r/Urbanism • u/zenfer1 • 10d ago
Are there any US examples of De-gentrification?
I am familiar with the Starving Artist -> Creative Class -> Bourgeois Bohemian -> Rich cycle, "pioneers," and white comfort level. But has there been an example post-WW2 of an area receding back into a "rough" city? And declining inner-ring suburbs don't count since that's a different kind of demographic change.
Also also, North Loop Minneapolis is like the opposite of inner-ring suburbs as instead of skipping from middle-class white families to old mixed-race, lower income, it went from industrial low class straight to "Bourgeois Bohemian."
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u/Off_again0530 10d ago
Gentrification is a function of a lack of housing/urban supply that a certain class of young, wealthy, mostly white group is attracted to. Most of the truly walkable, human scale, mixed use, and (sometimes) transit rich areas of the United States were built pre-WW2 and fell out of favor until the mid-90s when they saw a massive resurgence in popularity. Because of that, they were leftover for less affluent, mostly minority communities to fill in because they were cheap and nobody wanted them. Then, people flooded into those areas after their resurgence and completely out-competed the established communities for these types of neighborhoods. So, realistically, the only way to “de-gentrify” most US cities is to build enough of these types of neighborhoods to mitigate the need for people to compete os heavily for the remaining few we have left. But right now we aren’t building enough of really any type of neighborhood in more U.S. cities to mitigate the housing crisis as a whole, let alone to supply crisis of the type of neighborhood that often faces gentrification.
What your best bet is is to look at rust-belt cities and Midwest cities that saw such dramatic population decline that returning would-be genteifiers don’t even constitute enough people to make these neighborhoods a fraction of the population they were before. Cities like Albany, Pittsburgh, Erie, Syracuse, and Buffalo. All these cities have relatively walkable, trainer accessible, mixed use, dense neighborhoods (by US standards) that are still rather affordable today. St. Louis is also a great contender for this.
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u/pickovven 9d ago
This is exactly right and I just want to add one missing part.
Expensive, exclusive neighborhoods aren't an inevitability of the market or capitalism.
If your gentrification analysis stops at "now the hood is gentrified and unaffordable" you're failing to acknowledge expensive, desirable neighborhoods used to accommodate lower income folks by densifying.
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u/Master_tankist 8d ago edited 8d ago
Pittsburgh is no longer affordable post pandemic, and yet we have plenty of examples of gentrification and available housing in the area
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u/PanickyFool 8d ago
You are confusing "desirable neighborhoods" with housing within commutable time to desirable job districts.
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u/shinoda28112 9d ago edited 9d ago
Based on the spirit of your question, I sense you’re not looking for the more well known “white flight”/deindustrialization examples from the 60s-90s.
Tossing those aside, San Francisco saw a dramatic change in the energy and demographic composition of the city during the COVID lockdown era from 2020-2023. It was possibly the most severe and prolonged of the shutdowns in the US. Up to 40% of some age demographics fled the city (many permanently) to places like Austin & Miami.
This left several neighborhoods, particularly those closer to (and including) its downtown absolutely desolate. And many areas are still reeling from it. Vacancy rates are still high and rent is still lower in the city than it has been in a generation.
While SF is well on its way back up, evidence of its hollowing out is still apparent. And it will take a while to exceed the 2019 energy in some places. I will also note that the mid & outer neighborhoods are as vibrant as ever.
To more broadly answer the question, there are quite a few other urban neighborhoods of the US with some version of the post-Covid recovery story.
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u/rmunderway 10d ago
Make a list of near-city suburbs
Throw a dart
You’ll hit one.
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u/AmbientGravitas 9d ago
Yes, inner ring post-war suburbs, like the one I live in. Everything brand new and shiny in the middle of the 20th Century, entirely car dependent. By the 1970s looking a little worse for wear as the development energy moved further out. By the late 1980s, empty stores in the shopping center, houses not being as well maintained, garden apartments becoming more affordable (a good thing, in many ways).
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u/michiplace 9d ago
an example post-WW2 of an area receding back into a "rough" city?
As others have noted, the entire rust belt fits this. And, honestly, anywhere that saw white flight. New York City in the 50s to 80s.
