Research Questions:
Where is neighborhood change happening in NYC?
How is neighborhood change distributed throughout NYC?
What variables contribute the most to neighborhood change?

Defining Neighborhood Change

This phenomenon has been studied for almost six decades. In 1964, sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term ‘gentrification’ and she defined it as: ‘the invasion of working class neighborhoods by the middle class until almost all of the working class residents have been displaced’ (Glass, 1964).

Since then, the concept has been complemented and further developed to vary depending on the stage of neighborhood transformation (Melchert and Naroff, 1987), the population involved (Owens 2010) or even the location of the neighborhood within the city as a whole (Van Criekingen, 2003).

Furthermore, other authors have explored neighborhood change not only as a change in population but also as a change in the built environment and the economic dynamics of the neighborhood (Preis et al., 2021).

For this study, we considered neighborhood change as any significant variation in the neighborhood composition. The analysis has been carried out following the methodology presented below for an analysis of the neighborhood change between 2010 and 2019. We used census tract boundaries as an approximate spatial unit of the neighborhood.