The telltale signs of gentrification aren’t hard to spot: real estate investors buying houses, rents soaring, housing prices skyrocketing, longtime residents getting displaced. And they’re all evident in the Grove Park neighborhood of Atlanta, making it part of a national pattern long mired in race, class, and not-in-my-backyard policies.
Debra Edelson, executive director of the Grove Park Foundation, describes the process as “white money pushing out Black people.”
Why We Wrote This
Repeated failures in the U.S. to mitigate the downsides of gentrification may indicate that a different approach is needed – one that depends on a common understanding of what it means to be a neighborhood.
The telltale signs of gentrification aren’t hard to spot: real estate investors buying houses, rents soaring, housing prices skyrocketing, longtime residents getting displaced. And they’re all evident in the Grove Park neighborhood of Atlanta, making it part of a national pattern long mired in race, class, and not-in-my-backyard policies.
Debra Edelson, executive director of the Grove Park Foundation, describes the process as “white money pushing out Black people.”
Zoning, rent control, property-tax breaks, and taxpayer-funded affordable housing have long been used to manage growth and keep neighborhoods diverse. But new research shows the long-term failure of such tools to temper change.