Browsing by Subject "Gentrification"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Assessing Neighborhood and Social Influences of Transit Corridors
    (Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota, 2012-07) Fan, Yingling; Guthrie, Andrew
    This research investigates neighborhood and social influences of major transit improvements in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. To delineate a comprehensive picture, this research focuses on four transit corridors—Hiawatha LRT, NorthStar Commuter Rail, Cedar Avenue BRT, and Central Corridor LRT—each of which is at a different stage of planning, construction, or operation. The project undertakes a general quantification of neighborhood social change in transit served areas. For each corridor, the researchers also investigate inter-neighborhood and inter-corridor variations in social change, and examine residents' and business owners' perceptions of neighborhood social change, as well as of the specific impacts of transit corridors. A mix of quantitative analysis and survey research is used. By examining a wide range of system development stages including planning, construction, and operation, research findings will help policy makers determine at what point in the timelines of major transit capital projects policy responses are needed and likely to be most effective. By covering a variety of transit technologies including LRT, BRT and Commuter Rail, as well as a diverse range of urban and suburban neighborhoods, results from this research will help policy makers make more informed decisions about how to prevent and mitigate socially harmful neighborhood changes associated with various types of transitways. The research also presents strategies for engaging residents and businesses with negative, neutral and positive perceptions of transit projects in the transitway development process.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Can Transit-Oriented Development Enhance Social Equity: Current State and Active Promotion of Equitable Transit-Oriented Development
    (2018-07) Guthrie, Andrew
    Promoting social equity is an important part of the purpose of public transit. However, social equity has historically played a much more minor role in transit-oriented development. High quality transit has been shown to increase station area property values and cause concerns about the displacement of low-income residents by high-income residents when the desirability of a neighborhood increases. In combination, these dynamics of transportation and real estate economics mean that transit-oriented development is often not a natural social equity promoter. This thesis examines equity implications of social and economic change in the areas surrounding newly implemented transit stations, as well as public sector efforts to promote equitable transit-oriented development. I employ a mixed-methods approach including quantitative and qualitative components. Building from the bid-rent and rent gap theories, I examine change in station area low-, medium- and high-wage working population and jobs as a function of transit mode and difference in accessibility in a national, longitudinal analysis. I also explore public efforts to promote equitable transit-oriented development in the context of Harvey’s concept of entrepreneurial urbanism though a series of in-depth interviews with senior program staff, taking an interpretivist approach focused on interviewees’ shared understandings of their work and current limitations to it. In the national, longitudinal analysis, I find significant in-migration of high-wage workers to station areas, but not of low- or medium-wage workers, significant gains of high-wage jobs and losses of low- and medium-wage jobs. In the interpretivist analysis, I find process of equitable transit-oriented development promotion to be sharply constrained by current urban governance structures and relationships to the private sector. I close by recommending a focus on both preservation and production of affordable housing and entry-level, living wage jobs in station areas, careful consideration of the appropriate roles of mixed-income and all-affordable development, as well as critical consideration of when the entrepreneurial model of urban governance is at least benign and when alternatives to it ought to be considered.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Creating Affordable Homes: An Evaluation of the Minneapolis Homes Create Strategy
    (2024-05-01) Goodrich , Dan; Yudelman, Beth
    This project was a qualitative analysis of the Create Strategy of the Minneapolis Homes Program. The project was designed to determine to what extent the strategy is meeting its goals. The Minneapolis Homes Program is managed by the Community Planning and Economic Development (CPED) housing division. The mission of the Minneapolis Homes Program (started in 2020) is to help people access, create, and sustain affordable homeownership to eliminate racial disparities in homeownership. This capstone project was specifically focused on the Create Strategy of the program - to what extent are the Minneapolis Homes: Financing and Property Sale Programs successfully creating opportunities to build new homes and rehabilitate existing homes to eliminate racial disparities in homeownership within the city of Minneapolis? Three key findings emerged from our research: 1) Minneapolis Homes is well led and viewed as a national leader, 2) Some developers experience significant “pain points” when working with the city. Further, the experiences that builders have with the city can vary significantly and can be inconsistent. For example, newer community developers need more support navigating the city’s process and receiving early financial support for construction, while larger developers want more consistency, and 3) The Create Strategy is underfunded. More funding is needed for the Minneapolis Homes Create Strategy to increase capacity within the city as well as for specific development projects. In addition, outside forces such as post-Covid inflation, labor shortages, and the Minneapolis 2040 plan lawsuit are adding time, costs, and stress for builders. On a macro level, we recommend that Minneapolis Homes work closely with city departments and divisions to advance the city’s identified primary goal. On a micro level, we recommend that Minneapolis Homes 1) clarify the primary goal within CPED in relation to equity and homeownership: what to incentivize and what to require, 2) seek additional funding to advance the identified goals of the Create Strategy, 3) continue to streamline the process for developers and customize support (including more financial and logistical support when needed), and 4) continue to strengthen communication with developers, city staff, and funders. In addition, Minneapolis Homes should examine whether more homeowner participation in evaluating the Create Strategy is beneficial.