View all Articles
Commentary By Kay S. Hymowitz

The Mistaken Racial Theory of Gentrification

Public Safety, Cities, Culture, Economics, Culture Policing, Crime Control, Housing, Poverty & Welfare, Race

Lke all major economic and demographic shifts, gentrification has upended familiar ways of life. It has also led to dubious, racially tinged theories. In left-leaning blog posts and articles, changes wrought in places like Harlem or Inglewood are routinely described as “ethnic cleansing” or “racial cleansing,” or, more prosaically, “white people stealing stuff.” In a widely discussed 2014 rant, Spike Lee said white newcomers to the once-black neighborhood of Fort Greene in Brooklyn had “Christopher Columbus syndrome.”

“Gentrification is best understood through the lens of class, not race. For starters, plenty of gentrifiers are black.”

Lower the rhetorical heat, and you get the point. In the mid-20th century, poor Southern blacks migrated into Northern and Midwestern cities. A combination of black preference and white discrimination helped create mostly African American neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, Bronzeville in Chicago and Columbia Heights in Washington, D.C., where, despite many urban ills, residents forged a local culture about which they felt considerable pride. Now, seemingly out of nowhere, a heavily white college-educated population has started checking out apartments in these areas. During the first decade of the new millennium, a number of gentrifying cities with large black populations, including Chicago and New Orleans, lost more than 10% of their black residents.

But as shocking as a whiter Bed-Stuy may be, gentrification is best understood through the lens of class, not race. For starters, plenty of gentrifiers are black. The black educated middle class, some of whom had left for the suburbs when inner cities were collapsing, are now driving up rents for longtime residents in gentrifying areas of New York, Washington and L.A., just as their white counterparts are.

Also undermining the racial theory of gentrification is the disappearance of numerous white working-class neighborhoods. In a recent study, Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson found that Chicago neighborhoods with a substantial white working-class population were more likely to gentrify than areas that were more than 40% black. Remember, too, that gentrifiers have been considering many hardscrabble neighborhoods, like DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) in Brooklyn, that never had sizable black populations.

Another major current of gentrification suspicion blames its dislocations on an insatiably greedy 1%. “How Oligarchs Destroyed a Major American City,” announces a Salon headline — about Houston, of all places. “[A]t every point,” explains Gavin Mueller, a writer at the left-wing “Jacobin,” gentrification “has been a takeover planned by large business interests who fund their projects with tax abatements.... A powerful capitalist class of bankers, real-estate developers, and investors is driving gentrification, using a mixture of huge loans (to which only they have access) and government funding to push land values higher.”

“The Occupy Theory misses the dilemma that city halls face: Where are they supposed to put all those programmers and designers knocking at their gates?”

A nugget of truth is hidden in what one could call the Occupy Theory of gentrification, though it needs to be set in historical context. For a long time, the problem for cities was that “large business interests” had no interest in building there. With populations declining, who would buy (or rent) what they had to sell? To encourage investment, city governments courted businesses with tax abatements and loan guarantees. Some developers signed on, though they couldn't have known for certain that the educated class was readying itself for an invasion. Now gentrifying cities are rolling in affluent customers. The windfalls for speculators, investors and builders have understandably caused some grumbling from rent-challenged taxpayers, chafing over their contributions to those perhaps redundant abatements.

The Occupy Theory misses the dilemma that city halls face: Where are they supposed to put all those programmers and designers knocking at their gates? Things are so bad in San Francisco that one young entrepreneur is charging $1,000-a-month rents for shipping containers stored in warehouses, retrofitted into tiny apartments.

The demand for high-end housing has set the stage for some dodgy landlord dealings. A recent oral history of gentrification in New York, “The Edge Becomes the Center,” by D. W. Gibson, profiles a number of unscrupulous and even illegal dealings by landlords and their attorneys. One chapter concerns a Hasidic businessman whose racist machinations confirm Spike Lee's worst fantasies. He tries to buy out black tenants in all the Brooklyn buildings he invests in since, he insists, white people don't want to live with blacks. “Every black person has a price,” he says. “The average price for a black person here in Bed-Stuy is $30,000. Up over there in East New York, it's $10,000.”

How many bad actors are out there? Judging from the anecdotes in Gibson's book and from tenant-advocacy groups, you'd conclude “a lot.” Researchers, however, haven't found forced displacement of tenants and owners to be nearly as widespread as these stories suggest. In a study of several New York City neighborhoods from 1986 to 1995, Columbia University urban-planning professor Lance Freeman found a displacement rate only 0.5 % higher in gentrifying New York City neighborhoods than in areas that remained low-income.

A 2010 paper from New York University's Furman Center actually found less turnover and more renter satisfaction among poor households in “gaining” or gentrifying neighborhoods in U.S. metropolitan areas during the 1990s than in stagnant areas. The most pessimistic picture comes from a University of Toronto study, and even that one fails to qualify as dystopian. The authors calculate an average of 10,000 displacements a year among renters in New York City from 1991 to 2002. Most of the displaced blamed costs. A small number did become homeless.

The findings are troubling, but keep in mind that those 10,000 represent less than 10% of intracity moves among renters. The urban poor have always moved more than the affluent, in large measure because they're searching for better opportunities. Economist Joe Cortright, who studies mobility and urban development, observes that “far more of the long-suffering poor move out of high-poverty neighborhoods that stay poor than move away from high-poverty neighborhoods that see a significant reduction in poverty.”

“Regardless of what we think about it, the conditions that drive gentrification and urban inequality, displacement and neighborhood turnover are not likely to ease up”

Shifty landlords, suspect tax abatements and zoning changes are all worthy subjects of policy debate, but no policy can change the crucial fact that gentrifying cities are far better off than their cheap-rent counterparts. Cities like Detroit, Cleveland and Dayton, Ohio, that have struggled unsuccessfully to attract a large professional and creative middle class would like nothing better than to see such people beating a path to their forlorn neighborhoods. True, those places have lower rates of inequality than glamour-pusses like Los Angeles and New York. But they also have higher levels of concentrated poverty. Middle-class residents bring investment and safety, support local businesses and pay taxes that, if government behaves itself, can go to upgrading infrastructure and improving city services for everyone.

Regardless of what we think about it, the conditions that drive gentrification and urban inequality, displacement and neighborhood turnover are not likely to ease up. The United States produces about 1.6 million new college graduates yearly, up from 840,000 in 1970 and 1 million in 1990. Many of those 1.6 million will want to U-Haul their dorm gear to locations with the best job opportunities, which means cities such as New York, Washington, Seattle and Los Angeles. That means more demand for housing and offices, more competition for space and — if development continues to be resisted as it is in so many places — ever-higher rents.

This piece is an adaptation of City Journal in the Los Angeles Times.

This piece originally appeared in Los Angeles Times