Gentrification &
Residential Instability
The intensification and spread of gentrification to more neighborhoods across more cities over the last two decades has inspired a large body of interdisciplinary research on its consequences. Residential displacement has been central to scholarly and public debates on the consequences of gentrification, but the evidence has been mixed. This set of projects leverages longitudinal datasets, including the large-scale Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, to examine the extent to which gentrification is associated with displacement and other forms of residential instability that occur before moves ever take place, as well as after people move. While moving itself can be detrimental, does gentrification push residents to live in overcrowded conditions, substandard housing, and in financial precarity to avoid evictions or other forms of forced displacement? For those who are displaced, where do they end up? Are there racial disparities in these outcomes? How are anti-displacement policies and strategies, such as rent control and new production, mitigating these effects? We examine a variety of datasets, questions, and geographic locations to better understand how gentrification is affecting residential instability.
Residential Mobility in Philadelphia
A map of Philadelphia depicting gentrifying and non-gentrifying census tracts. Source: Unequal Displacement (2020)
In partnership with the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Community Development Department, we examined gentrification and displacement in the City of Philadelphia. Drawing from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel data, property tax payment data, and a variety of public datasets, we developed measures of gentrification and analyzed residential mobility patterns and the financial health of over 50,000 Philadelphia residents from 2002-2014 by socioeconomic status. We also examined the effectiveness of a new homeowner protection policy aimed at mitigating displacement affects residential mobility.
Academic Publications: Unequal Displacement (Am. J. Sociol., 2020), Effects on Homeowners (Reg. Sci. Urban Econ., 2020), Literature Review (Cityscape, 2016) Residents’ Financial Health (Cityscape, 2016), Residential Mobility (Reg. Sci. Urban Econ., 2016)
Public Engagement: Practitioner’s Summary (2015)
Selected Media Coverage: Bloomberg Business, Bloomberg CityLab (here and here), CNN, The Economist, Next City (here and here), NewsWorks Tonight (NPR), The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Business Journal, WHYY (here and here)
Data: This project relies primarily on data from 2002-2014 in the City of Philadelphia from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel—a restricted individual-level longitudinal dataset. Replication data and code for the gentrification measures and other unrestricted data used in the study “Unequal Displacement” (American Journal of Sociology, 2020) are available here. The gentrification measures used in our 2016 publications can be downloaded here.
Residential Instability in the Bay Area
Above ground view of San Francisco. Source: Todd Lappin via flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
We are working with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Community Development Department to explore gentrification and residential instability in the San Francisco Bay Area. Drawing from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel data and a variety of public datasets, we are developing measures of the intensity and spread of gentrification and analyzing residential mobility patterns of over 200,000 Bay Area residents by socioeconomic status. We also partnered with the Urban Displacement Project at the University of California, Berkeley to release a report and policy briefs examining the extent to which anti-displacement policies, like tenant protections and new production, affect residential mobility patterns.
Public Engagement: Housing Interventions (2022), Constrained Choices (2021), What We Learned (blog post, 2021), Overcrowding (blog post, 2020), Increasing Access to Affordable Housing (2019)
Selected Media Coverage: San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, Bloomberg News, STANFORD magazine
Funders: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Tackling Residential Instability in Oakland
In partnership with the City of Oakland’s Department of Housing and Community Development, we are tackling residential instability among low-income Oakland residents and racial disparities in it. Employing a range of data and methods, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel data, data collected by the City of Oakland, surveys, interviews, and automated machine learning of street view imagery, we aim to integrate academic and practitioner expertise to understand the mechanisms that drive racial inequity in residential instability and to develop timely data-driven policies and strategies to mitigate residential instability.
Public Engagement: Practitioner Reports (#1, #2) (2021)
Funders: Stanford Impact Labs, Stanford UPS, Stanford CCSRE Race & Justice Initiative
Tools: In partnership with Stanford DAMS, we developed a practitioner dashboard to capture Residential Instability in Oakland.
Map of Oakland depicting the ethnoracial composition of census tracts. Source: Neighborhood Change and Residential Instability in Oakland (2021)
Residential Mobility Patterns across the US
Our other projects on gentrification and residential instability focus on specific cities and metropolitan areas. We draw on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to test if the patterns we observe in Philadelphia and the Bay Area extend across the US. This project asks: How does gentrification affect displacement and the destinations of movers across the US? How does this vary by racial and ethnic group? How does the way gentrification is measured affect our conclusions?
Publications & Data
Academic Publications
Hwang, Jackelyn and Lei Ding. 2020. "Unequal Displacement: Gentrification, Racial Stratification, and Residential Destinations in Philadelphia." American Journal of Sociology, 126(2): 354-406. [Preprint]
Ding, Lei and Jackelyn Hwang. 2020. “Effects of Gentrification on Homeowners: Evidence from a Natural Experiment.” Regional Science and Urban Economics, 83(103536):1-14. [Preprint]
Hwang, Jackelyn and Jeffrey Lin. 2016. “What Have We Learned about the Causes of Recent Gentrification?” Cityscape, 18(3): 9-26.
Ding, Lei and Jackelyn Hwang. 2016. “The Consequences of Gentrification: A Focus on Residents’ Financial Health in Philadelphia.” Cityscape, 18(3): 27-55.
Ding, Lei, Jackelyn Hwang, and Eileen Divringi. 2016. “Gentrification and Residential Mobility in Philadelphia.” Regional Science and Urban Economics, 61:38-51. [Preprint]
Public Engagement
Chapple, Karen, Jackelyn Hwang, Jae Sik Jeon, Iris Zhang, Julia Greenberg, and Bina P. Shrimali. 2022. “Housing Market Interventions and Residential Mobility in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Community Development Working Paper 2022-1. doi: 10.24148/cdwp2022-01.
Hwang, Jackelyn and Vineet Gupta. 2021. “Residential and Neighborhood Instability in Oakland.” Changing Cities Research Lab.
Hwang, Jackelyn, Vineet Gupta, and Bina P. Shrimali. 2021. “Neighborhood Change and Residential Instability in Oakland.” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Community Development Working Paper 2021-1. doi: 10.24148/cdwp2021-01.
Hwang, Jackelyn and Bina P. Shrimali. 2021. “Constrained Choices: Gentrification, Housing Affordability, and Residential Instability in the Bay Area.” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Community Development Research Brief 2021-2. doi: 10.24148/cdrb2021-02.
Shrimali, Bina P. and Jackelyn Hwang. (2021 Apr 15). “What We Learned about Residential Instability in the Bay Area.” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Community Development Blog.
Shrimali, Bina P. and Jackelyn Hwang. 2020. “Overcrowding in the Bay Area: Where the Housing Crisis meets COVID-19,” Community Development (blog), Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, June 30, 2020.
Hwang, Jackelyn and Bina P. Shrimali. 2019. “Increasing Access to Affordable Housing Opportunities in Silicon Valley.” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper Series, No. 2019-01.
Ding, Lei, Jackelyn Hwang, and Eileen Divringi. 2015. “A Practitioner’s Summary: Gentrification and Residential Mobility in Philadelphia.” Philadelphia, PA: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
Data
This Residential Mobility in Philadelphia project relies primarily on data from 2002-2014 in the City of Philadelphia from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel—a restricted individual-level longitudinal dataset. Replication data and code for the gentrification measures and other unrestricted data used in the study “Unequal Displacement” (American Journal of Sociology, 2020) are available here. The gentrification measures used in our 2016 publications can be downloaded here.
In an effort to make our findings accessible, where possible, we provide a link to preprint versions of our publications. We are also steadily assembling our data and code to share publicly when possible.