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Exposure, timing, and vulnerability: The role of public transport in inducing gentrification
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2021) Fernando, Malithi; Heinen, Eva; Johnson, Daniel
    Gentrification is an increasingly common phenomenon in many urban neighbourhoods. While cities invest in more sustainable travel options for their residents, there is limited literature on its connection to gentrification of the surrounding areas. Understanding whether these investments induce gentrification is essential to ensure the positive impacts of public transport are not undermined by the displacement it may create. This paper presents a multi-analysis approach to studying gentrification, defined by a bi-axial definition of neighbourhood change which considers the negative components (displacement) and positive components (neighbourhood upgrading) of gentrification. We focus specifically on the extent to which exposure to public transport induces gentrification-like changes in neighbouring communities, the influence of time on the kind and magnitude of changes, and whether disinvested communities are most vulnerable. We analyse neighbourhood changes in Manchester, UK, in response to the introduction of the Metrolink tram network, and conclude that there is evidence of gentrification in areas with access to new light rail. We conclude that the length of exposure has a significant impact on the magnitude and direction of change for certain indicators of gentrification. We find mixed results regarding the susceptibility of disinvested communities to gentrification.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    From Vice to Nice: Race, Sex, and the Gentrification of AIDS
    (2017-04) Esparza, Rene
    My dissertation, From Vice to Nice: Race, Sex, and the Gentrification of AIDS, tracks the agency of white gay leaders in shaping urban politics in the 1980s vis-à-vis the racialization of public health discourses and practices. In the context of state indifference spurred by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, these leaders embraced racialized norms of sexual hygiene to articulate their Americanness. Because early in the epidemic, the racially coded language of public health represented the gay community as a threat to white Americans, gay community activists learned that meeting institutionalized-defined standards of moral health and sexual hygiene was a precondition for their social membership. However, in testifying on behalf of the gay community’s moral cleanliness, these leaders sublimated fears of perverse spaces, atypical gender roles, and deviant sexualities onto communities of color. Under neoliberalism, I argue that these racialized norms of sexual hygiene stood as yardsticks for Americanization. I underscore that racialized norms of sexual hygiene provided for the anesthetization and co-optation of gay radical politics and, in turn, gave form to what Lisa Duggan calls “homonormativity,” the normalization of white, middle-class class gay and lesbian politics of sexual respectability. Specifically, through a case study of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, I uncover how homonormativity converged with wider agendas and policies encompassing the “cleaning-up” of public urban spaces such as low-income neighborhoods and vice districts, and the policing of its racial denizens such as “crack-addicted” single black mothers, Hmong refugees, and Native American sex workers. Using multiple methods, including archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and discourse analysis, I illustrate that public health constructions of normative gender, sexuality, and domestic space became powerfully intertwined with private development so that both institutions worked in the service of promoting the economically prosperous potential of post-industrial inner-cities as centers of business, culture, and tourism. Gentrification, I conclude, does not simply denote the privatization of public urban spaces. It also reflects attempts at the privatization of non-normative sexuality in the service of reorganizing white heteronormativity.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Investigation on railway investment-induced neighborhood change and local spatial spillover effects in Nagoya, Japan
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2021) Wang, Lisha; Jiang, Meilan; Miwa, Tomio; Morikawa, Takayuki
    Previous studies have proven the significant causal relationship between railway investment and gentrification in some cities. However, most of them have focused on the gentry and less on the effect on other social classes. To observe how railway investment affects neighborhood change for different population types, this study investigated the investment effects of two urban railway lines separately on the neighborhood change of the gentry, older population, and students in Nagoya, Japan. These two railway lines consisting of a subway and an elevated railway opened in the same year and were located in different areas of the city. Moreover, the spatial autocorrelation in panel data was considered to investigate possible local spillover effects. Finally, we observed that the railway investments in highly urbanized areas were more likely to induce gentrification. In addition, railway investment has some significant treatment effects on students compared to the older population.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Manufacturing Urban America: Politically Engaged Urban Black Women, Renewed Forms of Political Censorship, and Uneven Landscapes of Power in North Minneapolis, Minnesota
