In recent years, the word “gentrification” has reached a larger audience as shows and films, like Gentefied and The Last Black Man in San Francisco, present how American cities are being transformed. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has left millions unable to pay rent and fueled a swell of people facing eviction notices, has prompted conversations about a possible new wave of gentrification.
But what does gentrification even mean? Coined in 1964 by British sociologist Ruth Glass, its five, fancy-sounding syllables can trip up older community members and new activists alike. Here, we'll walk through what gentrification is, why it matters, and how communities are mobilizing to stop it.
What is gentrification?
As Glass wrote in her book London: Aspects of Change, “One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes — upper and lower... Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.” The word she chose to describe this phenomenon borrowed from the word “gentry,” referring to the British upper classes.
In brief, gentrification happens when wealthier newcomers move into working-class neighborhoods. New businesses and amenities often pop up to cater to these new residents. Potholes might get filled; a new bus line might appear. These changes attract even more affluent people, and property values go up. Landlords raise rents to what these new arrivals can afford to pay, so the original tenants get forced out. Real estate speculators may pressure homeowners to sell their family homes. Some of those pushed out will move to more affordable neighborhoods, others to entirely different cities; others may become unhoused.
Gentrification is economic displacement: whole communities uprooted when rents rise. In the United States, forced displacement often happens along racial lines. It is occurring today in cities across the country, from Silicon Valley to New York City, from Seattle to Austin.
Who gets priced out?
For decades, particularly in the Jim Crow era, redlining and racial covenants have prevented Black families from renting homes or taking out mortgages in certain neighborhoods. This helped create concentrated, poor communities of color in cities across the United States. Then local governments began removing resources from these nonwhite communities, in a policy some refer to as “benign neglect.”
“The schools were in a state of decline, the roads, the buildings, representation,” Noni Session, director of Oakland’s East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, a community investment cooperative, tells Teen Vogue of urban cities during the Reagan years. Because of this, she says, poor Black and brown neighborhoods become “prime targets for property speculators” trying to make a quick buck by pushing out the existing community to bring in new, wealthier, whiter residents.
In the words of Daniel Gonzalez, a lifelong resident of San Jose, California, “It makes the most sense for developers and people in local government to eye poor neighborhoods to ‘upgrade’ and increase profitability from.” He sees these profit-driven neighborhood expulsions as a form of colonialism, the latest chapter in a story that began with the mass kidnapping of Africans through chattel slavery and forced dispossession of the land of Indigenous peoples to build the United States.
So, it’s bad?
Some people try to make the case that gentrification is good. When white people start pricing people of color out of a neighborhood, on paper it can look like an area is becoming more “diverse.” And who would argue that “safer” neighborhoods, higher incomes, or more bus stops are a bad thing?
One problem, says Liz Gonzalez of the nonprofit South Bay Community Land Trust, is that “the places that get gentrified seem to be where people of color live. You just push ’em out, push ’em out. You know, nobody cares where these people go, if they go to the street, if they go to another city, if they leave the state.” From this perspective, gentrification may make a neighborhood temporarily “more diverse,” but only as neighbors are priced out, which is less a victory for racial justice than it is window dressing for racial displacement.
Research into displacement rates paints a more complicated picture, though. Two studies published in 2019, one by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and another by a trio of professors at NYU, found that city dwellers move frequently for a multitude of reasons, and changes can increase quality of life and educational attainment for neighborhood children. On the other hand, Jean Anyon’s book Radical Possibilities describes a successful community school reform campaign in Chicago’s Logan Square that inadvertently created a situation where “housing values rise, businesses increasingly invest in the neighborhood, and low-income residents are pushed out by higher rents.”
Researchers and academics have not come to anything resembling a consensus on the effects of gentrification in American cities. But for those on the ground, the perception can feel quite different. It’s not that anti-gentrification activists are against nice things for their communities; these organizers say the problem is that often these nice things aren’t actually designed for them, but for their replacements — like a boutique that professionals new to the area can afford to patronize.
Meanwhile, they say, the human cost of gentrification is immense. “It’s been pretty devastating having my family displaced from the region,” says San Jose’s Daniel Gonzalez. “That separation just tore into the fabric of the family. I see this whole process of displacement and gentrification as an attack on families, communities, and the networks of mutual aid and support we’ve built here in San Jose.”
Policing displacement
Another source of tension between longtime residents and more recent arrivals can be their relationship with police. A 2017 report by the Economic Opportunity Institute using data culled from Seattles's police department showed that police reports in the city's gentrifying Central District increased by 62.4% between 2008 and 2016. A 2018 BuzzFeed story recounted how a group of Harlem neighbors who had played dominoes outside their buildings undisturbed for decades said they dealt with 311 complaints, presumably from unhappy neighbors.
And in March, Louisville, Kentucky, police fatally shot a 26-year-old emergency medical technician named Breonna Taylor in her own home. She was a Black woman living in a gentrifying neighborhood.
As Dezmond Goff, of Seattle’s Black Frontline Movement, tells Teen Vogue, “They increased police presence because that was one way [to break up the neighborhood.] If we incarcerate more people we can break up community that way, we can get people out that way.”
