Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2008, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Arts Administration, Education and Policy

The dissertation explores Seongsu-dong's hot-place syndrome or the retail gentrification phenomenon in relation to the global urban phenomenon of Brooklyn syndrome, focusing on its retail gentrification aesthetic and its social and cultural meanings. In doing so, the dissertation questions the tendencies within Korean journalism that explain the concept of hipster to explain the hot-place phenomenon as well as studies of gentrification that employ Bourdieu's theory of taste and distinction to comprehend retail gentrification cases. As an alternative, I attempt to rethink retail space design from the realm of taste to the dimension of cultural production, analyzing Seongsu-dong's hot-place aesthetic using Bourdieu's theoretical framework of the field of cultural production. Both archival and empirical data are utilized to examine the topic. The analysis begins by applying the field theory to the hot-place phenomenon, thus deriving the social and cultural meanings of Seongsu-dong's retail space aesthetic in the relationship and interaction between the designers of the retail spaces and their products. The focus then moves to the relationship and interaction between hot-places and the captured and filtered images of the hot-places reproduced in virtual space, deriving the meaning of the hot-place aesthetic under the influence of digital media in present-day hybrid reality. Finally, by analyzing the media representation of the global Brooklyn phenomenon, the dissertation will address the transnational meaning of Seongsu-dong's retail aesthetic.

Committee: Philip Armstrong (Advisor); Richard Fletcher (Committee Member); J.T. Richardson (Advisor) Subjects: Aesthetics; Architecture; Asian Studies; Comparative; Design; Interior Design

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Environment and Natural Resources

What happens after low-income neighborhoods achieve environmental victories? Historically, low-income people of color live near environmental hazards. Dominant narratives on brownfield redevelopment, the redevelopment of abandoned industrial sites, highlight increased property value as a positive economic development outcome for homeowners and reduced urban blight in the neighborhood. However, economically disadvantaged residents living close to redeveloped brownfield sites struggle to afford higher rents as their neighborhoods become more desirable to young professionals and the middle class after redevelopment. As scholars and activists aim to achieve environmental justice, it is important to address the racial, economic, and health implications of brownfield redevelopment. Environmental justice literature has focused on the siting of noxious industrial facilities and their relationship to the location of low-income communities and communities of color (UCC 1987; Bryant & Mohai 1992; GAO 1993; Bullard et. al. 2007; Taylor,2013). While this body of literature has grown over recent decades, it has not yet thoroughly explored the distribution of brownfield redevelopment. To this end, this dissertation contributes to the discipline through three empirical papers. The first paper examines the unintended consequences associated with brownfield redevelopment in the Little Village neighborhood in Chicago using the following qualitative methods: autoethnography, archival research, and semi-structured interviews with residents. The second paper uses Census and EPA Brownfield data from 1990-2017 to examine the national trends of brownfield redevelopment and gentrification in the U.S. using quantitative descriptives and paired t-tests. The third paper a multilevel liner regression analysis that examines the relationship between brownfield redevelopment and race / ethnicity in the U.S. All three papers demonstrate significant evidence of brownfield redevelopment and gentrif (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kerry Ard (Committee Chair); Reanne Frank (Committee Member); Cynthia Colen (Committee Member); Kendra McSweeney (Committee Member) Subjects: Environmental Justice

Doctor of Philosophy in Urban Studies and Public Affairs, Cleveland State University, 2018, Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs

