Poor neighborhoods go ungentrified
Gentrification has indeed been happening in Columbus and other Ohio cities, but not to the extent you might think.
While 10 neighborhoods in Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati have turned around, a recent study found that poverty in urban neighborhoods has expanded. Another 369 neighborhoods in those cities and five others — Akron, Canton, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown — stayed or became highpoverty neighborhoods.
It also found that neighborhood poverty affects Black households the most.
The size of Columbus masks the inequality between neighborhoods, said Jason Segedy, Akron’s planning and urban development director who worked on the study.
In Columbus, the number of highpoverty tracts jumped from 26 in 1980 to 50 in 2018, with the population of those living in high-poverty tracts jumping from 88,812 in 1980 to 166,530 in 2018.
“East Side, Northeast Side poverty increased a bit,” Segedy said. “There’s a lot of disparity.” Segedy’s research of Ohio cities built off of a national study called the Neighborhood Poverty Project by the Washington-based Economic Innovation Group. That study, which can be found at https://eig.org/neighborhoodpoverty-project, tracked changes in the number and composition of high-poverty neighborhoods in metro areas from 1980 to 2018.
Researchers defined neighborhoods as newly poor, persistently poor, in deepening poverty, or as turned around.
The latter is defined as neighborhoods with high poverty (30% and more) in 1980 that moved to low poverty (less than 20%) by 2018.
In Columbus, turnaround neighborhoods include the Short North and parts of Italian Village, and part of the KingLincoln District east of Downtown.
“In Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, the turnaround neighborhoods are close to downtown or some other asset like OSU,” Segedy said. “They almost have no choice but to gentrify.”
But areas that saw a growing percentage of poor residents include a large swath of the Hilltop and North Linden, which have significant percentages of Black residents: 20% for the Greater Hilltop area and 36% in North Linden, according to 2018 census estimates.
And neighborhoods with deep and worsening poverty affects Black residents, the study found. Across the eight cities and their home counties, Black residents were more than five times more likely to live in high-poverty neighborhoods than whites.
While 22% of the population in those counties are Black, Black residents make up 68% of the population in persistently poor neighborhoods, 55% in neighborhoods with deepening poverty, and 47% in newly-poor neighborhoods.
“So much of the national discussion has been about superstar cities seeing a resurgence,” Kenan Fikri, the Economic Innovation Group’s director for research and policy development. “We ended up ignoring the plight of everyday neighborhoods in Everytown, USA.
“These neighborhoods are crying out for revitalization.”
Fikri also said the proliferation of low-paying jobs plays a role in the plight of these neighborhoods.
“The country is quite good at producing jobs that don’t pay very much,” Fikri said. “That can have an impact on where people can live.”
Segedy’s study in Ohio suggests that transportation policies supporting urban neighborhoods combined with policies boosting local entrepreneurship and small business development will help those neighborhoods.
His study’s findings mirror those of other recent work, including that of the Greater Ohio Policy Center, which also has studied trends in Ohio cities.
Alison Goebel, Greater Ohio’s executive director, said the study shows how disinvestment is racialized, and that should point a way for policy makers, local governments and nonprofits to tailor solutions.
“The decline of communities and how to stabilize and prevent that precipitous disinvestment of resources, that’s a harder nut to crack,” she said. mferench@dispatch.com @Markferenchik