Term originally popularized in Britain in the mid-1960s and 1970s, when working-class neighborhoods in London began to be renovated to provide new sources of housing for middle and upper-class residents, thereby displacing or threatening to displace long-term, lower-income households. As property values in particularly thriving urban centers like London, New York City, NY, Los Angeles, CA and Boston, MA continue to rise, gentrification has become more common as inner-city neighborhoods are reclaimed for higher-income occupants. The term and phenom-enon itdenotes became particularly pronounced in the 1980s and 1990s in the US and in Europe, as strategies to revitalize aging urban centers were implemented in cities now characterized by post-industrial economies based on a burgeoning service sector and geared towards attracting suburban and out-of-town tourists. Increasingly industrial buildings and older types of housing are being rehabilitated to appeal primarily to young, urban professionals, forcing workingclass and poor families out of neighborhoods that have become newly desirable due to their housing stock or their proximity to downtown. In Upscaling Downtown: Stalled Gentrification in Washington, D.C. (1988), anthropologist Brett Williams provides an ethnographic perspective on neighborhood change; Neil Smith’s The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (1996) discusses gentrification as an integral feature of late capitalism and the turn towards neoliberal social policies.

Gentrification has also spawned a number of urban social movements in which residents have banded together to attempt to resist being displaced from their communities.