The Splintering of Black America: (Real Estate) Economics and Demographic Shifts

[Amo Husserl]

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He attributes that change to African-Americans taking advantage of new opportunities, resulting in a more economically segregated community.

"There have always been class distinctions in the black community," Robinson says, "but what I believe we've seen is an increasing distance between two large groups, which I identify as the Mainstream and the Abandoned."

Robinson says that while a "fairly slim majority" of African-Americans entered the middle class, a large portion of the community never climbed the ladder. It's getting harder and harder to catch up, he says, "because so many rungs of that ladder are now missing."

So as formerly segregated neighborhoods begin to gentrify; rents increase and longtime residents get pushed out.

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Immigrants linked to the gentrification of black neighborhoods | Science News

A study using U.S. census data shows primarily Asian and Hispanic immigrants may trigger gentrification in U.S. neighborhoods.

www.sciencenews.org

In 2015, Hwang showed that, even in the 1970s and ’80s, black neighborhoods were more likely to be gentrified following the arrival of Asian and Hispanic immigrants. With the number of U.S. immigrants growing from 9.7 million in 1970 to 42.4 million in 2014, Hwang suspected her earlier observations might still hold true.

Next, Hwang broke those gentrifying tracts down by race. She found that, in the 1990s, an influx of immigrants decreased the odds of gentrification in nonblack neighborhoods, but slightly increased those odds in predominately black neighborhoods. From 2000 to 2012, a 1 percent increase in immigrants to a black neighborhood increased the likelihood of gentrification by 9 percent. Conversely, the presence of immigrants in white and other nonblack neighborhoods decreased the likelihood of gentrification by 4 to 5 percent.

The research underlines that “gentrification is a much more complicated phenomenon than a white hipster moving into a black neighborhood,” says Mahesh Somashekhar, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago not involved with the study.

However, sociologist Derek Hyra suggests immigration trends may not be a main driver of gentrification. Instead, he wonders if all people, including blacks, whites and recent immigrants from Asia and Latin America, are simply following new jobs that happen to be located near historically black neighborhoods.

Immigrants pave the way for the gentrification of black neighborhoods

Many think of gentrification today as wealthy, white millennials moving into low-income, minority neighborhoods and driving up housing costs. Yet a new study suggests that another group may play a key role in the process: immigrants. Gentrification, in which affluent outsiders settle and...

www.thecoli.com