When Worcester and Pawtucket Red Sox officials announced in late August the team would move from McCoy Stadium and the Providence media market to Worcester, the news was pegged by fans and critics alike as a historically-significant day in the city of Worcester.

For City Hall, landing the deal was the end result of a decade or more of steady progress toward a more developed and attractive city for new homeowners and young professionals willing to pay for new luxury apartments downtown. Worcester, as has so often been repeated, is a city on the rise, and the WooSox coming to town both confirms the premise and promises to launch the city into a new chapter.

Of course, there are critics, both locally and from afar, who argue the ballpark and ancillary development, which requires a massive public subsidy ($100.8 million before interest), is too much risk for too little benefit, and could end up burdening the taxpayer and saddling an up-and-coming neighborhood with a large, car-centric mojo killer.

But if all goes according to plan, and there’s good reason to believe it will, given the track record of Pawsox Chairman Larry Lucchino and company, Worcester’s new leaf raises the specter of an issue that has dogged growing cities around the country, and it’s one many in Worcester may have thought impossible only a few years ago: It may be time to talk about gentrification.

Though there’s ample disagreement on the exact definition of the word, it means, loosely, the process of a neighborhood takeover by a more well-off population. As the neighborhood becomes more attractive for a new class of people — usually white, college-educated young professionals — rents rise due to demand, and longtime residents and businesses are pushed out by the new population.

In the long-term, will Worcester see gentrification like Boston, New York or the Bay Area? Will whole neighborhoods fall victim to a growing creative class pushing further and further away from the downtown neighborhood built for them? Will Worcester, like Somerville before it, cease to be a working-class city entirely?

In the short-term, what does the new ballpark development, which will feature hotels, new retail spaces and about 250 units of market rate housing, mean for Green Island, the small and often-forgotten neighborhood southwest of Kelley Square, and immediately abutting the new development? And it’s not just Green Island, the ballpark and the Canal District in general are surrounded by some of the most poor and Latino neighborhoods in the City – the type of neighborhoods that, historically, fall victim to the gentrification process.

Unlike cities where the tide of gentrification has already come and gone, Worcester has the chance, now, to take preventative action against the wholesale displacement of neighborhoods. But it’s a complicated problem for government to solve, not least because the increase of property values and the availability of high-end housing stock is a top priority for city administrations across the country. Is there something the city can do, through urban design, investment in affordable housing or in smart zoning, to keep Worcester the prideful working-class city it has historically been, while making room for a new class of more well-to-do people seeking an urban experience?

GREEN ISLAND AND THE WOOSOX

The case of Green Island and Polar Park is an instructive one because the park is seen to herald a bright horizon for the city, but also because there’s significant evidence urban ballparks contribute directly to the gentrification of neighborhoods around them.

In “Left on Base: Minor League Baseball Stadiums and Gentrification,” a study published earlier this year in the Urban Affairs Review, author Eric Joseph van Holm studied 24 minor league ballparks that opened around 2000. Analyzing census tracts, which are roughly the size of neighborhoods, although the borders aren’t always exact, he looked for changes in demographics from the 2000 census to the 2010 census and 2015 mid-year surveys. Near new stadiums, he found, median incomes increase, the number of college-educated residents increase, and the percentage of residents of color doesn’t decrease, but it slows in growth. Though his study did not find wholesale neighborhood turnover and significant rent increase, the groundwork for gentrification is clearly laid.

Further, the cost of the ballpark itself contributed significantly to both the increase in median income around it and the slowing of the growth of populations of color. A 10-percent increase in the stadium cost, van Holm wrote, led to a 2.81-percent increase in median incomes in the neighborhoods around it. It also led to a roughly 1-percent dip in populations of color versus other projects.

The fact is of note because the Polar Park project is among the most expensive proposals in Minor League Baseball, at about $90 million projected for the park itself, and $240 million overall, with the ancillary hotels, apartments and retail spaces. The park is projected to be the fourth most expensive in minor league history, per a study put together by Holy Cross economists.

