Table of Contents
Gentrification can be thought of as an invasion of members of the middle and upper classes into traditionally working-class neighborhoods. This results in the displacement of incumbent and long-term residents by younger or high-income people and drastically changes the social character of the neighborhood. This definition breaks gentrification down into two main components: a raising of the economic level of the neighborhood population and a change in neighborhood culture. These components usually manifest themselves in rising home values and rents. Furthermore, the new stores that move into gentrified areas also often cater to the higher-income demographic with more expensive products, resulting in a higher overall cost of living for the area. However, it is important to note that in the context of university/student-led gentrification, new residents may not be high-income themselves but may come from high-income backgrounds or have access to familial financial resources.
Universities themselves have taken on a significant role as urban developers and investors in recent years. This is most clearly evident in the promotion of commercial retail development and the construction of upscale housing in the neighborhoods adjacent to campuses. This process is exacerbated by cuts in state-funding to education, which forces universities to more heavily rely on tuition from out-of-state or wealthy students. They cater to these audiences by advertising a certain luxurious college experience that offers amenities such as elaborate buildings, upscale dorms, and advanced technology centers.
Universities also often have significant political clout with their local urban governments. In the absence of manufacturing or other industry, universities have become large regional employers. In every one of the top 20 largest cities in the U.S., higher education institutions are among the top 10 employers. Urban governments have a vested interest in protecting employment opportunities for their residents, and universities use this fact as political leverage to develop as they please.
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The History of the Issue, Historical Controversies, and University-Community Tensions
Community displacement and exclusion are not particularly new issues in North Philadelphia. The current state of gentrification in the region has about one hundred years of important historical build-up that led us to the situation we are in now.
In the nineteenth century, the area now known as North Philadelphia transitioned from being primarily farmland to a hub of industry. ‘Temple College’ was then formed in 1884 with the intention of being a place of academic opportunity for working class parishioners who would meet in the basement of the Grace Temple Baptist Church. Less than a decade later, in 1891, Temple College was incorporated by the state but maintained a mission that proclaimed they were “primarily for the benefit of working men.” To best serve their working-class benefactors, tuition was free and no previous formal education was required for admission.
Moving forward, the urban economic landscape of North Philadelphia began to radically change once the era of deindustrialization began in the 1950s. Factories that populated the area and provided employment for community members began to shut down and were not replaced by other employers or economic activity. Abandoned buildings and vacant lots began to populate the landscape. Deindustrialization, coupled with white flight, urban disinvestment, and redlining, began to drastically alter the demographics of the community as well. White flight and urban disinvestment were exacerbated by the race riots of North Philadelphia in 1964 which were spurred by police brutality against the community. Media sources sensationalized the story and painted an ugly picture of the neighborhood residents.
Deindustrialization and the aforementioned socioeconomic and sociopolitical factors began to reflect in institutional changes in Temple’s education model. The institution no longer felt a responsibility to cater to the place-based needs of working class people. Instead, they adopted a neoliberal model of education and began to operate much more like a competitive, profit-maximizing business. At the same time, the university began to transform into more of a residential campus that would serve those moving in from outside the community, rather than those already within the community. Philadelphia’s City Council encouraged and enabled this transition by changing zoning rules in such a way that the university could displace residents and seize homes and businesses in the name of “urban renewal,” a endeavor framed as being for the public good. All of these institutional changes can be summed up in the words of the architect of the university’s 1955 master plan who said “The squeeze of the slum area is becoming intolerable,” while calling to “Wipe the slate clean from the ground up.”
Local tensions inherently rose in response to Temple’s new development model. Aggravated residents called for a meeting with the university in 1969. During this session, Temple agreed to confine its future expansions to a 200-acre area. They also gave the city properties to use for public housing and acknowledged that over 7,000 residents had been purposefully displaced in the twenty years prior. Temple eventually went back on these agreements and expanded beyond the 200-acre area.
