The challenges of mapping gentrification

For all the attention paid to gentrification by urbanists — and increasingly by popular media — there’s very little consensus around the term. There’s no clear way of <a href="https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/12/no-ones-very-good-at-correctly-identifying-gentrification/383724/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">defining</a> or <a href="https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/08/why-its-so-hard-to-measure-residential-displacement/401132/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">measuring it</a>, and there’s even wide disagreement about whether it’s good or bad. Despite conventional wisdom that gentrification is always harmful, a good deal of research finds that it <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-gentrification/2016/06/03/b6c80e56-1ba5-11e6-8c7b-6931e66333e7_story.html" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">doesn’t cause widespread displacement</a> and that it can <a href="http://cityobservatory.org/gentrification-the-case-of-the-missing-counter-factual/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">even</a> <a href="http://cityobservatory.org/citylab-everything-you-think-you-know-about-gentrification-is-wrong/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">benefit</a> existing communities. There’s at least one area of general agreement: cities should develop policies that mitigate any negative impacts of neighborhood change (such as evictions, displacement, or rent-burdened households) while encouraging widely beneficial forms of population growth, economic opportunity, and local investment. But to apply those policies effectively, cities need to map where harmful change is happening — and according to new research, that’s yet another case of dramatic divergence. <a href="https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/the-challenges-of-mapping-gentrification-851c13df5b9e">Website</a>