Here’s How Wake County Neighborhoods Have Changed Over the Past Two Decades

Here’s How Wake County Neighborhoods Have Changed Over the Past Two Decades

While we continue to work toward a solution to low-income resident displacement in Wake County, we need to be mindful of an even more pervasive problem — concentrated poverty.

If you’re plugged into conversations about local issues here in Raleigh and Wake County, then you likely know that neighborhood change is something that’s been on the minds of a lot of residents in recent years.

Wake County has undergone tremendous growth over the past couple decades, growing by about 56 new residents each day. But the economic benefits of that growth have not always been distributed evenly, either throughout our communities or across our 1.07 million residents.

At the center of many conversations regarding neighborhood change is gentrification, which refers to the specific way in which the character of a neighborhood can change following an influx of affluent new residents. Signs of gentrification can be apparent. Think trendy coffee shops, hip new restaurants, and — by some measure — even bicycle lanes, all in a neighborhood with a history of economic under-investment and perhaps even disinvestment. Gentrification is a controversial topic in part because it means different things to different people. To some, gentrification is just the natural process by which neighborhoods change and revitalize. It’s how our towns and cities grow and become better. To others, however, gentrification is something much more threatening and dangerous; it’s something against which neighborhoods must be protected.

Anxieties about gentrification stem from the fact that, even though the arrival of affluent new neighbors can bring economic revitalization to a formerly distressed neighborhood, that economic renewal can sometimes come at an exceedingly high cost. Indeed, longtime residents, particularly people and families of color, sometimes find themselves priced out and pushed out of their neighborhoods in order to make way for richer — and generally whiter — newcomers. 

To begin a conversation about these and other concerns, the City of Raleigh hosted a free public event last month featuring a panel discussion on gentrification and displacement moderated by Kristen Jeffers, founder of “The Black Urbanist.” Though criticized by some for failing to do a better job of listening to and taking questions from the community, last month’s event led us to wonder just how, precisely, neighborhoods in Wake County have changed in recent years. 

How many neighborhoods throughout the county are dealing with gentrification and displacement of lower-income residents? And are there other challenges stemming from our rapid growth that are perhaps even more pervasive than this? Indeed, which neighborhoods throughout Wake County have so far gone untouched by any sort of economic revitalization? And for how many of our neighborhoods have poverty, inequity, and disadvantage grown yet deeper and further concentrated?

Mapping Neighborhood Change Across Wake County

To better understand how neighborhoods in Wake County have changed, we created the interactive map below, which shows four major patterns of change since 2000: (1) Growth; (2) Low-Income Displacement (i.e., Gentrification); (3) Low-Income Concentration (i.e., Concentrated Poverty); and (4) Abandonment.

The map, which we hope will be useful to residents and policy-makers alike, is based on a comparison of data from the 2000 U.S. Decennial Census and the 2017 American Community Survey, which is the latest version of the survey released each year by the U.S. Census Bureau.

We categorized the types of neighborhood change over the past two decades using precisely the same methodology as that which was used in a report published earlier this year by researchers from the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School.  

As in that report, which focused on the entire U.S., we grouped neighborhood changes in Wake County into four categories based on changes over time in the number of low-income and non-low-income residents living in each census tract. Census tracts from 2000 were mapped onto census tracts from 2010 using the Longitudinal Tract Data Base (LTDB), a tool created by researchers at the American Communities Project at Brown University.

The only major differences between our analysis and the one from the University of Minnesota is that: (1) the analysis from the University of Minnesota includes data only up to 2016, whereas ours includes data up to 2017; and (2) we used slightly less strict criteria for categorizing neighborhood change. 

For instance, as further detailed below, neighborhoods were only classified as having changed if, from 2000 to 2017, the number of non-low-income residents changed by more than 5 percent and the population share of low-income residents changed by more than 2.5 percentage points. In the University of Minnesota study, however, neighborhoods were classified as having changed if the number of non-low-income residents changed by more than 10 percent and the population share of low-income residents changed by more than 5 percentage points. We did this merely to permit classification of a greater number of census tracts than would otherwise have been possible. 

