Because no one has brought up the “G-word” lately:
Back in 2003, Lance Freeman, an associate professor of urban planning at Columbia, wanted to find out just how much displacement had occurred in two predominantly black, rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods: Clinton Hill and Harlem (Freeman’s home). But “much to my surprise,” he wrote in his book There Goes the ’Hood, he didn’t find any causal relationship between gentrification and displacement. More surprising, he found that “poor residents and those without a college education were actually less likely to move if they resided in gentrifying neighborhoods.” How does that square with our beliefs about Ikea-hoods?
Often lost amid our caricatures of benighted hipsters invading a blighted neighborhood is the fact that without gentrification, you’ve simply got a blighted neighborhood. “The discourse on gentrification,” Freeman writes, “has tended to overlook the possibility that some of the neighborhood changes associated with gentrification might be appreciated by the prior residents.” Freeman contrasts the late-century decline of Harlem with the conditions of the Lower East Side (or Harlem) decades earlier. Early urban slums were bustling and overcrowded, and thus could sustain a wide range of services. By contrast, Harlem lost 30 percent of its population in the seventies alone. Such neighborhoods became penal colonies of poverty, drained of population, services, and hope. Which explains, in part, the lack of displacement when gentrification improbably arrived. Once these neighborhoods improved, people opted to stay if they possibly could …
… For a neighborhood, or a city, abandonment is a death sentence. Gentrification—especially when coupled with intelligent urban policy—can serve as a reprieve, even if it arrives in the form of guilt-wracked hipsters and yoga studios. And it’s why cities from Buffalo to Braddock, Pennsylvania, are trying to spark similar renewals by luring artists and creative small businesses. These efforts are easy to dismiss or caricature as well; no doubt someone in Braddock has already opened a saloon with antlers over the bar. Yet the ailing cities that save themselves in the 21st century will do so by following Brooklyn’s blueprint. They’ll gentrify as fast as they can.
– “What’s Wrong with Gentrification?” from New York Magazine (hat tip to Brownstoner for the link).