbanites move all the time, for countless reasons, and that gentrification has scant impact on that constant flow. Those who stay put as a neighborhood grows more affluent often see their quality of life rise and their children enjoy more opportunities. Those who leave rarely do worse.

- In a separate study at NYU by Kacie Dragan, Ingrid Ellen, and Sherry A. Glied, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the researchers used Medicaid records to track thousands of children from address to address, between 2009 to 2015, a period of boiling gentrification. They found that schoolkids who lived in neighborhoods that saw an influx of college graduates didn’t move away more often than their peers in less fluid areas. Taken together, the papers suggest that gentrification’s upsides for longtime residents not only exist but go a long way toward mitigating the pain it causes.

- Citing previous research, Brummet and Reed say that “exposure to higher-income neighborhoods has important benefits for low-income residents, such as improving the mental and physical health of adults and increasing the long-term educational attainment and earning of children,” Brummet and Reed assert. — The studies make it clear that the simple narratives of gentrification’s evil don’t hold up. A neighborhood is not a filled and stoppered bathtub, where for every drop that flows in, another must slosh out. It’s more like a wet sponge, with residents draining away and evaporating all the time, newcomers passing through or settling in, finding whatever crannies seem hospitable at any given time.

- The Philadelphia Fed paper concludes explicitly that changes in a neighborhood’s demographics are driven far more by who moves in than who moves out. Shifting the emphasis away from displacement matters because it suggests that efforts to protect a neighborhood’s character are largely beside the point. Those who live there will move or stay, get used to the newcomers or not. They are not being evicted en masse, and they cannot be sheltered as a group. More people leave New York for the suburbs or other states than arrive from other places around the country, and that’s almost always been the case.

- Today, the city’s population is growing (slowly) partly because of the influx of recent college grads, but mostly because of births and arrivals from abroad. If you feel that the city is crowded enough, thank you very much, and can’t absorb another new New Yorker, then your problem is with immigrants and babies born within the five boroughs, not with an avalanche of tech bros. The flow of population in and out gives New York much of its strength and some of its problems; sometimes the two are indistinguishable. A dysfunctional school system pushes many families to the suburbs; if it got stellar overnight, the city would become unmanageably clogged just as quickly.

- Different prongs of the anti-gentrification movement offer mutually exclusive solutions. One extreme urges the construction of affordable housing: build it dense, soon, and everywhere. Any objection is inhumane. To fuss over open space, historical fabric, or the need for sun on parks is to care about the wrong things and the wrong people. The counter-faction sees new construction as the cause of displacement rather than the cure. “Affordability” is just a word to sugarcoat a developer boondoggle. The first group would like to see New York grow ever more towers, the second wants all the building to stop and for affluent newcomers to just go away.

- In practice, most policies that combat gentrification protect the status quo. They encourage people to stay where they are and they slow the rate of demographic change. We have a constellation of good and worthy programs that protect vulnerable residents from being bullied or buffeted and allow them to stay in their homes if that’s what they want. The state’s newly reinforced rent regulations will be a boon to many. Broadening the base of jobs, shoring up a beleaguered transit system, caring for parks and public space, shedding car traffic on city streets these efforts can all mitigate against the economy’s persistent inequities.

- Policies specifically aimed at keeping communities intact can be counterproductive. In many subsidized new buildings, for example, the city sets aside half of all affordable apartments for applicants who already live in the neighborhood. That’s a troubling practice because trying to keep communities intact through quotas often winds up perpetuating segregation. A report by a Queens college sociologist Andrew Beveridge, which the city hoped to suppress and a judge recently made public, found that, thanks to such set-asides, affordable-housing lotteries in predominantly white neighborhoods exclude African-Americans.

- Government should be making it easier, not harder, for people to change addresses if and when they want to. As newcomers roll in, with or without college educations, nobody has the right to tell them they shouldn’t or can’t. In the short term, gentrification makes neighborhoods more, not less, economically diverse and more racially integrated. The problem is that over time, those advantages dissipate, though not uniformly, and temporarily mixed neighborhoods become homogeneous again, and each new population in turn defends the turf it colonized. Diversity, not preservation, should be the goal. Instead of expending vast amounts of energy trying to shield fragile communities from change, we should make sure they reap its benefits.

.....