Gentrification In Urban Areas

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he term Gentrification is coined together by a British Sociologist Ruth Glass to describe the movement of middle class families into urban areas causing the property value to increase and displacing the older settlers. In the past decades, gentrification have been defined and refined depending on the neighborhood 's economic, social and political context. According to Davidson and Less definition, a gentrified area should include investment in capital, social upgrading, displacement of older settlers and change in landscape. Many urban cities like Chicago, Michigan and Boston have experienced gentrification, however, it is affecting the Harlem residents more profoundly, uprooting the people who have been living there for decades, thus destroying …show more content…
Between 1910 and 1920 African American population increased by sixty percent in New York City while the number of whites living in the area decreased.The White Landlords began to sell their properties to black before the prices began dropping. Blacks are not alone to be blamed for driving out white from Harlem partly because by the 1920s mass transportation created new residential areas like Flushing, Boro Park, and Riverdale. (Tritter,115). As an effect, from 1920s and 1930s 118792 white people left Harlem while 87,417 negroes arrived. The quality of life in Harlem were not appealing to the second generation of the white residents. As the population increased rapidly the city passed tax exemption to “spur new construction” in the Upper Manhattan areas. The housing conditions began to get worse in the 1920s as the white landlords stopped taking care of their properties. Harlem emerged as a slum because of high cost of living, rent increased rapidly due to housing shortage and influx of negro migration. The Harlemites were forced to pay high rent because no other parts of the city was as welcoming as Harlem for them. A report in 1927 demonstrate that negro tenants paid $ 2.75 per room, per month more compared to the white …show more content…
if someone’s income is not contributing to the economy, the person must be replaced with high or moderate income people. Similarly, when the rents of house stock increase, low income households are priced out of the community. For example, from 1990 to 1997 the number of household with income less than ten thousand had decreased by twenty-six percent. The city’s renovation program to transform the long neglected buildings is paving a way to uproot the older settlers.From 1970s and 1980s , the city took over most of the abandoned property because no taxes were paid on them for a long period of

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