How Long-Time Black Residents from a Gentrifying Neighborhood in New York City Make Mobility Decisions

• In Event: 40821 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10. Neighborhood Preferences and Residential Mobility

Abstract

Despite persistent segregation and stagnation, some disadvantaged, predominantly Black, neighborhoods in central cities have gentrified in recent years, with significant changes in their class characteristics and racial composition (Freeman and Cai 2015; Rucks-Ahidiana 2021; Sutton 2020). Existing research on gentrifying neighborhoods, while deeply concerned with displacement, has mostly studied gentrification’s effects within neighborhood boundaries and does not follow residents who move away. How do long-time residents make decisions about leaving their gentrifying neighborhood? How do they make decisions about migration destinations? How do residents experience the outcomes of their move and make sense of the move retrospectively?
This paper presents findings from in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations of a carefully constructed sample of current and former long-time Black residents at different stages in their residential move trajectory from a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Understanding the process and consequences of these moves, as well as the variation in the process, is critical to ascertaining the costs of gentrification on Black Americans, who have long faced constraints and discrimination in the housing market, as residential mobility is a key process through which racial stratification by space is maintained.

Author

• Xinyi Zhang, New York University