Commercial Gentrification Indexes: Using Business Directories to Map Urban Change at the Street Level

Abstract

This article presents the case for utilizing business directories in building commercial gentrification indexes as tools for research on neighborhood change. It reviews several existing methods of capturing retail change within the growing literature, codifies them as the boutique index, the food index, and the ethnic index, and discusses methodological issues that emerge in building them. A comparative case study of two Little Italies in NYC employs multiple indexes to reveal that the food index––rather than ethnic index––provided the key variable in understanding how consumption practices marked different trajectories of neighborhood change. Whereas the sociological literature on gentrification has primarily relied on socioeconomic indicators and housing data, changing retail landscapes have been understudied and measuring commercial gentrification remains a site–specific, ad–hoc endeavor. To overcome this gap, the article calls for methodological standardization across different sites to increase attention to the role of commercial spaces in accounts of gentrification.