Capital and Spatial Spillover in Urban Gentrification: A Case Study of Columbia’s Harlem Expansion

• In Event: Addressing Educational Challenges: Justice, Rural Higher Ed, Pandemic Impact, Attention Economy, and Urban Gentrification

Abstract

The process of gentrification entails the upscaling of disinvested communities by an influx of wealthy, college-educated people at the expense of a neighborhood's existing residents. Despite the growth of gentrification studies as an academic discipline, there remains a scarcity of literature that critically interrogates the role that urban colleges and universities play in promoting gentrification in their host cities. The present study employs a mixed methods approach to scrutinize this dynamic, using the expansion of Columbia University into the Manhattanville neighborhood of West Harlem as a case study. Using geographically normalized tract-level data from the 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010 censuses and American Community Survey data from 2008-2012 and 2015-2019, a qualitative differences-in-differences (DiD) analysis is performed on selected clusters of census tracts in West and East Harlem. DiD is a quasi-experimental approach in which the trends of target variables—in this case, median rent and proportion of degree-eligible college graduates—are measured in two otherwise comparable groups to determine the causal effect, if any, a given intervention (the construction of Columbia's Manhattanville campus) had on one group's outcome. The analysis suggests a spatial spillover of the effects of gentrification between West and East Harlem. Columbia's Manhattanville expansion is then analyzed through the theoretical framework of capital, first developed by Bourdieu and later expanded upon by Rérat and Lees. Specifically, the University's invocation of eminent domain—in which the government expropriates private lands for public use—is analyzed within the larger context of evolving eminent domain jurisprudence to make the novel conclusion that gentrification is mediated through disparities in multiple types of capital between gentrifying institutions and target neighborhoods. Through analysis of spatial spillover and capital exchange, the present study complicates enduring perspectives of the urban campus as a siloed spatial unit and extends existing frameworks to the analysis of urban gentrification.

Author

• Aarush Santoshi, Bergen County Academies