Prof. Jackelyn Hwang and co-authors publish “Integrating or segregating? Gentrification, the changing city-suburb divide, and black exceptionalism” in Social Forces

August 2026

by Jackelyn Hwang, Elizabeth Roberto, Francine I. Stephens, and Jacob S. Rugh

Abstract:
Racial residential segregation has been pivotal in maintaining racial inequality following the Civil Rights Era. The transformation of cities by the spread of gentrification in recent decades may have mitigated these longstanding divisions or reproduced them as gentrification reorganizes residential patterns across urban space. However, the extent and nature of this relationship remain in question. We bridge theories of racial capitalism and residential sorting to test the racialized nature of gentrification’s prevalence, and we use a decomposition approach for measuring segregation to examine the relationship between the prevalence of gentrification and changes in segregation between various race-income groups from 1990 to 2019 across US metropolitan areas. We find that the prevalence of gentrification within central cities is associated with decreasing segregation between several groups—including poor Black and nonpoor White households—but also increasing segregation between poor minority and nonpoor White households in the suburbs and between nonpoor Black and White households overall. Altogether, the results highlight the changing spatial structure of segregation and the evolution of residential attainment for nonpoor Black households in the twenty-first century. They suggest that the spread of gentrification may contribute to dismantling longstanding patterns of segregation by race and class but may simultaneously contribute to new patterns of segregation in the suburbs and reinforce Black-White divisions.