This dissertation is composed of three essays. The three essays have different topics, research questions, methods, and conclusions. The first essay focused on how to identify gentrified areas. This dissertation employed census tract data of the urbanized areas within 12 metropolitan statistical areas in the United States of America to identify gentrified census tracts. To discern gentrified census tracts, this dissertation created the Gentrification Index which is composed of Neighborhood Transformation Index and Displacement Index. Among 12,803 total census tracts, 11,690 census tracts (91.31%) have been identified as no gentrification, 843 (6.58%) census tracts have been recognized as somewhat gentrified, and 270 (2.11%) census tracts have been verified as gentrified census tracts. The second essay asked whether or not gentrification process is different depending on the regional context. Therefore, this dissertation hypothesized that the urbanized areas that are in Rustbelt, Legacy cities, and Shrinking cities (RLS) in six MSAs are explained better by the production-based approach. On the other hand, it is hypothesized that the urbanized areas that have reputations regarding the robust Economics, diverse Cultures, and Technology hubs (ECT) in six MSAs are explained better by the consumption-based approach. Therefore, this dissertation examined the hypotheses through structural equation modeling. As a result, the consumption-based approach explained gentrification process in both ECT and RLS MSAs, but the production-based approach did not reveal the critical argument that capital investment causes the low-income family displacement in both ECT and RLS MSAs. The third essay investigated income group dynamics in gentrified census tracts that were found in the first essay. Hierarchical cluster analysis and Principal Component Analysis were used to identify unique groups of income class distribution for the time periods 2000 and 2010. This dissertation concluded t (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brian A. Mikelbank (Advisor); W. Dennis Keating (Committee Member); Kangrae Ma (Committee Member) Subjects: Geography; Urban Planning

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, City and Regional Planning

This dissertation is composed of three essays written with the aim of understanding the relationship between HOPE VI (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere) and gentrification. In the first essay, I develop a standardized method, Spatial Gentrification Index (SGI), to measure the degree of gentrification across the 250 top-populated Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) for the periods of 1990-2000 and 2000-2010. In order to improve measurement, I use the factor analysis to address the intercorrelations among the key possible determinants of gentrification. The results show that racial turnover is an aspect of the gentrification process, and affluent groups—particularly the White population—receive the most benefits from gentrification. Also, gentrifiers are characterized by white members of a young professional who has different attitudes and behaviors from ordinary middle-class residents. In particular, “gentrifiers,” who are pioneers in revitalizing abandoned neighborhoods, appear to lead gentrification from 1990-2000. During 2000-2010, the ability of original residents and in-movers to afford housing costs in neighborhoods becomes significant, and more redevelopment of existing, blighted neighborhoods occurs with the influx of private or public capital. In the second essay, I examine the relationship between HOPE VI and gentrification among 97 MSAs. Using multiple regression, this study investigates how the implementation of HOPE VI influences on the degree of gentrification in terms of change in SGI. The results indicate that HOPE VI itself generally has the impact of reducing gentrification, although the impact of previous gentrification is larger than in places without HOPE VI. The implementation of HOPE VI facilitates more poor and minority households to live in neighborhoods than areas with no experience with HOPE VI. These findings suggest that future redevelopment programs should build sustainable communities for all income le (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Rachel Kleit (Advisor); Bernadette Hanlon (Committee Member); Kareem Usher (Committee Member) Subjects: Urban Planning

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.), University of Findlay, 2024, Education

After years of disinvestment, typical of many of America's Rust Belt cities in the 1970s and 80s, a renaissance is underway in many. Local officials in shrinking cities are desperate for development. However, increased investments, the renovation of historic buildings, new restaurants, and other amenities that attract newcomers to an area characterize gentrification (Ehrenfeucht & Nelson, 2020). This study examined neighborhood change in Lima, Ohio's central business district and adjacent neighborhoods. The study of gentrification has produced a wide range of evidence on its presence and continued expansion, which has been linked causally to both positive and negative consequences (Finio, 2022). Few researchers utilized mixed methods, in which census or other data was joined with personal or field surveys to ground-truth gentrification processes (Finio, 2022). This mixed methods study gathered data from the US Census Bureau for 2000 and 2020 and from two focus groups conducted to gather data from Lima's residents and small business owners. Data were initially analyzed and coded utilizing MAXQDA. Additionally, the researcher utilized artificial intelligence (AI), specifically ChatGPT, as a novel approach to assist in coding and analyzing the qualitative data. Bereitschaft's (2020) gentrification component was utilized to determine the gentrification status of the study area(s), and the Neighborhood Change and Gentrification Scale (DeVylder et al., 2019) was used as the basis of the qualitative inquiry. Based on the findings of this study, recommendations and analyses were given.

