Housing Forum: Gentrification in the Twin Cities – Fact or Fiction?

Friday, November 18, 2016
1:00pm – 2:30pm
Room L-110 (Honeywell Auditorium)
Carlson School of Management
321 19th Avenue S
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Register now.Gentrification, the process where once neglected inner city locales experience a spur in investment and a drastic shift in its residential characteristics, is one of the most important urban issues of our time. For many, this implies that long-term, low-income residents are displaced by higher-income residents, ensuring that the historic residents are unable to directly benefit from large-scale reinvestment.

Questions about gentrification in our region are being asked almost on a daily basis. It’s influencing advocacy efforts in neighborhoods and being discussed by our elected officials.

Questions animating the discussions include:

• “What is gentrification?”
• “Is it happening in our neighborhoods?”
• “Is it good or bad?”
• “What should we do about it?”

For the past year CURA has been doing research to help answer some of these questions. Using qualitative and quantitative methods we are both engaging with other scholarly work in this area to determine what kind of neighborhood change is happening or could happen, and we’re interviewing neighborhood leaders, elected officials, and staff at the Cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis to examine how people are experiencing neighborhood change.

Our research suggests that at the neighborhood level, the effects of gentrification are much more nuanced than any generalizable definition. While our research is not complete, we’re far enough along we wanted to share what we’ve learned thus far.

Join us for a CURA Housing Forum on November 18 where we’ll share our findings to date and engage in critical discussion around this important issue in our region.

Register now.