Transit-Induced Gentrification and Displacement: The State of the Debate

Investments in new transportation infrastructure hold the potential to transform the urban socioeconomic landscape by reshaping accessibility and by encouraging new developments around these investments. This chapter outlines the theoretical arguments for why and how transport, specifically rail transit, is expected to impact the socioeconomic composition of neighborhoods and reviews the relevant empirical literature on the subject. Neighborhood socioeconomic change, including gentrification, can be viewed as the product of shifts in residential sorting of residents reacting to the placement of a new (transit) amenity which may place increased demand for living in a particular area. This demand may place an upward pressure on nearby housing values and rents, affecting the socioeconomic composition of those willing and able to afford these price premiums, thus spurring or accelerating gentrification. Rising land values may also lead to the disproportionate exit of lower-income residents unable to keep up with elevated rents or property taxes. To date, the empirical evidence on the link between transport investments and gentrification has mixed findings, very often underscoring the importance of local context in directing a neighborhood’s path. Research has overwhelmingly centered on aggregate neighborhood changes, but several studies have recently emerged that center on individual movements that give rise to these neighborhood-scale outcomes.

The Role of Migration Costs in Residential Sorting

Economistsgenerallyemploytwo ‘revealed preference’ approaches to measure households’ preferences for non-market amenities—the hedonic and equilibrium sorting models. The conventional hedonic model assumes free mobility across space. Violation of this assumption can bias the estimates of household willingness to pay for local amenities. Mobility constraints are more easily handled by the sorting framework. In this chapter, we examine the role of migration costs in household residential sorting and apply these two models to estimate the willingness to pay for clean air in the USAand China. Our results demonstrate that ignoring mobility costs in spatial sorting will underestimate the implicit value of non-market amenities in both countries. Such a downward bias is larger in developing countries, such as China, where migration costs are higher.

Mapping Urban “Mixing” and Intercommunal Relations in Late Ottoman Jerusalem: A Neighborhood Study

Although Ottoman cities long have been recognized as sites of significant ethnic and religious heterogeneity, very little scholarship exists that documents or analyzes patterns of residential sorting, be it segregation, the physical separation of groups from each other in the urban landscape, or its opposite, integration. GIS mapping of the Ottoman censuses of Jerusalem illuminates these urban patterns and reveals the importance of scale when considering this question. Even the most “integrated” neighborhood on the aggregate level reveals “segregated” zones of clustering and concentration at the smaller scales of quadrant, street, and building. At the same time, the proximity and exposure of residents to each other reveals how very porous boundaries were in the neighborhood. In order to understand how and why the city developed such a complex spatial pattern, qualitative sources like newspapers, memoirs, and court records are a necessary supplement to demographic records. This approach allows for a comprehensive outlining of the economic, legal, religious, and cultural factors and forces contributing to both segregation and integration in an Ottoman city. It also points to a multidisciplinary reconstruction of the social space of an historic neighborhood.

Neighbourhood deprivation, life satisfaction and earnings: Comparative analyses of neighbourhood effects at bespoke scales

Neighbourhood socioeconomic disadvantage has a profound impact on individuals’ earnings and life satisfaction. Since definitions of the neighbourhood and research designs vary greatly across studies, it is difficult to ascertain which neighbourhoods and outcomes matter the most. By conducting parallel analyses of the impact of neighbourhood deprivation on life satisfaction and earnings at multiple scales, we provide a direct empirical test of which scale matters the most and whether the effects vary between outcomes. Our identification strategy combines rich longitudinal information on individual characteristics, family background and initial job conditions for England and Wales with econometric estimators that address residential sorting bias, and we compare results for individuals living in choice-restricted social housing with results for those living in self-selected privately rented housing. We find that the effect of neighbourhood deprivation on life satisfaction and wages is negative for both outcomes and largely explained by strong residential sorting on both individual and neighbourhood characteristics rather than a genuine causal effect. We also find that the results overall do not vary by neighbourhood scale.

Perceived Pollution and Residential Sorting in Germany: Income May Not Sort, But it Helps to Escape

The disproportionate exposure of minorities and socio-economically disadvantaged households to environmental pollution is often explained by selective migration or sorting mechanisms. Yet, previous empirical findings remain inconclusive. In this study, we offer an explanation for mixed findings by focusing on the selective out-migration process triggered by environmental pollution. We use household-level panel data of the German SOEP from 1986 to 2016 and within-household estimates of correlated random effects probit models. More precisely, we test if the subjective impairment through air pollution selectively affects the probability of out-migration according to income and minority status. We find that perceived air pollution has a stronger effect on the likelihood of moving for households experiencing an income increase. Surprisingly, we find only small and imprecise differences between native German and first generation immigrant households, and a relatively large proportion of this difference can be explained by income. This indicates that selective out-migration processes substantially differ from selective in-migration processes, and environmental inequality research should more carefully distinguish the single steps of neighbourhood sorting.