Committee: John Gillham (Committee Chair); Scott Grant (Committee Member); Kyle Wagner (Committee Member) Subjects: Demographics; Urban Planning

Bachelor of Sciences, Ohio University, 2024, Geography

Kansas City, Missouri (KCMO) is a city defined by divisions, none so damning as the racial and socioeconomical split produced by Troost Avenue, a former commercial district that has seen severe decline over the past 60 years due to redlining and racially restrictive housing covenants. In recent years, the city government of KCMO has made efforts to blur this divide by investing in properties directly adjacent to the avenue. Through public-private partnerships, these flagship properties have not only excelled in uplifting the economic status of Troost neighborhoods, but also rewriting the fabric of a historically marginalized community east of the avenue. Resident narratives, combined with census data, are evidence that the city has been successful in gentrifying the harsh racial divide at its heart. However, in a bid to correct the wrongs of the past, the city has created new inequalities and exacerbated the socioeconomic distress of long-time residents and small businesses along Troost Avenue. This case study delves into the urban planning history of KCMO and what narratives the city and property development firms have constructed to justify revitalization in Troost Avenue neighborhoods, and how these actions have impacted the existing community of Troost Avenue. The story is more complicated than gentrification alone, and this case study offers a more nuanced perspective on downtown revitalization as a leading cause of urban inequality.

Committee: Yeong-Hyun Kim (Advisor); Harold Perkins (Committee Co-Chair) Subjects: Geography; Urban Planning

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2024, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice

From the 1960s to the 1990s, murder rates in the United States nearly doubled. Starting in 1957, homicides were the lowest since World War II at a rate of 4 per 100,000. In the decade between 1963 and 1974, homicide rates zoomed from 4.6 to 9.8. They peaked in 1980 at 10.2. The homicide rate bounced down to 9.79 in 1991, only to plummet for a decade. Scholars have proposed many reasons for the surge in violence. Their theories pointed to a variety of social and psychological suspects. But they overlooked an obvious variable: urban renewal. Urban renewal was a large and expensive government effort aimed at transforming cities. It changed cities by buying properties, displacing families, demolishing buildings, and constructing places. These changes created new opportunities for offenders to find unguarded suitable targets. Its crime-creating mechanisms were removing the incentives for property owners to manage their places, shifting crime target locations, introducing users, and creating new daily routines. When urban renewal was enacted at modest levels, it did not create violence and may have protected against it. But when inflicted on a large scale, it resulted in many unnecessary killings. I reached these conclusions after conducting the first study of urban renewal's impact on homicides between 1954 and 1974. I used the following datasets: Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports, the Federal Government's Urban Renewal Directory, the Urban Renewal Characteristic Report, the County and City Data Book, New York City homicide data (Monkkonen, 2006), and Governmental Responses to Crime (Jacob, 1992). Regardless of all the social factors, urban renewal cannot be ignored as a prime suspect in the rise in crime. This dissertation contains two studies. First, I tested the impact of urban renewal on homicide rates across the United States using a negative binomial mixed model. The models showed that a city completing a f (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John Eck Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Shannon Linning Ph.D. (Committee Member); Ben Feldmeyer Ph.D. (Committee Member); Nicholas Corsaro Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology

