Heeding the call: an empirical evaluation of gentrifacation research Article Swipe

The field of gentrification research remains at a critical juncture. The current stream of research has largely abandoned the task of asking the "big questions" of measuring, identifying, and predicting gentrification in favor of highlighting its ambiguous relationship with folk symbols-like hipsters, cafes, and residential displacement-whose evidence remain scarce or contradictory. The field has become entrenched in niche camps favoring certain methodological approaches or subvariants of gentrification highlighting single populations or indicators as tantamount to the entire process (e.g., green gentrification, commercial gentrification, and tourism gentrification). Leading scholars suggest a variety of theoretical and methodological remedies for breaking the current churn of ambiguity in gentrification research. These remedies include empirically testing long-assumed theories and associations of gentrification, increasing contextual comparisons across analyses, bridging quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches, and incorporating methodological lessons and techniques from other social science disciplines. This dissertation constructs three publishable research manuscripts to test these suggested remedies. It uses these largely methodological fixes to interrogate fundamental research questions of the field: What neighborhood changes occur in tandem with gentrification? Do the development patterns of gentrifying neighborhoods differ from non-gentrifying neighborhoods? Is the neighborhood the best analytical lens for measuring gentrification? The first manuscript draws on the cases of Boston and Philadelphia to construct an empirical validity test of the common neighborhood change metrics associated with gentrification. Central to this manuscript's analysis is a simple novel measure of gentrification via neighborhood socioeconomic status rise. This constructed metric serves as the core measure of gentrification for all three of this dissertation's manuscripts. With its emphasis on making comparisons that account for locational contextualities, the first manuscript's analysis shows how the unique demographic, socioeconomic, and historic contexts of Boston and Philadelphia influence their distinct manifestations of gentrification. The second manuscript compares how development patterns, measured via building permits, distribute across both gentrifying and non-gentrifying neighborhoods of Boston, MA from 2014 to 2018. Results show how development patterns look relatively similar across these different neighborhood types of Boston. This both questions the long-held theories of gentrification's unique building patterns but also stresses the importance of continued contextualized comparative work on neighborhood development patterns within gentrification research. The third manuscript tests how well the neighborhood, as a unit of analysis, measures built environment changes associated with gentrification. It utilizes proportional distributions and nested multilevel models to analyze how well various sub-neighborhood measures predict the concentration and persistence of building permits among gentrifying land parcels, street segments, and census tracts in the City of Boston from 2014 to 2018. Results illustrate the importance of land parcels in predicting and understanding the built environment changes associated with gentrification. Thus, while the neighborhood remains a useful lens for understanding gentrification, new geographies (both small and large) may unlock new explanations of gentrification's manifestation, spread, recoil, and rebuff. The analyses within all three manuscripts demonstrate how a blueprint exists for an empirical reevaluation of gentrification research. The remedies suggested by leading scholars allows gentrification researchers to reorient the field towards an empirical reevaluation. If gentrification is to remain a viable empirical term across urban studies, researchers and contributors must contend with its legacy of ambiguity and replace the current stream of research with critical methodological evaluations that consistently evaluate, test, and refine what we think we know about this social process of neighborhood change. --Author's abstract