Another controversial piece of history within the campus-community interface was the construction of the Liacouras Center in 1998. Once again, Philadelphia’s City Council gave Temple permission to build as long as the university would agree to devote $5 million to improved housing for residents of the area, but once again Temple never followed through on this promise. Despite this, the Liacouras Center was built. Up until then, Broad Street informally represented the western boundary of the campus. By building on the other side of it, this construction symbolized further encroachment into community space. Construction of the center was also a key part of President Liacouras’s vision of “Templetown,” a rebranding of the surrounding area that would be intentionally exclusive of long-term residents. While the official designation of “Templetown” was recently removed from Google Maps labelling, a disregard for the community in Temple’s development model has continued into the 21st century.
Who This Issue is Important to and Why + Positive and Negative Impacts
In the context of North Philadelphia, the issues of developmental gentrification is important to 3 entities; Temple University (at both the institutional and individual level), private developers/landlords, and incumbent, non-student residents of the communities surrounding the university. In the case of the university and the incumbent residents, these entities also contain subgroups that are affected by the process of gentrification uniquely from each other. First, Temple University has 3 identifiable subgroups; the student body, faculty and staff, and the administration/institution.
Temple University: Students
Temple’s student body is a diverse one, racially, ethnically, culturally, and most importantly to us, in regards to where they come from to attend Temple. This wasn’t always the case though, as throughout most of its history, Temple’s student body was vastly comprised of either commuter students or students that had lived in the North Philadelphia area. This put very little pressure on the university or the surrounding area for student housing, a trend that would shift fairly quickly as Temple became a school predominantly consisting of resident students.
This change is continually exacerbated by the university’s financial imperative to expand their reach when it comes to recruiting students; recruiting either from elsewhere in the state, or more favorably for out of state students in order to get more tuition. This relative explosion in resident students and subsequently a need for student housing also coincided with a change in city owned land use in the surrounding neighborhoods which involved the city scrapping plans for affordable housing and opting to sell the land to the highest bidder in order to gain much needed revenue for the city.
Subsequently, with university encouragement, many private developers began buying up the land in order to capture the growing student housing market, in turn causing some existing landlords to rapidly increase rents in order to capitalize on students and their support systems’ ability to spend more on rent than working families already living in the neighborhood. This is where the double edged sword of gentrification leaves its mark. The influx of students with housing needs not met by the university itself not only caused longtime residents to be priced out of the neighborhood, but also for students to be paying somewhat inflated rent rates to often times irresponsible, opportunistic landlords or developers that are often from companies based in NYC and other out of state operations.
These developers often utilize cheap and fast construction methods and don’t provide as much maintenance support or large trash disposal options for tenants who are moving out, causing annual overflow of couches and mattresses onto the curbs. This angle of irresponsibility in the developers and landlords and its negative effect on students who need housing, as well as the fact that the university has done nothing to check these landlords while funneling student tenants to them, is one not often brought up in the discussion surrounding gentrification in North Philadelphia. However, it is one that would be helpful in getting student support on this issue, as good-quality and affordable housing is a platform everyone can get behind.
Resident students do reap some benefits of gentrification. These include increased housing options, luxury amenities afforded by the school, and an influx of retailers that cater to suburban tastes or align with “youth” culture. However, the negative impacts of high rents, shotty housing, negative community relations, higher tuition to pay for the university’s non-essential amenities, and less resources devoted to actual educational endeavors will be most effective in getting students to care about this issue and see their vested interest in stopping gentrification.
Private Developers and Landlords
The overarching model of neoliberal development is what has led private development to run rampant in North Philadelphia. Neoliberal development models are market-driven strategies that groom and commodify spaces for private investment and business ventures that attract upscale consumers. After redlining and urban disinvestment economically crippled urban areas, developers have swooped in and began to “revitalize” the same neighborhoods by buying cheap properties or land parcels, fixing them up, and selling or renting them at a profit. Overall, this neoliberal development model leads to gentrification that makes spaces economically attractive to investors who will benefit from spatial access to middle and upper class consumers of properties, retail, and other goods.
