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Before displacement: studentification, campus-led gentrification and rental market transformation in a multiethnic neighborhood (Parc-Extension, Montréal)
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This article explores a case of campus-led neighborhood change that weaves together an analysis of gentrification, studentification and displacement. Contributing to the understanding of displacement pressure, this empirical study employs a temporal perspective and an innovative mixed method that captures the shifting state of the rental market and the perceptions of neighborhood change as understood by immigrant and low-income residents of Parc-Extension. We analyze how studentification is promoted in a campus-led gentrification case study, showing how both gentrification and studentification participate in the rise of evictions and displacement pressures for long term residents. By documenting the residential experience in rental housing through semi-structured interviews and data mining of rental listings on a popular platform in Canada (Kijiji), we propose an empirical perspective on displacement pressure and contribute to the development of this concept in gentrification and studentification studies. The article begins by reviewing the literature on gentrification-induced displacement, displacement pressure, state-led gentrification and studentification. This is followed by contextualizing our Montréal case study. We then outline our mixed methodologies and explain our data collection by web-scraping and fieldwork modalities. Finally, we discuss our results showing how the mechanism of displacement pressure can be linked with studentification and new-build, campus-led gentrification.
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... Ainsi, à partir des décennies 1990-2000, de nombreuses municipalités voient dans les espaces industriels délaissés des terrains propices au développement de grands projets urbains devant contribuer à la création de valeur (Harvey, 1989 ;Kipfer et Keil, 2002). Alors que le passage à la ville post-industrielle laisse, aux marges des espaces péricentraux, des friches enclavées et polluées bordant des quartiers d'habitat ouvrier et immigrant dégradés (Lo, 2011 ;Jolivet et al., 2022), les schémas de développement métropolitain favorisent leur redéveloppement, les autorités publiques profitant de ces espaces vacants pour implanter de nouvelles infrastructures ouvrant l'ère de la ville dite « créative », verte et numérique. Ces espaces liminaux que nous nommons « péricentraux », autrefois proches banlieues (inner suburbs) et aujourd'hui totalement intégrés au noyau urbain (urban core), deviennent alors la nouvelle « frontière » urbaine (Smith, 1996) des opérations orchestrées par la municipalité. ...
... 39 En ne prenant pas les mesures nécessaires à la mitigation des retombées socioéconomiques de l'arrivée du nouveau campus et en évitant de consulter la population locale du côté de Parc-Extension, la municipalité et l'université, sans l'avouer, contribuent à la transformation de Parc-Extension comme nouveau territoire de la spéculation immobilière et donc à la gentrification comme projet. Si ce nouveau projet urbain qui permet la réurbanisation d'espaces « vides » ne déplace pas directement les résidents, il provoque en réalité diverses formes de déplacements indirects, via la hausse des prix locatifs, mais aussi des formes de dépossession culturelle et symbolique de leurs territoires pour les résidents avec l'arrivée massive d'étudiants et de jeunes diplômés dans le quartier (PEAMP, 2020 ;Jolivet et al., 2022). 40 Une troisième consultation publique marquant les quinze ans du projet, dont le rapport est paru en mars 2022, montre que les nouvelles phases de développement prévues sur la parcelle du MIL (une école et un nouveau pavillon de l'UdeM notamment) ne sont pas l'objet des requêtes des citoyens et organismes communautaires qui ont déposé des mémoires à l'office de consultation publique en vue de la constitution de ce rapport. ...
... figures 2 et 3 à gauche). L'implantation du MIL, tout comme la création de nouveaux condominiums lors de la phase 2 de la mise en oeuvre du projet, agit comme une véritable revalorisation de la rente de situation pour les propriétés alentour et réduit le risque pour les promoteurs d'investir dans un secteur comme Parc-Extension(Jolivet et al., 2022). ...
This paper focuses on the impacts of major urban projects developed in traditionally working-class and immigrant inner suburbs of Montreal. Through the example of the MIL campus project, which is part of a revitalisation and international marketing plan, the objective is to show how the development of new green and creative spaces on former industrial brownfields accelerates gentrification. Our argument is that gentrification is seen as a “project” driven by public funding and policies. The paper begins by contextualising pericentral spaces, showing how they have shifted from ‘“in-between” and disinvested spaces in the 1970s and 80s to new metropolitan centralities in Montreal. The paper then examines the role of different public actors in the implementation of this urban revitalisation project and demonstrates how the MIL project accelerates the gentrification of pericentral immigrant neighborhoods such as Parc-Extension. Then, the role of the university as a public actor is questioned in this specific case study around the implementation of the new campus. Finally, the paper demonstrates how the principles of sustainable urbanism and the creative city, widely promoted by public actors, contribute to the legitimisation of gentrification by public policies.
