Don't Say Gentrification

The word at the center of housing policy confusion, fear, and recrimination // Have courage and conviction, and supply, supply, supply!

“I’m just so worried about gentrification.”

This sentiment is as common as it is counterproductive.

Not because the people expressing it aren’t worried about real problems, but because their phrasing distracts policymakers and political tastemakers from actually solving the problems. In casual conversation it forces people into a guessing game, unsure of what exactly their interlocutor means. Why?

“Gentrification” is a word without a clear, universally acknowledged meaning. It is a deleteriously broad umbrella term that inelegantly groups many different concerns. When people say it, they mean some combination of the following:

• Sharply rising rents

• Displacement of long-time residents

• The rich winning at the expense of the poor, the powerful winning at the expense of the less powerful

• Changing neighborhood character (language, art, etc)

• The destruction of close-knit, high density social and kin networks

• Plain, cookie-cutter “niceness” replacing dynamic, beautiful variation (the “Chipotle and an Equinox next to the gray-inside-and-out apartment” building)¹

• Strained race relations, inequality, and disparity

Of course, many of the things above overlap. They can be different points of time on the same timeline, or different facets of the same problem. Sharply rising rents can cause displacement. Neighborhood character can change by becoming cookie-cutter.

In almost every conversation I’ve witnessed between two parties discussing gentrification, they are at least partially talking past each other—using different implicit definitions of the term without realizing it.

Party A: “Gentrification [sharply rising rents] can be solved with rent control!”

Party B: “We have to block all of these new buildings, because they are causing gentrification [plain cookie-cutter niceness, the rich winning, etc]. Rent control doesn’t go far enough.”

Party A: “What are you talking about? Blocking them makes gentrification [sharply rising rents] worse!”

Party B: “Allowing them makes gentrification [plain cookie-cutter niceness, the rich winning, etc.] worse!”

This kind of conceptual confusion between engineers would result in a bridge collapsing, and it results in terrible housing policy in the case of lawmakers.

No common meaning, no common solution

If people do not agree what “gentrification” means, and they are unaware that they disagree, they will probably not be able to formulate a successful policy response to it. This is why I tell people, as an experiment, to stop using the word.

Instead of saying “gentrification,” be as concrete as you can. Say the phenomenon or event that you are specifically worried about, like “sharply rising rent in the form of [this increase over this time period in this area]” or “the neighborhood racial composition will change in [this way].” Only at that point are you getting specific enough to start thinking about validating or falsifying your claim, coming up with policy solutions, and taking action.

However: if there is one aspect of “gentrification” that almost everyone agrees on, it’s change. Gentrification means change. Whether it is good or bad, large or small, fast or slow, people are talking about some kind of change. Human beings are famously averse to this; it makes sense that the conversation around gentrification is so strained, and that it inevitably comes up when anyone talks about building or changing anything. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The problem is law, not people

No matter our income level, we’re all just trying to find a place to live within our price range. Getting to know people one-on-one across the income spectrum shows that most people (even those making ~$150k a year, like our city council members, or really anyone) struggle to find a place to live without being threatened by the price of rent. That’s just the reality of a housing crisis—almost no one is spared. If most people were, it wouldn’t be a crisis.

We all know the scramble of jumping on StreetEasy or Zillow when our lease renewal comes up. We all know the difficulty of finding a nice place to live. We all know the pain and expense of moving regularly. And if you’re outside the five boroughs looking in—hoping to one day come here to chase your dream or find common community and acceptance with those like yourself—you know the sadness that comes from a dream deferred.

If you are blaming people for gentrification (in most of its meanings), you are forming a circular firing squad. People are just trying to live.² What would you have them do otherwise? Move away from New York City and start a new life rather than find a cheaper place in the five boroughs within their price range? Stay in a part of the country that they’re incompatible with? Be concrete, and do not evade: what exactly are you telling people to do?

People are not the problem.³

The problem is our laws. They have locked us all in a musical-chairs housing situation. Do not look at your fellow Americans, your fellow New Yorkers, and curse them so. Turn your eyes to City Hall and the New York State Legislature.

Supply skepticism and the solutions to our housing crisis: changing the law

But I’ve made some assumptions in my writing so far. I have assumed, for one, that our housing crisis is fundamentally induced by a lack of supply. Let me lay out the basic sequence of my other assumptions:

• New York City is experiencing a housing crisis. Specifically, it has far too few available housing units to satisfy the demand for housing. It is a crisis of short supply. Our vacancy rate is 1.4%.⁴

• NYC currently has about 3.5 million housing units for a population of 8.8 million.⁵

• 71% of NYC’s residential buildings were built before 1951.⁶ That is how little we’ve built in the modern era.