“Policy makers commonly tout sports stadiums as redevelopment projects that generate widespread public benefits, but their potential effects on vulnerable populations living near the construction must be taken seriously. The results presented here show that minor league baseball stadiums have a significant effect on income and racial composition in the surrounding area 10 years later, indicating their potential to alter neighborhoods within a city,” van Holm wrote.

Van Holm argued the results indicate the need for governments to track the effect of public projects, not just on employment and tax revenue, but on local populations. If a local population is shown to be harmed or displaced by a project, consideration, he argued, should be given to employment opportunities or other benefits for those directly impacted.

He also argued for the development of inclusionary housing policies and programs, that set out to tuck below market rate housing in areas that begin to prosper.

A local study out of Clark University came to largely the same conclusions as “Left on Base.” Author Dominique Wilkins found in her review of existing writing, mostly on NFL stadiums, that, more than anything, athletic complexes shift the housing development around it to a priority on loft, condo and studio spaces, as opposed to traditional single family units like homes or floors of a triple decker.

Wilkins, like van Holm, called for greater focus on preserving housing for low- to moderate-income families. Nonprofit housing ownership, emergency renter funds and zoning reform to promote the inclusion of affordable units are tools local governments can use to resist gentrification, she wrote.

“The construction of athletic stadiums results in the displacement of that community’s original population. Those neighborhoods start as low-income, mostly minority neighborhoods, and change to middle and high-income, mostly white neighborhoods,” she wrote.

The neighborhoods surrounding the ballpark are similar to the ones described in Wilkin’s report. Green Island, roughly encompassed by a census tract that stretches from Green Street to the north, and south along Millbury Street to the intersection with Quinsigamond Ave, is a majority Latino neighborhood and, for the most part, poor. The median income for a family in that neighborhood is $30,096, and the median home value is $218,200. Almost all residents are renters, at 89 percent, and 33.9 percent live in poverty. The racial composition of the neighborhood is 41 percent hispanic, 34 percent white, 13 percent African-American, and 10 percent Asian, according to mid-cycle survey census data from 2016.

Other neighborhoods around the ballpark are similarly composed. Main South, just across the railroad line, is 45 percent Hispanic with a median family income of $25,945 and a poverty rate of 40.8 percent. Across I-290 are Union Hill and Vernon Hill, which are 45 and 41 percent Hispanic, respectively, with poverty rates at 31 and 24 percent. In all three neighborhoods, almost all the residents rent. In Main South, 91 percent of residents are renters, on Union Hill 78 percent, and on Vernon Hill 88 percent.

RISING RENTS?

On a recent sunny afternoon in Green Island, the mostly triple-decker neighborhood was still, save for the occasional family out on a walk, a neighborhood auto mechanic pulling cars in and out of his small, white brick shop, and work vans plunky slowly down the tight and sometimes bumpy roads.

Manuel Rodriguez, a resident of Grosvenor Street, worked on a car parked in front of his house. His wife Elizabeth looked on through the open window of their first-floor apartment.

When asked what he thought the development would bring to the neighborhood, he said, through his wife as a translator, rents would probably go up, and traffic may congest the tight residential roads. Elizabeth Rodriguez said they’ve lived there for about 10 years.

“The rent’s not bad, but I don’t know what’s going to happen when they come,” she said, referring to the ballpark and ancillary development. “I hope the rents don’t go up, but the landlord across the street, he’s already happy. He’s already saying he’s gonna hike the rents up. He’s already speaking about that.”

From their front porch, the southern edge of the Wyman Gordon property slated for the development could be seen at the end of the street.

“For the city, it’s going to be good because they’re going to make money, but for the people living around here, the rents are going to spike up and it’s not going to be so good,” Elizabeth Rodriguez said.

A block over, on Lodi Street, Jennifer Puello had a different perspective. She stood on her front porch as a crew brought in furniture from a pack van. Upgrading, she called it, with a smile. She said the area needs more retail, and she’s excited to see what the park will bring.

“Progress, you know. It’s good. It’s good for the city,” she said.

