Professor Smith will analyze tax arrears data for the Lower East Side area of Manhattan to determine whether they can be used to identify "turning points" at which disinvestment in housing stocks stops and reinvestment commences. Smith hypothesizes that gentrification (reinvestment) diffuses behind a frontier line, and that there may be secondary frontier lines behind the major frontier that represent investment by different kinds of financial institutions. The major objective of this research is to examine the economic processes involved in the gentrification of the Lower East Side from 1975 to 1986. Smith will link processes identified there to the larger context of urban change in North American cities.
