Chris Wyczalkowski and colleague, Eric van Holm’s, “Gentrification in the wake of a hurricane: New Orleans after Katrina” was recently published in Urban Studies here. They analyse the potential for Hurricane Katrina to have contributed to patterns of gentrification during the city’s recovery one decade after the storm. We study the association between Hurricane Katrina and neighbourhood change using data on the damage from the storm at the census tract level and Freeman’s (2005) gentrification framework.Hurricane Katrina damaged 200,000 homes and displaced more than 800,000 residents of the region. This research examines the rate at which gentrification would occur pre and post hurricane. In order to create this comparison researchers utilized data from the City of New Orleans to mark any physical changes or damagers and then tracks gentrification using Census data over a fifteen year period- 2000 to 2015.
They utilize these neighborhood change principles and find a positive relationship between gentrification and damage from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Their model “suggests that those neighborhoods with a higher percentage of physical building damage were more likely to have gentrified one decade after the storm.”
To more about the article, check out City Lab’s write up here.