But sometimes those institutions become prone to insularity and function in an echo chamber where reality and outside voices are muffled. Sometimes, sloppy thinking, or rather, perhaps, self-confirming thinking, becomes endemic.
That's the only explanation I have for this article by Grabinsky and Butler. Poverty and Social Mobility and Social Justice and Gentrification are all topical among the clerisy and it is useful to establish definitions and gather data and explore what each of these things are, how they relate to one another and to other goals and what might be done to ameliorate negative circumstances.
Grabinskiy and Butler start their argument with:
Gentrification – the migration of wealthier people into poorer neighborhoods – is a contentious issue in most American cities. Many fear that even if gentrification helps a city in broad terms, for instance by improving the tax base, it will be bad news for low-income residents who are hit by rising rents or even displacement. But this received wisdom is only partially true.Is gentrification even a real issue? You'd think from the common discussion that poor people in cities all across the US are being displaced from their old well established communities and forced to relocate to areas where they have no knowledge or infrastructure to function well. G&B provide the data to answer at least one question: Are poor neighborhoods being gentrified?
Cortright and Mahmoudi examine more than 16,000 census tracts[1] – small, relatively stable, statistical subdivisions (smaller than the zip code), of a city – within ten miles of the central business districts of the 51 largest cities. Their key findings are:Let's make this concrete. Of the 1,100 neighborhoods that were in poverty in 1970, 99 have escaped that poverty, i.e. have been gentrified. 1,001 remain in poverty or close to it. Meantime, an additional 2,099 neighborhoods have slipped into poverty in that time frame. So if our goal is to reclaim neighborhoods from high poverty, we have saved 99 and lost 2,099. A 5% effectiveness ratio. I think it is clear from those numbers that the issue is not gentrification but rising concentration of poverty. Why are we wasting any time being concerned about the putative issue of gentrification?
High-poverty neighborhoods tripled between 1970 and 2010: The number of census tracts considered “high-poverty” rose from around 1,100 in 1970 to 3,100 in 2010. Surprisingly, of these newly-impoverished areas, more than half were healthy neighborhoods in 1970, before descending into “high-poverty” status by 2010. Our Brookings colleague Elizabeth Kneebone has documented similar patterns in the concentration of poverty around large cities.
Poverty is persistent: Two-thirds of the census tracts defined as “high-poverty” in 1970 (with greater than 30% of residents living below the poverty line), were still “high-poverty” areas in 2010. And another one-quarter of neighborhoods escaped “high-poverty” but remained poorer than the national average (about 15% of population below FPL )
Few high-poverty neighborhoods escape poverty: Only about 9 percent of the census tracts that were “high-poverty” in 1970 rebounded to levels of poverty below the national average in 2010.
That question becomes even more pertinent when you take into account a couple of other issues: Churn and Consequences.
John Buntin had a very good post a few weeks ago, The Myth of Gentrification by John Buntin. Among his points was that people in poor neighborhoods are not displaced in the way that we normally think about that happening. People move in and out of neighborhoods all the time. There is a high level of churn approaching 20-40% in poor neighborhoods. So what happens when a poor black resident of a neighborhood moves out as part of the normal churn and is replaced by a young white aspiring person? The young white person did not do anything that caused the poor black resident to leave. Is that gentrification? If it is, it is gentrification without the implied privilege and oppression that is normally part of the narrative.
Gentrification, as it is commonly understood, is about more than rising housing prices. It’s about neighborhoods changing from lower-income, predominantly black or Latino neighborhoods to high-income, predominantly white neighborhoods. Demographers and sociologists have identified neighborhoods where this kind of displacement has occurred. Wicker Park in Chicago, Harlem and Chelsea in Manhattan, Williamsburg in Brooklyn—these places really did gentrify. Sociologists and demographers captured these changes in case studies and ethnographies. But starting a decade ago, economists began to ask more nuanced questions about the displacement the other social sciences were documenting. Simply documenting that low-income people were being forced out of a neighborhood whose housing prices were rising didn’t mean in and of itself that gentrification was causing displacement, they noted. Poor people often move away from nongentrifying neighborhoods, too. Indeed, low-income people move frequently for a variety of reasons. The real question was whether low-income residents moved away from “gentrifying” neighborhoods at a higher rate than they did from nongentrifying neighborhoods.Buntin elaborates on what is actually happening.
One of the first people to explore this question in a sophisticated way was University of Washington economist Jacob Vigdor. In 2002, Vigdor examined what had happened in Boston between 1974 and 1997, a period of supposedly intense gentrification. But Vigdor found no evidence that poor people moved out of gentrifying neighborhoods at a higher than normal rate. In fact, rates of departure from gentrifying neighborhoods were actually lower.
It wasn’t just Boston. In 2004, Columbia University economists Lance Freeman and Frank Braconi conducted a similar study of gentrification in New York City in the 1990s. They too found that low-income residents of “gentrifying” neighborhoods were less likely to move out of the neighborhood than low-income residents of neighborhoods that had none of the typical hallmarks of gentrification.