She said she isn’t necessarily worried about rent hikes – she and her husband are looking for a house anyway.

Next to her triple decker, which appeared recently renovated, sat a vacant lot, fenced off with no trespassing signs and an aging collection of litter wrapped around the links.

The 4,356-square-foot lot, listed for $59,000 and billed as ideal for a single-family or duplex home on Zillow, has sat vacant for six years with little interest, said Puello. But that’s not the case recently.

“Last week, there were like seven people looking, saying ‘I want to buy it, I want to buy it.’”

Local housing experts warn outside interest in the neighborhood could lead to displacement of longtime residents, but Green Island also might, just by nature of its design, be resistant to a wholesale demographic takeover.

Andy Howarth, director of development at Worcester Community Housing Resources, said Green Island is, for the most part, small units on tiny lots – “postage stamp lots,” he called them – which may be less attractive to new tenants or owners just by nature of their size.

“I think there’s some hope that the neighborhood around the ballpark will remain a diverse community,” he said.

Two factors will play heavily in the fate of the neighborhood, he said. One is the patch of vacant lots between Green Island and the Wyman Gordon property along Lamartine Street. What happens with those lots, especially the two at the intersection of Lamartine and Lodi, will be telling of what happens to the neighborhood. If, for instance, large luxury housing units are proposed, the neighborhood could start to swing that way, diminishing the stock of small, affordable, single-family units, he said. The second factor is the success of downtown housing developments such as 145 Front Street – where a one-bed can rent for as much as $2,080 per month, The Grid and The Edge, which offer rents considerably higher than the surrounding neighborhoods. If those complexes fill and there remains demand, the rent surge will spill over.

“If the downtown housing really drives rents up tremendously, Kelley Square and Green Island and the ballpark neighborhood will follow,” said Howarth.

But, he said, there hasn’t been much evidence to suggest the new luxury housing is driving up area rents, at least not yet.

“If you walk down Green Street and count housing units at 7:30 at night with the lights on, it doesn’t give you a picture of the area running up quite as fast as people would like,” he said.

The city has already taken some steps to work with Green Island as the development comes online. City Manager Ed Augustus Jr. is having staff in the housing department put together a plan to use grants for rehabilitating houses in Green Island, similar to the Union Hill initiative of 2015. The grant funds are offered to landlords for needed renovations, but come attached with affordability restrictions on the units.

“Private market forces are going to be what they are, but we can try to mitigate it a little bit with some public participation at least in some of the housing there,” he said.

COMMUNITY BENEFIT

One of the key unresolved issues in the push to construct the new ballpark is whether or not the city will sign on to a community benefits agreement, which will lay out certain conditions for hiring local, purchasing local and making sure the immediate neighborhood sees tangible benefit from the project, which is expected to generate a strong $744,000 budget surplus in the first year.

The Worcester Community Labor Coalition is currently in talks with the city regarding the language of the CBA, but they have not yet come to an agreement, or released a draft document of what it entails. Community Labor Coalition organizers say gentrification, affordable housing talk and protections for area small businesses are aspects of the deal.

Sheilah Dooley, a member of the coalition and director of Pernet Health Center in Green Island, said language protecting Green Island is essential.

“This whole area, Vernon Hill, Green Island, could change drastically in the coming years,” she said. “It’s definitely an issue people are concerned about.”

She cautioned against the mentality that raising rents and driving the poor people away will clean up the area.

“It’s not just going to go away because the rents go up and other people move here,” she said. “We need to strengthen families and make lives better for people instead of shooing them away.”

Augustus said his office is waiting for a list of requests from the CLA and is open to them. He did, however, point out that language requesting local preference for ballpark jobs is already in the agreement.

A DIRTY WORD

“Gentrification” is not a word often spoken at City Hall. The subject only came up several times at the two public hearings held in the month between announcement and approval of the ballpark.

One of the city councilors most vocal on the issue is District 4 Councilor Sarai Rivera. Earlier this year, she called for a look into commercial gentrification downtown, especially in the small spaces primarily run by people of color in and around the midtown mall. Now, she’s focusing on the neighborhoods around the new ballpark as well.

