The Most Gentrified Cities In America

The Cleveland Fed today released a study of gentrification patterns and the effect of gentrification on residents' financial health.

Daniel Hartley, the author of the study, defines a neighborhood as gentrifying "if it is located in the central city of a metropolitan area and it goes from being in the bottom half of the distribution of home prices in the metropolitan area to the top half between 2000 and 2007", noting that housing prices are a good overall reflection of the economic health of a neighborhood.

"Though all cities experienced some gentrification, most saw less than a third of neighborhoods with the potential to gentrify do so," wrote Hartley.

"Four cities saw significant shares of the neighborhoods that could gentrify, do so: Boston (61 percent), Seattle (55 percent), New York (46 percent), and San Francisco (42 percent). In Boston, the gentrifying neighborhoods represented about a fourth of the entire city's population. In other cities, the proportion was much smaller."

Below is a list of U.S. metros in order of percentage of a city's low-price tracts that gentrified (third column).

Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA)	Proportion of low-price census tracts in the city (those with below-median MSA home value), percent	Proportion of the city's low-price tracts that gentrified, percent	Proportion of the city's total number of tracts that gentrified, percent
Boston	43	61	26
Seattle	17	55	9
New York City	40	46	18
San Francisco	31	42	13
Washington, DC	55	35	19
Atlanta	59	31	18
Chicago	57	28	16
Portland	48	28	13
Tampa	73	24	18
Los Angeles	51	23	12
Denver	52	23	12
Virginia Beach	31	23	7
Minneapolis	71	22	16
New Orleans	59	20	12
Austin	51	19	10
Jacksonville	61	17	10
Nashville	58	16	9
St. Louis	84	16	13
Anchorage	50	15	7
Honolulu	28	15	4
Las Vegas	53	15	8
Colorado Springs	48	14	7
Philadelphia	81	14	11
Albuquerque	47	13	6
Houston	55	13	7
Miami	62	12	8
Cincinnati	72	12	9
Fresno	57	11	6
Tucson	67	11	7
Charlotte	40	11	4
Phoenix	64	10	7
San Diego	46	10	5
Columbus	65	9	6
Indianapolis	60	8	5
Kansas City	68	8	6
Corpus Christi	45	8	4
Sacramento	64	8	5
Milwaukee	83	7	6
Pittsburgh	73	7	5
Dallas	52	7	4
Memphis	62	7	4
San Antonio	58	7	4
Lexington	52	7	3
Cleveland	93	7	6
Oklahoma City	55	7	4
Buffalo	78	6	5
El Paso	46	6	3
Omaha	54	6	3
Raleigh	35	4	2
Toledo	72	4	3
Wichita	57	4	2
Oakland	83	3	3
Baltimore	95	3	3
Tulsa	53	3	2
Detroit	94	3	2

The following map, based on the data in the study, shows the cities with the largest percentage of their gentrifiable neighborhoods actually gentrifying: