Commentary : Gentrification, segregation and the vocabulary of affluent residential choice

When I began my doctoral work, on gentrification in London, I was fuelled by a desire to measure what was largely an invisible social problem. Household displacement had barely been tackled as an issue and, as for public policy, the idea had entered neither the vocabulary or psychology, except perhaps through well-known texts on the impacts of dislocation through slum clearance, such as that by Young and Willmott (1964).The almost total influence of gentrification in many centralcity areas suggests that any displacement that could be achieved has already occurred and that this has already left many boroughs and neighbourhoods as high-income enclaves, often with a remnant scattering of public housing.