We’ve long been told that gentrification is the scourge of many communities, and we’ve become very familiar with the scenario: a stable middle-class community is destroyed when wealthy (usually white) people move in, drive up home prices, and force out the “diverse” population that had been there previously.
There are problems with this narrative of course. Very often, the working-class homeowners who leave the neighborhood experience a windfall from selling their property to the incoming “up and comers” who buy out the aging homeowners. There is an upside.
On the other hand, there are indeed downsides to gentrification. There are real social costs when a neighborhood disintegrates and the neighbors go their separate ways. As we’ve noted before, communities with a highly mobile population can often experience more crime, stress, and more health problems.
This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on Sept 13, 2017.
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