Gentrification is a process of neighborhood change and destabilizing force impacting many communities throughout Metropolitan Atlanta. While often discussed, many residents and policymakers lack a clear understanding of the factors that contribute to this sort of neighborhood change and do not have good predictive tools for targeted approaches to mitigation strategies. Using Rigolon and Németh's 2019 study, "Toward a socioecological model of gentrification: How people, place, and policy shape neighborhood change," this project aims to provide a data-driven approach to understanding the risk of gentrification in Atlanta by analyzing a variety of factors, including distance from the central business district, proportion of multifamily housing stock, age of housing, and demographic composition.
While other factors may have strong local significance for neighborhood change, Rigolon and Németh identified these four factors as key predictors of gentrification in multiple cities across the United States. While access to public transportation is often thought to be responsible for gentrification, their study found that this was not as significantly correlated as distance from the central business district. Moreover the study found that larger proportions of older multifamily housing stock set the stage for significant redevelopment. Finally, the authors note the strength of lingering racial prejudice in neighborhood reinvestment activities and found a strong correlation between risk of gentrification and higher proportions of white residents. To measure the risk of gentrification, this project assigned a score from 1 to 10 to each census tract for each of these four factors and averaged the sum to return a gentrification likelihood score on a scale of 1 to 10.