Philadelphia, March 25th, 2019: Report: Philly is gentrifying more than San Francisco, the poster child for displacement
Gentrification is happening across the country, but conventional wisdom would have you believe that much of the most vigorous activity is centered around West Coast cities in the midst of a tech boom.
A new report from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based policy group, casts some serious doubt on that assumption. While places like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle have indeed grappled recently with rising housing costs and an influx of new residents, none of them has experienced as much gentrification as Philadelphia, according to the NCRC. From 2000 to 2013, 57 different census tracts in Philly became gentrified. That’s the fourth-highest figure in the country during that span, behind only New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
That gentrification is happening here in Philly should come as a surprise to precisely no one. One need only look at how neighborhoods like Northern Liberties and Graduate Hospital have changed in the last couple of decades to see the forces at play in real life. But more than San Francisco — really?
The NCRC classified an area as eligible for gentrification if it had, according to census data from 2000, a median household income and home value below the 40th percentile of the surrounding region. Thanks to a handy interactive map published as part of the study, we can see clearly in Philadelphia that huge swaths of the city — anything on the map shaded with color — were candidates for gentrification.
In San Francisco, meanwhile, many neighborhoods were already so prosperous in 2000 that they weren’t even eligible, suggesting that any gentrification in those areas may have already taken place by 2000. San Francisco, it seems, is in a later stage of its gentrification timeline than Philadelphia. (The late stage, at least for San Francisco, with its affordable housing crisis, isn’t so desirable, either.)
