Does Gentrification Displace Poor Children? New Evidence from New York City Medicaid Data

Kacie Dragan, Ingrid Ellen and Sherry A. Glied

No 25809, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The pace of gentrification has accelerated in cities across the country since 2000, and many observers fear it is displacing low-income populations from their homes and communities. We offer new evidence about the consequences of gentrification on mobility, building and neighborhood conditions, using longitudinal New York City Medicaid records from January 2009 to December 2015 to track the movement of a cohort of low-income children over seven years, during a period of rapid gentrification in the city. We leverage building-level data to examine children in market rate housing separately from those in subsidized housing. We find no evidence that gentrification is associated with meaningful changes in mobility rates over the seven-year period. It is associated with slightly longer distance moves. As for changes in neighborhood conditions, we find that children who start out in a gentrifying area experience larger improvements in some aspects of their residential environment than their counterparts who start out in persistently low-socioeconomic status areas. This effect is driven by families who stay in neighborhoods as they gentrify; we observe few differences in the characteristics of destination neighborhoods among families who move, though we find modest evidence that children moving from gentrifying areas move to lower-quality buildings.

JEL-codes: J6 R31 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ure
Note: CH EH PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published as Kacie Dragan & Ingrid Gould Ellen & Sherry Glied, 2019. "Does gentrification displace poor children and their families? new evidence from medicaid data in New York City," Regional Science and Urban Economics, .

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25809.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25809

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25809

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().