Doctor of Education , University of Dayton, 2023, Educational Administration

This research study delves into the lived experiences of African-American homeowners in Reclamation City, a metropolis undergoing substantial revitalization and housing transformation over the past 25 years. The primary objectives of this study encompass understanding the driving factors motivating Black homeowners to invest in residential properties in the city, uncovering the influences that encourage their steadfast commitment to homeownership, and examining the formidable challenges and obstacles they encounter amidst rising property costs, housing market fluctuations, and the encroachment of gentrification. Additionally, this research explores the implications of dwindling residential inventory, the effects of gentrification on Black homeowners, and the prospects for generational wealth-building among African American offspring in this evolving urban landscape. Furthermore, this study captures Black homeowners' personal impressions, reflections, and sentiments regarding tangible and intangible changes within their neighborhoods and the city. It also presents innovative strategies to curb the outmigration of Black homeowners from Reclamation City. It recommends critical initiatives to attract new Black homeowners while retaining those who resist the urge to sell their homes and depart. The foundation of this research lies in a comprehensive examination of the Black experience in America, historical factors, and enduring practices that have hindered African Americans' social, economic, and political progress. It incorporates personal narratives from Black homeowners and insights from African American financial services professionals, complemented by a review of pertinent literature. This dissertation introduces the concept of "Black resiliency" as a central framework for understanding how African American homeowners navigate the challenges posed by gentrification. Employing a qualitative participatory action research approach, this study scrutinizes gentrific (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ricardo Garcia Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Matthew Witenstein Ph.D. (Committee Member); Lariece Brown Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; American History; Black History; Black Studies; Social Research; Urban Planning

Doctor of Education , University of Dayton, 2023, Educational Administration

This research study delves into the lived experiences of African-American homeowners in Reclamation City, a metropolis undergoing substantial revitalization and housing transformation over the past 25 years. The primary objectives of this study encompass understanding the driving factors motivating Black homeowners to invest in residential properties in the city, uncovering the influences that encourage their steadfast commitment to homeownership, and examining the formidable challenges and obstacles they encounter amidst rising property costs, housing market fluctuations, and the encroachment of gentrification. Additionally, this research explores the implications of dwindling residential inventory, the effects of gentrification on Black homeowners, and the prospects for generational wealth-building among African American offspring in this evolving urban landscape. Furthermore, this study captures Black homeowners' personal impressions, reflections, and sentiments regarding tangible and intangible changes within their neighborhoods and the city. It also presents innovative strategies to curb the outmigration of Black homeowners from Reclamation City. It recommends critical initiatives to attract new Black homeowners while retaining those who resist the urge to sell their homes and depart. The foundation of this research lies in a comprehensive examination of the Black experience in America, historical factors, and enduring practices that have hindered African Americans' social, economic, and political progress. It incorporates personal narratives from Black homeowners and insights from African American financial services professionals, complemented by a review of pertinent literature. This dissertation introduces the concept of "Black resiliency" as a central framework for understanding how African American homeowners navigate the challenges posed by gentrification. Employing a qualitative participatory action research approach, this study scrutinizes gentrific (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ricardo Garcia Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Matthew Witenstein Ph.D. (Committee Member); Lariece Brown Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; American Studies; Black History; Black Studies; Ethnic Studies; Sociology

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2023, Geography

The changing urban morphology, particularly in African cities, is due to the changing regimes of accumulation from colonialism to globalization. Ridge in Accra, Ghana, has witnessed a change in its morphology and the conversion of most colonial bungalows into high-end land uses. The thesis examined the underlying processes of urban morphological change at Ridge by contextualizing ground evidence with frameworks of frontier urbanization, speculative urbanism, gentrification, and urban renewal. The thesis used High-resolution aerial photograph, Google Earth imagery, and field inventory to map the morphological changes. Interviews were conducted to examine the spatial processes underlying the transformation of Ridge. I also employed archival records, news articles, a public land sale document, and the Strategic Development Plan for the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area to contextualize field findings. The findings show a remarkable change in the morphology of Ridge. Also, the frameworks of frontier urbanization, speculative urbanism, gentrification, and urban renewal did not fully explain the changes due to a lack of data. However, local and global forces have interacted to provide a conducive environment for private capital to enable the production of Ridge. I provide three related recommendations for further research in the urbanization of African cities.

