| The intent of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), and subsequent regulations implementing these laws, was "to encourage financial institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they are chartered, and for other purposes", including qualified low- or moderate-income applicants and people living in low- and moderate-income census tracts. However, some suggested that gentrification was a potential unintended consequence.;Following Hackworth (2000), gentrification is defined in this research as "...the production of urban space for progressively more affluent users...". Existing research focuses mainly on gentrification in the largest city in a metropolitan area, and generally ignores the transformation of space in other parts of the metropolitan area, including the extent to which gentrification is occurring in older satellite cities and suburban communities. Furthermore, current research on gentrification relies on OLS and logit, which limits the ability analyze the spatial concentration of gentrification, or control spatial autocorrelation.;The dissertation uses case studies to examine characteristics of suburban gentrification, and how it is different from central city gentrification, to help inform the explanatory modeling. This study suggests that while the CRA may create the potential for gentrification by facilitating lending to higher income borrowers in lower income neighborhoods, the case studies reveal how important the local state is in facilitating the kinds of changes needed to generate large scale reinvestment that are likely to result in gentrification. This may be an even more important factor in suburbs since the impacts of disinvestment, and how to respond to it, is relatively new there. Complicating factors are that housing values are generally higher in the suburbs than in the city so suburbs are starting from a different level of investment needed to revitalize, and, as Hackworth's model of contemporary gentrification suggests, the apparent level of disinvestment in a suburb may be more relative to the investment levels of its neighbors than to the actual disinvestment occurring within its borders.;Keywords: Community Reinvestment Act, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, suburban gentrification, housing... |
