A Study of Gentrification
Introduction
Gentrification is a phenomenon that takes place when housing becomes too expensive to accomodate pre-existing or indigenous community members. With the arrival of the pandemic, home affordability has become a popular subject that is garnering an increasing amount of attention. Anyone can observe the recently deceased rent moratorium and skyrocketing house prices and predict that a crisis is potentially imminent. Housing is a staple of human life and a fundamental necessity, therefore it is essential that people have a thorough understanding of the causes and externalities of changes in home affordability.
Visualizations
Median Salary per Borough
New York County refers completely and exclusively to Manhattan
Total Amount of Jobs per Borough
Total Crime per Borough
Total Violent Crime per Borough
Total Property Crime per Borough
Observations
As seen in the very first visual, the price of rent for a two bedroom apartment in New York City is largely immune to circumstances.
There hasn't been a single two year period in which rent continued to trend downwards, despite any economic or social factors.
What is most surprising is that from this data alone there doesn't seem to be an obvious ugly duckling. Staten Island appears to benefit from
from a smaller and more consistent amount of crime but the earning power of its residents doesnt vary significantly from residents in the Bronx, Queens, or Brooklyn.
Manhattan boasts the largest annual median salary, but that is simply explained by the fact that it is the borough that employs the most people, making it central to economic
opportunity.
While the fringes prove to be useless, there seems to be a lot of information to interpret on the margin, where there is parity between the boroughs.
Despite posing as a central hub for employment and economic opportunity within the city, Manhattan has the least violent crime (with teh exclusion of Staten Island),
leading one to assume that economic hardship plays a significant role in the prevalnce of violence within a society. Property crime remained largely flat and consistent
throughout this same time frame.
Ethnic and Racial Differences between the Boroughs
Note: This is made by a third party and not myself.
More information provided by The US Census Bureau
Conclusion
Despite a clear hiccup in the prices of houses, rent continued to increase at a linear rate between the years of 2006 and 2019. This disparity can be inferred to most harshly affect those in marginalized communities that do not have the ability nor opportunity to purchase homes. Whilst wages seem to be uniform across the four boroughs surrounding Manhattan, there are nuanced differences in crime that can yield very interesting observations. The best example being that there is an observable inverse correlation between employment and violent crime.
Links to Code
Resources
Data
Racial/Ethnic Demographics
Rent Data
Crime Rates
House Pricing Index
References
Geojson county borders provided by Eric Celeste.
Geojson zip code borders provided by enactdev .
Supreme Court verdict on Rent Moratorium (pdf).