From Gentrification to Decline: How Neighborhoods Really Change

When people talk about how big cities have changed over the last two decades, the word that inevitably comes up is gentrification—the influx of affluent newcomers. A transformative wave of wealth—often accompanied by displacement of lower-income neighborhood residents—has seized prominent parts of Washington, D.C., New York City, and San Francisco. But across U.S. metros, gentrification may not be the dominant type of urban change. Instead, it’s the concentration of poverty—particularly in the suburbs—that’s the type of transformation most Americans have been experiencing.

That’s according to new report and mapping project by William Stancil, a research fellow at the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute of Metropolitan Opportunity. What Stancil and his colleagues have created is sort of a national-level atlas, if you will, of neighborhood change over the last two decades. It allows users to see what type of shift happened on the ground not just at the metro level, but at a regional level.