Committee: Ian Yeboah (Advisor); John Maingi (Committee Member); Naaborle Scakeyfio (Committee Member) Subjects: African Studies; Geography

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Environment and Natural Resources

Is urban agriculture a ‘real utopia' (Wright 2010)? In other words, does urban agriculture provide a viable solution to inequalities within the dominant industrial agri-food system? Urban agriculture is part of an alternative food movement that aims to solve social and environmental problems created by industrial agriculture. Urban agriculture organizations frequently embrace food justice goals such as racial equity and improved food access for people with low-income. Research has found benefits associated with urban agriculture, including improved nutrition and increased food security (Audate et al. 2019) and opportunities for community development (Ilieva et al. 2022). However, scholars also criticize urban agriculture for failing to challenge the underlying values and economic system that support industrial agriculture (Davidson 2017; McClintock 2014). This dissertation furthers critical research into urban agriculture and other alternative food system strategies by examining to what extent urban agriculture in Ohio provides benefits that are equitable. First, I use a geocoded dataset of 426 urban agriculture sites to test the relationship between a count of urban agriculture sites in each of the 1,895 census tracts within an urbanized area in Ohio and tract demographics, measures of food access, vacant housing, gentrification, and historic redlining. I find a positive association between more urban agriculture sites and a higher proportion of Black residents, and a negative association with low food access designation. These findings challenge representations of urban agriculture as pervasively White and raise questions about the role food access rhetoric plays in establishing urban farms and community gardens. Additionally, I find a positive association between a higher number of urban agriculture sites, specifically urban farms, and gentrification. Second, I present case studies of two urban agriculture organizations in gentrifying neighborhoods in Columbus (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kerry Ard (Committee Chair); Linda Lobao (Committee Member); Shoshanah Inwood (Committee Member); Jill Clark (Committee Member) Subjects: Agriculture; Environmental Justice; Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Geography

One of the most important factors that influence the quality of life in America is the cost and quality of housing, yet more than half of Americans report having trouble finding an affordable place to live (Tighe 2010; Schaeffer 2022). The creation of Community Land Trusts stems from questions regarding what to do about poverty, social inequality, and the relationships between people, land, and home. Once rooted in anti-capitalist and social justice practices, CLTs have more recently been seen as a strategy to limit financial housing speculation and as a vehicle to provide affordable housing. Here in Columbus, The Central Ohio Community Land Trust (COCLT) sits uncomfortably between the City's express dedication to the growth of property values and an attempt to provide affordable housing adjacent to the so-called free market. In this research, I investigate the circumstances of the introduction of the COCLT as a response to the growing affordability crisis in the oldest part of the city, Franklinton. Through an in-depth study of how the COCLT operates, this research aims to detail a novel CLT arrangement and advance our understanding of the multiple ways CLTs can work. This research broadly contributes to the field of Urban Geography, informs urban housing policy, and combines ethnographic methods with archival research to untangle the web of social connections, paradoxical policy, and particular histories which weave together to form this version of the Central Ohio Community Land Trust.

Committee: Madhumita Dutta (Advisor); Miranda Martinez (Committee Member); Kendra McSweeney (Committee Member) Subjects: Geography

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2023, Geography

As universities continue to expand, the residential demands of students often generate competition for limited affordable housing units on the margins of the campus. This process, known as studentification, can, in some cases, contribute to the growth of the knowledge sector without subjecting already-established residents to large-scale changes. In other instances, the influx of student renters in the near-campus housing market has driven immense changes in the social, cultural, and physical fabric of once relatively stable communities. In this thesis, I analyze the role of university officials in managing off-campus development and the perceptions of student and non-student residents in neighborhood change driven by studentification. Utilizing a case study on the University of Cincinnati, I analyze the consequences of studentification based on a series of mapping activities and semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders in the area. In addition, using secondary sources and interviews with planning officials, I identified some of the challenges and opportunities of managing residential expansion through partnerships among university officials and off-campus, private housing developers. Overall, the overarching goal of this thesis is to provide a grounded, multi-perspectival account of the localized effects of studentification to help university planning officials mitigate the negative impacts of the expansion of off-campus student housing on their periphery.

