What Drives Displacement? Involuntary Mobility and the Faces of Gentrification

Recent quantitative studies on the relationship between gentrification and residential displacement have produced inconsistent findings. We examine whether these differences may be attributed to variation in the conceptualization and measurement of gentrification by testing a variety of different operational definitions of gentrification while holding data sources and other methodological decisions fixed. We treat gentrification as a family of related phenomena, estimate a family of operational measures of gentrification from Census data, and, for each measure in the family, test the association between gentrification and displacement in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find that several relationships between gentrification and residential displacement are robust to the choice of measure from the family of gentrification measures we consider. In particular, we find no evidence that gentrification increases the probability of displacement for renters or homeowners, regardless of how gentrification is defined and operationalized. However, consistent with recent studies of particular metro areas, we find evidence that homeowners who live in gentrifying neighborhoods are less likely to be displaced than homeowners in comparable neighborhoods that are not gentrifying

Tax policy and tax protest in 20 rich democracies, 1980-2010.

Why are some policies protested more than others? New data on protest against eight categories of taxation in twenty rich democracies from 1980 to 2010 reveal that economically and socially concentrated taxes are protested most, whereas taxes that confer entitlement to benefits are protested least. Other features of policy design often thought to affect the salience or visibility of costs are unimportant for explaining the frequency of protest. These findings overturn a folk theory that political sociology has inherited from classical political economy; clarify the conditions under which policy threats provoke protest; and shed light on how welfare states persist