gentrify
Other forms: gentrified; gentrifying
To gentrify is to fix up a neighborhood so that wealthier people want to move there, with the unfortunate result that poor residents can't afford to live there anymore.
This process often begins when middle-class people start buying and sprucing up homes in a poor neighborhood. Over time, more well-off people move in, along with hip coffee shops and fancy restaurants and shops — and house prices and rents go way up. It takes a while to gentrify a whole neighborhood, but eventually it becomes nearly impossible for lower-income people to stay. Gentrify is from gentry, or "nobility," and its root, which means "high-born."
- MLA
- APA
- Chicago
Vocabulary lists containing gentrify
When her Los Angeles neighborhood starts developing and reducing the amount of affordable housing, fifteen-year-old Rhea leads her friends in creating fake news about gang activity in order to scare away invasive investors.
Not wanting the same path as her father, a revolutionary Black nationalist who founded the separatist Movement in Philadelphia, sixteen-year-old Nigeria Sankofa Jones decides to apply for legal emancipation.
After serving two months in a youth correctional facility for a robbery he didn't commit, high school senior Andre Jackson returns to his Portland, Oregon neighborhood to find that his freedom is further restricted by the COVID-19 pandemic.