Elvin Wyly

The Right to Stay Put, Revisited: Gentrification and Resistance to Displacement in New York City

Displacement has been at the centre of heated analytical and political debates over gentrification and urban change for almost 40 years. A new generation of quantitative research has provided new evidence of the limited (and sometimes counter-intuitive) extent of displacement, supporting broader theoretical and political arguments favouring mixed-income redevelopment and other forms of gentrification. This paper offers a critical challenge to this interpretation, drawing on evidence from a mixed-methods study of gentrification and displacement in New York City. Quantitative analysis of the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey indicates that displacement is a limited yet crucial indicator of the deepening class polarisation of urban housing markets; moreover, the main buffers against gentrification-induced displacement of the poor (public housing and rent regulation) are precisely those kinds of market interventions that are being challenged by advocates of gentrification and dismantled by policy-makers. Qualitative analysis based on interviews with community organisers and residents documents the continued political salience of displacement and reveals an increasingly sophisticated and creative array of methods used to resist displacement in a policy climate emphasising selective deregulation and market-oriented social policy.

Islands of decay in seas of renewal: Housing policy and the resurgence of gentrification

Abstract For many observers, the recession of the early 1990s signaled the end of what Berry called islands of renewal in seas of decay. In the past decade, however, shifts in mortgage finance have intersected with developments in assisted housing to alter the links between gentrification and housing policy. In this article, we use field observation, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, and HOPE VI plans to analyze the resurgence of gentrification in eight U.S. cities. Between 1992 and 1997, gentrified neighborhoods attracted conventional homepurchase mortgage capital at a rate that grew at more than 2.3 times the suburban rate. Logit models confirm that mortgage capital favors gentrified neighborhoods even after controlling for applicant and loan characteristics, suggesting a new relationship between mortgage lending and neighborhood change. In some cities, gentrification has surrounded islands of decay and poverty with landscapes of renewal

American home: Predatory mortgage capital and neighbourhood spaces of race and class exploitation in the United States

Abstract Predatory home mortgage lending has become a central concern for housing research, public policy and community activism in US cities. Regulatory attempts to stop abuses, however, are undermined by claims that ‘predatory’ cannot be defined or distinguished from legitimate subprime lending, and claims that the industry performs a public service by meeting the needs of low‐income, high‐risk consumers (many of them racially marginalized) who would have been denied credit in previous years. We evaluate these claims in historical‐geographical context, drawing on David Harveys theory of class‐monopoly rent to analyse what is new (and what is not) in contemporary financial exploitation. We use a mixed‐methods approach to (1) provide econometric measures of subprime racial targeting and disparate impact that cannot be blamed on the supposed deficiencies of borrowers, (2) qualitatively assess the rationale for judging particular subprime practices and lenders as predatory, and (3) trace the connections between local practices and transnational investment networks. The fight against predatory lending cannot succeed, we argue, without a renewed analytical and strategic emphasis on the class dimensions of financial exploitation and racial‐geographical discrimination.

The “Camden Syndrome” and the Menace of Suburban Decline Residential Disinvestment and its Discontents in Camden County, New Jersey

The recession of the early 1990s drew widespread attention to rising poverty and fiscal distress in inner-ring suburbs, and the next downturn will doubtless revive fears that suburbia could endure the same fate as the inner city. The authors challenge conventional urban theory, which explains suburban decline primarily in terms of who moves in and who moves out, by drawing on the literatures concerning the circulation of capital in the built environment. They present a case study analyzing the systematic withdrawal of capital from neighborhoods southeast of Philadelphia, where suburban decline has been dubbed the “Camden Syndrome.” Multivariate analysis of mortgage lending decisions between 1993 and 1998 is used to test the hypothesis that suburban decline cannot be explained solely in terms of the supposed deficiencies of new residents.

“The Color of Money” revisited: Racial lending patterns in Atlanta's neighborhoods

Abstract In 1988, the Atlanta Journal‐Constitution published “The Color of Money,” an influential series examining mortgage redlining in Atlanta. The articles documented wide lending disparities between white and black neighborhoods of similar income levels. Given sweeping changes in housing finance since 1988, we seek to determine whether Atlantas racial geographic disparities in mortgage lending have changed. Analysis of 1992 to 1996 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data reveals slight improvement. Atlantas depository lenders made 4.2 times as many conventional home purchase loans per owner‐occupied unit to middle‐income white neighborhoods as they did to middle‐income black neighborhoods; a decade earlier, this ratio was 5.2. Nondepositories post lower ratios, particularly for Federal Housing Administration‐insured loans, but this market segment raises concerns because of potential abuses. By the indicator of most enduring theoretical and policy interest—conventional home purchase lending by depositories...

