White guilt be gone

By Barbara Kiviat | June 30, 2008 | +

A story I wrote about how gentrification does not drive low-income minorities from their neighborhoods went up on Time.com over the weekend. It starts:

People tend to think gentrification goes like this: rich, educated white people move into a low-income minority neighborhood and drive out its original residents, who can no longer afford to live there. As it turns out, that’s not typically true.

You can read the full article here.

Or, if you’d like to read the study it’s based on, you can go here.

Barbara! (Remember: I’m signing these posts so that when you get your morning e-mail, you know that it’s me writing and not Justin.)

Related Topics: Economy & Policy

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tegwar

I’m a touch underwhelmed on first glance. They define gentrifying neighborhoods as those which were in the bottom quintile by income in 1990 and experienced an increase of $10k in average income by 2000. That is an impressive step in income, but I’m not sure that’s what we mean by gentrification. That increase would appear to have only moved a neighborhood up to somewhere near the 40th percentile of neighborhoods at best. My question: Do we think of gentrifying / gentrified neighborhoods as those still below the median income? Is that really when we see the white yuppie class flowing in?

I guess I’m just not sure they set their marks on gentrification quite right. Does gentrification involve the poorest neighborhoods simply becoming less poor or do we mean taking the neighborhood more toward ‘upper middle class’?