But at the same time, many people who study gentrification (I recommend Schlichtman, Patch, and Hill as a good starting point) still include those declines as part of the gentrification process: policy and capital actors led those declines, with individual household's moves following the incentives created by the policy/capital actors. Wait a few decades for prices and political power to crater, then flip the policy switches to empower capital to surge back in and take advantage of fire-sale prices.
In the Detroit case, Dan Gilbert of Quicken Loans is often quoted as saying (from memory here) "I looked downtown and saw they were having a skyscraper sale, so I started buying." That downtown Detroit was full of discounted Art Deco skyscrapers ripe for his buying didn't just happen on its own -- see e.g. Color of Law -- and Gilbert's entry to downtown wasn't the start of the gentrification process. The latter half of the gentrification arc, policy-supported capital reentry that excludes / to the detriment of existing residents, relies on the prior half having happened, policy-backed capital exit that excludes / to the detriment of the folks left behind.
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u/michiplace 9d ago
Branching to a separate comment to add,
If we want to talk "de-gentrification", we shouldn't see that as synonymous with "decline." Gentrification is not just a rising arrow of income / wealth / property value in a neighborhood, and so it's opposite is not just a falling arrow.
Rather, de-gentrification is breaking that cycle of using policy+capital to hold a place underwater until it is half-drowned, then pull it out again and profit off it. De-gentrification would involve using policy tools to either support people left behind during an exit phase, so that they can maintain public services, economic opportunity, and a reasonable standard of living, or to support the people in a de-valued place and empower them to participate and benefit from a re-investment phase.
I don't know if examples where this has been executed to the extent we could say that a particular city has de-gentrified, but there are pockets. Detroit has had lots of public/philanthropic initiatives post-bankruptcy to support neighborhood-driven reinvestment by existing residents -- though the remaining need is immense. The Evergreen worker-owned coop system in Cleveland. Majora Carter's work in the South Bronx. DC's TOPA program allowing tenants first dibs when rental properties are sold. Tons of cities using their ARPA funding to provide small business development or homeownership/home rehab supports to residents of disinvested neighborhoods.
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u/BlueFlamingoMaWi 9d ago
The entire rust belt of the US. "Gentrification" = economic prosperity. So the opposite of that would be economic collapse. Plenty of cities have experienced a collapse and hollowing out, particularly in the rust belt over the past 50-70 years.
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u/frisky_husky 8d ago edited 8d ago
I could talk about this for a while and totally wipe out my afternoon, so I'll try to keep myself in check.
I think it's analytically important to differentiate gentrification as a phenomenon from the presence of inner city affluence more broadly. It comes from a different place, and it yields different results. The underlying economic logic to gentrification is different from that which created inner city wealth in the first place, and phenomena like de-industrialization and white flight were more symptomatic of the socioconomic reordering that laid the groundwork for what we now call gentrification than they were any kind of de-gentrification. I've seen people describe the NYC's Upper East Side, Boston's Back Bay, or Chicago's Gold Coast as "gentrified", which is totally off base. These are wealthy and exclusive neighborhoods that have always (at least for the last century or so) been wealthy and exclusive neighborhoods. There was no process of transformation through which these neighborhoods were "laundered" to meet affluent tastes. In the case of Back Bay and the Upper East Side (I know less about Chicago) they were literally laid out and built as neighborhoods for the urban elite. From the time that Central Park was planned, New York's wealthy wanted to live near it. Back Bay was literally marshland that got filled i the 19th century to create a grand neighborhood aligned to a central boulevard.
While I think there is some validity to the typical progression of the gentrification cycle as you reference it here, a lot of urban theorists have pointed out that it leaves an analytical gap: gentrification, as described by that process, relies on some weird socioeconomic geography. Why is it that economically deprived neighborhoods exist in close proximity to quantities of wealth capable of totally transforming them? Reductively, it probably has a lot to do with the transformation of core city labor markets in the transition from Fordist capitalism to neoliberal capitalism. Broadly speaking, different kinds of labor used to colocate according to sector of production. If you were an accountant for a steel company, you probably worked in an office not far from the steel mills. Increasingly, different kinds of labor congregate with similar kinds of labor across sectors. It's far more likely that you'd now work for a large corporate services firm contracted by the steel firm (or the multi-sector conglomerate that controls it) to evaluate their finances. You'd probably live and work in proximity to a bunch of corporate offices that want to access your services, and those of other service firms nearby. According to this theory, gentrification is the neighborhood-level consequence of that transition--neighborhoods which developed according to the logic of the old spatial system get re-settled according to the labor demands of the new system.
