• DOI:10.1353/urb.2002.0012
• Corpus ID: 155028628

Does Gentrification Harm the Poor?

@article{Vigdor2002DoesGH,
  title={Does Gentrification Harm the Poor?},
  author={Jacob L. Vigdor},
  journal={Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs},
  year={2002},
  volume={2002},
  pages={133 - 182}
}

• Jacob L. Vigdor
• Published 1 January 2002
• Economics
• Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs

For several decades, social scientists have tracked the fiscal health of American central cities with some degree of concern. Suburbanization, spawned by technological innovations, consumer preferences, and at least to some extent by government policy, has selectively pulled affluent households out of urban jurisdictions.1 The leaders of these jurisdictions are left with the prospect of satisfying more concentrated demands for services with a dwindling tax base, realizing that further increasing the burden they place on residents will simply drive more of them away. In the process, cities have become concentrated centers of poverty, joblessness, crime, and other social pathologies.2 A detached observer of this cycle might conclude that its reversal—the return of affluent households to the central city, associated increases in property values and the government’s tax base—would be welcomed by city leaders. In fact, the response to such a turnaround, if labeled as “gentrification,” is quite likely to be negative. In San Francisco, for example, a mayoral candidate in 1999 pledged to declare “war on any and all gentrification” if elected.3 Though usually associated with larger and faster-growing cities, gentrification and its associated tensions have been noted in cities from Milwaukee to Baton Rouge.4 Scholarly interest in gentrification peaked in the