What Yelp Can Tell Us About Gentrification and Race

A new, just-published study by the sociologist Sharon Zukin—known for her earlier work on lofts, artists, and gentrification—along with Scarlett Lindeman and Laurie Hurson of the City University of New York, sheds new light on the connection between gentrification, restaurants, and race. The study examines this nexus by using online Yelp reviews of restaurants in two rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhoods with very different populations: Greenpoint and Bedford-Stuyvesant, or Bed-Stuy.

Greenpoint is a historically Polish neighborhood: 57 percent white and just 3 percent black, with a declining Hispanic population. Bed-Stuy is a historically black neighborhood (now 59 percent black), but it has seen a 700 percent increase in its white population from 2000-2010.