Lei Ding et al. have posted a Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Working Paper, Gentrification and Residential Mobility in Philadelphia, to SSRN. The abstract reads,
Gentrification has provoked considerable debate and controversy about its effects on neighborhoods and the people residing in them. This paper draws on a unique large-scale consumer credit database to examine the mobility patterns of residents in gentrifying neighborhoods in the city of Philadelphia from 2002 to 2014. We find significant heterogeneity in the effects of gentrification across neighborhoods and subpopulations. Residents in gentrifying neighborhoods have slightly higher mobility rates than those in nongentrifying neighborhoods, but they do not have a higher risk of moving to a lower-income neighborhood. Moreover, gentrification is associated with some positive changes in residents’ financial health as measured by individuals’ credit scores. However, when more vulnerable residents (low-score, longer-term residents, or residents without mortgages) move from gentrifying neighborhoods, they are more likely to move to lower-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods with lower values on quality-of-life indicators. The results reveal the nuances of mobility in gentrifying neighborhoods and demonstrate how the positive and negative consequences of gentrification are unevenly distributed.
I am not in a position to fully evaluate the methodology of this paper in this post. At first glance, however, it appears to be a well-constructed and large study, tracking “the residential location and financial health of a random sample of more than 50,000 adults.” (1) At the same time, useful household characteristics like income and race were not available to the authors, so the study has some significant limitations.
Given the intensive debates that gentrification engenders in NYC and elsewhere, it is still helpful that the authors offer up some facts and grounded interpretation of those facts. The authors specifically find that “gentrification is associated with positive changes in residents’ financial health: Residents in gentrifying neighborhoods experience an average increase of 11 points in their credit scores, compared with those who are not residents.” (1) At the same time, their results “suggest that less advantaged residents generally gained less from gentrification than others, and those who were unable to remain in a gentrifying neighborhood had negative residential and financial outcomes in the gentrification process.” (2)
Those who decry gentrification as well as those who promote it (quietly, more often than not) will find support for their positions in this paper. But those who are trying to understand just what we are talking about when we talk about gentrification and its effects will be left with a more textured understanding of how the demographics of gentrifying neighborhoods change. If cities are serious about promoting socioeconomic diversity, they must understand what is happening when neighborhoods are in flux.
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