City Overview
Understanding Gentrification
Gentrification has been an issue in the community over many years and has significantly affected many of the city's neighbourhoods. It remains a particular concern in St Kilda and in Port Melbourne where the impact of developments including Beacon Cove has raised awareness of its impacts.
Overseas and local experiences show that while gentrification can have positive impacts on an area in terms of upgrading infrastructure and bringing in capital, it can also have negative impacts such as displacement and isolation. Council wants to further develop its understanding of this complex subject and to share this understanding with the community.
What is this Thing Called Gentrification?
Gentrification is a process in which higher income households displace lower income residents of a neighbourhood, changing the essential character and flavour of that neighbourhood.
Under this definition, gentrification has three specific conditions: displacement of original residents, physical upgrading of the neighbourhood, particularly of housing stock, and change in neighbourhood character.
Therefore gentrification does not automatically occur when higher income residents move into a lower income neighbourhood. For example, when the movement of higher income residents moving is small scale, or the movement is to vacant land or buildings, it is called urban regeneration.
Sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term in London in 1964. Gentrification is an ongoing, cyclical process that is widespread in the developed western world. It is a process that is hard to grasp, partly because commentators disagree over how and why it happens, and partly because most of the discussion occurs in the UK and the US context and is not easily transferable to an Australian context. In Australia, gentrification occurs in most inner urban municipalities of capital cities.
How do we Know it's Happening Here?
Port Phillip is growing at a rapid rate - faster than the metropolitan Melbourne average over the five years between 1996 and 2001. Many of the people who have moved in to the area in this time have particularly high incomes. The attached Persons who have moved to Port Phillip by Income, ABS Census 2001 graph shows that 28.9% of people who have been living in Port Phillip for less than five years have a personal income of more than $1,000 a week. In the greater Melbourne area, 11.9% of people earn this much.
Gentrification in Port Phillip is not just a recent phenomenon. If you look at the attached graphs, based on household income figures from the last five censuses, you will see the extent of change over the past twenty years. They show that there are significantly fewer low-income households and substantially more higher income households in the municipality now than there were in 1981. It is a long-term issue requiring long-term responses.
Does it Matter?
Overseas and local experience shows that while gentrification can have positive impacts on an area in terms of upgrading infrastructure and bringing in capital, it can also have negative impacts such as displacement and isolation.
Gentrification is a highly visible expression of wider social and economic change. There have been demographic and household changes that create the potential for new patterns of housing demand, including trends to later marriage, lower rates of marriage and increased divorce and relationship breakdown.
Globalisation is redrawing inner cities, as previously unfashionable areas attract business executives, senior bureaucrats and a range of well-paid workers in financial services, advertising, and the media. Access to the city and key facilities is vital for these groups, to maintain their position in the dynamic and insecure economic environment. Central location and apartment living reduces time lost in traditional suburban pursuits of commuting and house maintenance.
At the other end of the income and employment scale, low paid service workers whose labour maintains the amenity of redeveloped areas must move elsewhere, often commuting long distances back to work. Older long-term residents can be forced out, driven as much by the disappearance of familiar landmarks and memories as by rising rents, living costs and diminishing services. This can result in family or generational separation. Low-income people living in denitrified areas have reduced opportunities for community participation, and there are well-documented links between social isolation and ill health, irrespective of income levels. An increasingly segregated and unequal city is not in any one's interest.
What can be done?
Long-term responses to gentrification depend on action from all levels of government and from individuals. Housing market, employment, welfare and taxation reforms require State and Federal government responses.
The City of Port Phillip's Community Housing Program, funding for community organisations that support low income people, council services that are aimed at and sensitive to low income people, leadership on diversity, and a commitment to tolerance and social justice are all ways in which the council currently seeks to address the impacts of gentrification. The council is keen to identify other ways, in partnership with the community of Port Phillip and other levels of government, that more can be done.
Links - More Information on Gentrification
www.lycos.co.uk/gentrification/
This UK website is a comprehensive on-line resource for anyone interested in learning more about gentrification.
http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/gentrification/gentrificationexsum.htm
This American website reviews the findings, analyses and frameworks developed during the gentrification wave of the '70s and '80s. It suggests policies and strategies that can be pursued to advance equitable development in the American context.
http://www.policylink.org/EquitableDevelopment/
This American site has a "tool kit" for use in ensuring that new investment in an area benefits all community members and to integrate strategies to avoid gentrification and displacement
Community and Governance; Urban Activism in Melbourne in the 1960s and beyond
Information about a research project into urban activist responses to gentrification in inner Melbourne in the 1960s and 70s.
Use eServices to ask us a question, request information or give us feedback online. If you prefer call ASSIST on (03) 9209 6777 or TTy (03) 9209 6713 and ask for Social & Cultural Planning & Policy.
