Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The in-migration of relatively affluent households to disinvested central city neighborhoods has risen markedly in recent years, leading to considerable debate over consequences of gentrification, especially as it relates to residential displacement. The purpose of this paper is to provide the first empirical evidence about the relation between gentrification, residential displacement, and student achievement. In particular, this paper draws on a nationally-representative sample of children from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and provides a formal mediation analysis that decomposes the total effect of gentrification on children’s academic achievement into that which operates through residential displacement and that which operates through alternative pathways. This study addresses the following three research questions:

1. What is the total effect of gentrification on the academic achievement of children?
2. What is the effect of living in a gentrified versus a non-gentrified neighborhood on the academic achievement of children if children are subsequently exposed to rates of displacement they would have experienced living in a non-gentrified neighborhood?
3. What is the effect of the level of displacement that children would experience living in a gentrified neighborhood rather than the level of displacement that children would experience living in a non-gentrified neighborhood?

This study finds evidence that gentrification has a positive total effect on the reading achievement growth of children. However, this total effect masks differences in the effect of staying in versus being displaced from a gentrifying neighborhood. Specifically, the adjusted estimate of the natural direct effect of gentrification on reading achievement indicates that if children were exposed to a gentrified verses a non-gentrified neighborhood, and then were subsequently exposed to the level of residential displacement they would have experienced in the average non-gentrifying neighborhood, their performance growth on reading achievement would have increased. By extension, the adjusted estimates of the natural indirect effect indicates that if children were to live in a gentrified neighborhood and then were exposed to the level of residential displacement they would experience living in this neighborhood rather than the level of displacement they would have experienced in a non-gentrifying neighborhood, their performance growth on reading achievement would decline. In other words, the positive effects that gentrification has on children’s reading achievement is mitigated by the fact that gentrification displaces some children from the neighborhood.