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This paper develops the neologism state subsidy gap to underscore the necessity of state intervention in the formation and potential closure of rent gaps. The state subsidy gap is the economic gap that must be bridged by the state to make a currently unviable urban investment scenario potentially profitable for private developers. The pertinence of this conception is particularly apparent in old industrial, relatively impoverished cities where global capital is less likely to dump its surpluses with secure expectation of profitable returns. The issue is exacerbated in economically risky neighbourhoods encompassing fragmented land ownership, poor infrastructure and large-scale areas of urban devalorisation. Such conditions necessitate substantial derisking public intervention if ‘market failure’ is to be addressed—yet success is never guaranteed and is far from universal. It is argued that much closer attention to the stalling, interruption or failure of urban regeneration projects is imperative given the extent of public expenditure and the limited social outcomes arising from attempts to correct market failure. Here, the concept of the state subsidy gap shows its value, shedding light on unjust social outcomes, exposing capitalism’s inherent vulnerabilities, and illustrating the dependence of private capital on public interventions for its reproduction.
This paper is an investigation into the psychological aspects of displacement, where displacement is understood as a form of un-homing that severs the connection between people and place. Extending the human-geographical discussion begun by Mark Davidson and Rowland Atkinson on the possibility of being displaced while staying put, I argue that words and narratives – here exemplified by the Swedish (neo-classical) economic discourse on market rents – can displace people, and that this particular kind of un-homing is best understood as alienation. A theoretical underpinning is psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe’s work on identity and language and on the effects of neoliberal political economy on our psychological well-being. I analyze texts by and interviews with economists arguing for the abolishment of the ‘rent regulation system’ and find that their use of the terms ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ frames (current) tenants as undeserving and in the way. Economists encourage displacement (of people who lack the means to pay market rents), they gentrify with their words. By being told they are a ‘welfare loss’, tenants with affordable housing in attractive parts of the city are pushed to become critical on-lookers onto themselves, thereby dis-placed from the spontaneous act of dwelling and alienated from their original insideness. A larger conclusion is that the famous economist Milton Friedman was right: neo-classical economic theory, and homo neoliberalismus, in particular, does not respect geography. This disrespect, I explain, should be interpreted as a philosophical negligence towards human situatedness in place, and as an ethical carelessness towards people’s need for home.
This paper presents a study about studentification in the medium-sized university town of Goettingen, Germany. While many studentification studies focus on the transformation of owner-occupied houses into houses of multiple occupation, this study is about displacement in the rental housing market. I argue that within this context, the displacement of marginalised social groups takes place through rental prices and private landlords’ preferences for students of higher education. Hence, I focus on how landlords extract high rents from their property without making serious investments and investigate landlords’ strategies for increasing their return on investment via higher education student tenants. I explain their strategies, grounding this research in semi-structured interviews with landlords, property managers and real estate agents, complemented by statistical data. I show that different rental strategies landlords apply lead to the separation of different social groups. Hence, this paper argues that the strategies of landlords have an important impact on urban segregation and urban development in cities. Therefore, a deeper investigation of these strategies would help us achieve a better understanding of how the process of studentification proceeds and how displacement takes place.
As the rental housing market moves online, the internet offers divergent possible futures: either the promise of more-equal access to information for previously marginalized homeseekers, or a reproduction of longstanding information inequalities. Biases in online listings’ representativeness could impact different communities’ access to housing search information, reinforcing traditional information segregation patterns through a digital divide. They could also circumscribe housing practitioners’ and researchers’ ability to draw broad market insights from listings to understand rental supply and affordability. This study examines millions of Craigslist rental listings across the USA and finds that they spatially concentrate and overrepresent whiter, wealthier, and better-educated communities. Other significant demographic differences exist in age, language, college enrollment, rent, poverty rate, and household size. Most cities’ online housing markets are digitally segregated by race and class, and we discuss various implications for residential mobility, community legibility, gentrification, housing voucher utilization, and automated monitoring and analytics in the smart cities paradigm. While Craigslist contains valuable crowdsourced data to better understand affordability and available rental supply in real time, it does not evenly represent all market segments. The internet promises information democratization, and online listings can reduce housing search costs and increase choice sets. However, technology access/preferences and information channel segregation can concentrate such information-broadcasting benefits in already-advantaged communities, reproducing traditional inequalities and reinforcing residential sorting and segregation dynamics. Technology platforms like Craigslist construct new institutions with the power to shape spatial economies, human interactions, and planners’ ability to monitor and respond to urban challenges.