A MODEL FOR IDENTIFYING GENTRIFIED AREAS WITH CENSUS DATA

Empirical research on gentrification suffers from a dichotomy between richly detailed neighborhood case studies and macro-scale, census-based analyses, perpetuating uncertainty over the extent and timing of gentrified areas in American cities. We develop a model relating tract-level census statistics to the results of a detailed field survey of 24 census tracts in Minneapolis-St. Paul. We use stepwise and canonical discriminant analysis to select nine variables distinguishing gentrified neighborhoods and to classify all central-city tracts for each decade between 1960 and 1990. Results indicate a moderate level of overall accuracy, and the model is more than 90% accurate in distinguishing areas of heavy reinvestment from stable, middle-class districts. Compared with other techniques, our approach more accurately distinguishes gentrification from other types of inner-city redevelopment, providing a useful tool for identifying the phenomenon with a measurable degree of precision.

Geographies of mortgage market segmentation: the case of essex county, new jersey

Since the late 1980s, mutually reinforcing trends in economic growth, public policy, and community activism have fostered a wave of residential mortgage lending to ‘underserved markets’ in US cities. Yet many of the changes in housing finance that supported sustainable home ownership also lured a new generation of subprime and predatory credit institutions specialising in high-cost, high-risk lending. For many urban and minority neighbourhoods, the old problems of exclusionary redlining are now accompanied by new dilemmas of exploitive greenlining. This paper analyses the market penetration of subprime lending institutions and the subsequent concentration of mortgage ‘pre-foreclosures’ in low- and moderate-income, African American neighbourhoods. Focusing on Newark, NJ, and its surrounding suburbs, Gary Kings ecological inference technique and a series of logistic regression models are used to assess the role of borrower characteristics, institutional divisions, and neighbourhood context in the process of mortgage market segmentation. The evidence corroborates theories emphasising the dynamics of capital investment, financial services restructuring, and the economic incentives for racial-geographic targeting, and not the presumed credit deficiencies of urban and minority home owners. Unfortunately, the tidy empirical analysis offered here is overshadowed by the enormous societal experiment now underway across the US, as a wave of delinquencies, defaults and foreclosures undermines the belated minority home ownership gains achieved during the unprecedented boom of the 1990s.

Has mortgage capital found an inner‐city spatial fix?

Abstract For two generations, urbanists have analyzed how residential mortgage lending reflects and reinforces inner‐city inequality. Yet the basic dichotomies of this literature have been eroded by parallel developments in community organizing, public policy, and restructuring of financial services. Securitization, institutional structure, and increasingly sophisticated market segmentation have altered the relationship between mortgage capital and the inner city, redrawing patterns of exclusionary redlining into more complicated, stratified inclusion into prime and subprime reinvestment flows. In this article, we analyze lending dynamics in neighborhoods at the nexus between gentrified reinvestment and enduring poverty in 23 large U.S. cities. A strong, sustained resurgence of capital investment is woven together with enduring racial‐ethnic exclusion that cannot be blamed on borrower deficiencies. Institutional restructuring and secondary‐market linkages reinforce newer class and racial‐ethnic inequalities through subprime segmentation: Lenders’ willingness to serve black borrowers, for instance, is becoming closely associated with subprime specialization.

Mapping the Olympic growth machine

Theories of growth machines and urban regimes have informed the study of urban political economy for more than three decades, but these theories remain focused on intra‐urban processes. Using a case study of the bidding process and the planning of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, we explore the transnational dimensions of the urban growth machine and explore common aspects between the growth machine and regime theory literature and the literatures on the entrepreneurial city and transnational urban policy transfers. Through its evolving networks with other urban regimes, Vancouver’s growth machine provides a ready forum in which local elites can acquire specialized knowledge on new urban entrepreneurial strategies elsewhere. Actors situated in different parts of the local growth machine are establishing various connections with urban regimes in other cities, in what is best understood as a nascent growth machine diaspora. Growth machine and regime theories remain valid in their basic conceptualization and maintain their strength through their adaptability to various contexts, but can be enriched by analyses of policy circuits, travelling theories and learning networks.

Making New Mortgage Markets: Case Studies of Institutions, Home Buyers, and Communities

Abstract Americas housing and mortgage markets are undergoing a dramatic transformation, as urban reinvestment and attempts to tap underserved markets of new homeowners alter historical processes of redlining and discrimination. This article synthesizes findings from case studies of private lenders, lender consortia, and nonprofit community organizations that are active in underserved markets and analyzes the strategies these organizations use to attract and qualify mortgage applicants and retain new homeowners. The case studies reveal a diverse array of strategies designed to address market imperfections related to information, discrimination, and household financial characteristics. Although these strategies expand homeownership opportunities, challenges remain. They reflect inherent tensions between the industry trend toward standardized, efficient business practices and the customized, often expensive programs needed to address the multiple obstacles to homeownership and community development faced by underserved households and communities. They also reflect the historically unequal distribution of risks and rewards in Americas central socioeconomic institution—homeownership.