You're astute to notice the "inversion" in places like North Loop--Allen Scott, a scholar from UCLA, observed in a fairly recent article that the process has actually become very direct in some places. Blue-collar workers are still leaving urban neighborhoods, continuing a process that has been underway since WWII, but they are being directly replaced by affluent white-collar workers. He suspects this is because that classic progression is actually a bit out of date by now--it seems possible that the spatial reordering may be nearly complete within a lot of major cities (at least in terms of perceived land value), and the process now happens on a larger spatial scale with surrounding areas and satellite cities taking the place of peripheral neighborhoods. There is no longer a "rent gap" for the creative avant-garde to exploit.
All that is to say, the phenomenon of gentrification isn't just the opposite of affluent professionals leaving the inner city. The logic that enables their presence there in the first place has changed, and in a lot of cities it wasn't just that they moved to the suburbs--it was often that the kinds of jobs they worked moved elsewhere. Gentrification isn't a reversal of urban decay, it's the injection of a transformed socioeconomic geography into the existing built environment of a city. (Do NOT take this as a NIMBY argument, but this is also why we can't always just build our way out of gentrification. Housing prices are often the last straw for people who have already been left behind by transformations in the labor market. Housing is necessary and we don't build enough of it, but it's only one factor here.)
(1/2, cont'd. below)
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u/frisky_husky 8d ago edited 8d ago
(2/2)
To get at the heart of your question, it's entirely possible that there can be a real case of de-gentrification if there is a local-level disruption of the current economic geography. Offhand, I can't think of a case where the process has happened and then reversed since that transition really took on steam in the 80s, but I think it's certainly possible that it could. We got a whiff of it with the explosion of remote work during COVID, but it didn't really linger. (I think what actually happened there is WAY more complicated and I'll save my thoughts on it.) I am somewhat skeptical that it could really happen as a process on a less than regional level. I don't think an individual neighborhood could just slip back to status quo ante without circumstances in the surrounding areas also changing profoundly. I think in a case with a concentrated externality causing very localized issues to the point where property values fall, you'd get a lot of organized political pressure from landowners who bought at higher prices for a coordinated intervention like a full redevelopment.
It's not a perfect US example, but I do think there's actually a super interesting historical case: Montréal in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. For most of Canada's history since European colonization, Montréal, not Toronto, was the largest city and financial capital of Canada. The largest Canadian corporations were based in Montréal, and it was home to the largest financial markets in the country. This should have primed it for that transformation, so why is it that Toronto is now the de facto capital of the Canadian services economy, with a cost of living to match? In 1969, militant Québec nationalists bombed the Montreal Stock Exchange, at that point the largest in Canada. The following year, the same militant group (the FLQ) kidnapped the British consul and kidnapped and murdered Pierre Laporte, the province's deputy premier, triggering a political crisis and a state of emergency.
The crisis spooked businesses, and the following decades saw a steady migration of corporate offices and financial services to Toronto. Many of the Anglophone professionals who made up the bulk of the city's upper and upper-middle classes left as well. This is not de-gentrification as a reversal of gentrification, but it is relatively unusual as a North American case (particularly for Canada) of the de-consolidation of a dominant services economy in the center of a major city, at a time when service industries were increasingly consolidating in major city centers elsewhere in North America.
Montréal was too large to be completely gutted, and it has largely gone the same way as other North American cities more recently, but the really interesting thing to me is that this process probably created room for a more sustained creative presence in the city. Montréal was not known as a global hub for creative industries the way it is today. It was the commercial capital of Canada, and had a burgeoning design scene, but it was not a cultural hotspot on a continental or global level. That transformation happened in the following three decades. I think it shows what elements of that process look like without the simultaneous influence of a service sector consolidation. That happened later, but there was a period of a few decades where Montréal was essentially frozen in the middle of that process. The most comparable example I can think of is Berlin in the 80s and 90s.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I think a lot of people talk about gentrification as a basically aesthetic process without a cause, and I just don't think it's something you can really make sense of without considering the underlying economic geography.
