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The subject of this thread is living in Parkchester, the Bronx. Are we done with races, and can we return to the topic? Anybody looking for an affordable place to live in NYC? Any budget-minded condo buyers, single or with a family?
The subject of this thread is living in Parkchester, the Bronx. Are we done with races, and can we return to the topic? Anybody looking for an affordable place to live in NYC? Any budget-minded condo buyers, single or with a family?
The subject of this tread is "priced out of Manhattan", not Parkchester per se.
I think it's offensive when white people deny that they are gentrifiers.
Don't be surprised if the people of color in your new neighborhood aren't THRILLED to see you there (especially the renters in the neighborhood).
Reductionism is the act of oversimplifying an issue, breaking it down into small parts that don't reflect how complex it actually is.
I know you aren't getting your information from the Furman Institute or the Federal Reserve Bank of Philly study because if you did, the arguments wouldn't be so reductionist.
Quote:
But those who have studied the subject closely, like Columbia University urban planner Lance Freeman, believe that the issue of displacement is more myth than reality. In fact, Freeman’s detailed empirical research has found that the probability of a family being displaced by gentrification in New York City was a mere 1.3 percent.
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Why does gentrification have essentially no discernible effect on homeowners moving out of the neighborhood? Owners have more money and more equity in their homes. Their costs are locked in and do not rise like rents do.
But my research shows that longtime residents aren’t more likely to move when their neighborhood gentrifies; sometimes they’re actually less likely to leave (in part because of the improvements gentrification can bring). In one study, I found that the probability that a household would be displaced in a gentrifying neighborhood in New York was 1.3 percent. A 2015 study in Philadelphia found something similar — that neighborhood income gains did not significantly predict household exit rates.
But gentrification is hardly a white thing. In many neighborhoods, middle-class Asians, blacks and Latinos are part and parcel of the process. Millennials and young professionals of all races appreciate the attractions and conveniences of city living. In a 2009 study, I found that gentrifying neighborhoods are more racially diverse than non-gentrifying ones.
In minority neighborhoods that are gentrifying, nonwhite gentrifiers aren’t as noticeable as white ones. And even when we do notice them, we don’t call them gentrifiers.
To be sure, market forces help change commerce in gentrifying neighborhoods. But often lurking behind the “invisible hand” are activists and policymakers who wish to nudge the market to produce certain outcomes.
With the growth of research demonstrating the benefits of living in more economically integrated neighborhoods for low-income families, it’s surprising that this narrative doesn’t play a big role in how people think about gentrification. When the economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues’ findings about the connection between economic integration and economic mobility were reported, they were framed as an argument for moving poorer families into richer neighborhoods, and not vice versa.
The narrative that results from ignoring this more positive data is popular because of its “truthiness”—it seems to be right according to intuition, regardless of what factual evidence suggests. The truthiness here is that gentrification is assumed to be an intrinsically malignant process, and so any evidence to the contrary is deeply discounted or ignored, even as it piles up. The aforementioned studies, and others, simply don’t fit into the most common understanding of the issue.
So why is it that the prevailing narrative ignores the abundance of evidence that relatively few low-income neighborhoods get gentrified, and that when they do there is much less displacement than is commonly assumed?
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The New York and Philadelphia studies both confirmed earlier research that gentrification is seldom associated with displacement, and that it is frequently associated with higher incomes and better economic results for the longtime residents of gentrifying neighborhoods.
There was also a series of articles on gentrification that Governing ran earlier this year. While the magazine acknowledged that gentrification (as defined by rising rents and educational levels) and displacement of the poor are not the same thing, it proceeded as if the link between the two were strong. But in fact, there were more low-income people living in the neighborhoods that Governing identified as “gentrifying” in 2013 than in 2000.
Implicit in all these narratives is a strong quasi-segregationist impulse: Rich people ought to live with rich people, and poor people ought to live with other poor people. Anything that changes this status quo is suspect: If rich people move into poor neighborhoods, it’s called gentrification. If poor people move into rich neighborhoods, it’s called social engineering. It’s difficult to see how this framing ever leads to a world in which there is less economic segregation.
The answer was mixed, but mostly positive. A study from the well-respected Furman Institute at NYU showed that residents of public housing in wealthy or “increasing income” neighborhoods earned substantially more, on average, than public housing residents in low-income neighborhoods. Moreover, they experienced less violent crime and their children went to better public schools—and, likely as a result, did better in school themselves. While low income residents of gentrifying neighborhoods cited problems finding affordable local retail and a sense of alienation from the businesses and institutions catering to their very different neighbors, on balance, many thought their neighborhoods had changed for the better.