Committee: Damon Scott (Advisor); David Prytherch (Committee Member); Susan Jakubowski (Committee Member) Subjects: Geography; Urban Planning

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Geography

Introduction Much is known about human trafficking, but alarmingly little is known about anti-trafficking practices. In general, and without substantive investigation, the anti-trafficking movement is taken-for-granted as a force for good, beyond reproach, and somehow magically uncoupled from trafficking per se. Yet the animating logics and practices of the anti-trafficking movement reproduce some of the very same violences of trafficking itself. By investigating the mechanics and logics of anti-trafficking, as well as the ways in which gendered and sexual violence constitutes both illicit and licit forms of gendered and sexualized labor related to human trafficking and rescue, this project pushes back against the normative logic of much of the trafficking research which to date has exempted anti-trafficking from serious, sustained critical analysis. My dissertation research remedies this situation by subjecting recent federal anti-trafficking legislation SESTA/FOSTA to rigorous social scientific scrutiny and specifically by learning from the people who occupy the liminal space between victim and worker, in order to situate anti-trafficking efforts in their historical, economic and political contexts. Chapter 1: Sex, Labor and the Consent Gap Despite many shared goals and investments, the anti-trafficking movement has long been at odds with the sex worker's rights movement. The anti-trafficking movement is characterized by a commitment to radical feminist values which view heterosexual sex as inherently violent and consent to paid sex impossible. In this view, the sex industry is painted as uniformly violent and exploitive. For this reason, the anti-trafficking movement has advocated the increasing criminalization of the sex industry (what Elizabeth Bernstein calls “carceral feminism”). Taking seriously the implications of an emerging sex worker literature which is critical of work, I argue that to understand consent when sex is work, the term's component (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mathew Coleman (Advisor); Madhumita Dutta (Committee Member); Jennifer Suchland (Committee Member); Joel Wainwright (Committee Member) Subjects: Geography; Womens Studies

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2022, Environmental Studies

The research conducts a detailed analysis of neighborhood change, eviction, and displacement in Cincinnati as a result of recent investment projects under the names of neighborhood improvements, revitalization and green public spaces. I have examined how waves of gentrification have shifted demographic characteristics of residents in the Over-The-Rhine neighborhood of Downtown Cincinnati, and a growing shortage of affordable rental homes for low-income households. Over-The-Rhine is promoted as a success story as it has attracted new developments, businesses and young professionals. However, many old communities of this gentrifying neighborhood have been displaced and evicted during the pandemic. This displacement has affected both residents and small business owners, primarily within the last 15 years. Class, ethnicity, and age of residents/business owners are crucial aspects of this current issue.

Committee: YeongHyun Kim (Advisor) Subjects: Environmental Studies; Geography

BA, Kent State University, 2021, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Geography

The scope of Studentification literature in an American context is minuscule compared to its global counterparts. Researchers in the United Kingdom, Australia and even China have studied this concept in depth, but seldom in the United States. Plagued by falling under the umbrella term of gentrification, studentification shares a similar long-term process but experiences a vastly different outcome and target demographic. This thesis aims to both distinguish studentification apart from gentrification and provide a concrete methodology identifying the process of studentification in an American context. By combining urban geography concepts and Dr. Mark Gottdiener's theory of the Sociospatial Approach for gentrification, a newly designed framework for studentification was created that could be compared to real world instances. To do so, we used Cecil B. Moore, a neighborhood of downtown Philadelphia adjacent to Temple University as our case study site. Through a means of collecting relevant geospatial data and formulating GIS maps, we created a final Getis-Ord GI* hotspot map of studentification likelihood in Cecil B. Moore. The results suggest that studentification is most intense within three blocks of the Temple Campus, and greatly dissipates within the neighborhood each block moving west until little change has been seen in the last 20 years. Studentification significantly impacts the need for public services, affordable housing, petty crime and decreasing green space. As a result, it is necessary to acknowledge studentification and find alternative solutions using urban geography concepts to tackle this emerging problem in American cities.

