Resident to Student Displacement: Examining Gentrification’s School Enrollment Implications in 21st-Century Los Angeles County

• In Event: Resident to Student Displacement: Examining Gentrification’s School Enrollment Implications in 21st-Century Los Angeles County

Abstract

Stratification research on gentrification often examines its residential displacement-related implications, with many studies examining whether gentrification directly or indirectly leads to the relocation of low-income, long-term residents; findings have been mixed (Freeman 2005; Hwang and Ding 2020; Lees 2008). Limited research, however, has considered whether gentrification–and the residential mobility it may induce—coincides with elevated school mobility (c.f. Pearman 2020).

If gentrification engenders not only residential displacement but also student displacement, enrollment and segregation levels of public schools in gentrifying areas may be negatively impacted. Clarifying gentrification’s effects on (1) individual-level residential mobility and school enrollment, (2) how these residential and educational selection effects vary by students’ sociodemographic backgrounds, and (3) what the implications are for school and district enrollment and segregation levels is critical at a time when America’s core-city school districts are enduring spiraling housing costs (Mikhitarian 2018; Schuetz 2022) alongside steep declines in student enrollment (Chapman and Fuller 2023), as well as stubbornly high school segregation levels.

We examine these multilevel neighborhood gentrification-school enrollment dynamics within twenty-first century Los Angeles County. Los Angeles includes some of the nation’s most gentrification-impacted neighborhoods (Scott 2019) and contains a core-city school district marked by steep enrollment declines in recent decades (Blume 2022). Our analyses rely on geocoded child-level panel data from Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), and the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey. Both are linked to school-level administrative data from the California Department of Education and Urban Displacement Project (UDP) neighborhood-level data (Chapple and Thomas 2020). The UDP data operationalizes neighborhood gentrification using a binary indicator of whether a census tract exceeded countywide decadal change, vis-à-vis residents’ educational attainment levels; proportion White; median household income; and median gross rent.

Using these longitudinal, multilevel datasets, we first reassess whether families residing within neighborhoods classified as gentrified during the 2000s and 2010s exhibited a higher rate of out-neighborhood migration and housing instability/homelessness compared to otherwise-similar families in non-gentrifying disadvantaged neighborhoods. We then expand beyond the scope of prior gentrification research to assess the rates at which children within displacement-impacted households remained at their original school of enrollment versus enrolled in a new school— and whether patterns vary by sociodemographic characteristics. Finally, we use these findings as inputs to simulation analyses that gauge how gentrification-induced school reenrollment patterns shape Los Angeles County school districts’ total enrollment and race/class segregation levels, relative to what they would have been in the absence of gentrification pressures.

Preliminary school-level analyses, based on 1,376 Los Angeles County elementary campuses during the 2000s and 2010s, support our core hypotheses linking gentrification to student displacement and to corresponding decreases in enrollment and increases in segregation. All else equal, student enrollment drops were ~10% steeper in schools whose surrounding neighborhood experienced some degree of gentrification. Importantly, gentrification-associated enrollment drops were sharpest among White students. Overall, the study underscores how gentrification, housing costs, and school enrollment patterns are deeply intertwined; policymakers may need to address all three simultaneously.

Authors

• Jared Nathan Schachner, University of Southern California

• Ann Owens, University of Southern California

• Gary Painter, University of Southern California