But New York City is unique in having such huge concentrations of public and subsidized housing in many affluent or “increasing income” neighborhoods. In most places, low-income residents in low-income communities live in market rate housing that’s affordable because there is so little demand for it from middle class and upper-income households. In those cases, you would expect that as demand increases, those residents would be priced out, excluding them from the benefits of an increasingly resource-rich community.
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First, demographic change in gentrifying neighborhoods doesn’t happen the way most people think it does. Ding et al find that in gentrifying neighborhoods, existing residents are just 0.4 percentage points more likely to move out in a given year than they would be in a non-gentrifying neighborhood. (As a baseline, just over 10 percent of all residents moved in a given year.) Even in those neighborhoods with the most rapid increases in rents and income, existing residents are just 3.6 percentage points more likely to move. Moreover, because the authors are interested in involuntary displacement, presumably for economic reasons, they look at whether people who leave gentrifying neighborhoods are more likely to move to poorer communities. In most cases, the answer seems to be no.
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The point here is not that everything in gentrifying neighborhoods is peachy. After all, there’s very little displacement of economically vulnerable people in exclusionary high-income neighborhoods, because there are no economically vulnerable people to begin with. But when there are problems, they’re less likely to be existing residents forced out by rising rents, and more likely to be potential residents who are turned away before they even arrive. The challenge, in neighborhoods that are becoming more affluent as well as ones that already are, is to make sure that there is a sufficient stock of affordable housing (both subsidized and “naturally occurring” at market rate) to accommodate people of whatever means who want to move in. The best way to do that remains to make sure there isn’t an overall shortage of housing, and that there’s a variety of housing types, from single family homes to apartments of various sizes; and to remain friendly to developers of subsidized housing and people holding housing vouchers.
But the fact that rigorous studies of neighborhood change consistently produce results that, at least, complicate widely repeated narratives about gentrification ought to give us pause. While there are certainly people who are forced out of their homes by rising rents, it’s curious that the focus on those cases tends to crowd out attention on people who would like to move to a neighborhood but can’t afford it, a situation that appears to be more widespread. Similarly, the implicit assumption of most gentrification coverage—that the absence of gentrification would result in the preservation of the existing neighborhood as is—clearly needs to be reassessed. We’ll write more about this media issue tomorrow.
Reductionism is the act of oversimplifying an issue, breaking it down into small parts that don't reflect how complex it actually is.
I know you aren't getting your information from the Furman Institute or the Federal Reserve Bank of Philly study because if you did, the arguments wouldn't be so reductionist.
You can quote whoever you want, but you're seen as a gentrifier in Parkchester. I certainly get dirty looks when I'm there.
I agree. She is clearly in denial. Parkchester is fairly mixed but still mainly black and brown. I do see some whites there, but not many and I don't think the old-timers would care to see too many whites moving in.
The old timers are white. That doesn't make sense.
I know some Puerto Ricans from Bushwick and they're not resentful about the presence of white people. I think that as long as you're not a stereotypical white yuppie who calls the police about people smoking weed (if people like this even exist), then people won't have a problem with you on an individual level.
And Bushwick has many people from Mexico and Ecuador, who in many cases, have not been there much longer than white people if at all.
And gangs in Jackson Heights? I'm surprised but it can't be too big of a deal because Jackson Heights is pretty safe overall.
Of course, many minorities are successful, and not just Asians. The South American community overall is not doing too bad, and there are many middle class and higher black people in Brooklyn and Queens.
It's a pretty terrible narrative isn't it? It assumes that if your are non-white, you can't be financially successful or law abiding.
You can quote whoever you want, but you're seen as a gentrifier in Parkchester. I certainly get dirty looks when I'm there.
are you sure it is dirty looks? sometimes I find the stoop culture to be uncomfortable when visiting a ghetto neighborhood. Every block there are people outside starring at me as I go by. Similarly to people who hangout in front of bodegas look like they are up to no good.
You can quote whoever you want, but you're seen as a gentrifier in Parkchester. I certainly get dirty looks when I'm there.
I don't. I get people giving me their 20% off coupons when I am buying overpriced Dutch Ovens at Macy's. (This happened right before Thanksgiving.)
Being nice and friendly is a helpful thing.
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