Commentary: 21st Century Gentrification

Lance M. Freeman
Columbia University

The papers presented at the Research Symposium on Gentrification and Neighborhood Change, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 25, 2016, are indicative of a sea change in gentrification scholarship. In this commentary, I place the research presented at the research symposium and in the Symposium section of this issue of Cityscape into the context of earlier research on gentrification. In doing so, I aim to show how this scholarship complements our understanding of the process of gentrification and to also show how current efforts might be informed by understanding past scholarship.