Gentrification

Gentrification describes a shift in the class composition of an urban neighborhood. Wealthier residents and new capital arrive in an area that had experienced disinvestment, renovating housing stock and drawing new retail and services. Property values and rents rise, the built environment improves, and the demographic makeup of the neighborhood changes — often along both class and racial lines.

The process typically unfolds in stages. Artists, students, and other price-sensitive newcomers move into inexpensive housing near the urban core. Their presence and the neighborhood's improving reputation attract developers and more affluent buyers. Rising demand pushes up rents and property taxes faster than incumbent residents' incomes rise, and long-standing tenants and small businesses are priced out. Sociologists debate the drivers: some emphasize the rent gap between a property's current and potential value, which makes reinvestment profitable, while others emphasize the residential preferences of a growing professional class.

Gentrification is a standard example of how social structure shapes individual outcomes. Displacement disrupts social networks and access to familiar institutions, and forced relocation is associated with stress and worse health outcomes — a concrete link between neighborhood-level processes and the socioeconomic gradient in health. The process is also studied through competing theoretical lenses: structural functionalism frames it as urban renewal serving a system need, while conflict theory frames it as one group's gain achieved at another's expense.

The MCAT psychological, social, and biological foundations section tests gentrification within demographic characteristics and processes, alongside urbanization, globalization, and social movements. Expect passage-based questions asking you to identify gentrification from a description or to connect it to residential segregation, social capital, or health disparities rather than to define the word in isolation.