Of course, displacement is not the only way in which gentrification could harm the poor. Residents of gentrifying neighborhoods might stay put but suffer from rising rents. Freeman and Braconi found that rents did rise in gentrifying neighborhoods in New York. But rising rents had an unexpected effect: As rents rose, residents moved less.
“The most plausible interpretation,” the authors concluded, “may be the simplest: As neighborhoods gentrify, they also improve in many ways that may be as appreciated by their disadvantaged residents as by their more affluent ones.”
In 2010, University of Colorado–Boulder economist Terra McKinnish, along with Randall Walsh and Kirk White, examined gentrification across the nation as a whole over the course of the 1990s. McKinnish and her colleagues found that gentrification created neighborhoods that were attractive to minority households, particularly households with children or elderly homeowners. They found no evidence of displacement or harm. While most of the income gains in these neighborhoods went to white college graduates under the age of 40 (the archetypical gentrifiers), black high school graduates also saw their incomes rise. They also were more likely to stay put. In short, black households with high school degrees seemed to benefit from gentrification.Ironically, Buntin then goes on to cite the same data as Grabinsky and Butler. I suspect that Grabinsky and Butler are going to arrive at the same conclusion in the second, forthcoming article, as Buntin has in his single article. Just more circuitously and less obviously.
McKinnish, White, and Walsh aren’t the only researchers whose work suggests that blacks often benefit from gentrification. In his book, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality, sociologist Patrick Sharkey took a close look at black neighborhoods that saw significant changes to their ethnic composition between 1970 and 1990. He found that when the composition of black neighborhoods changed, it wasn’t because whites moved in. That rarely happens. For black communities, neighborhood change happens when Latinos begin to arrive. Sometimes these changes can be difficult, resulting as they often do in new political leaders and changes to the character of the communities. But Sharkey’s research suggests they also bring real benefits. Black residents, particularly black youth, living in more diverse neighborhoods find significantly better jobs than peers with the same skill sets who live in less diverse neighborhoods. In short, writes Sharkey, “There is strong evidence that when neighborhood disadvantage declines, the economic fortunes of black youth improve, and improve rather substantially.”
In other words, the problem isn’t so much that gentrification hurts black neighborhoods; it’s that it too often bypasses them. Harvard sociologists Robert Sampson and Jackelyn Hwang have shown that neighborhoods that are more than 40 percent black gentrify much more slowly than other neighborhoods. The apparent unwillingness of other ethnic groups to move into and invest in predominantly black communities in turn perpetuates segregation and inequality in American society.
While critics of gentrification decry a process that is largely imaginary, they’ve missed a far more serious problem—the spread of extreme poverty.
From Buntin's article, I think there is a strong case that the emotionalism about the theoretical travails and injustices of gentrification has clouded understanding what is actually going on and led to a prejudice based conclusion that stands in the way of focusing on the real problem (spreading endemic poverty) and developing real solutions to the real problem.
To put it baldly, there are SJW advocates who appear mostly driven by a desire to punish young white professionals, rather than help poor blacks and Latinos. The SJWs would rather focus all their energies on the 5% of neighborhoods which have actually gotten better than focus on the 95% which have remained bad or gotten worse.
When you stop focusing solely on class and race and start focusing on understanding the facts and the mechanics of the real issue, you might actually begin to make some real progress. I think that perhaps one of the reasons SJWs are so blind to reality is that tackling the real root causes of poverty, which tend to be behavioral and cultural rather than institutional and legal, is that the real root causes do not lend themselves to generating revenues for the SJWs.
For example, redlining by banks of neighborhoods (choosing not to extend mortgages to individuals in designated neighborhoods) used to be a real and pernicious barrier to development for those neighborhoods. Redlining has now been outlawed for several decades and banks are supposed to extend mortgages based on individual borrower financial details rather than on the geographical location of the property. That's great and has made it easier for money to flow to where there is opportunity. In many of the settlements reached between banks and regulators back in the 1970s and 1980s, as redlining was outlawed and the laws enforced, those settlements usually included substantial "donations" or directed payments to the advocacy groups who brought the cases.
Getting rid of institutional and legal barriers can be revenue generating for the SJW advocates. None of that is bad but it is limiting.
The problem is that, to the extent that the remaining barriers to the elimination of poverty are behavioral and cultural, there is little money in that. People are reluctant to change their behaviors, even when it is demonstrably in their favor to do so. It takes a lot of interventions and effort with very little return and almost no financial return to the SJW advocates doing the intervening.
Hence, I suspect, the continuing fulminations against gentrification. Gentrification is not really the problem. In fact there is good emerging information indicating that it is part of the solution to concentrated urban poverty. If they play their cards right, there might be some money in it for the SJW advocates which makes it attractive to them to focus their efforts on the 5% that getting better and ignoring the cost, expense and absence of recompense for dealing with the behavioral and cultural issues underpinning the 95% of neighborhoods stuck in poverty or getting worse.
As long we allow those who want to focus solely on race, class, gender to set the agenda, there will be perverse incentives that stop us from dealing with the reality that needs to be addressed.
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