“I have it in my notebook, so it’s funny you called,” she said as we met earlier this week. “I have this big list of things I bring up to the manager and right there on it, ‘gentrification and Green Island.’”

Rivera, perhaps more than any other councilor, has to look at this project through multiple lenses. As one of the three members of the Standing Committee on Economic Development, she voted for the project twice and adamantly supports it. But as the District 4 councilor, she represents almost all of residential Green Island, all of Main South and parts of Vernon Hill.

Rivera said she and the city manager had a meeting with some of the key stakeholders in Green Island around the time of the announcement.

“There’s a lot of conversation about the Canal District, but this is going to directly impact the residential aspect of Green Island,” she said. “And Green Island has a longstanding history of a neighborhood, of a community, of residents.”

It’s also a neighborhood that, historically and along with South Worcester, has been neglected by City Hall, she said. But she and Augustus have approached both business leaders and residents in the area. In meetings with residents, concerns about the new development stood next to ongoing issues with the empty storefronts on Millbury Street, the triple deckers in the neighborhood needing more support from the city, and the area’s particular trouble with the way it’s districted for schools, she said.

Gentrification, Rivera said, is a tricky thing for city government to work around.

“How do we infringe on someone and say, ‘You purchased this building but by the way we’re going to put stipulations on what you charge.’ Do we say that on the West Side, on the South Side?”

The issue is coupled with wage stagnation and gender and race equity. Gentrification could be combated by giving people more opportunity for better work, Rivera said. The thing to do now, she said, is to make it an issue and open up a citywide conversation.

“We’re not the first city to go through this,” she said. “We have an opportunity to get it right.”

‘TIPPING POINT’

Gentrification in Worcester is not by any means an issue sparked by Polar Park alone. There are pockets of the city already seeing rent increases and demographic changeover – Howarth pointed to the Elm Park neighborhood and the area around UMass Medical School – and the development renaissance in the city’s core could, if successful, kick the process into overdrive.

Multiple experts interviewed for this story pointed to one surefire way to combat the issue: building and incentivizing housing that regular, working people can afford, and making sure neighborhoods have a mix of high end and affordable units.

In the case of Green Island, Augustus argued the housing complex projected for the site, at 250 units, introduces market-rate housing to a neighborhood that doesn’t really have any.

“We’re diversifying it. That’s what we want. We don’t want certain areas for poor people and certain areas for rich people. We want economic diversity, we don’t want segregation by income,” he said.

Mullen Sawyer, executive director of the Oak Hill Community Development Corporation, agrees there’s merit to that argument. Market-rate housing alleviates the pressure on smaller, more affordable units, and overall contributes to the vibrancy of a neighborhood.

The trouble, Sawyer feels, is the city’s housing market, especially at the lower ends, is in a squeeze – far more demand than available supply. Vacancies are nearly non-existent, at less than 1 percent net, per his research, and folks even up into the middle class are spending far too much of their income on housing already. The only area where ther has been significant growth in the Worcester housing market is at the highest levels, what we might call luxury or market rate housing. The most plausible result, Sawyer said, is that home prices and rental rates are bound to rise.

“We’re going to look back and say this is a tipping point,” he said. “It’s a citywide tipping point.”

The city needs to take more action, Sawyer said, to create housing units for low- to middle-income families, and do more to encourage investment and home ownership. Units can be created through rehabilitating old triple deckers and multi-families to open up units that may not be available. Local employers also need to do more to place their workforce in affordable units, he said. Local CDCs are organizing to come up with a way to introduce more units to the market, which Sawyer said are needed in the thousands to keep the city stable.

