Community Engagement

Gentrification is a phenomenon wherein a poor neighborhood or urban area is transformed into a wealthier area, normally by wealthier people moving into that area. Gentrification sometimes also results in the previous inhabitants being displaced by the new, wealthier people moving in. Saginaw, Michigan, has been experiencing some form of gentrification for decades. This project aims to understand the level of gentrification that Saginaw has undergone in the years of 2008 and 2019, as well as understand where Saginaw falls on the “spectrum” of gentrification.

To understand where Saginaw is in terms of gentrification, we designated several different classes of characteristics that were common to gentrified areas. We then used Google Street Imagery to go block-by-block through Saginaw, giving each street face a “Gentrification Score” based on the characteristics that we defined beforehand. Two different gentrification scores were given to each block, one for imagery from 2008-2012 (earliest available), and one for imagery from 2017-2019 (latest available). After giving each block a gentrification score for both the earliest and latest years available, we determined five different ranges of gentrification scores and used ArcGIS to map out the results. An analysis of the results shows that blocks within Saginaw that had been going through gentrification in the earlier years were normally still going through gentrification in 2017-2019, with a few outlier blocks that had only become more disinvested as time went on.

These results suggest that as a whole, Saginaw is still experiencing a high amount of gentrification, with some areas experiencing it more than others. As time goes on, Saginaw will more than likely continue to experience gentrification in most areas. Some amount of bias in each block score is unavoidable, however, Saginaw is clearly experiencing different levels of gentrification depending on where it is that one is looking.