Property Ownership, Tenure, and Displacement: In Search of the Process of Gentrification

Despite three decades of continuous research on gentrification, there are a number of areas where understanding of this process still remains quite rudimentary, especially with respect to the actual process of gentrification itself. The author seeks to focus attention upon this issue by examining how historic change to property ownership and tenure structure of housing induced by gentrification impacted upon the unfolding of this process in the inner Sydney suburb of Glebe from 1960 to 1986. By using an empirical analysis he reveals that a synchronisation existed between the market behaviour of small-scale property owners, working-class incumbent upgraders, and middle-class homebuyers and renters which had a significant bearing upon both the timing and the extent of gentrification activity in the case study. In addition, once a less orthodox method of measurement was employed, social replacement was found to operate alongside social displacement. The implications of these findings suggest that the process of gentrification is much more complex than has been previously inferred in the empirical literature and that this particular form of neighbourhood change can follow a number of possible trajectories, as has been more recently asserted in cross-cultural research.