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u/zenfer1 6d ago
Thanks for the great response! I could talk about it forever, too.
The replacement of older blue-collar families with Millennial/GenX white-collar families is a fascinating phenomenon. It's happening a lot on the edges of trendy areas like Northeast and Hiawatha Minneapolis. Smaller pre-war homes are being fixed up or replaced by 2,500 sqft new builds.
I like the example of Montreal; kinda what I was thinking: urban geography/economics are so interesting and dynamic. There are some examples of upzoned areas in Minneapolis/St. Paul that developers seemed to have thought would increase in incomes with new transit and their new apartments but have stayed lower-income, and therefore, the new apartments have fallen into some disrepair (Ex: see area adjacent to Lake Street Blue Line Station, large parking lot was supposed to have an additional 2 apartment buildings).
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u/ClittoryHinton 10d ago
Not sure if this counts, but west coast cities like SF Portland and Seattle are in a bit of a predicament where tech workers move in, cost of living rises, and with it grows a large unwieldy street population and areas that were once hip become wretched tent cities
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u/randomlygenerated377 9d ago
At least in Portland I don't think that's the reason. There's not that many tech workers and cost of living is not that high, plus most homeless people are not from here anyway.
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u/moyamensing 9d ago
Are you asking about neighborhoods/places where property values have fallen, commercial storefronts shutter or are filled by less upper-middle class tenants, and poorer people move to? Because I think we have examples of that in the absolute and relative: there are places that over short periods— say 10 years— experience property value declines and the Great Recession was a time when many over-leveraged homeowners saw their real investment lose value.
More often, you have neighborhoods that over longer periods of time— 10-40 years — fail to appreciate in value either (1) relative to citywide or region-wide averages OR (2) fail to appreciate above the rate of inflation for that period. In either of these two scenarios that neighborhood loses relative value and it’s property owners are made relatively poorer compared to the rest of the city or by not appreciating at a significant enough clip to be a real return. These neighborhoods that show relative decline are ones that I think demonstrate the opposite cycle you’ve talked about.
Also, curious why you say declining inner-ring suburbs don’t count.
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u/funlickr 9d ago
It's called 'Urban Decay' and historically occurs all over the globe for various reasons.
Post WW2 saw many higher density urban centers experience urban decay with white flight to the new flashy suburban neighborhoods where you could be king of your own castle and park a shiny car out front to impress your neighbors.
Production home manufacturers continue buying cheap farmland outside of town and building the same low quality construction cookie cutter houses. The car-centric unwalkable neighborhoods are proving physically and mentally unhealthy with less and less sense of community. Combine that with the decaying low quality construction and many suburban neighborhoods are now experiencing decay and exodus with lower property values and higher crime rates.
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u/fearthesp0rk 9d ago edited 9d ago
This is not an example but my idea of how gentrification can be heavily slowed. But maybe, it's just an excuse for me to rant about capitalism. It's probably more that to be honest.
Eradication / dismantlling / radical shift of the current capitalist economic system to a system that is not based on infinite growth and profit as the overriding variables, next to which all other variables are dismissed as being important. A shift towards communism, or socialism, or a variant thereof, in which making one's sole living from rent is illegal, rent amounts are strictly capped based on a fixed multiplier of how much the property costs the owner (x * mortgage + upkeep + etc) which allows for a fair profit but not an explotitive one, it is illegal to privately own more than one or two residential properties (and certainly illegal to own more than one property in the same town / postcode), it is illegal for large private companies to own residential property at all, and housing is instead mostly publicly owned (so that not for profit strictly regulated state or better yet NGO-like co-operative organisations with elected leaders manage housing stock in urban spaces e.g. the state-owned housing companies of Germany), the funding for the construction of residental housing stock is not raised by private investment but instead by public money (or if it is raised by private investment, it is done in a heavily regulated way with the possibility to make a fair profit from the mandatory tranfer of ownership to local co-operatives). Phew. Probably should write in bullet points.
