Municipal Expenditure in New York City and Gentrification
I spent a semester in undergrad (Fall 2014) working on an econcomics research project, trying to review ostensible gentrification in New York City, and any reaction in the cities budget. A common theme of those decrying gentrification is that poor, underclass communities are underserved by the municipal government, while gentrifying neighborhoods experience reinvestment. I took sanitation expenditure as my metric for city investment, and identified how it changed over time along with common indicators of gentrification - primarily rising home ownership, declining median age, and rising median income.
Overall, I did not find evidence of city preference for sanitation expenditure due to the primary gentrification indicators, but did find changes according to city zoning characteristics.
For a deeper look please review the paper itself.
andrew Follmann
thanks for reading!