Neighborhood Change and Youth Educational Pathways: Where, When, Why, and For Whom Might Gentrification Matter?

• In Event: Links Between Youth Contexts and Learning Opportunities: Structural Systems, Culture, and Everyday Experiences

Abstract

Gentrification is occurring across the United States at an increasingly rapid pace (Couture & Handbury, 2020). Prior work has linked gentrification to declining public school enrollment (Pearman, 2020), increased racialized discipline disparities (Pearman, 2021), and heightened anxiety (Dragan et al., 2019), but the effects on individual-level developmental outcomes—especially those relevant for academic engagement—are not well understood. The arrival of more affluent households to gentrifying neighborhoods may bring increased investments to local schools, which could improve educational opportunities. Living in a gentrifying neighborhood also exposes youth to a greater number of neighbors with college degrees, which could motivate academic engagement. However, mere proximity is insufficient to facilitate supportive cross-class, cross-race connections (Chaskin & Joseph, 2015). Moreover, gentrification has been linked to heightened experiences of racism- and classism-related social exclusion (Shmool et al., 2015), which could negatively influence school motivation.

This study uses longitudinal individual-level administrative records matched to census data to examine how living in a gentrifying neighborhood relates to 12th-grade GPA and postsecondary plans. The sample includes public-school students followed over time from third through 12th grade (2010 to 2019) in North Carolina, one of the fastest growing and increasingly diverse states in the country (N=231,346 1% American Indian, 2% Asian American, 13% Black, 29% Hispanic, 51% White, 4% Multiracial, 49% female, 51% male, and 54% economically disadvantaged). Regression models compared 12th-grade education outcomes between youth who started out in historically disinvested neighborhoods that gentrified from 2010 to 2019 with those who started in similarly situated neighborhoods that did not gentrify, using coarsened exact matching to adjust for non-random neighborhood selection (Sharkey, 2012).

Results indicate that living in a gentrifying (versus chronically disinvested) neighborhood may have a small positive effect on 12th-grade GPA and plans to attend college, but only among relatively advantaged youth. For non-poor youth, living in a gentrifying neighborhood was associated with a 0.02 increase in 12th-grade GPA and a one to two-percentage-point increase in intentions to pursue a 4-year degree. For White youth, living in a gentrifying neighborhood was associated with a one to two-percentage-point increase in the likelihood of pursuing any type of college. Yet, among economically disadvantaged youth there was a negative (but not statistically significant) relation between gentrification and 12th grade GPA, and for all racial-ethnic groups besides White youth, the relation between gentrification and intentions to pursue college was not statistically significant. Moreover, racial turnover moderated the potential effects of gentrification. Among Black youth living in majority-Black neighborhoods, there was a positive relation between gentrification and intentions to pursue college, but only in neighborhoods that did not also become increasingly White (Figure 1). These findings are consistent with an intersectional ecologies perspective (Roy, 2018) which suggests that how gentrification is experienced will depend on multiple aspects of neighborhood identity—i.e., not just changes in aggregate economic conditions, but also racial turnover. In sum, these findings highlight the complexities of neighborhood change and demonstrate the potential limitations of policies that incentivize neighborhood integration without also supporting inclusion.

Author

• Jane Leer, Boston College
  Presenting Author