ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Long-established urban neighborhoods can thrive without gentrification — properties being upgraded by more affluent, often whiter, people who displace lower-income people — a recent study found.
- Neighborhoods with concentrated poverty disproportionately affect people of color
- There are eight indicators that show a neighborhood might achieve inclusive prosperity; lowering poverty rates while remaining ethnically diverse
- Jordan Heights in Allentown was used in the study as one neighborhood that achieved inclusive prosperity
The study came to that conclusion partly based on an Allentown neighborhood that did just that from 2000 to 2015.
The study is from Brookings, a leading American research group, and Common Good Labs, a data-driven research startup headed by Rohit Acharya and Rhett Morris.
And the neighborhood is center city Allentown's Jordan Heights.
While often not an active effort of any party, gentrification can be a force in displacing Black and Hispanic residents of an area.
The study's focus was neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, or U.S. Census tracts that had poverty rates of 30% or more.
“In total, one in 15 residents live in these neighborhoods [of concentrated poverty], which is about the same size of population as the entire state of New York or the entire state of Florida," Morris, one of the authors of the report, said. "So that's a lot of people.
"And one in eight Hispanic people and one in five Black folks live in these places. And that's concerning for a number of reasons.”
Acharya, the other author of the study, and Morris aggregated data from many sources over years to find neighborhoods with concentrated poverty across the nation that significantly reduced poverty rates without displacing the local community.
They found 193 that did so between 2000 and 2015.
One was Jordan Heights.
Indicators of success
The highlighted neighborhoods achieved what Acharya and Morris have coined “inclusive prosperity,” or the condition of having decreased poverty rates at least 10 percentage points while the largest ethnic group did not decline by more than 5 percentage points.
Those points occurred in neighborhoods with stable or growing populations with normal-to-high resident retention.
What that means is that many of the same people were living there, and those who moved were replaced by demographically similar people, yet things still got better.
There were eight factors that Morris and Acharya found that were present in 2000 that could point to the positive changes being present in 2015.
The first three are external indicators: positive economic growth, relatively low homicide rates and a low risk of displacement in the surrounding areas. Morris explained those factors were what they deemed “necessary but not sufficient” for inclusive prosperity to happen.
The internal factors: higher home ownership, lower residential vacancy levels, increased housing density, greater self-employment and the presence of community-building organizations, were deemed “powerful in many different combinations.”
The more of those internal factors that were present, the more poverty was diminished, on average.
“What we want to emphasize is, none of these factors by themselves are what we would call a silver bullet or a panacea,” Morris said.
“It's rather when they come together and are found in combination that they seem to be strong enough to bring about the sorts of positive change we want to see.”
An Allentown example
Jordan Heights generally stretches from Tilghman Street to Linden Street and from Jordan Creek to past N. 7th Street, though the study used a U.S. Census tract within Jordan Heights, on the southeastern side.
That neighborhood had five of the indicators of inclusive prosperity in the year 2000: the three essential external factors as well as greater self-employment and the presence of community-building organizations.
“What's interesting is the way we assessed homeownership and vacancy in comparison to the rest of the area around it," Morris said. "And actually, relative to the nation as a whole, [Jordan Heights] actually had pretty high home ownership rates. It's just relative to the metropolitan area that is located in" that it didn’t achieve that indicator.
Jordan Heights moved from a poverty rate of 51% in 2000 to one of just 33% in 2015, and Morris said it seems to have stayed stable up to about 2020, as well.
However, it still qualifies as a neighborhood with concentrated poverty.
The overall population numbers were largely the same in 2000 and 2015, and the proportion of the population that is Hispanic and Black grew in that period, as well.
“As is the case, in many places in the country, local incomes increase, but they do not increase as much as the home values," Morris said. "So the incomes are not keeping pace, necessarily, with the cost of buying a home in this region.”
In addition to the eight formal indicators that Acharya and Morris identified in the study, Morris noted other things that many of the 193 neighborhoods had in common.
He pointed out the St. Luke’s Hospital campus on a map of the area around Jordan Heights.
“One of the things that we're seeing as we dig further into these sorts of neighborhoods is that they are often adjacent to hospital campuses … and community colleges,” Morris said.
“There does seem to be a little bit of a pattern there, which is what we certainly plan to look into the next round of research.”
Morris said the next step is focused on effecting change, rather than just documenting it.
“We are looking for a small number of local cities or regions who are interested in participating in a pilot program with us to use the tools of data science to identify ways to improve the indicators of inclusive prosperity in their neighborhoods,” Morris said.
