There Goes the Hood: The Meaning of Gentrification to Long-Term Residents.

This paper describes how residents of two gentrifying neighborhoods feel about the changes taking place around them. The research is based on a series of semi-structured in-depth interviews with long-term residents of two gentrifying neighborhoods in New York City. The focus of this paper is on what these residents believe to be the forces behind the dramatic changes they are witnessing as their neighborhoods gentrify. In particular, the influx of whites into these predominantly black neighborhoods is fraught with meaning to many of these respondents. This influx is both feared as a harbinger of the demise of their black community and welcomed for the improvements in services it is thought to bring. These feelings and perceptions are described and analyzed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]