The future of cities

0:00Jackelyn Hwang:This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, and I'm your host, Russ Altman. Since we started this show eight years ago, it's become an archive of amazing and impactful work by my Stanford colleagues. Research is not something that just happens in the lab, and as you'll hear on this show, the research at Stanford can impact areas like health, technology, law, and business, and many other topics that can affect everyday life. We hope you'll tune in to learn more about how research has the potential to help your life and to help the lives of people you care about in your family and your community.

0:32If we can better measure neighborhoods, like the physical, visible conditions, and identify how that relates to individual well-being, affect, stress, and also just life chances overall, then maybe we can manipulate things about the neighborhood environments in a very tangible way. So I just feel like this area of research has clear pathways to intervention that I hope would help create these safe, quality, stable neighborhoods that we envision.

1:08Jackelyn Hwang:This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, and I'm your host, Russ Altman. If someone pops into your head today as you listen to this episode, why don't you tell them about the show? Word of mouth is a great way to spread the future of everything. Today, Jackie Huang will tell us that cities in America are changing rapidly, and this is impacting the residents, of course. Unfortunately, it's impacting some residents, the poor and the marginalized, in adverse ways that need to be addressed. It's the future of cities. Today, we're continuing our feature called The Future in a Minute.

1:40Jackelyn Hwang:At the end of my conversation with Jackie, I will ask her some rapid questions, and she'll give me some hopefully rapid answers. Also, before we get started, a reminder to please share the show with friends, neighbors, and relatives who you think might enjoy it. Word of mouth is a great way to spread word about the future of everything.

2:03Jackelyn Hwang:Cities are changing in the United States, and it's for multiple reasons. We're seeing gentrification in some areas. We're seeing immigration. Demographics are changing. Climate change has effects on buildings and the built environment. There's issues in crime, which is going down in the cities, education, schools, and the financial underpinnings of real estate in major metropolitan locations. All of this is changing how cities look and how cities work. And unfortunately, it's having effects on marginalized and poor communities who are often left squeezed. Well, Jackie Huang is a professor of sociology at Stanford University, and she's an expert on cities, neighborhoods, gentrification, and how this is affecting especially the poor and marginalized communities in the cities.

2:52Jackelyn Hwang:So, Jackie, how did you decide to focus on cities and the social dynamics within neighborhoods and cities as a major thrust in your research? Sure. So I think my interest in this area really stems from just my experience growing up. I grew up in a suburb right outside of Philadelphia. And when I was growing up, my sisters were much older and they lived in the city. And I think I was just always just kind of interested in the discourse around the city and how terrible it was and how people tried to avoid it, even though we lived five miles from it. And then a very different experience when I would visit my sisters and, you know, that it was just kind of cool.

3:32And like, there was a lot of interesting things going on. And then when I came, I actually went to Stanford as an undergrad and was a math major. But then I soon discovered sociology later in my years. And, you know, a lot of the discourse in sociology was about urban poverty, segregation and sort of just this stark contrast to my experience, but also kind of helped make sense for what I heard people talk about when I was growing up in the suburbs. And so I actually wrote my senior thesis on a gentrifying neighborhood in Philadelphia because I was just interested in understanding how this change was happening while we also have this picture of stark segregation and disinvestment in urban neighborhoods.

4:16So that's where I started getting interested in it. After college, I worked in a high poverty neighborhood in Philadelphia for a couple of years and just really just driven to understand why we have this stark difference in places and why some places are changing and others aren't. And that's sort of how I got into this area. And I've been doing it for a couple of decades now.

4:42Jackelyn Hwang:Great. Well, I had a very similar relationship to New York City growing up, 13 miles or eight miles away from New York and went to high school there in the 70s, which, as you probably know, was a tumultuous time for New York City. So great. OK. So when you write about cities, one of the things you start out with is like a review of all the things that are changing. And it's really breathtaking. And I think many of us know that there was some dynamics around COVID, but it's way beyond that. So could you give us kind of a little sense of where are cities now and what are the changes that they're undergoing that kind of fuel a lot of the things that you then study?

5:18Yeah, sure. So I think I frame a lot of my work around the 21st century American city and just how rapidly it's been changing, how different and radically different it is from the past. And as I mentioned, a lot of what I study, a lot of what our urban sociology has been based on is just this idea of persistent and durable neighborhood inequality and segregation. And today, cities are just incredibly different, right? So we have widespread gentrification. When I was doing this project in the early 2000s and telling people about gentrification, a lot of people had no idea what I was talking about.

