Toward a theory of gentrification

Abstract

Suburbanization was the result of a number of political, social and economic decisions.Judicial decisions such as the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education prompted many Whites to remove their children from inner-city public schools, and re-enroll them in local private and parochial schools, or (in most cases) leave the city altogether and relocate to suburban areas."White flight" to suburbs was exacerbated by the discriminatory economic practice of "redlining" which prevented potential borrowers from receiving mortgage loans in certain inner-city areas.The systematic exclusion of ethnic and racial minorities from suburban areas through homeowner's associations and discrimination on the part of mortgage loan lenders, real estate professionals, and landowner use of "restrictive covenants" helped keep 1960s and early 1970s suburbia monolithically White and middle class (Hirsh, 2000;Squires, 1994; 2002;Wilson, 1987).Structuralists contend that the "return to the city" that gentrification engendered was not completely the result of middle class persons making rational and free resettlement decisions.Instead, it was the result of previous judicial, economic, and political policies that helped decrease inner-city property values.Geographer Neil Smith calls these decreases "rent gaps."Some of these gaps attracted middle class persons looking for investments with high return potential.Gentrification, therefore, is seen primarily as a function of political and economic maneuvers.The notion that gentrifiers wanted to escape the narrow, family-oriented life of suburbia may be true, but for structuralists such motives are incidental to their desire for high investment returns made possible by 1960s-and 1970s-era policies.Smith in particular is famously quoted as seeing gentrification as a return to the city "by capital not people" (1979). The rational choice conceptualization.Rational choice theorists are largely critical of structuralist conceptualizations of gentrification.Such conceptualizations, rational choice theorists argue, work to deny agency as they posit human motivation as mere reactions to social, economic, and political constraints.Rational choice theorists assume that each human being is capable of satisfying his or her own needs and desires -that is maximizing his or her own utility.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.