    (2015-05) Lewis, Brittany
    Racialized public policies further concentrated poverty in central cities across the nation, necessitating the continued deconstruction and redevelopment of the “slums” staging the next sequence of dramatic acts in Black women’s history of resistance. In most discussions of inner-city renewal, Black women are framed as objects for study: single mothers, "welfare queens," drug addicts, and other stereotypes abound, situating these women at best as victims, at worst as sources of urban decay. But Black women share a long legacy of urban activism in local neighborhoods that, if recognized, could shift the conversations that shape the urban renewal agenda. My research complicates the study of race, gender, and urban politics by centering Black women’s activist experiences to better understand how communities experience and resist the racialized legacies of housing segregation, redlining, and concentrated poverty in North Minneapolis, MN. By magnifying how Black women “talk back” within a competitive urban context framed by dominant material and political interests I shed new light on the ways that Black women undermine the states claim for regulatory control over Black urban space. I investigate Black women's actions in: (1) public housing; (2) community economic development; and (3) efforts to utilize neighborhood associations as participatory empowerment bodies for all those affected by urban transformation. All of these domains of neighborhood resilience and renewal have been influenced by hegemonic urban renewal discourse, policies, and practices. My research explains how this discourse has shaped a political environment that does not invite rigorous debate and critique by all affected residents. Yet, politically engaged urban Black women continue to challenge these restrictive forms of privatized political engagement exposing uneven landscapes of power. As such, my dissertation asks the following questions: (1) How can the strategic political actions of urban Black women challenge dominant power and its discursive frame, particularly when Black women are often framed as culprits in urban decay? (2) What social, political, and/or economic barriers hamper Black women’s efforts to reframe the urban renewal agenda considering local histories of urban development (and underdevelopment) as well as the intersections of race, class, gender, and gentrification? And (3) what can we learn about citizen participation and the limits of dominant frameworks for urban renewal by centering the resistant innovations of Black women activists?
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Navigating a Gentrifying Neighborhood: Examining the Impact of a HOPE VI Mixed Income Housing Development on the Social Connectedness of Young People
    (2020-07) Calhoun, Molly
    Neighborhood redevelopment creates inevitable disruption in the lives of young people, particularly through the demolition of social communities. For almost 30 years, public housing neighborhoods have been completely demolished to make way for mixed income housing developments in increasingly coveted urban spaces. The mixed income housing model, a form of state-sponsored gentrification, increases investment in historically disinvested areas and socially and economically “mixes” residents across racial and economic lines. This study examined the effect of a HOPE VI mixed income redevelopment process in the South Lincoln public housing development in Denver, Colorado, on the social connections of youth. Young people’s experiences of residential transition and social connectedness were examined through constructivist grounded theory, as well as a combination of descriptive statistics, egocentric social network analysis and geographic information systems (GIS) mapping to assess the size, strength, and spatial nature of social connections. Eighteen young people described the redevelopment as gentrification that was driven by race, profit, and power. They illuminated the loss of home as a reinforcement of harm through neighborhood redevelopment, continued social connection despite diminished community connectedness, and overall nuances from sharing their own story. The findings illustrate the critical nature of centering young people through social justice initiatives and investments as well as the integration of critical race theory as a perspective that informs the model of mixed income housing.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Our bikes in the middle of the street: community-building, racism and gentrification in urban bicycle advocacy
    (2013-06) Hoffmann, Melody Lynn
    It is no surprise to people living in U.S. urban spaces that bicycling continues its ascent into popularity. Neighborhoods and cities across the country are now committed to making their spaces welcoming to bicyclists which include bicycling events, bicycle lanes, and businesses that cater to cyclists. In my time as an urban bicycle commuter, I have noticed that a particular bicyclist is being hailed by neighborhoods and cities--one that has both racial and class privilege. Through my ethnographic research in three U.S. cities I have confirmed my suspicion that the bicycle signifies different values and meanings to different bicycling demographics. In this dissertation I ultimately argue that the "rolling signification" of the bicycle contributes to its ability to build community, influence gentrifying urban planning, and reify and obscure systemic race and class barriers. I begin my dissertation with a case study on the Riverwest 24, a 24-hour bicycle race, and how its organizers and participants build community but I complicate this