5:53And now it's just a common household word. Immigration has increased rapidly since the 90s. And so cities are incredibly diverse, changing attitudes, changing class composition. So just diversity, both racially and socioeconomically has changed a lot. There's been a major decline in crime. So as you're referencing the cities in the seventies, eighties, nineties, which is very high crime and crime is just below half in a lot of cities is very, you know, cities are a lot safer. And then I think education reform, I worked in education prior to going to graduate school. And during that time, there were big pushes for our school choice.

6:32And I think that's really disentangled how neighborhoods and schools are tied together. And that's shaped how people move to different places and choose where to live. And then I think today, I mean, we, you know, post recession, there's been the financial foreclosure crisis. Subtime lending crisis has really shaped where people live. And now we're in an affordable housing crisis, right? And that's the new housing crisis that people talk about. homelessness has skyrocketed. I think something that comes out of the wake of the Great Recession is what people talk about as financialization of the housing market.

7:07And so this is just the influx of financial actors in shaping the housing market and financial practices. So really, house homes are now financial assets and commodities more than homes for people. And so has led to an increase in corporations owning homes and just increased capital among corporations and these large-scale entities and decreased power among the people living in it. Another thing that's on my mind is just climate change, right? So that's been increasingly happening, climate disasters, climate change. And so I think risks are really reshaping housing markets themselves. Climate disasters are more frequent and more intense, and that's really changing cities as well and how people think about where to live.

7:56Jackelyn Hwang:So, okay. So thank you. So that really is a very helpful kind of almost on every front. There's been evolution and it's been very rapid. So you've mentioned the word gentrification a couple of times, and I know you write about it a lot. So as a starting point, tell me about gentrification. You mentioned it as even one of the kind of inspirational things that you saw even in your undergraduate work and even maybe growing up near Philadelphia. So tell me about gentrification and how we can think about it and what kind of effects it has on cities and on neighborhoods. So I guess maybe a good place to start is how people, how I'm talking about gentrification, how I'm defining it when I talk about it, because it means a lot of different things to different people and it's really evolved in its meaning over time.

8:42So when I talk about it, I kind of, I'm thinking of classic conceptions in sociology, urban geography, that really think about it as a class-based transformation of urban neighborhoods. So the idea here is that there's an influx of middle and upper class residents into previously disinvested neighborhoods. And a lot of the early writings in the 60s and 70s were about urban neighborhoods, central core neighborhoods that were abandoned. And we see this influx of people into these neighborhoods and then an increase in the valuation of these places. Since then, gentrification, even defining it, has become a very contentious topic within scholarship.

9:24We see it in the suburbs, in tourist towns, we see it globally. And it's not just about middle and upper class people coming in, but a lot of it is about the influx of state capital and investment and money by these larger actors. And so it can look very different. It can happen in different paces and different places nowadays. And I think that's sort of been the evolution of gentrification itself as a process. And I think that brings a lot of questions on what the consequences of it are, which is where a lot of my research has focused lately. Yeah.

10:02Jackelyn Hwang:So, okay. So what have you found? I mean, I have a rough sense because I've, of course, before each guest comes, I stalk them and read all of their papers or at least the titles and abstracts. So how do you study gentrification? Given your definition, which you said is based in kind of traditional early definitions of city-based displacement and repopulation, are there surprising dynamics that people might not realize happen? because I think many people say, well, you know, the neighborhood was falling apart and then we moved in a bunch of people who have more resources and now the neighborhood looks much better.

10:36Jackelyn Hwang:What's not to love? Yeah. Okay. I could go on and on and on from this. I guess a starting point is something that when I first started or, you know, in the early years during my dissertation, when I was researching this, is that the discourse and this definition is really class-based, But when you talk to someone about gentrification, a lot of it is about white people moving into predominantly minority neighborhoods. This kind of contradicts this idea that segregation is persistent, that neighborhood inequality has been persistent and durable for decades. And so one of my studies goes and tries to look at, is this persistence real?

11:19Are minority neighborhoods gentrifying? And I think something that's surprising is that maybe to some people is that predominantly black neighborhoods are the last to gentrify, least likely to gentrify, and then also gentrify at a slower pace when they do. And this really does fit into what our understandings of segregation and this racial hierarchy in neighborhoods that has been persistent for decades. So it's sort of that research is kind of showing how these same processes that produce segregation are still operating within gentrification as gentrification unfolds. Another, I think, surprising finding is about displacement.