• In the past full decade, NYC approved about 200,000 housing units. The population increased by about 629,000 in that time.⁷

• 39% of NYC’s residential buildings exceed their allowable size according to zoning law; they were built before modern zoning regulations and were grandfathered in, and it would be illegal to build them now.⁸ Not only do our laws restrict building, they restrict the size of those things that are allowed at all.

• NYC is divided into 59 community districts. 10 of these accounted for about 50% of all approved housing units in the past decade. That doesn’t mean they built a lot, it just means most of the city illegalizes building.⁹

• NYC’s housing supply problem is caused by bad laws that largely illegalize new housing construction throughout the city, delay the housing that is allowed, or make it more expensive than it would otherwise be. These laws are, in part, our 1961 zoning resolution¹⁰ and our construction codes.¹¹ We need changes at both the city and state level, although the city could take care of a substantial amount of the problem if it were aggressive enough.

• NYC builds relatively little housing. You might say, “but I see construction and scaffolding everywhere!” Well, I won’t deny that NYC has construction and scaffolding. The question is: are these signs that a lot of new housing is being built? They are not. NYC builds less housing per capita than even San Francisco.¹²

• NYC needs hundreds of thousands of net new units just to get to equilibrium. It needs even more for the city to keep growing in a healthy fashion.

• Many concerns like warehoused units are side shows, even as they should be addressed and discussed.¹³ We will not get the units we need by turning away from the central problem—massively increase net new units—and addressing ancillary problems. Building the hundreds of thousands of new units we need would also go a long way to solve most of the ancillary problems people like to focus on. With much more supply relative to demand, landlords start to compete for tenants. We saw that play out exactly during the pandemic demand bust, and we see it in other parts of the country where supply has matched and exceeded demand: “Rental demand remains high in Austin, but oversupply has left landlords no choice but to lower rents.” [Editor’s note: I don’t buy into the frame that calls this “oversupply.” It should be called “housing abundance.” These homes are not a problem.]

• It is possible to build a lot of new housing quickly, while also mitigating many of the worries that people have when they use the word “gentrification.”¹⁴ No policy will ameliorate the effects 100%, but that’s not possible anyway. Building new housing will still address the problem more than the status quo (the housing shortage), which only makes them worse.

Pick your hard

There are no easy paths forward on housing and “gentrification.” The policy decisions of past generations and current legislatures have created the problem.

Our options are either the growing pains of a solution and brighter future, or the terminal pains of a worsening disease. The choice is clear. And choosing to not build hundreds of thousands of new units in the next decade, at minimum, is choosing the worsening disease.

In addition to my own research, I rely on places like NYU’s Furman Center as intellectual proxies. I think they do excellent work, and represent the cutting edge in housing research. One of their most recent papers tackles concerns about “gentrification” head on, and I encourage you to read it with an interested and critical eye.

Supply Skepticism Revisited:

Although “supply skeptics” claim that new housing supply does not slow growth in rents, we show that rigorous recent studies demonstrate that: 1) Increases in housing supply slow the growth in rents in the region; 2) In some circumstances, new construction also reduces rents or rent growth in the surrounding area; 3) The chains of moves sparked by new construction free up apartments that are then rented (or retained) by households across the income spectrum; 4) While new supply is associated with gentrification, it has not been shown to cause significant displacement of lower income households…¹⁵

Meet the moment

The issue at the core of gentrification, with most of the meanings it has, is housing supply. Either you increase it enough, or not. If your pet solution doesn’t do that, or prevents that, it doesn’t matter how much social approval or in-group acclaim it receives. As there was once a forge of freedom, we must have a housing D-Day. Build the homes. Rush them to completion. Defeat rising rents and displacement. Anything else is forfeiture and weakness in the face of an enemy that does not care about you, your family, or your friends: bad law that illegalizes housing, slows housing, and raises the price of housing.

We are not each other’s enemy, not matter our differences in class, income, race, creed, or anything else. Do not listen to anyone who turns you against each other, and cultivate the courage and conviction to rebuff those who would sow division. Stay laser focused on the laws that illegalize housing, and the lawmakers who could change them.

Housing supply really is an emergency. If you’re not tossing out as much housing as you can, of all kinds, embracing B-minus politics and imperfection, you’re not treating it like an emergency. You’re like the NYC Council: dutifully declaring an emergency, but passing no laws to address it.

Excelsior.