As the “spaces that Black bodies are clearly allowed to circulate are often more highly policed, more highly traumatized by that policing,” says Session, of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, “a sense of control and ownership is slowly withdrawn from those communities.”
Some cities that report they’re too poor to afford quality public schools or affordable housing have somehow found the cash to buy impressive military hardware for their police departments. In Oakland, California, the school district has seen millions of dollars in budget cuts, but, in February, the local sheriff’s deputies reportedly rolled up in an armored personnel carrier to remove two unhoused moms from a vacant building, according to accounts given to Fox KTVU by supporters of the moms who were members of the local homeless advocacy group Moms 4 Housing. (The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office’s confirmed to Teen Vogue that they deployed the vehicle, a Lenco BearCat, but denied that it was used in the arrest itself. According to KTVU’s report, the moms who were arrested were not charged.) There are many reasons for the militarization of the police in poor cities, but organizers maintain one of them is that city governments have a lot to gain from gentrification and the racialized policing that facilitates it.
Causes and effects
The reason gentrification is profitable has to do with big changes in the American economy. There was a time when big business needed low-wage workers to man the factories in American cities. “Continued industrialization… further increased the number and size of US cities," authors of Social Problems: Continuity and Change wrote in 2010, among other factors like population growth and immigration. Millions of Black people left the South to move to the cities of the North, Midwest, and West Coast in what came to be known as “the Great Migration.” “To fill the assembly lines,” Isabel Wilkerson wrote in the September 2016 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, “companies began recruiting black Southerners to work the [northern] steel mills, railroads and factories.” The southern San Francisco Bay Area was urbanized to house microchip assembly line workers as the nascent Silicon Valley “exploded,” in the words of Richard Walker’s 2018 book, Pictures of a Gone City, “across a well-established agrarian landscape.”
These workers weren’t treated well and they didn’t get rich. They often lived in the worst, segregated neighborhoods doing repetitive, back-breaking work. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, tells the story of one Chrysler auto plant in 1970 Detroit where two workers lost their lives due to workplace accidents in a period of just two weeks. At the same time, Black workers “couldn’t buy a home in Dearborn, Grosse Point, Warren, or many other Detroit suburbs.” But the labor of assembly line workers made America’s richest companies rich, so these employers paid workers enough to live close enough to their jobs. As Robert Fitch put it in The Assassination of New York, “Cities grew because mass production required masses of people concentrated in one place.”
Most of these jobs are now gone. Many factories have moved overseas in search of cheaper labor with fewer environmental and labor protections. From the 1970s through the '90s, many American cities became impoverished as deindustrialization and white flight to the suburbs stripped them of their tax base and the last stable jobs disappeared. The service and hospitality industry became a leading source of employment, offering employees low-wage jobs in retail and restaurants. Anyon wrote in Radical Possibilities, “Large and small factories used to dot the downtowns of most large cities. Today, most neighborhoods in the central cities and urbanized low-income suburbs have bodegas, ‘deli’s’ and other small businesses — and relatively few jobs, compared to the number that are needed.”
“I really view what happened with my family as the reverse of industrialization,” says Gonzalez. “The reason there’s not really a need for people like me or members of my family around is because it’s more profitable to urbanize and do it with a certain type of individual, especially here in Silicon Valley. You know, tech workers and people who work in high-paying jobs.”
As Session puts it, “If you start from the 1940s, when my grandparents came and a lot of people like them, Oakland was a major port. It was really booming for the shipping industry and heavy industry and heavy manufacturing. All of the empty but now sort of trendy warehouses” being rented at a premium to new gentrifiers “were a result of being a heavy manufacturing and heavy shipping city.”
The big moneymakers of today’s economy aren’t automakers and canneries but tech and biotech companies, finance and real estate firms, and the elite universities that train workers for all of the above. Instead of masses of workers assembling cars, we have smaller numbers of higher paid “skilled workers” sitting in offices to code, invest, or teach. These workers are paid enough to gentrify neighborhoods, and cities compete to attract them. The working-class people of color who might have worked on the assembly lines a generation or two ago? They are using diverse tactics in fights to hold on to their neighborhoods, their homes, and their lives.
How are communities fighting gentrification?
When Amazon wanted to build a new campus in Queens, New York, residents who feared being priced out mounted a successful campaign that contributed to stopping the development. In San Jose, some residents are fighting a proposed Google campus that could lead to the displacement of thousands, with some even blocking a Google bus carrying employees to work in 2018. Though the company recently announced its “vision” for a transformed downtown, the South Bay Community Land Trust is still moving forward with its vision of cooperatively owned land as a solution to displacement from San Jose.
According to the Oakland Community Land Trust (CLT), “By removing land from the market and holding it in perpetuity, a CLT buffers its housing and other land uses from the volatility of economic, environmental, and political crises that often disproportionately impact low-income residents and communities of color.”
Across the country, movements are pushing to decommodify housing and treat it as a human right. Rather than investment opportunities for property developers or wealthy individuals, these organizers want homes to be safe shelters in which people are able to live affordably and build their lives.
“Decommodifying land reminds us of the right usage of a roof and a door and a window and ground upon which to stand,” says Session. “The right usage is to ground community and ground the future.”
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: An Eviction Crisis Is Coming — We Need to Treat Housing as a Right
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