In Search of Answers on Gentrification

Back in the 1980s, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was gripped in an economic crisis as it suffered the effects of de-industrialization: Its unemployment rate was triple that of Detroit’s today. “We basically died,” Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto said on a recent press call. But, in a much-celebrated comeback story, the city came back to life. “In 30 years Pittsburgh changed its economy. It built out an entire new city of eds and meds, technology, finance and energy. Now we’re seeing a new Pittsburgh emerge.”

That’s the narrative of many major urban areas today. If Donald Trump ever took the time to talk to people in the “inner cities” he loves to denigrate, he’d know that many of them are more concerned about rising rents than they are about rising crime. Preserving affordable housing—and easing the displacement of existing residents that often follows these urban economic comeback stories—is the current problem that New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy has been tracking throughout the year. The center’s latest report, released on October 27, highlights some of the ways that governments in high-cost cities have been responding to the affordable housing issue. Reads the report: