Gentrification: Are University Students at Fault?
At my home school, the University of Southern California, students and residents of the local community often come into conflict. Many worry that the student body is harming the surrounding community, displacing low-income residents who often have nowhere else to go. Student organizations have popped up in an attempt to limit gentrification which residents are observing in the University Park neighborhood. Wide social justice rallies have been held to show the harm that gentrification has brought to the University Park Neighborhood. These concerns are by no means unique. Urban universities around the country are concerned about the impact they have on surrounding neighborhoods and often pursue policies to limit their student body’s impact. One area of growing controversy is the new construction of apartments, which often appear to kick residents off of their land and impose uncharacteristic developments on the built environment. However, while increased newbuild apartments may make it seem like gentrification is occurring around university campuses, these developments instead limit displacement.
Before diving into the arguments about whether or not universities are causing gentrification, it is necessary to understand what it is and why it is a problem. In their book Gentrification, Loretta Lees, et al. define Gentrification as, “the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city into middle-class residential and/or commercial use.” As a neighborhood gentrifies, displacement occurs in a four stage process. In the first stage, risk-tolerant lower-middle-class people move into a low-income area, often displaced themselves due to high costs in other parts of the city or a desire for privacy or creative freedom. Then, small-scale speculators identify the area as a potential investment opportunity and begin buying and renovating disused properties in the area. In the pivotal third stage, these speculators and residents popularize the area for middle-class residents. The fourth stage is where most displacement occurs, as housing becomes more scarce and new residents fight with older residents over the direction of future development in the area. This model of gentrification captures both the social change and displacement that gentrification causes. While certain authors or advocacy groups might focus on one aspect or another, it is important to note that the harms of gentrification emerge from both displacement and social change, not merely one or the other. The changing preferences of residents and normal housing market churn are not themselves part of gentrification.
With all of this considered, why is gentrification a problem? Proponents of gentrification as a strategy for economic development recognize the important economic gains that gentrification can bring to an area. Among these positive aspects which are frequently cited are rising property values, increased local revenues, and an increased social mixing within an urban area. In contrast, Dr. Joe Hoover, researcher at the University of London, argues that gentrification represents a great injustice. Not only does gentrification cause direct harms of displacement, unsustainable property speculation, and homelessness, but it also causes secondary psychological and social costs. Gentrification causes communities to be torn apart and family homes to be condemned to rising property values, forcing out historical residents of a community. And while urban redevelopment may be nothing new, the injustice created by displacement and the forcing out of lower-class communities is not dissimilar to the redlining of the 20th century, Hoover argues. While gentrification may bring some economic benefits to a community, the social and economic displacement it causes seems to outweigh those harms. When pursuing economic development and the growth of social, environmental, and economic resources within a community, care needs to be taken to prevent displacement and its subsequent injustices. Many take this line of reasoning to stand against any future development and see all development and densification as leading to the displacement inherent in gentrification. They see new developments around university campuses, especially in lower-income areas, as being concomitant with the harms of gentrification. However, these newer, high-density developments limit gentrification’s impact on a community.
Increased construction and densification within a community enable more people to live within the same area. Shane Phillips, urban planner at UCLA, shows that all else equal, areas that build more housing tend to be more affordable and areas that build less housing tend to be less affordable. This makes fundamental sense when considering the supply and demand model of markets. Demand for housing is relatively inelastic, as people tend not to stop demanding housing just because it is expensive as they need it to survive. Furthermore, moving to a more affordable city or area can carry high costs of abandoning one’s community, not to mention employment or other spatially-linked attributes of a person. As a result, in a supply-constrained market, prices will be high and many will not be able to afford homes. An increase in supply will lower the price of housing and enable more people to obtain it, leading to positive social and economic outcomes. Unambiguously, expanding the supply of housing should be seen as a positive to reducing the injustice of displacement. However, many wrongly oppose new housing as it makes it seem as though neighborhood composition is changing. Even though the opposite is occurring; existing residents are staying put in housing they already have access to while new residents take over the new units being built, limiting displacement to that caused by the normal churn of the housing market. On the USC campus, the construction of a massive student housing complex relocated businesses, directly adding to the housing supply and increasing the amount of housing available to residents. While many USC students have organized against the project, their fears of gentrification are unfounded.