11:56So a worry that a lot of us have is that when neighborhoods gentrify, it leads to the displacement of poor residents or the long term residents or minority residents. And when I started studying this, a lot of the research finds that there is not displacement, that people are not more likely, poor people, minority residents, long-term residents are not more likely to be displaced from neighborhoods that gentrify versus those that don't. And so at the time, there was generally limited data which this was based on. And so one of my studies looks at, at the time, was large-scale data. Now there's even larger-scale data, but it was using consumer credit records.

12:37And so this was a 5 % sample of adults in Philadelphia. So it was 50 ,000 residents that we could follow over time. And similarly, we don't find that there's higher rates of displacement or movement among poor residents in gentrifying neighborhoods compared to those that don't gentrify.

12:54Jackelyn Hwang:So if I could ask, because that's surprising because it seems like there's just a certain number of units in the neighborhood. And so how could that even be? So could you explain a little bit more about how it's possible for there to be a gentrification, some influx of new people, but that the previous residents are still there in some sense? Yeah. So it's not necessarily that they're still there. It's that they're still there at the same rate as those in poor neighborhoods that don't gentrify. And actually, I think the main explanation is that just poor people are highly unstable residentially.

13:28And so they move a lot. And in our study in Philadelphia, they move the most in poor, black, non-gentrifying neighborhoods. And so it's really a story of poverty and financial instability. Residential instability is experienced among the poor at greater levels in poor black neighborhoods. And and a lot of the research on evictions finds that this is more common in these neighborhoods instead. The other thing is that in gentrifying neighborhoods, there is more investment. Right. So there are new units that are being built. And so in some, you know, there are buildings that people can fill or units that incomers can fill without necessarily displacing long term residents.

14:07However, this research, a lot of the work that I've been trying to do is to shift the attention from whether or not someone moves to thinking about where people move and the destinations. And so when we think about it that way, and these are like the longer term consequences of gentrification, even if people are moving at similar rates, what we find in the research is that when poor people move or when poor minorities move, they end up in much worse neighborhoods than others. And so what this implies is that poor white folks are actually maybe benefiting or cashing out or able to save money and move to better neighborhoods when their neighborhoods gentrify.

14:48Jackelyn Hwang:Yes. And I can. OK, so that's a very clear and concerning trend, which is that the original residents are being squeezed into, as you characterize it, less good neighborhoods, which I assume means worse infrastructure, worse schools, probably higher crime. And so do the cities watch this? Do they read your work? And do policymakers try to make things better? I can speak to this in a couple different ways. So I think, you know, people can read the work and have read the other work that predated this and think about and say, oh, gentrification doesn't cause displacement. Let's keep building. I have tried to do a lot of work specifically with local practitioners and policymakers to think about it a little more deeply because I'm trying to add more nuance to this.

15:40So I've done a lot of work in Philadelphia and a lot of that work has been more around changing tax policies around keeping long term homeowners in. I would hope that people at that time I didn't do as much engaged work with directly with policymakers. I hope that my work is read. I've done some podcasts and panels around that. And so I just think in general, there's one more awareness around the potential implications of gentrification and displacement. I mean, I think with Matt Desmond's work around evictions, there's just been a broader attention to displacement and efforts around that. And again, I think related to my work, displacement is not just something for gentrifying neighborhoods.

16:21It's something happening across the board. And so I think there's been a lot of efforts there. One thing that I think my more recent work has turned to, especially because it's been focused on the Bay Area, is that actually poor people move very little here in gentrifying neighborhoods and in not gentrifying neighborhoods. So I kind of something, I replicated that work in Philadelphia in the Bay Area. And what we found was that there's actually just very little movement among that same group of of poor residents that we were looking at here. And that led to an interview study that we did in the city of Oakland.

16:56And I've done a lot of work with Oakland's housing department. And what we find there is actually people are being squeezed and living in very unstable, unsustainable conditions. And so with policymakers there, I've worked with the Department of Housing and Community Development and their staff there. And we've really done, I think, our policy brief around our findings from the interviews and the quantitative data have really informed their strategic action plans around anti-displacement efforts. And then this led to a homelessness prevention program that launched a couple years ago that we helped with the evaluation on.

17:34And so there's just been a real big push on anti-displacement as a key pillar of housing and community development and homelessness prevention. So there has been a lot of great work in the homelessness space. And I think there's been increasingly more attention around homelessness prevention. So not just people who are already unhoused and then, you know, trying to house them and keep them unhoused, but people who are housed, but on the brink of becoming unhoused. And so that's been such a great experience just working with Oakland and really seeing our work go into how they think about policymaking and programs.

