Author: Sujata Gupta / Source: Science News
Many think of gentrification today as wealthy, white millennials moving into low-income, minority neighborhoods and driving up housing costs.
Yet a new study suggests that another group may play a key role in the process: immigrants.Gentrification, in which affluent outsiders settle and renovate rundown neighborhoods, generally decreases in white neighborhoods when immigrants from Asia and Latin America move in. The opposite is true in black neighborhoods, where rising immigrant numbers increase the odds an area will be gentrified.
“Changing the ethnoracial composition might make neighborhoods seem more amenable for [white] people to move in,” suggests study coauthor and sociologist Jackelyn Hwang of Stanford University, who presented her findings April 11 at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America in Austin, Texas.
Wealthy and middle-class whites fled the nation’s cities for racially homogenous suburbs in the 1950s and ’60s. Then over the next few decades, they slowly returned to cities to be closer to jobs and other amenities. That return triggered the gentrification of urban communities, initially in predominately white and other nonblack neighborhoods. By the 1990s, though, whites were also moving to predominately black neighborhoods.
In 2015, Hwang showed that, even in the 1970s and ’80s, black neighborhoods were more likely to be gentrified following the…
The post Immigrants pave the way for the gentrification of black neighborhoods appeared first on FeedBox.