Demographic Changes and Gentrification of Mt. Hope

Title

Date

2023

Description

Student presentation on the demographic changes and gentrification of Mt. Hope between 2000 and 2020, from the AFRI1075 course: Providence Housing Ecosystem: Development, Displacement, and Gentrification and the Root Shock PowerPoint presentation.

Format

mp4

Language

English

Contributor

Toby Arment

transcript of

Speaker 0 [00:00,191 - 03:18,003]: All right, I will quickly run through the demographic changes that happen in this neighborhood. So we want to look at demographic changes as a way to kind of understand the impact tangibly of the foreclosure crisis in the neighborhood and how it has been shifting with so much displacement happening in its past. On the screen you can see a map from the 2018 Housing Works Rhode Island report, You Don't Have a Problem Until You Do, identifying gentrification in Providence. The areas in light blue are identified as gentrifying Dark blue is non-gentrifying, and gray is higher income. As you can see, the Mountain Hope neighborhood is not identified as a gentrifying neighborhood. So we want to look at what gentrification looks like. OK. So in class, we discussed three different measures of gentrification. First, there's a population approach, where you add great changes to the composition of the neighborhood. There's also an individual level approach, which looks like an individual increase in mobility. And then finally, there's the motivational approach, which adds to the individual approach with data about whether or not the move was voluntary to understand if people were forced out or simply choosing to move. In our analysis, we use the population approach, which is particularly volatile as found by H. Jacob Carlson. It's important to understand that when looking at these factors. So one of the two factors included in our population analysis is race. We can see in 2000, the neighborhood had a percentage of Black residents at 38%. In 2010, that shrank just 32%, and then in 2020, that had shrunk even more rapidly to 21%, of course, probably having a lot of impact from the 2009 foreclosure crisis. The second measure we looked at was education. In 2000, only 43% of residents in the neighborhood had a college degree. By 2010, that had grown to 45%, and then it spiked even further to 55% in 2020. So we can see that demographics of the neighborhood changed fairly rapidly and the population was not growing. So it is probable that there was some amount of displacement happening that was causing these changes and that residents were leaving, particularly as the neighborhood lost Black residents by 27% or an absolute loss of 447 Black residents between 2000 and 2020, that those Black residents were probably being replaced by other people, particularly highly educated professionals. We saw that the percent of people with a college degree rose and the median income rose. So it's possible there's displacement, but the identification is hard to say. The Housing Works Rhode Island report did not find a significant increase in rent or a significant increase in the share of the neighborhood that was white, which we also saw. So it is impossible to conclude that there was for sure identification without a doubt, because we don't have motivational individual level data. We only have collective data without motivation. So these moves may have been voluntary. It is hard to say. But I think regardless of that, there are a couple of notes we can take away from this. First is that the neighborhood is just simply changing very rapidly. In two decades, the percentage of Black residents decreased by 27%. And there have become a lot more number of educated individuals in the neighborhood. And also, I think another important takeaway is that change was most dramatic between 2010 and 2020, which was when the majority of people were losing their homes due to the foreclosure crisis. So it is quite possible that the displacement from the foreclosure crisis accelerated the displacement that we were seeing in this neighborhood.

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