The Trouble with Gentrification

Abstract

Abstract This chapter reviews the main conceptual and empirical concerns about gentrification, which, as it turns out, trouble popular conclusions about its causal relation to displacement that fuel prominent condemnations of gentrification. It argues for two main points: First, gentrification-based displacement may not be the problem that critics charge it is. Second, the focus on gentrification in “superstar cities” obscures other larger injustices in social-spatial arrangements and the consequences of the history of housing discrimination against non-whites, exemplified by the African American experience of state-sponsored residential segregation, discrimination in housing, and land-use policy and neighborhood disinvestment. The excessive focus on the experiences of superstar cities, with the shocks of reinvestment they experienced, obscures older and continuing patterns of disinvestment that have affected peoples and places distant from the fashionable centers that grab our collective attention.