18:10Jackelyn Hwang:This is the future of everything. I'm Russ Altman, and I'm speaking with Jackie Huang from Stanford University. In the last segment, we thought about cities and how they're changing and how that change can lead to some people benefiting, but lots of other people being squeezed in many ways. In this segment, we wanna talk a little bit about the use of technology to make measurements that can then fuel your research. And I know you've done some really exciting things with Google Street View. We'll get to that in a second, but first I wanna remind everybody that at the end of our conversation, I'm going to ask Jackie about the future in a minute.

18:43Jackelyn Hwang:A few quick questions followed by a few quick answers. And that's going to be a lot of fun. So Jackie, tell me about how Google Street View could possibly be useful for studying cities and neighborhoods. Yeah. So this has been another line of my research. Google Street View came out when I was in graduate school. And at the time, I was trying to come up with my second year paper and figure out how to measure gentrification, which turned out to be very difficult. There wasn't really consensus in the literature. And so I think something about gentrification had been hard to define with the census variables that people generally use.

19:23And so a lot of the qualitative research or, you know, theories about gentrification would just talk about how you know it when you see it. And so Google Street View comes out and this really provides public access to videotaping and seeing neighborhoods and cities across the world, really virtually every block. My advisor in graduate school, one of his famous projects in the 90s was holding a camcorder out of a window of an SUV and driving up and down streets in Chicago. And then they would have these.

19:55Jackelyn Hwang:Oh, so this was part of a tradition in the lab. Yeah, yeah, actually. And so, yeah, there's a tradition in sociology called systematic social observation, also on criminology, where people would walk around neighborhoods and fill out these surveys for different indicators. And, you know, think of it now versus sitting at your desk and looking at Google Street View. That's very costly, labor intensive. You need a team of researchers to go out and fill out these surveys. And so in graduate school, I did this with Google Street View, which saved some time, but still took up a lot of time. So I created these surveys on what to look for for different indicators, spent a lot of time going up and down streets and filling them out.

20:36But then, you know, the last 10, 15 years, AI has just really changed what you can do. So I've been spending a lot of my energy on using computer vision technology to try to look at neighborhoods at scale. It hasn't been such a quick and easy solution as I thought it would be when I started working on this probably 10 years ago at this point. But we've been training neural network with the evolution of AI, computer vision models. We've been working on trying to use convolutional neural networks to read images at scale. And now with vision language models, I think that just creates a whole new frontier on what we could potentially do.

21:20Some of the bottlenecks with the traditional AI way of doing things has been really generating high quality training data. A lot of the things I'm interested in that sociologists are interested in are not just like objects on sidewalks and buildings, which are generally easier models to train, but really the conditions of neighborhoods. And so trying to get those conditions, which she has some perception, you know, subjective elements to it and trying to put some objectivity to it has been challenging.

21:53Jackelyn Hwang:So can I ask, this is, this is fascinating and I know it's complicated, but can you give me a feeling of the types of things that like a Google street view image might have that would tip you off to the conditions in the neighborhood? I'm just, is it like, I'm thinking maybe uncollected garbage or buildings, a lot of buildings that are shuttered? I mean, what are the kinds of things you look for? Yeah. So I think a lot of trash has been the easiest, but it's taken a long time to do. So yeah, not just uncollected garbage, but really scattered litter has been a sign in sociology. It's considered a classic sign of disorder.

22:30And so when you think about gentrifying neighborhoods, it might be the lack of disorder, the absence of these elements over time that signal, as a signal. Also looking for blight how kept vacant lots are. So you might think of gentrifying neighborhoods, people might take vacant lots and turn them into community gardens or clean them up. And so that's sort of another sign. And then in other work, we've just been basically looking at new construction or rehabbed buildings, which we've shown highlights like more using the computer vision models, highlights more things than just building permit data, for example.

23:06And so there's a lot you can see.

23:10Jackelyn Hwang:Speaking of seeing, I saw that you wrote a paper about eye tracking when somebody goes into a neighborhood. What do they actually look at? Is that is that am I getting it right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So part of what I think something that has come up as we've been having, you know, building the training data is like, what are people actually seeing? Are they looking at trash? Or is it something else that is causing them to say that there's trash? And so I've become more interested in just like what drives these perceptions of cleanliness around neighborhoods. And so with some folks in the engineering school at Stanford Sarah Billington and Heyong No, we did an eye tracking study to explore how the visibility of trash or RVs or construction sites changed how people perceive neighborhoods and how it affected their stress levels and affect.

23:59And it's actually pretty poignant. People really do focus and trash was the most, had the most effect among those different indicators.