understanding of community building by exploring the neighborhood's long history of activism and its spatial connection to a major segregation line. The importance of a neighborhood's history as it intersects with bicycle advocacy is made clear in my second case study in Portland, Oregon where neighbors clashed, along racial lines, about renovating a specific bicycle lane. And thus I argue that the Black residents and history rooted in Black culture in Portland's Albina neighborhood produce a haunting (Gordon, 1997) within the reconstruction of that bicycle lane. In my final case study I explore whether the theory that bicycle lanes can lead to gentrification holds any merit. In Minneapolis I have found evidence that the local government is coopting bicycle infrastructure to recruit educated, upwardly mobile people--with little regard to its impact on residents who fall outside of that demographic. This cooptation is wrapped up in power relations that allow the city government and "creative class" to define what a sustainable and livable city looks like. This dissertation makes a rather large intervention in Communication Studies as it illustrates the importance of rich description, spatial analysis, and ethnography in our scholarship.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Transit-Induced Gentrification in U.S. Metropolitan Areas
    (2020-10) Qi, Yunlei
    Problem: Gentrification is a term used to describe the process and changes that commonly occur in lower-income and/or minority neighborhoods with the influx of more affluent residents who are more likely to be white, increases in property values, the renovation of housing, the upscaling of local commercial and retail properties, and potentially, the displacement of current residents. Some studies in the past two decades have found that the sustained growth of the high-quality public transit systems—both rails and buses—may have triggered or accelerated gentrification in some U.S. metropolitan areas (MSAs). Some studies define that phenomenon as the “Transit-Induced Gentrification” (TIG). Until now, nineteen empirical studies have examined TIG in one or several cities, with twelve of them focused on American cities. Some fundamental studies have been conducted to explain TIG based on previous theories and hypotheses of the traditional gentrification. Through the summary of literature, three unsolved issues on TIG have been identified. First, current studies have not reached consensus on the pervasiveness of TIG, partly because of their different operational definitions and measures of gentrification and their different research designs. Second, current studies have not found sufficient empirical evidence to support the hypotheses explaining TIG, and factors associated with the probability of TIG are not clear. Third, scholars are still not clear about whether displacement always happens during the TIG. Research strategy and findings: This dissertation is designed to address the first two unresolved issues. With a quasi-experimental design, this dissertation examines the hypothesis of TIG in all neighborhoods newly served by rapid transit stations that opened from 2000 through 2009 across the U.S. This dissertation confirms that TIG is likely but not inevitable by comparing the pretest-posttest results between all new rapid-transit-served neighborhoods and a control group selected by nonparametric propensity score matching that controls for neighborhood characteristics and the impact of Great Recession. This dissertation provides the first comparison of the likelihood of gentrification associated with both rail and bus rapid transit (BRT) and shows that rail stations are more likely to induce gentrification than BRT stops. This dissertation also shows that TIG is more evident over long-term than over short-term for rail-served neighborhoods. Methodologically, although some previous studies have used Census block groups (CBGs) as the areal unit of analysis, most have used Census Tracts (CTs), and none has compared results from simultaneous analysis using both CBGs and CTs. This dissertation makes a contribution by comparing results from using both CBGs and CTs as the areal unit of analysis. The comparisons show that CBG-based analyses better approximate the areas served by transit stations, are more consistent with theory, and therefore provide more valid results. This dissertation also applies the multi-level (hierarchical) logistic regressions to identify and examine factors that are likely to be associated with the probability of TIG, including both MSA and neighborhood characteristics. The results show that MSA characteristics are less stable and provide less and evidence of the probability of TIG than neighborhood characteristics. Some socioeconomic characteristics of neighborhoods, mainly measures of poverty, show consistent significance in the examinations for their impact on the likelihood of TIG. Take Away for Practice: The findings of this study have some policy implications. The BRT is less likely to induce gentrification compared with rail transit, and thus could help sustain the transit service to the most vulnerable without the same likelihood of gentrification. The identification of neighborhoods with higher probability of TIG, such as the neighborhoods with higher poverty rates and people of color and lower proportions of college-educated residents, enables policy-makers and urban planners to target policies such as affordable housing and rent ceilings to assist the most vulnerable areas and residents. In addition, the use of different definitions and measurements of TIG results in substantial differences in the percentages of neighborhoods classified as experiencing gentrification and in identification of different factors that affect the probability of TIG. These findings can be interpreted as evidence that policy makers and planners need to involve stakeholders, especially the low-income and people of color who are more vulnerable to gentrification, in their deliberations over definitions of TIG and when establishing anti-gentrification policies.