Still, the need for more working-class housing is a real one, and the city has taken steps to improve and expand the stock. In a report on affordable housing put together earlier this year, city planners laid out the past five years of investment in affordable housing, which totals $17.6 million. The funds went toward developing or preserving 1,752 units deemed affordable by the state’s criteria. At 13.4 percent of housing units that qualify as affordable throughout the city, Worcester has the third most in the state, behind Springfield and Boston. Worcester, wrote Chief Economic Development Officer Mike Traynor, has more affordable housing than the next 11 cities and towns in Worcester County combined. The city also launched a down payment program that has helped 95 families start a mortgage.

But despite those investments, the waiting list for Worcester Housing Authority units is many thousands long, and people often wait years for the chance to move in. Rents in Worcester and across the state are on the rise, and people have been struggling to make rent before gentrification in Worcester could be seriously considered.

Sawyer feels the answer is increased home ownership rates. In neighborhoods like Green Island and Union Hill, those rates dropped to the teens after the housing crisis of 2008. If home ownership rates climb back TO 30 and 40 percent, neighborhoods will be much more resistant to gentrification. The city can help via an expanded down payment assistance program, he said.

“That’s how the economy will work for everybody,” he said. “It will tone down gentrification.”

Yvette Dyson of the Common Ground Community Development Corporation works closely with these families in the lower Chandler Street area, just up Madison Street from the incoming Polar Park development. High-end housing and new development are not bad things, she said. Cities need them to grow. But there aren’t enough affordable units and there aren’t enough job opportunities.

“What’s never understood is close to 45 percent of the population is earning less than the median income,” she said, which should, in theory, qualify them for affordable housing. “We’re not able to provide housing for these folks.”

If rents spike dramatically in any of the working class neighborhoods around the ballpark, Dyson said with confidence, people won’t be able to afford it.

“It’s just going to displace people,” she said.

Even the narrative of the development renaissance can do damage to the city’s working poor, she said. Instantly becoming a hot spot, putting the city “on the map,” encourages outside investors to buy up property as low as they can, feeling they can sell it in the coming years and triple their investment. It’s that process, among many others, that make it hard for working people to scrape by, even in a city where people have historically come to do just that.

“I don’t know if we’re going to answer this question on gentrification,” Dyson said, “but if we don’t do anything, we’re not living up to our end of the bargain.”

AN EMOTIONAL ISSUE

Regardless of whether Polar Park, or the downtown luxury housing developments, or other force usher in a wave of gentrification, the threat of it, and the accompanying anxiety, are top of mind for many longtime residents watching the changes to the city’s core.

This mood is perhaps best captured by a documentary put together by members of the Future Focus Media Co-op, edited by Tyler Brown, a 21-year-old living in the Green Island area, and featuring rapper TyShawn Dion, who grew up in Worcester.

The 9-minute film, called “Uncommonwealth: Permit to Build,” opens with, and largely focuses on, the words of Dion.

“At the end of the day, Worcester is the heart of Massachusetts” he said, opening the film. “So all this fake love, the ‘New Worcester,’ this whole new wave that’s coming in, that’s not Worcester.”

Dion goes on to argue the new development downtown aims to appeal to well-to-do white people from Boston, and people he knows that used to live downtown have already been pushed out. Meanwhile, he said, the public schools need more investment.

“If you know that there’s people struggling and there’s not enough housing for people and you know there’s kids that are going to school hungry and aren’t getting fed at lunch because they’re running out of lunches at school, why wouldn’t the money go there?” he asked. “That’s a problem. That doesn’t make sense.”

Brown said response to the film has been overwhelming. The documentary has had a handful of showings in collective houses, art galleries and colleges around the city.

“People were like, ‘Yeah, this is true,’” Brown said. “When we were making it, a part of me didn’t necessarily believe in the video, what we put together and created. I didn’t believe people were going to care as much as they did.”

The issue is a personal one for Brown. He and his mother both work to afford their place, but some months it can be tough. That financial strain, coupled with the looming threat of possibly dramatic rent hikes, has Brown wondering if his family can stay in Worcester.

“It doesn’t smack you until it’s in your home,” he said. “You don’t really care about it until it’s too late.”

Bill Shaner can be reached at 508-767-9535 or at wshaner@worcestermag.com. Follow him on Twitter @Bill_Shaner.