An exploration of the importance of the strategy used to identify gentrification

Abstract

Urban scholars have described the importance of gentrification in major cities across the USA since the 1970s. While there is consensus that gentrification shaped social and physical aspects of neighbourhoods, scholars have yet to agree on how gentrified neighbourhoods should be identified. Owing to the lack of consensus, gentrification was measured in a variety of ways, which greatly influenced the neighbourhoods studied in previous research and potentially the findings of research that assessed the importance of gentrification for other neighbourhood outcomes. The current study contributes to this debate by applying and comparing two census-based strategies for identifying gentrified neighbourhoods with a qualitative neighbourhood selection strategy derived from The New York Times to New York City neighbourhoods for the span of years from 1980 to 2009. Results confirm that each of the strategies identified different neighbourhoods and that qualitative strategies for identifying gentrified neighbourhoods may overlook areas that experienced similar changes to those more widely recognised as gentrified. Given these findings, additional analyses assessed which census-based neighbourhood selection strategy better represented the neighbourhoods perceived by The New York Times, a major media outlet that shaped discourse on gentrification in the USA, as having experienced gentrification.