Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Field Note
“In 2008, downtown Fort Worth, Texas looked quite different than
it did when I fi rst visited in 1997. In that eleven year period, business
leaders in the City of Fort Worth gentrifi ed the downtown. The Bass
family, who has a great deal of wealth from oil holdings and who now
owns about 40 blocks of downtown Fort Worth, was instrumental in
the city's gentrifi cation. In the 1970s and 1980s, members of the Bass
family looked at the empty, stark, downtown Fort Worth, and sought
a way to revitalize the downtown. They worked with the Tandy fam-
ily to build and revitalize the spaces of the city, which took off
in the late 1990s and into the present century. The crown jewel in
the gentrifi ed Fort Worth is the beautiful cultural center called the
Bass Performance Hall, named for Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass, which
opened in 1998.”
Figure 9.34
Fort Worth, Texas.
© Erin H. Fouberg.
waterfront “theme” areas to attract visitors. These areas
include festival marketplaces, parks with exotic sculptures
and play areas, and amusement zones occupying former
industrial sites. Cities including Detroit and Minneapolis
commercialize their central business districts by building or
using tax incentives to attract professional sports stadiums
to the central business district. Ventures have been success-
ful in attracting tourists and in generating business, but they
alone cannot revive downtowns because they cannot attract
what the core of the city needs most: permanent residents
with a stake in its future. The newly commercialized down-
towns often stand apart from the rest of the central city.
Beginning in the 1960s, central-city neighborhoods
located conveniently close to central business districts, but
run down as a result of out-migration of residents, began
to attract buyers who were willing to move back into the
city to rehabilitate run-down houses and live in central-
city neighborhoods. A process called
gentrifi cation
—the
rehabilitation of houses in older neighborhoods—took
hold in the central-city neighborhoods of many cities.
In the United States, gentrifi cation began in cit-
ies with a tight housing market and defi ned central-city
neighborhoods, including San Francisco, Portland, and
Chicago. Gentrifi cation slowed in the 1990s but is grow-
ing again, as city governments are encouraging gentrifi ca-
tion through beautifi cation programs and si
gnifi cant tax
breaks to people who buy up abandoned or dilapidated
housing. The growing interest in central-city housing has
resulted in part from the changing character of American
society: the proportion of childless couples (heterosexual
and homosexual) is growing, as is the number of single
people in the population. Chil
dless couples and singles
often choose to live in cities because the suburbs do not
look as attractive as they typically do to families with young
children. Gentrifi ed central-city neighborhoods attract
residents who want to live within walking distance of their
workplace and close to cultural, entertainment, and rec-
reational amenities, nightlife, and restaurants (Fig. 9.34).
One consequence of gentrifi cation is increased hous-
ing prices in central-city neighborhoods. In many cities,
gentrifi cation has displaced lower income residents because
property taxes rise as land values rise and the costs of goods
and services in the neighborhood, from parking to restau-
rants, rises as well. For urbanites displaced by gentrifi ca-
