Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 816

Matthew L. Schuerman has a new book out called, Newcomers: Gentrification and Its Discontents . I haven't read it. But in it, he argues that "gentrification is all around us." Hence the title. Will Stancil has an interesting rebuttal to this position as part of his book review in the Washington Monthly . Here's an excerpt:

Schuerman settles on what he admits is a simple definition of gentrification: the process by which a neighborhood goes from having below-average to above-average incomes for its region. But he never really applies it. While he frequently asserts or implies that gentrification is exploding across cities, he doesn’t say how many neighborhoods actually meet his definition.

As a demographic researcher, I decided to check. Using U.S. Census data, I looked at the share of people in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago living in places that met Schuerman’s definition of having gentrified between 2000 and 2016. In New York, it’s 3.1 percent of residents. In San Francisco, the number is 4.4 percent. In Chicago, it’s 4.8 percent. Needless to say, this does not represent a vast swath. Although the numbers might increase if the time frame were extended, change at a generational pace is far less disruptive than change that takes place over a few years. Using Newcomers’ own definition, the story of urban America is not a tidal wave of gentrification but creeping racial and economic transition.

In fact, this aligns with the growing academic consensus that gentrification is much rarer than is commonly believed. This year alone, there have been no fewer than three national studies into the prevalence and location of gentrifying neighborhoods. (Disclosure: I authored one of these studies, for the University of Minnesota.) Despite using very different methods, all three studies roughly appear to agree that about 10 percent of neighborhoods in metro areas were gentrifying. Research has also tended to show that no matter how you measure gentrification in the urban core, it’s almost always more common to find neighborhoods afflicted by intensifying poverty. Out of the fifty biggest American regions, forty-four have core cities where the population in poverty has grown faster than the overall population since 2000. The only exceptions are New York City, Los Angeles, D.C., New Orleans, Atlanta, and Providence.

This issue of concentrated poverty has come up before on the blog through posts like this one about Detroit . The data is pretty clear: The number of high poverty Census tracts in the US is increasing faster than the number of gentrifying Census tracts (i.e. Census tracts that are becoming wealthier).

So could it be that the problem isn't actually gentrification? It is that, paradoxically, gentrification isn't happening enough and more broadly, and that it is leading to rising inequality across our cities. That strikes me as being the greater issue.

Photo by  Hardik Pandya  on  Unsplash

Yonge Street divides Toronto between east and west. It's an iconic street (though it has its ups and downs). Since 2018, the City has been studying ways to redesign and improve the stretch that cuts through the middle of downtown.

It is a story that we have seen in many other cities around the world, perhaps most famously in NYC. Here is a street where pedestrians outnumber vehicles and yet we allocate more space to the latter (within a fixed ROW). This study hopes to fix that.

They've narrowed things down to four Alternative Designs (downloadable, here ). All of them prioritize pedestrians, but in different ways. As of right now the preferred option is Alternative #4. It looks like this:

The section around Dundas Square (from Dundas Sq up to Edward Street) is fully pedestrianized with only emergency vehicles having access during the day. This segment has the highest pedestrian volumes. The other blocks allow for a combination of one-way and two-way vehicular traffic.

Vehicular access is obviously still important for things like loading, but it's pretty clear that the future of Yonge Street is pedestrian priority. We should probably be doing this right now. If you'd like to voice your own opinion, you can do that here until Friday, December 6, 2019.

Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer who is known for his images of industrial landscapes. In 2018, he released a documentary film called Anthropocene: The Human Epoch . It was the third in a trilogy of films that he directed alongside Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. In this one, the group tries to draw attention to the way in which us humans have (negatively) reengineered the planet and created a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene . I think many of you will find it interesting and eye-opening. Here's a trailer (it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8_suryIVqA&feature=youtu.be