Abstract
Few studies have considered the role of immigration in the rise of gentrification in the late twentieth century. Analysis of U.S. Census and American Community Survey data over 24 years and field surveys of gentrification in low-income neighborhoods across 23 U.S. cities reveal that most gentrifying neighborhoods were “global” in the 1970s or became so over time. An early presence of Asians was positively associated with gentrification; and an early presence of Hispanics was positively associated with gentrification in neighborhoods with substantial shares of blacks and negatively associated with gentrification in cities with high Hispanic growth, where ethnic enclaves were more likely to form. Low-income, predominantly black neighborhoods and neighborhoods that became Asian and Hispanic destinations remained ungentrified despite the growth of gentrification during the late twentieth century. The findings suggest that the rise of immigration after 1965 brought pioneers to many low-income central-city neighborhoods, spurring gentrification in some neighborhoods and forming ethnic enclaves in others.
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Notes
For this study, I employ this working definition and conceptualize gentrification as a phenomenon that occurs at the neighborhood-level within central urban areas. See Brown-Saracino (2010) for alternative definitions.
Evidence of gentrification in U.S. cities dates back to the 1950s, but this period of gentrification was slow, sporadic, and generally isolated to a few neighborhoods in northeastern cities (Hackworth and Smith 2001).
Only tracts below the citywide median were observed, which excludes many working-class neighborhoods in cities that experienced widespread economic decline. About 25 % of tracts below the national 1970 median income were not observed. Supplementary analysis using census-based gentrification measures (see Footnote 7) for these tracts yield similar results for Asians, and Hispanics are negatively associated with gentrification. Over 10 % of the additional tracts became Hispanic enclaves, for which none gentrified. Results are presented in Online Resource 1.
I exclude 24 tracts with missing housing data because of having very few housing units.
This measure is based on discriminatory analysis comparing HW’s field survey results with census variables. The measure considers tracts with the highest average rank for the following factors to be gentrifying: % college-educated at the end of the period (t 1); % with some college education (t 1); average household income ratio in t 1 to the beginning of the period (t 0); homeownership rate (t 1); % professionals (t 1); change in % ages 30–44 from t 0 to t 1; and % above poverty (t 1). They also included % black and % white nonfamily households, but I exclude these measures to avoid imposing assumptions of racial change for the purpose of the analysis.
Gentrification surveys in eight of the 23 cities use 1990 tract boundaries. Although the majority of tract boundaries remained the same from 1990 to 2000, in tracts that were split into multiple tracts, I assigned the same gentrification category to all tracts; in tracts that were merged or where boundaries were revised, I assigned the gentrification category that comprised the majority of the spatial area.
The 1970 census does not distinguish Hispanics by race group or Asians from Native Americans and “other race” groups. I employ Timberlake and Iceland’s (2007) strategy to allocate Hispanics to racial categories based on the proportions of Hispanics identifying by each race in the tract in 1980 and to separate Asians from other groups based on the 1980 proportions of Asians among a combined category of Asians, Native Americans, and other races. I consider only those individuals who reported being a member of one racial/ethnic group in the 2000 census.
Models using 1970 or 1980 as baseline years with survey-year fixed effects yield similar results, which are presented in Online Resource 1, except that Hispanics had a negative effect in high-immigration cities only in 1980.
HW distinguished between whether tracts showed early signs of gentrification or intense gentrification activity. Multinomial logistic regression models predicting gentrification levels show similar main results across levels except that the interaction effects occur only in intensely gentrifying tracts.
I do not use a selection model because the goal of the analysis is to understand the determinants of gentrification among gentrifiable tracts, rather than to infer what neighborhoods would have experienced across the economic spectrum. Thus, there is no need to adjust for the fact that nongentrifiable tracts are excluded from the sample.
Results for models examining tract characteristics 16 years prior to the survey (presented in Online Resource 1) are similar, except that Hispanics have a stronger and statistically significant negative effect on gentrification.
Models with black and white population counts instead of percentages or percentage whites instead of blacks yield similar results.
Consumption-side perspectives of gentrification emphasize characteristics of gentrifiers, such as education levels and professionals (Ley 1996), but these variables reflect ongoing gentrification, rather than predictors of subsequent gentrification, and therefore are not included.
The distinction between city contexts in the 1970s is most relevant for this analysis; thus, I do not use other common immigrant destination typologies, which focus on the timing of immigrant flows over the last century (e.g., Singer 2004).
Models using continuous variables for the percentage change in Asians and Hispanics or the share of blacks in cities yield similar results.
Models with city fixed effects produce similar results.
I use a relatively higher threshold than other studies identifying enclaves with census data (Alba et al. 1997; Logan et al. 2002) because I include all Asians and Hispanics rather than specific ethnic groups. The results are similar with lower thresholds and nonlinear continuous terms, as described in the Results section. Over 40 % of tracts that met this threshold were in nongentrifiable tracts, indicating that many enclaves formed in higher-income areas or in areas that declined in later years. Results are similar from analysis of tracts that were low-income in 1970 or 1980 using census-based gentrification measures and are presented in Online Resource 1, except that Hispanics have a stronger and statistically significant negative effect on gentrification.
I use population shares rather than population thresholds because populations vary widely across the sample. I use relative, rather than fixed, threshold values to define neighborhood racial categories to account for the changing Hispanic and Asian populations over time and relative differences between cities. For similar reasons, I define racial categories based on the relative share within each city, in contrast with Logan and Zhang (2010), who constructed categories based on relative shares across their entire sample of high-immigration metropolitan areas.
Even though Logan and Zhang (2010) described “global” neighborhoods as containing all four groups, I also include tracts with either Hispanics or Asians.
Results are similar for unlogged group population counts or percentages trimmed at the 5th and 95th percentiles. The negative effect of Hispanics, however, is statistically significant with these alternative specifications and not statistically different in high-immigration cities.
Results from models examining the early growth of Asians and Hispanics are consistent with these findings and are presented in Online Resource 1.
Tract-level income gains and poverty losses are also positively associated with gentrification, but the main results hold in models including these variables.
I find no differences, however, in the effects of Hispanics in Puerto Rican gateways.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (Grant No. DGE-1144152), the NSF-IGERT Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy at Harvard University (Grant No. 0333403), and The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health (Grant No. T32HD007163). I wish to thank the Demography Editor and anonymous reviewers, Asad Asad, Monica Bell, Alexandra Killewald, Jennifer Lee, Jeremy Levine, Jim Quane, Robert Sampson, Robert Vargas, Mary Waters, William Julius Wilson, and audiences of various workshops and meetings for helpful comments on previous drafts and presentations of this article. The content in this article is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
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Hwang, J. Pioneers of Gentrification: Transformation in Global Neighborhoods in Urban America in the Late Twentieth Century. Demography 53, 189–213 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-015-0448-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-015-0448-4