The last two decades have witnessed a growing trend towards transit-oriented development (TOD) as a critical approach for achieving sustainable mobility. However, some analysts and community activists have expressed concerns that TOD could induce gentrification and potential concomitant low-income group displacements. This paper presents a systematic review of 35 quantitative research-based studies presenting evidence on gentrification outcomes resulting from transit-based interventions, published between 2000 and 2018. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic review on this topic and thus provides a useful synthesis of current empirical evidence on transit-induced gentrification. Although there is some evidence supporting the transit-induced gentrification hypothesis, methodological flaws render many of the studies' conclusions highly questionable. The findings suggest that gentrification is more closely associated with existing local dynamics, built environment attributes, and accompanying policies than transit-oriented development. In its critical analysis of research approaches, this paper warns that the incorporation of several sources of bias into study designs may engender a number of misinterpretations, thus ultimately leading to misguided conclusions and policies.
Studentification—the concentration of students within a particular neighbourhood and associated impacts—represents a “generationed” or age‐segregated housing submarket defined by a distinct life course stage. I analyse this submarket through the lens of David Harvey’s concept of class monopoly rent, a critical theory of residential submarkets, drawing on semi‐structured interviews with key informants and students in Waterloo—Canada’s largest private purpose‐built student accommodation market. Planning interventions, real estate strategies, and neighbourhood politics have intertwined to enable the extraction of class monopoly rent from a clearly delineated student housing submarket. I show how studentification, and the age segregation it entails, is produced by and serves to reproduce capitalist urbanisation, illustrating temporal power dynamics of rent. A radical political response to the impacts of studentification on students and other residents alike must therefore adopt an intergenerational perspective that confronts class and life course dimensions of the process simultaneously.
Over the past two decades, gentrification scholarship has expanded to include larger and more diverse processes. At the same time, definitions of residential displacement have expanded from direct economic and physical displacement to include indirect price shadowing and the loss of a sense of place. These developments have complicated how scholars understand the relationship between gentrification and displacement, particularly as they apply to diverse gentrification processes. The paper uses metropolitan-scale redevelopment in Seoul and its attendant displacement patterns to interrogate this relationship. Analyses of the regulatory regimes, agents of change, and social geographies of redevelopment are combined with survey and interview data from displaced residents to demonstrate the relationship between metropolitan-scale redevelopment and the process of repeat and chronic displacement in Seoul. To more effectively conceptualize gentrification’s displacement impacts, more attention must be paid to investigating the complex relationship between varying development processes and the displacement they engender.
Social mix policies have emerged as a prominent mechanism to legitimate
neighbourhood redevelopment efforts across the US. Despite integrationist rhetoric,
results often disabuse marginalised communities of their claims to the city. This paper
employs a hybrid spatio-temporal analysis at the intersection of political-economic theories
of gentrification and post-colonial and Black geographies literatures to examine
underlying cultural logics and affective experiences animating such processes of neighbourhood
transformation, contestation, and succession. Reflecting on 15 years of experience
researching Over-the-Rhine (OTR), Cincinnati, we contribute a stylised distinction
between the foundational, mature, and ongoing legacies of urban settler colonial relations.
Our account discloses the power geometries shaping neighbourhood space by
illustrating the impact of the discourses, tactics, and strategies employed by pro-development actors and neighbourhood activists as OTR’s socio-political landscape shifted
over time. In conclusion, we engage the thorny questions these dynamics raise surrounding
how inner-city neighbourhoods are theorised and struggled over after gentrification.
Studies of the connections between urban geographies and studentification have an international signature across continents. Yet, the transformative effects of student populations in China are under-stated within theorizations of urban change, despite unprecedented demands for student housing. In this paper, we explore neighborhood change in Haidianlu within Beijing. With an original focus on off- and on-campus student accommodation, we show that studentification processes are fueled by predilections to live off–campus and the production of student-oriented housing. The significance of our discussion is to assert that less-regulated student lifestyles are reinforcing urban geographies of socio-spatial segregation and are illustrative of the effects of the privatization of housing and land markets in China. The concept of studentification is pivotal to theorize how cross-cutting relations between the expansion of higher education and marketization of housing markets are reshaping Chinese cities to become more exclusionary, and comparative to other geographies of global studentification.