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While Some Things Change, Some Things Stay The Same: Reflections on the Study of Gentrification

Although we have been studying gentrification for more than 50 years now, gentrification seems to have become a hot topic of public concern only in recent years. The growing interest in the phenomenon reflects both its increasing prevalence and its changing nature. The term now conjures up connotations and stylized images of race and class, but these are often inconsistent with scholarly findings of gentrification. These inconsistencies between the past and present and between the public and academic understanding of the phenomenon bring us to an appropriate juncture to reflect on the scholarship on gentrification. For most of the twentieth century, the study of neighborhood change that dominated urban sociology explained neighborhood decline in central cities. With rapid urban growth in the first half of the twentieth century followed by the large-scale decline of manufacturing and suburbanization, the general trend of central city neighborhoods in the United States was indeed decline. It is no surprise, then, that theoretical understandings of neighborhood change largely focused on this particular direction of change. Early Chicago School scholars described the invasion and succession process by which the innermost central city neighborhoods continually remained home to those with the lowest socioeconomic status as cities grew and new immigrants arrived (Park et al. 1925), and a subsequent generation of urban scholars sought to explain the declining social conditions in the poor minority neighborhoods that expanded in the years after World War II (e.g., Massey and Denton 1993; Wilson 1987). Following the publications of Wilson’s (1987) The Truly Disadvantaged and Massey and Denton’s (1993) American Apartheid, a field of research blossomed, particularly within urban sociology, on the persistence of these poor minority neighborhoods. This research has made substantial progress over the last few decades in advancing our understanding of the causes and consequences of these neighborhoods. While the dominant trend of low-income, central city neighborhoods has certainly been that of decline and persistence, gentrification—the socioeconomic upgrading of previously low-income, central city neighborhoods1—has become increasingly widespread and has made its mark in many urban areas by now. Urban scholars began to take note of gentrification appearing across several cities over 50 years ago. Gentrification countered the dominant trend of low-income, central city neighborhoods, and forced scholars to rethink understandings of neighborhood change, which mainly explained the decline of central city neighborhoods at the time. Gentrification represented