The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in July released a working paper stating the perception that gentrification hurts low-income Americans is false.
Quentin Brummet and Davin Reed, the paper’s authors, wrote that residents of a gentrifying neighborhood do not leave as often as first believed and they could gain from the changes around them.
Brummet and Reed devised a national data set of longitudinal individual outcomes from the 2000 Census and the 2010-14 American Community Survey, which, according to them, lets them “identify original residents and to follow changes in their outcomes whether they move or stay.”
The pair determined that residents with minimal income are less affected by gentrification.
Senior Strategist for State Affairs David Guenther with the nonprofit Mackinac Center for Public Policy said that the authors’ research concluded that “a typical neighborhood will see roughly 70 percent of its less-educated renters move in or out over the course of a decade; that increases by a mere 4 percent to 6 percent in a gentrifying neighborhood.”
“Gentrification creates some important benefits for original resident adults and children and few observable harms,” the paper stated.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that 60 percent of less-educated homeowners and 30 percent of less-educated renters remain in gentrifying neighborhoods. The poverty rate around them decreases by 7 percent, according to the paper.
Brummet and Reed said that low-income, less-educated families with children who stay in a gentrifying neighborhood are more likely to attend and complete college as opposed to children in families who move from high-poverty neighborhoods into those with less poverty.
Austin, Texas, the research showed, is among the cities in the country where gentrification is occurring at a very rapid rate. Texas’ capital also bore the distinction of being the largest U.S. city to experience a real decline in the African-American population during the 2000s.
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