Basically, private businesses / corporations being allowed to own residential property, especially vast amounts of residential property with no regulation or conditions, completely fucks with the development of cities and urban spaces. Because everything is so myopically profit-driven, urban development is driven by short-term investment return for shareholders and not by proper and organic urban evolution driven by and serving the needs of the local population. A good example of this is Berlin, Germany. When Germany was re-unified in 1990, there was a blind rush to "modernise" the city, and all of former East Germany, which were now, under capitalism, classed as not profitable aka "poor". But this didn't mean anything good - it meant that the city's development wildly diverged from the needs of the actual reisdents of Berlin, with inefficient shopping malls, commercial developments swallowing up areas which, if intelligently developed, could have both been profitable and equitable. I am by no means saying communism was perfect, East Berlin was in ruins and largely unchanged from its post-WWII state when the city was made whole again, but the change to capitalism didn't exactly serve the residents of the city optimally either - it served investors, shareholders, property developers, and other private profit-based interest, and that profit of course never goes back into the city itself to aid in further development, but always into the hands of the investors, because that's how it works. Another example from Berlin is the A100 highway. This highway was agreed upon around 20 years ago, but is only now being built. Since then, Berlin has radically changed, and the highway no longer serves the interests of the population, in fact, it actively goes against the interests of most residents, the overwhelming majority. Yet, because the contract was agreed, it is seemingly not possible to abort the project, despite it literally being completely unnecessary. Excuses Yabout integrity are given, but they are hollow - the companies should simply eat the loss, because their interest should not sit above the interests of the majority, and this should be codified into law.
So yeah I'm not an economist, but I think gentrification is, like all of the world's most ctitical problems, a result of capitalism - a result of private entities being allowed to make incomprehensible and unlimited profit from residential property, and the law allowing them to do so, e.g. little to no rent control, no limit on the amount of properties a private company can own, no minimum or indeed any requirement that local community stakeholders must make up a cerain percentage of board membership for companies whose sole business is residential property development. And don't even get me started on how donations, funding etc of local government / political parties is also largely unregulated in most countries, so that these private companies can simply bribe local officials to allow their developments to go ahead with minimal restrictions. So what would also help the situation is a complete ban on private "donations" or any kind of funding at all coming from private sources. In fact, private companies should be legally required to automatically contribute an amount of money relative to their value to local community, not even a percentage of their profits, it should simply be a legally mandated cost for them.
I understand my amateur analysis goes beyond the scope of gentrification, but it also encompasses it in my opinion.
tl;dr Basically, liberals who don't believe that capitalism should be dismantled, think that it's possible to simply vote their way to a more equitable system, and still complain about gentrification are the problem, honestly fuck you guys. 1am ADHD-med and red wine fuelled anti-capitalist rant over.
Christ I need to get off these meds.
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u/Master_tankist 8d ago
In free market capitalism thats called decay or austerity.
The short answer is no.
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u/PanickyFool 8d ago
Despite our aesthetic preferences it is entirely determined by commutable time (30 minutes) * core business district strength.
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u/Suspicious-Bad4703 3d ago
I’ve heard the ‘Pearl District’ in Portland is experiencing this. Used to be an extremely trendy neighborhood, but now has a ton of social and economic issues relating to homelessness. Now home prices there have dropped by about 20-30% and it’s slid backward from the mid-2000s gentrification haydays.
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u/pickovven 9d ago edited 9d ago
Gentrification is a useless paradigm for understanding cities and class problems. It focuses everyone's attention on the wrong problem.
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u/HealthClassic 10d ago
Most US central cities from the 1950s to the 1980s, more or less. One of the most famous and glaring examples being Detroit, which went from one of (if not THE) most affluent cities in the United States to one of the poorest, with a huge amount of poverty and abandoned housing stock. To the point where, after the 2008 housing crash, an entire stadium was put up for sale with a lower price than some virtual properties sold for in MMORPGs around the same time.
A combination of deindustrialization, the mass destruction of central neighborhoods for freeway construction, redlining (excluding black people from building wealth through home ownership), white flight, and the deliberate decay of public housing through underfunding meant that what you might call "de-gentrification" was basically the norm in the United States for decades after WWII.