10 US Cities Where Gentrification Is Happening the Fastest

It has been playing out across the country — urban areas once occupied mostly by African-Americans are being reinvented with overpriced housing and businesses that welcome affluent White citizens and displace Black people who had made the neighborhoods their homes for generations. Governing, an organization that examines America’s neighborhoods, recently analyzed census tract data to determine where gentrification is taking hold the fastest. Here are the top 10. Portland, Oregon Once the heart of Portland’s African-American community, Northeast Portland is now actually only one-fourth Black, down from 75 percent in 1990, according to portlandpulse.org. Washington, D.C. Here’s an example of just how drastically some of these D.C. neighborhoods have changed. Census tract 87.01 — which covers much of Eckington between North Capitol Street NE and 2nd Street NE bound by Rhode Island and Florida avenues NE — had a median home value of $414,100 in 2013, according to The Washington Post. That represents a 158 percent increase, after inflation, from the median home value in 2000. In 2000, only 20.6 percent of adults in that portion of Eckington had a college degree. In 2013, 38.1 percent did. Minneapolis Incomes are rising in Minneapolis neighborhoods at a faster pace than the city’s suburbs, according to an analysis of census data by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. The shift toward higher-income neighborhoods in the city has been more dramatic after the recession than in any U.S. metropolitan area other than Portland, Oregon. Seattle The beloved art-house cinema Harvard Exit in the Capital Hill section of Seattle is closing, sold off to a developer to make way for high-income housing. Protests are popping up, big and small, out of concern over the drastic neighborhood changes. Atlanta The Black population, once at 54 percent, is expected to drop below half that number in coming years based on the influx of whites into the city and Blacks leaving the city, according to IdentityMic, which executed a study on cities "radically altered" by gentrification. Virginia Beach, Virginia The building of the Virginia Beach Town Center, which features high-rent apartments, shops and restaurants, is just one sign of the changing dynamics for the city's residents. Denver Property values and rents have increased faster than wages, putting the new downtown apartments and the existing housing stock out of reach of the working class. And that, Mayor Michael Hancock said on the radio show "Colorado Matters," is threatening the city’s very identity. “The vibrancy of this city is to have a diversity of residents,” Hancock said. “We don’t want to ever be known as a city of just those who have.” Austin, Texas City records show that by 1932, the entire Black population of Austin had been moved to what was dubbed the “Negro District.” Now, that neighborhood is quickly being transformed, with 40 percent whites and more than 40 percent Latinos now occupying the area that has priced-out the original Black occupants. Sacramento, California The Oak Park section of Sacramento, historically all-Black, has undergone a dramatic redevelopment that has increased home sales by 10 percent in the last year, an arc that is a concern for longtime residents who have been or fear being priced out of the neighborhood. New York Filmmaker Spike Lee, in a rant that went viral on the Internet last year, summed up how gentrification has changed parts of Brooklyn and Harlem, places Blacks called home that are now populated with Caucasian families walking dogs or pushing baby carriages. In an epic take, Lee said, among other things: "They just move in the neighborhood. You just can’t come in the neighborhood. I’m for democracy and letting everybody live, but you gotta have some respect. You can’t just come in when people have a culture that’s been laid down for generations and you come in and now s**t gotta change because you’re here? Get the f**k outta here. Can’t do that!"

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