A quick look at gentrification in Philadelphia

The topic of gentrification and its’ effects on neighborhoods is the source of many hot topic debates.  The definition of the term is self is not even agreed upon.  The Oxford dictionary defines gentrification as the process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, typically displacing current inhabitants in the process. You can another definition from many anti-displacement activists that define gentrification as a profit-driven, race, and class change of a historically disinvested neighborhood.

The topic is made only more confusing by terms like “Neighborhood Revitalization”.  Gentrification and Neighborhood Revitalization: What is the difference?  It turns out a lot.  I however do not want to wade into this aspect of gentrification.  I wanted to look at the how gentrification is measured. 

In economics gentrification is measure use four variables:

1. Median household income

2. Percent of residents with a college degree or higher

3. Gross rent

4. Home value

I simply wanted to look at the number of buildings in an area and the rate of demolition and new development by neighborhood over time to see what areas of Philadelphia were being developed.  This process obviously would not be a perfect local measure, nor would it measure all aspects of the gentrification process, but I thought it would be a fun project.

Here are some of the interesting facts I found during this project:

1. There are a total of 564,552 land plots in Philadelphia.

2. For this project I only was looking at buildings zoned as: Residential, Residential Low Density, Residential Medium Density, Residential High Density, Commercial, Commercial Consumer, Commercial Business and Professional, Commercial Mixed Residential.  That came to 506,796 buildings.

3. The number of buildings demolished between 2017 and 2022 in Philadelphia is 12,338.

4. There are 157 neighborhoods in Philadelphia.  158 if you count the shared neighborhood between East Falls and Paradise.

Each dot on the map represents a building that has been demolished.  The color of the dot is used to group the buildings by neighborhood. The color of the neighborhood itself represents the percentage of buildings that has been demolished ranging from white, representing less than 1%, to dark blue, representing 10% or higher.

Each black square on the map will tell you the name of the neighborhood, the total number of buildings within that neighborhood that meets the criterial I outlined above, the number of building that have been demolished in that neighborhood between 2017 and 2022, and the percentage of change that number represents for each neighborhood.

Using this you can compare neighborhoods quickly to see which neighborhood is experiencing more change over the 5 year period.  For example you can see in the image above that the Sharswood neighborhood has experienced over 20% change in all of its buildings while in Spring Garden area only 2% of the buildings has changed. 

If you want to see the full sized image (83Mb) you can download it here: DOWN LOAD IMAGE.

REFERENCES

1. Building demolitions - datasets - opendataphilly. (n.d.). Retrieved October 11, 2022, from https://www.opendataphilly.org/dataset/building-demolitions

2. Land use. OpenDataPhilly. (2014, December 8). Retrieved October 11, 2022, from https://www.opendataphilly.org/dataset/land-use

3. Philadelphia neighborhoods. OpenDataPhilly. (2014, December 8). Retrieved October 11, 2022, from https://www.opendataphilly.org/dataset/philadelphia-neighborhoods