Have You Gentrified Yet?

Gentrification is said to have happened when traditionally low-income neighborhoods experience rising numbers of higher income residents. However how we identify and measure that rise can vary depending on the method used. There can therefore be some debate about whether a neighborhood has gentrified or not.

Enterprise Community Partners has devised an interactive mapping tool which allows you to see whether neighborhoods in 93 different U.S. cities have gentrified under three different established measurements of gentrification. Select a U.S. city on the Gentrification Comparison Tool and you can see which local neighborhoods have experienced gentrification, in any of the last four decades, under three different measurements of gentrification.

It can be a little difficult to compare neighborhoods across the three different maps in order to see which neighborhoods have gentrified under all three definitions. If you want to see which neighborhoods have been deemed to have gentrified under two or more definitions then you can select 'Two Measures' or 'Three Measures' under the 'Overlap in Gentrified Tracts' heading in the map sidebar. This will highlight on the map only those neighborhoods which have gentrified under more than one definition. For example, in Seattle in the first decade of this century only one census tract (in West Seattle) has gentrified under all three measures.