By Kevin Hartnett
Globe Correspondent
Boston Globe - August 06, 2014
When we think of gentrification, we imagine swarms of young upper
middle class white people moving into previously minority neighborhoods,
bringing pour-over coffee and higher property tax bills in their wakes.
It’s a controversial migration, not least because of the existing
residents who are displaced, but it’s also seen as a welcome step away
from the segregation that set in after the “white flight” of the 60s and
70s.
Now an inventive new study using Google Street View and an
archive of 1990s videotapes has found that gentrification may involve
less racial mixing than we assume—and in fact, may reinforce residential
segregation.
In an article this month
in the American Sociological Review, doctoral student Jackelyn Hwang
and Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson used Google Street View to take a
virtual walking tour of Chicago. As they went, they looked for details
like home renovations or new construction that indicate gentrification
is underway, or litter and graffiti, which indicate it’s not. Based on
those observations they gave each census tract in Chicago a
gentrification score. Then they compared those scores against a similar
but far more labor-intensive study Sampson had carried out twenty years
earlier.
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