Committee: David Kaplan (Advisor); Alison Smith (Committee Member); Richard Adams (Committee Member); Aimee Ward (Committee Member) Subjects: Geography

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

My dissertation research seeks to advance our understanding of the link between local communities, educational attainment, and mobility in the United States and to inform policymakers working to increase educational attainment and improve labor market outcomes for Americans. Gentrification has reshaped many of America's largest cities in recent decades. While it has been linked to improvements in neighborhood consumption and environmental amenities, the extent to which these positive effects spill into local public schools is an open empirical question. After matching Census tracts to attendance zones for public elementary schools in New York City, I use school-, grade-, and tract-level data and a natural experiment that spurred gentrification in part of the city to estimate the causal effects of gentrification neighborhood school outcomes in the first chapter of this dissertation. Using an instrumental variables approach to address the endogeneity of gentrification, I find that gentrification reduces math test scores, but I find no statistically significant effects of gentrification on class sizes, school expenditures per pupil, or student demographic characteristics. Most of the effect on performance can be explained by a 5 percent increase in absence rates conditional on changes to school and student characteristics. Lastly, I provide evidence that decreased access to healthcare in gentrifying attendance zones is a possible mechanism for the increased absences. In the second chapter, using individual-level, geocode data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth's 1997 cohort, I identify the extent to which business dynamism in local labor markets relates to the location decisions of labor force participants, and I examine how the effect differs for individuals with varying levels of educational attainment. I find that increases in business dynamism in local labor markets are associated with an increase in the probability college gr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mark Partridge (Advisor); Audrey Light (Committee Member); Elena Irwin (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics; Education; Labor Economics; Public Policy; Regional Studies

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2021, Geography

Gentrification has been a topic of major academic interest for decades now. Over the entirety of that duration, the challenge it poses in terms of eroding senses of place and physical displacement has not abated. As such, there is a continued need to understand how our representations and conceptualizations of gentrification discursively perpetuate its occurrence within greater neoliberal and neocolonial power structures. As a contribution to that need, this research will analyze a partnership between a private hospital and a faith-based community development organization that reflects the current direction of neoliberal urban development. While the partnership discursively projects itself as anti-gentrification and has taken explicit and conscious efforts to avoid gentrification in the South Side neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio, its discourse and efforts are ultimately both constrained by and compatible with the greater neoliberal and neocolonial power structures in which the partnership still operates. Research was conducted by qualitatively analyzing 56 pertinent textual documents and five key informant interviews as well as by quantitatively considering census tract data for the area of interest. Through analyzing previously existing textual materials (news articles, academic journals, promotional materials, planning documents, etc.) as well as specifically elicited discourse through key informant interviews, this study will demonstrate how discourses of gentrification, place, and economic development mediate interactions between a changing urban community and the greater power structures that abet gentrification in the area of study. This research suggests that gentrification is discursively reproduced by means of a distilled framing of the term gentrification in which gentrification and displacement are separate.

Committee: Thomas Smucker (Advisor) Subjects: Geography; Public Policy; Urban Planning

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2021, Spanish

En esta tesis examino como Vida, una serie original de STARZ, representa la relacion entre la identidad latinx y la gentrificacion en el barrio de Los Angeles, Boyle Heights. Este barrio tiene una de las poblaciones latinx mas grandes en los Estados Unidos, y la serie muestra el proceso de gentrificacion que muchas personas en este barrio perciben como una amenaza a identidad cultural. Primero exploro la gentrificacion en terminos de su historia, sus causas, y sus consecuencias culturales. Luego, analizo la relacion entre la gentrificacion y la teoria de la conciencia mestiza de Gloria Anzaldua para mostrar como los personajes principales de la serie llegan a valorar y expresar la complejidad de su identidad latinx. Argumento que Vida muestra que la gentrificacion no solo es un cambio economico en un espacio geografico sino tambien simboliza un proceso de cambio que refleja una zona fronteriza. De esa manera la serie da visibilidad a la diversidad de la experiencia latinx y la identidad queer. Representa el negocio de la familia como un sitio que revitaliza el barrio porque es un espacio seguro, inclusivo, y poderoso para una comunidad latinx que sigue cambiando sin ocultar o despreciar los varios componentes de su identidad.

Committee: Amy Robinson (Committee Chair); Valeria Grinberg Pla (Committee Member); Carles Ferrando Valero (Committee Member) Subjects: Language