This article starts from the premise that gentrification means displacement — that when the Yuppies move in, the longtime residents are (eventually, inevitably, tragically) forced to move out. It’s a familiar story, one Chen describes as “well documented” because it’s repeated so often. And it’s wrong.
A 2004 study (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01944360408976337) found that residents in gentrifying neighborhoods in New York were *less* likely to move — by a significant margin — than those in other neighborhoods in the same city. Similar studies since then have found that gentrification, rather than killing neighborhoods, can often breathe new life into them. As one 2008 study (http://www.nber.org/papers/w14036) put it, “rather than dislocating non-white households, gentrification creates neighborhoods that are attractive to middle-class minority households, particularly those with children or with elderly householders. Furthermore, there is evidence that gentrification may even increases [sic] incomes for these same households.”
In other words: when you see the hipsters moving in, don’t automatically think, “There goes the neighborhood.”