A new study challenges the notion that Detroit is rapidly gentrifying and even that gentrification is as harmful as many believe.

Indeed, the analysis by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia is one of several lately that see more positives than negatives in the changing nature of many urban neighborhoods.

The findings are undoubtedly controversial at a time when many cities are debating the impact of neighborhood change.

“Concern that gentrification displaces or otherwise harms original neighborhood residents has featured prominently in the rise of urban NIMBYism and the return of rent control as a major policy option,” authors Quentin Brummet and Davin Reed write in their study titled “The Effects of Gentrification on the Well-Being and Opportunity of Original Resident Adults and Children.”

But, they continue, “Overall, we find that many original residents, including the most disadvantaged, are able to remain in gentrifying neighborhoods and share in any neighborhood improvements. Perhaps most importantly, low-income neighborhoods that gentrify appear to improve along a number of dimensions known to be correlated with opportunity, and many children are able to remain in these neighborhoods.”

In a finding that many Detroiters may find surprising, the authors say that Detroit has hardly gentrified at all so far. Of the 1,000 census tracts around the country that have gentrified the most, only two are in Detroit, both in the Midtown area, as measured by the influx of college-educated adults. That’s less than 1% of the potential census tracts in Detroit.

The contrast with several other major cities is stark, Reed said in a phone conversation.

“It’s not saying that change isn’t happening in more than two places in Detroit,” Reed said in a phone interview. “It’s saying it’s not happening at the same scale that it’s occurring in D.C. or Portland or Seattle. Certainly, people can be concerned about what’s changing Detroit but it’s just not at the same scale as it’s happening elsewhere.”

Specific findings

First, the authors found that when neighborhoods gentrify, they improve in many ways known to be beneficial for children, such as seeing lower poverty rates and better schools. And they found that many original resident children, including the least advantaged, are able to stay and benefit from those changes.

Some of the long-resident children are even more likely to attend and complete college, they found.

Next, the study disputes the idea that large numbers of people are displaced during the gentrification process.

“The results for children and adults show that many original residents are able to remain in gentrifying neighborhoods and share in any neighborhood improvements,” the authors write.

And while some people are displaced, the actual number is far less than the number who would have moved anyway given the natural flow as people move in and out.

“Gentrification increases out-migration to any other neighborhood by 4 to 6 percentage points for less-educated renters and by slightly less for other groups,” the study found. “However, these effects are somewhat modest relative to baseline cross-neighborhood migration rates of 70% to 80% for renters and 40% for homeowners.”

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And even those displaced fare better than often believed, the study found.

“Importantly, we find no evidence that movers from gentrifying neighborhoods, including the most disadvantaged residents, move to observably worse neighborhoods or experience negative changes to employment, income, or commuting distance.”

Familiar findings

This is hardly the first study to find that the dangers of gentrification have been overstated, especially in Detroit. The 2015 “Gentrification in America” study by Governing magazine looked at census tracts in the nation’s 50 largest cities to see whether home prices and education levels had risen significantly between 2009 and 2013.

The study found that Portland, Oregon, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis and Seattle were all hotbeds of gentrification, places where at least 50% of their census tracts had shown dramatic changes in home values and education levels. But Detroit ranked near the bottom, along with El Paso, Texas, and Las Vegas.

Of almost 300 census tracts in Detroit, only seven had gentrified between 2009 and 2013 — just 2.8%, among the lowest of any U.S. city studied in the 2015 analysis.

And tellingly, even those seven tracts in Detroit, widely scattered through the city, all showed population loss during the study period. The seven gentrifying districts had gone upscale in terms of education and home values but had lost ground in other ways.

This is not to suggest that cities like Detroit don't suffer from many urban ills. But Alan Mallach, a noted urban planning expert, writes in his recent book “The Divided City” (Island Press, 344 pages, $30) that gentrification in a few neighborhoods obscures the real problem — concentrated poverty and unemployment in neighborhoods that never gentrify.

"Gentrification may be happening in a few corners of Detroit, but the big story in that city — even if it doesn't get the attention it deserves — is the persistence of concentrated, debilitating poverty and the decline of once-healthy, vital neighborhoods," he wrote

Part of the disagreement over neighborhood change is that the word “gentrification” has become a catchall term to mean many kinds of urban ills and trends well beyond neighborhood change.

“One of the reasons the debate is so difficult is because everybody defines things a little differently and that allows certain words to stand in for other things that are happening,” Reed said.

Debate will continue

A study like this is unlikely to still the debate over neighborhood change in Detroit. Indeed, Mayor Mike Duggan’s administration and City Council have increasingly pressed developers building new housing and commercial projects to set aside units for affordable housing or to open retail in the city’s neighborhoods as a way of softening the impacts of neighborhood change.

New York, meanwhile, is in the middle of a fierce debate on new legislative protections for renters to combat rising rents.

But Reed insists that cities are more naturally resilient than the debate over neighborhood change might indicate. Neighborhood change, especially if it means new residents moving into a city, often brings more benefits than harm.

“If you just walk around a lot of these cities, some neighborhoods in Detroit, you do see that neighborhoods seem to be changing a lot,” Reed said. “Eastern Market, the Midtown corridor, they are different than they were 10 years ago. But neighborhoods are a lot more dynamic than the standard narrative assumes.”

Contact John Gallagher:313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com.Follow him on Twitter@jgallagherfreep. Read more on business and sign up for our business newsletter.