Housing
No One's Very Good at Correctly Identifying Gentrification
A new study suggests there's a gap between how researchers think about gentrification and what journalists are telling the public.
There's a compelling new paper published in the latest issue of the journal Urban Studies that takes the New York Times to task for not deploying the word "gentrification" very well.
The study, by sociologist Michael Barton of Louisiana State University, examines the differences between neighborhoods that the Times has identified as “gentrified” or “gentrifying” in the past three decades, and those identified by Census data and major academic studies. He finds a wide – and concerning – gap between the neighborhoods that social scientists call “gentrified” and those to which the Times affixes that label.