Where Growth Comes From: A Debate of Methods for Urban Revitalization

Garfield Neighborhood of Pittsburgh (vacant homes)

A central component of social work in urban environments is the notion of community revitalization.  Even flourishing cities experience fluctuations in prosperity or contain areas of decay, and it is the focus of many community organizers to consider how to best foster urban renewal.  An often utilized approach to community revitalization is gentrification; a process in which affluent people are injected into weakening areas.  While gentrification is a common approach, the term has become a dirty word in many community organization arenas since it was first coined in the 1960s. The prominent criticism of gentrification is that it is a system in which the minority poor are pushed out and replaced with affluent whites.  As such, many argue that instead of building a community up, gentrification actually replaces depleted communities with new ones, forcing existing residents to remain poor, just somewhere else. 

Garfield Neighborhood of Pittsburgh (new building

However, many recent studies have begun to argue against the popular opinion that gentrification is a racist and classist mechanism for urban development.  A 2008 Times article provides results from a studying examining Census data from more than 15,000 neighborhoods across the U.S., and cites a number of significant statistics that contradict the popular view of gentrification (the below points are quoted directly from the Times article):

•  Low-income non-white households did not      disproportionately leave gentrifying areas
• Though college-educated whites accounted for 20% of the total income gain in gentrifying neighborhoods, black householders with high school degrees contributed even more (33%)
• Black residents who never finished high school…weren't moving out of their neighborhoods at a disproportionately higher rate than from similar neighborhoods that didn't gentrify
• While gentrification did not necessarily push out original residents, it did create neighborhoods that middle-class minorities moved to
• The only group that was less likely to move to a gentrifying area was high school–educated whites aged 20 to 40 with kids

These findings depict a system of urban renewal that builds on the influx of more economically prosperous residents, rather than the outflow of low-income residents.  But even if gentrification does not expel existing residents, its foundation is a revitalization philosophy that focuses on the injection of new economic vitality into an area.  Such an approach is at odds with the methods espoused by Jane Jacobs and John McKnight.  Both Jacobs and McKnight have promoted stances that urban renewal can come from within the communities, with Jacobs encouraging the organic regeneration of communities, and McKnight advocating that abundant communities are a product of the identification, utilization, and association of the “gifts” of community members.  McKnight makes the case for the strengthening of communities through the fostering of members’ skills in the below video, in which he explains the community develop is predicated by the recognition and utilization of skills, where as "community busting" occurs when outsiders enter a community and characterize that community by its deficiencies.

The approach elected for community revitalization may reflect the perspective one holds around the influence of social integration.  Gentrification postures on the assumption that existing gaps cannot be filled from within the community.  Instead of seeing the process of making connections among existing residents as a method for growth, this approach is founded on the assumption that something which is lacking must be added—something is missing from the community, rather than something that already exists is just not being utilized.  Conversely, the positions proposed by Jacobs and McKnight suggest that social integration can foster community development because it allows the skills, experiences, and diversity of a community to be nurtured and shared—when a person is integrated they are provided the capacity to contribute their strengths to the well-being of the community. 

In addition to the resources included within the blog, readers who enjoyed this discussion may be interested in the following:

• The Real Problem with Gentrification: A phenomenon that revived cities can also make them monotonous: Philadelphia architect Inga Saffron contemplates how gentrification has created homogeneous urban communities.  Incorporating Jane Jacobs’ theories to urban renewal, in which physical diversity can spawn growth organically, Saffron suggests that gentrification efforts diminish social diversity.
• Betting wrong on gentrification in Chicago: This 2013 discussion demonstrates one outcome of gentrification efforts do not materialize.  Looking into the experience of one Chicago resident, we see that sometimes renewal requires more than affluent residents investing in weakening areas. 
• Jane Jacobs: Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit focused on “sustaining public spaces that build stronger communities,” provides a synopsis of Jacobs’ perspective, as well as a short biography and quotes.