Gentrification

Abstract

Within sociological scholarship, gentrification broadly describes a process of upward class transformation characterized by an influx of higher-class people and capital into a geographical space. Gentrification has evolved over time to encompass a broad scope of changes across a wide range of places—beyond cities and poor neighborhoods and across the globe—and that are facilitated by a diverse set of actors, including individuals and households with varying racial and ethnic identities and orientations, commercial businesses, institutions, landlords, investors, developers, and policymakers. Given the increasingly wide range of processes that gentrification describes and the changing nature of gentrification itself, the scholarship attributes several macrolevel and meso-level factors to the rise and spread of gentrification and explores many domains of consequences associated with gentrification, including physical, political, cultural, and social displacement; socioeconomic mobility; health and well-being; crime and safety; and resistance. Gentrification has heterogeneous consequences for residents and other stakeholders within gentrifying neighborhoods, across different forms and stages of gentrification, and beyond neighborhoods undergoing gentrification themselves. In the United States, the racialized nature of how gentrification unfolds and how its consequences manifest is a key feature. This article reviews the state of the literature in sociology on gentrification’s causes and consequences and identifies directions for further research.