Identifying Gentrification: The Case of Portland

Portland, Oregon has been considered a candidate for gentrification in recent media due to its changing populations, businesses, and landscapes. Authors have worked to study the effects of gentrification across the United States, focusing on large cities such as Detroit and San Francisco. While these results are increasingly interesting, they tend to focus on census data many years in the past. There is also a gap within the literature: west cities that are not coastal cities. This is extremely important; many people are being displaced or seeing their neighborhoods change character and composition due to gentrification. Using census tract data from the years 2000 and 2010, I study the effects of median household income, median contract rent, population, employment, and geographic mobility on gentrification in the city of Portland. I use principal component analysis to create a factor variable that represents gentrification. I then create an index from this component and attempt to identify which neighborhoods in Portland are experiencing the most gentrification. My component shows low employment, rent, and median income--all indicators for a gentrified neighborhood. It also reveals a large amount of instability in residents. These consistencies with the intuitive ideas of gentrification allow me to use it in an index to measure which areas of Portland may be most gentrified. I hypothesize that areas within the inner city with high levels of diversity will be higher on my gentrification index than outer city tracts that have low diversity. I use a map and qualitative information alongside my quantitative analysis in order to look at these neighborhoods and determine if they are truly gentrified. I discovered that neighborhoods that have been gentrified according to my index typically have lower diverse populations after becoming gentrified, higher housing prices, high rents, higher status employees, and more access to amenities. The data also reveal that non gentrified areas look similar, as their high rents, high housing prices, high position employees, and access to amenities makes them unable to be gentrified. Ultimately, the data reveal that a significant amount of Portland falls high on the gentrification index, and therefore the city is gentrifying quickly