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

Session Type: Symposium

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 ecological analyses link publicly-available data on Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) elementary schools' catchment zones and on these schools' total and race-disaggregated enrollment levels with proprietary data from RentHub on rental unit listing prices for all units located within the catchment zones between 2014 and 2023. We then run multilevel models to assess whether schools within catchment zones that exhibited the steepest rental unit price increases over this decade endured the steepest declines in overall K-5 enrollment. The findings that emerge from these models become inputs to simulation analyses that gauge how housing cost-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 analyses support our core hypotheses linking housing cost increases 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.

Sub Unit

• Division L - Educational Policies and Politics / Division L - Section 8: Social Policy and Education

Chair

• Mark Chin, Vanderbilt University

Papers

• Suburban Spillover: An Analysis of Gentrification Exposure and the Socioeconomic Composition of Schools - Kenton Shimozaki, Vanderbilt University

• Resident to Student Displacement: Examining Gentrification’s School Enrollment Implications in 21st-Century Los Angeles County - Jared Nathan Schachner, University of Southern California; Ann Owens, University of Southern California; Gary Painter, University of Southern California

• Impacts of School Racial Diversity on Precursors to the Development of Antiracism in White Youth - Mark Chin, Vanderbilt University

• School Desegregation Through Redrawing of District Boundaries: Evidence From New Jersey - Tyler Simko, Harvard University

Discussant

• Francis A. Pearman, Stanford University