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Many Rust-Belt cities have seen almost half their populations move from inside the city borders to the surrounding suburbs and elsewhere since the 1970s. As populations shifted, neighborhoods changed-in their average income, educational profile, and housing prices. But the shift did not happen in every neighborhood at the same rate. Recent research has uncovered some of the patterns characterizing the process.
Most major Rust-Belt cities have seen their populations shrink since their heydays, and with that decline, the average income of the remaining residents has fallen as well. Cities such as Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh have each lost more than 40 percent of their populations over the last four decades. However, the losses have not been uniform across neighborhoods. Some neighborhoods have declined more rapidly than others.
The uneven population decline across neighborhoods implies that the distributions of income, house prices, and human capital have also shifted within cities and the larger metropolitan area over time. While the challenges posed by the decline in overall population are well recognized, the movement of the population across neighborhoods within these Rust-Belt cities creates additional challenges. Policy- makers and city planners need to understand how such neighborhood dynamics evolve and, ultimately, how the underlying dynamics interact with the provision of public services and infrastructure.
Recent research on population and income dynamics in four Rust-Belt cities shows that neighborhoods with the lowest housing prices are the ones that experience the steepest declines in population, but that income falls more sharply in neighborhoods with middle-tier house prices. These patterns are the reverse of a gentrification process. Both processes involve the borders of poor and rich neighborhoods. But where gentrification typically leads to an outward expansion of high-income neighborhoods into low-income neighborhoods, reverse gentrification involves an inward contraction of high-income neighborhoods, as the border areas become low-income.
This Commentary describes the reverse gentrification process and its consequences in four cities-Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh-from 1970 to 2006. While reverse gentrification occurred to some degree in all four cities, there are distinct differences across them. In addition, to show how neighborhood dynamics in the central city influence the surrounding suburbs, the Cleveland-Akron metropolitan area is explored more closely, focusing on changes in the inner-ring and outer-ring suburbs.
Patterns of...