Private developers and landlords are the most obvious “winners” in the process of gentrification because they benefit financially from it, and they do not have to deal with the ramifications of their actions because they likely do not live in the area. The only negative impact of gentrification for them is community backlash. While a possibility to frame anti-gentrification as an opportunity for Temple exists, it is less likely that we would be able to get private developers and landlords on our side. From this front, it will be more of a fight. Private developers will be especially difficult to deal with because Temple has little to no control over their actions. That being said, Temple could be doing more to pressure these entities because an obvious relationship between Temple and off-campus housing projects exists.
Temple invites them to the housing fairs and has a referral list for off-campus housing options for students on their website. It is very unlikely that these entities would choose to relocate if Temple asked for more accountability from them. Lastly, there are large governmental and legal forces at play with this entity that complicate our ability to take action. City governments often benefit from private development because it stimulates economic growth and much-needed tax revenue. In this realm, support for specific policies, laws, fair taxing systems, and zoning rules that protect long-term residents and dedicate resources to public rather than private goods will be our best line of defense.
Non-Student Residents
Non-student residents are the population that is most obviously affected by gentrification in a negative way. First, there is the displacement component, in that residents are uprooted and spatially pushed out of their neighborhood. This displacement is most evident in the changes in racial demographics of Temple’s surrounding neighborhoods. In a Pew report on gentrification in Philadelphia it was found that the southern neighborhoods of Temple’s surrounding area were 1% white in 2000 and 96% African-American, whereas the demographics in 2014 were 38% white and 48% African-American. For the western neighborhoods, similar drastic changes can be seen in an increase from 8% white to 55% and a decrease in the African-American population from 88% to 36%. In the eastern neighborhoods, the population of white residents increased from 16% to 31% and the African-American population decreased from 64% to 41%. As an institution that prides itself on diversity and inclusion, these numbers point to a stark hypocrisy.
Incumbent residents that are not yet displaced also face a host of negative impacts that have been previously outlined such as increased rents/ home values, cultural and social exclusion, and high costs of living. Over the course of just six years (2010-2016), house values in the zipcodes surrounding Temple where many off-campus students now live, such as 19121 and 19122, have increased 15% or more. In 19122, the projected increase for 2018 is expected to be another 5.6%. Individual’s taxes may increase if their property value increases, making it financially more difficult for long-time homeowners to remain in the area. Higher property values may also encourage landlords to raise rents or seek tenants who are able to pay more, leading to the same issue of displacement for long-term residents.
While social/cultural exclusion of residents experiencing gentrification is more difficult to quantify, its impact is not to be ignored. Long-term neighborhood residents have built social ties and support systems that are usually recognized as a form of “social capital.” Social capital is extremely important for low-income individuals because it helps them attain their essential needs via people they can rely on when money is not available to pay for these needs, such as depending on a neighbor for child/eldercare or sharing of food resources.
When these networks are disrupted by gentrification and sociocultural exclusion, it has negative psychological effects at the level of the individual and a loss of community cohesion. Furthermore, culturally appropriate institutions and businesses make people feel that they “have a place” in the city. A sense of belonging has long been recognized as a psychological human need, as framed out in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The alienation caused by gentrification is bound to have negative psychological effects. It was even found in a New York city study that hospitalization rates for mental illness were two times higher in individuals that experienced displacement than those who remained in their neighborhood. In addition, displaced residents were more likely to make emergency room visits for drug or alcohol related issues.
There are some ways in which non-student residents may benefit from gentrification, such as increased attention, amenities, and resources devoted to their neighborhoods. Although they are not the intended beneficiaries, positive externalities of gentrification exist for them in the form of increased safety patrols and retail outlets. The most obvious example of this is a grocery store in what may have otherwise been a food desert. It can also be said that gentrification brings economic opportunities to residents by bringing in more places of employment. However, the aforementioned positive externalities can also paradoxically impact residents in a negative way.
For example, increased safety patrols can lead to residents being the target of increased policing and criminalization. Also, new retail markets may be out of their financial reach, or end up replacing the pre-existing affordable options. Lastly, newly created employment opportunities are oftentimes low-paying service sector jobs that do not pay enough to keep up with an increased costs of living. Furthermore, if residents are displaced, they will not even have the opportunity to reap benefits from the increased attention and resources their community is receiving.
