Understanding gentrification

Urban history expert Richard Harris looks at what it is and what it means for Hamilton

Back in the mid-1970s, when I was a young and impressionable graduate student, I decided that I was going to study a topic that was just beginning to attract attention: gentrification.

When I proposed this to my academic supervisor he asked “Is that a word? I mean, do people say that?” With my fingers crossed, I assured him that they did.

Today, no one would ask that question. It is the subject of a minor academic industry. Even in Hamilton, it seems, everyone is talking about it, and plenty of them reckon it’s a problem. A big problem. Is that true?

Different people will give you different answers.

In fact, they will even use a different language. There are those who talk about gentrification, and there are others who speak about renewal and revitalization. They are talking about the same thing, or at least different aspects of the same process: upgraded homes and stores, new businesses, rising prices, and higher tax revenues. But the labels matter.

In Hamilton we know all about the importance of language. We used to be Steel City, a brand that didn’t sell well in Toronto. More recently we became the City of Waterfalls, which sold better but created its own problems. And for some, including some gentrifiers in the Lower City, we became the Hammer: gritty, resilient, and authentic.

Like all of those words, ‘gentrification’ has its own connotations, mostly bad. It would be difficult to find any published commentary about gentrification which doesn’t mention the ‘d’ word. But how big an issue is displacement?

The short answer is: we really have no idea. And that is true for any city, not just Hamilton. There are of course plenty of anecdotes, examples of real hardship caused by rising rents. But, as with other distressing events that hit the headlines — murders, plane crashes — they can be a misleading guide to the norm.

It is actually very difficult to figure out how common direct displacement is. You would have to contact hundreds of people, and then wait a year or three, to find out whether it is a big issue. And contacting people after they have already moved is a challenge.

The few good studies of displacement report — would you believe it? — different results. Some of the best work, by Lance Freeman in New York City, suggests that direct displacement is in fact unusual.

What is ‘direct displacement,’ and what other types could there be? Direct displacement happens when, perhaps because she has renovated her property, a landlord raises the rent so much that the existing tenant has to move on. There have been prominent local examples, including some highrise apartment buildings, but how common this is we don’t know.

Other things happen which are sometimes referred to as displacement, but again we need to be careful with words. Some people who could afford to stay — perhaps the homeowners — may decide to move when their neighbourhood changes beyond recognition. Friends and neighbours have left, stores closed.

Is this voluntary displacement a problem? For some vulnerable citizens, yes, especially if there is nowhere appropriate for them to go. But, as we all know, neighbourhoods change, friends move, and we adapt.

And then, when a neighbourhood gentrifies, it ceases to be affordable to the sorts of people who used to live there. People who might have liked to move there, because of work, amenities, or social services, can no longer do so.

Gentrification has excluded them from a certain part of the city.

Is this sort of displacement-by-exclusion a problem? The answer depends on whether affordable housing, along with comparable workplaces, stores, and services, are available elsewhere.

Of these three types of ‘displacement’ — involuntary, voluntary, and by exclusion — only the third is inevitable and ubiquitous. One take-away, then, is that above all we need to think about whether the people who are being excluded will be able to thrive, or even survive.

But how, I hear you asking, does all of this apply to Hamilton?

To answer that question, we need to think of recent trends that have been affecting our city. At the local scale, certain neighbourhoods have indeed been changing in new ways. That is what we might call gentrification in Hamilton.

But at the regional scale and beyond, Hamilton has been shaped by larger forces that have highlighted the purely local developments. These may be called the gentrification of Hamilton. Two more articles (to be published before the end of April) will look at each of these trends.