1. For further commentary on this “nice but not good” effect, see Ra by Sarah Constantin.

2. Those who want to blame people for gentrification (whatever that means to them) will do so no matter what. They will paint a person as whatever villain they must be, making whatever assumptions and unsubstantiated claims they must, for the sake of an argument—the facts be damned. The prospect of this prejudicial treatment keeps many people from speaking about housing and gentrification on the internet especially—they know a stranger might highlight their race, socioeconomic status, immigration status, point of origin, etc, and use it as a prejudicial attack vector, often to score cheap in-group points. The attackers might rouse others, who will join the prejudicial, illiberal mob. One thing the mob will not do: consider anyone’s individual circumstance, and realize that they are just trying to live their life. The mob will certainly not take full stock of the laws that create housing scarcity, the economic research that contradicts their claims, the history of repeated transformation of their city or neighborhood, or the central reality of the housing emergency in NYC: almost no one is spared. They are in it to villainize people, which is as easy as it is ineffective. But it does not change the fact that people are not the problem—the law is.

3. Using the word “gentrifier” as a slur is common, and done by people of every political valence. People are the problem, this word says. People are bad. People just trying to live, are bad. I categorically reject this.

4. Look no further than our vacancy rate. It is 1.4%. “No room at the inn” just about nails it. From the NYC Comptroller’s report, New York City’s Housing Supply Challenge:

Last week, the triennial New York City Housing & Vacancy Survey (HVS) for 2023 was released, detailing the tightest housing market in the city in over 50 years. The rental vacancy rate fell to a multi-decade low of 1.4%, down dramatically from 4.5% in (pandemic) 2021 and 3.63% in (pre-pandemic) 2017.

5. Strategies to Boost Housing Production in the New York City Metropolitan Area from the Citizens Budget Commission (2020), specifically this graph. You can find slightly (but not meaningfully) different numbers from different sources, depending on how they calculate population, and how current they are up to this moment in 2024.

6. Welcome to the FAR Dome: By How Much is Gotham Allowed to Grow? from Jason Barr’s blog. See the first paragraph of the “Overbuilt Gotham” section.

7. Strategies to Boost Housing Production in the New York City Metropolitan Area, this graph, and this page for population data. 

8. Welcome to the FAR Dome: By How Much is Gotham Allowed to Grow?. See the first diagram in the “Sixty Years of the Floor Area Ratio: What Has Changed?” section.

9. Strategies to Boost Housing Production in the New York City Metropolitan Area, specifically this graph.

10. See Welcome to the FAR Dome: By How Much is Gotham Allowed to Grow? (2022). The 1961 zoning resolution put strict growth controls in place that we are now firmly pressed against.

11. For example, see this proposed amendment to the construction codes that the NYC City Council did not pass: “Int. 0794-2022 would have amended the New York City Building Code to double the allowed floor plate of single-stair buildings up to six stories, from the current 2,000-sq. ft. limit to 4,000 sq. ft. The bill was sponsored by CMs Rita Joseph and Farah Louis, with the help of the Center for Building.”

12. Strategies to Boost Housing Production in the New York City Metropolitan Area from the Citizens Budget Commission (2020), specifically this graph.

13. The warehousing discussion itself is fraught and full of bad-faith actors uninterested in understanding what is true (sometimes units are held off market for good reasons!), but that is a separate essay.

14. See Supply Skepticism Revisited (Nov 2023), particularly the abstract.

15. In point four in the abstract, the paper uses the word “gentrification.” In the context of the paper, this refers to changes that happen to a place, and is distinct from displacement of people. See Supply Skepticism Revisited, pp.23-24 (emphasis added):

Many discussions argue that new construction will harm lower-income residents by gentrifying lower-rent neighborhoods, displacing current residents of those neighborhoods, and leaving them no place in the city that they can afford. That concern is particularly acute for BIPOC residents, who are more likely than others to face discrimination as they try to find other places to live and less likely to have the resources to meet the expenses involved in moving. Worries about displacement often treat gentrification and displacement as the same thing, but as Pennington (2021, p. 3) noted: “Displacement happens to people; gentrification happens to places.” Further, gentrification may happen without displacement if the population of highincome residents increases without any change in the mobility patterns of low-income residents. More generally, neighborhoods can see a fair amount of turnover and demographic change in any given year regardless of gentrification.

To put a finer point on it: if you want to make a claim that gentrification (as used in the paper) results in displacement of people, you first need to have an idea about the base rate of demographic change that would happen anyway—it is not going to be zero. Do not commit the base rate fallacy!