The definitions for each category of neighborhood change are listed below. For our purposes, “low-income residents” are defined as anyone living below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. “Non-low-income residents” are considered to be everyone else. 

Definitions of Neighborhood Change

The categories of neighborhood change listed below, along with the associated definitions, were adapted from the April 2019 report American Neighborhood Change in the 21st Century, from the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity.

1. Growth — from 2000 to 2017, the number of non-low-income residents increased by more than 5 percent and the populations share of low-income residents decreased by more than 2.5 percentage points. Moreover, the number of low-income residents grew.  
2. Low-Income Displacement — from 2000 to 2017, the number of non-low-income residents increased by more than 5 percent and the population share of low-income residents decreased by more than 2.5 percentage points. Moreover, the number of low-income residents declined. 
3. Low-Income Concentration —  from 2000 to 2017, the number of non-low-income residents decreased by more than 5 percent and the population share of low-income residents increased by more than 2.5 percentage points. Moreover, the number of low-income residents grew. 
4. Abandonment — from 2000 to 2017, the number of non-low-income residents decreased by more than 5 percent and the population share of low-income residents increased by more than 2.5 percentage points. Moreover, the number of low-income residents declined.

Types of Neighborhood Change in Wake County (2000 – 2017)

In the interactive map above, click on a census tract to view the statistics used for determining how that neighborhood changed from 2000 to 2017.

Major Takeaways

Although gentrification typically gets a lot of attention in the public sphere, it’s not the dominant form of neighborhood change happening here in Wake County. As in other parts of the country, the most common form of neighborhood change is a trend toward concentrated poverty, typically defined as when 40 percent or more of residents within a particular neighborhood or census tract fall below the federal poverty line.

Out of the 55 census tracts we were able to identify as having changed substantially from 2000 to 2017, 35 percent experienced growth, 24 percent experienced low-income displacement, and 36 percent experienced low-income concentration. Only 5 percent experienced abandonment.

Although this appears, at first glance, to suggest that the types of neighborhood change that have occurred in Wake County over the past two decades have been fairly evenly distributed, it’s important to note here that we used slightly less strict criteria for categorizing neighborhoods than the University of Minnesota study upon which this analysis was based, as described earlier. As such, it’s possible that our approach categorized some neighborhoods incorrectly based on random variations in resident populations rather than based on meaningful patterns of change.

When we apply exactly the same criteria as used in the University of Minnesota study — and thereby diminish the chances of incorrectly categorizing some neighborhoods — we see a noticeably clearer pattern. Out of 35 census tracts identified as having changed substantially over the past 20 years, 51 percent showed a change in the direction of low-income concentration.

Wake County communities certainly need to continue to address gentrification and displacement, and the results of our analysis by no means suggest otherwise. But while we continue to work toward a solution to resident displacement, we need to be mindful of the even more pervasive problem of concentrated poverty.

These two challenges do not need to distract from each other, either in our public conversations or in our approaches to policy. In fact, we can address both of these issues simultaneously. But to do that we need to do more than merely talk about the need for more affordable and low-income housing. We also need to have serious conversations about where such housing should be placed within our towns and cities. Because, after all, it doesn’t make much sense to add additional low-income housing only to neighborhoods already struggling with high poverty. In fact, such an approach could make matters a whole lot worse by further exacerbating economic and racial segregation.

So, moving forward, we plan not only to expand on our prior work to support more affordable housing in Wake County but also to call upon elected leaders and those in the development community to make sure that new affordable and low-income units are not built solely in neighborhoods with high poverty. We also plan to dig more deeply into the data presented here and to explore further what communities and organizations in our area are doing to combat geographically concentrated poverty and disadvantage. In doing so, we hope to highlight the important work being done in Wake County to address related issues such as homelessness and housing insecurity for our most vulnerable populations.

Stay tuned for more, and let us know your thoughts on these important issues in the comments below.

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Brian Kurilla, Ph.D. is the Policy Analyst for WakeUP Wake County and an Experimental Psychologist and Data Scientist. 

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