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Title: Neighborhood Change, Gentrification, and the Urbanization of College Graduates
Citation Type: Journal Article
Publication Year: 2023
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Abstract: There has been a striking reversal in where college graduates choose to live within the largest US cities. For most of the twentieth century, Americans who could afford it moved to the suburbs. At some point after 1980, college graduates started moving back downtown. This urban revival intensified at the turn of the twenty-first century, even as the suburbanization of the US population as a whole continued unabated. Accelerating inflows of college graduates transformed downtown neighborhoods in almost all large US cities, raising policy concerns over housing affordability in gentrifying areas. The share of downtown residents with a college degree rose threefold between 1980 and 2017, from 15 to 45 percent, and downtown areas reverted from being the least-educated to being the most-educated areas of US cities. This gentrification of the United States’s downtown areas had a strong age and racial bias. Over the last few decades, college graduates who are young and white experienced much larger changes in their propensity to live downtown than any other demographic group. Now, in the post-pandemic era, there are early signs of renewed suburban attractiveness and there may be yet another reversal in college graduates’ location choices. In this article, we discuss these changes in where the college-educated choose to live within cities and their consequences.
Url: https://www.aeaweb.org/full_issue.php?doi=10.1257/jep.37.2#page=31
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Authors: Couture, Ray; Handbury, Jessie
Periodical (Full): Journal of Economic Perspectives
Issue: 2
Volume: 37
Pages: 29-52
Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS
Topics: Education, Housing and Segregation
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