Gentrification: Good or Bad for the Urban Poor?

Join us on Friday, October 7 from 2:30pm – 4:00pm at our office on 75 Bay State Road for a workshop lecture featuring Professor Jackelyn Hwang from Princeton University. Professor Hwang will share her forthcoming co-authored paper, Moving Down: Gentrification, Displacement, and Residential Destinations in Philadelphia, and offer a talk about her current research with Lei Ding from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

This lecture is part of a larger workshop on Urban Inequalities, led by Sociology Associate Professor and IOC Faculty Advisory Board member Japonica Brown-Saracino and PhD candidate, Taylor Cain.

Please find an abstract of Professor Hwang’s paper below.

Moving Down: Gentrification, Displacement, and Residential Destinations in Philadelphia

Jackelyn Hwang, Princeton University

Is gentrification good or bad for the urban poor? We draw on a unique large-scale consumer credit database of residents in Philadelphia from 2002–2014 and consider the residential destinations of movers out of gentrifying neighborhoods after accounting for selective differences in residential mobility. We find that low-credit score movers from gentrifying neighborhoods are more likely to move into lower quality neighborhoods within the city compared to similar movers out of nongentrifying neighborhoods. These findings are particularly true for low-credit score movers from majority black neighborhoods. Further, residents with low credit scores are increasingly more likely to move into low-income, nongentrifying neighborhoods relative to other types of neighborhoods over time as neighborhoods gentrify throughout the city. Together, the results demonstrate how gentrification could be both directly and indirectly associated with the displacement of financially unstable residents into lower quality neighborhoods, contributing to the persistence of neighborhood inequality in Philadelphia.