The limiting effect that new housing stock has on displacement is enhanced in university areas by the preferences of students and existing residents. Students demand a particular kind of housing: typically shared units in more upscale-looking buildings. As they are often new to the area, they do not have a very strong preference for older or family dwellings. In contrast, existing residents usually want affordable housing in long-term, separated, and family-oriented dwellings. This division in the housing market creates the possibility for the creation of two submarkets: university students living in newer apartments while long-term residents live in houses and townhouses in the area. Empirical evidence from a paper by Alvaro Cortes, Vice President for Research at the Urban Institute, shows that this prediction bears out. Over time, landlords recognize the demand from the university student submarket and begin building housing targeted towards that submarket. As a result, new students can move into an area without disrupting the existing housing stock. The only instance in which students would disrupt the initial housing stock is if regulations or community pushback stops the development of new housing, limiting students to competing in the same market as existing residents.
This reveals a key aspect of the university housing market. It is not simply the demands of the student body that raise property values and cause displacement. Rather, it is the collaboration of local governments and corporate landlords to raise property values which cause this displacement. When given the option to live in newly built, dense apartments, university students will jump at the opportunity, leaving the surrounding neighborhoods intact. However, when they are deprived of this option, university students will have no choice but to participate in the same housing market as other residents. Often, the university students’ greater resources and highly inelastic housing demand will win out over the residents’ fewer resources and relatively less inelastic housing demand, causing displacement. When local governments or community traditions limit densification, as is so common in post-automobile cities, corporate landlords recognize the opportunity to profit off of increased land values while investing relatively little in property development or renovation. For example, at the University of Southern California, located in Los Angeles’ working-class South Central neighborhood, corporate landlords have increasingly invested in typical single-family homes while the city of Los Angeles fails to act to upzone the area to account for demand. The housing civil society organization Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) reports that a growing 9.6% of single-family housing in Los Angeles is owned by corporate landlords and 23.67% is owned by Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). An in-depth map published by SAJE also shows that nearly all single-family dwellings adjacent to USC are owned by corporate landlords. This supercharges the displacement process. However, it is not simply the fault of demand from the student body. For better or for worse, that demand has existed since the university opened its gates. Rather, it is the policy and market failure to build housing that the market demands which causes students to seek substitutes for the type of housing which they would rather choose to rent.
It is worth acknowledging that a university’s growing student body may cause other aspects that appear to be “gentrification.” Students may change the demands for businesses and other amenities in an area. While this paper has focused solely on the physical harms of resident displacement, it does recognize the potential harms that a shift in local businesses might cause. A new café with distressed industrial décor is certainly a far cry from the types of businesses that used to exist in many working-class areas surrounding universities. These disputes over the nature of the community reveal instead that displacement is not occurring. If the existing residents of an area were being uniformly kicked out of their homes and replaced by university students, we would expect this homogenous community to demand the same types of businesses and services (hip cafés, student bars, etc.) and to welcome the proliferation of student housing. Instead, the conflict over what types of uses have right to a neighborhood reveals that the existing residents of a community are staying and are demanding that the services that have historically existed in the community remain. These conflicts over displacement are important dialogues about harm to the adjoining communities near universities. However, they are still crucial evidence that these communities can thrive in the presence of the university. It is instead a problem when these debates are not occurring, as they reveal that university students have effectively forced out those longer-term residents who are equally as important to the community.
New developments near universities do not cause displacement. Rather, they enable the student body to have access to the type of housing that they enjoy with minimal impact on the surrounding community. Most universities have existed within their communities for over a century. To say that they are newly displacing the unaffiliated residents of their surroundings does not make logical sense. Students and long-term residents can come into conflict with each other; however, this does not mean that they are unable to resolve these conflicts and come to an agreement on how scarce urban land should be used. While student-driven displacement cannot be entirely ignored, focusing on new developments with increased density incorrectly directs our attention to the wrong problem. Advocates for lower-income communities should welcome these developments and encourage densification to limit, rather than cause, displacement.
