Urban Gentrification and Community Displacement: Measuring Social Capital Loss

Abstract

Urban gentrification—the process by which low-income or working-class urban neighborhoods are transformed through the influx of higher-income residents, rising property values, and displacement of existing inhabitants—has been a central topic in urban sociology since Ruth Glass coined the term in 1964. Contemporary gentrification research has moved beyond documenting the phenomenon to analyzing its welfare effects on displaced and remaining residents, with particular attention to the destruction of neighborhood social capital. This paper argues that conventional measures of gentrification’s costs—displacement counts, rent burdens, and poverty exposure—substantially underestimate the welfare impact because they fail to account for the destruction of dense social networks, mutual aid systems, and collective efficacy that long-term residents have built over decades. Drawing on Sampson’s (2012) neighborhood effects framework and Coleman’s (1988) social capital theory, we develop a measurement framework for social capital loss from gentrification and review evidence from qualitative and network analysis studies in Chicago, New York, and London.