From the archives: Gentrification as a housing problem
The root cause of displacement is inflexible supply
Anya Martin explains why most strategies to tackle gentrification fail, and how building more homes might work, for Issue 15. Read it on our website here.
The neighborhood of Edgehill is just south of downtown Nashville, Tennessee. Established by Union forces as a camp for fugitive slaves during the American Civil War, further waves of African Americans arrived during the Great Northward Migration in the 1900s. But since that early period of the twentieth century, its status as a historic and predominantly black neighborhood began to change. Demand for housing there began to rise due to economic growth and new jobs in surrounding neighborhoods like Music Row, where Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton recorded their hits, from the 1950s onward, and the Gulch, an upscale area that has been heavily redeveloped since the 2000s.
In an attempt to preserve its character, Edgehill was mostly zoned for single- and two-family use in 1974, and then to mostly single-family use in 2000, meaning homes cannot be easily redeveloped into apartment blocks, and in 2018 the city designated it as a historic conservation area.
As an attempt to preserve the architectural character of the neighborhood, it was a failure: over the course of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first, the original homes were replaced by larger, single-family zoning-compliant homes. If the intent was to prevent the displacement of the local community, to say it failed to work is an understatement: the number of black residents fell by 80 percent in just 20 years. Local news described it as a perfect storm of gentrification ‘[sweeping] away affordability for half of Nashville’s residents’.
Gentrification – broadly, existing lower-income residents being displaced from their neighborhood by incoming higher-income residents – is widely recognized as a serious problem. It inspires more activist engagement, protest, and artistic depiction than virtually any other policy issue in housing. Villainous gentrification is a recurring trope in TV and film. Lower-income residents dislike rapid, uncontrolled change in their neighborhoods just as much as the wealthy, but have generally had much less success at blocking it.
Most attempts to slow or stop gentrification have failed as resoundingly as Edgehill’s. Migration to, between, and within cities as economic opportunities shift is inevitable and almost a human universal. Attempting to stop people from seeking better lives in a new area generally does not work, but we can avoid most of the harms of gentrification by making space for them in the places they want to go. Housing supply is not a panacea, but removing constraints on housing supply growth can make inevitable migrations benefit communities, rather than harming them. And in some cases, like London’s estate regeneration programs, they have done it in ways that benefit and enjoy the enthusiastic support of the existing community.
You can read the rest of the piece here.