# stop talking to me about gentrification It's interesting that when new words enter the collective lexicon there seems to be a rush to use them and use to them a bit too liberally. What better example than "gentrification." The following chart is an attempt to visualize gentrification. For a given year on the vertical axis, the color corresponding to a neighborhood measures the _difference_  between median price-per-square-meter for a property sold in that neighborhood versus the median price-per-square-meter for a property sold city-wide. In other words, blue means that a neighborhood will be relatively expensive, and red would imply relatively inexpensive. If, over the course of the 15 years displayed, a neighborhood went from red to blue, that would signal that relative to the city's median property prices, it had become relatively expensive. This, to my mind, is how one could spot gentrification. See for yourself if you can find the widespread and terrible gentrification in Buenos Aires. ## gentrificatrix That's a fun new word :) Relative property prices (per square meter) across neighborhoods, 2001 - 2016. Puerto Madero removed from analysis. ![[media/gt1.svg]] The above isn't a perfect chart, but it's a decent birds-eye-view. From here, we can pick out some stripes that run "red-to-blue" and look deeper. Let's look at three examples and try to construct a narrative. Let's look at Agronomia, San Telmo, and Villa Crespo. ## agronomia "PPSM:" Price Per Square. Meter. Blue: Agronomia, Tan: Citywide. ![[media/gt2.svg]] Let's look at the distance between those two lines, holding the citywide number constant. ![[media/gt3.svg]] ## san telmo ![[media/gt4.svg]] ![[media/gt5.svg]] ## villa crespo ![[media/gt6.svg]] ![[media/gt7.svg]] Even in these most of cherry-picked examples, I would argue that there is little evidence of gentrification. San Telmo between 2006 and 2011 rose rather sharply, but when put into context with the median prices across the city and its subsequent fall, it seems like volatility more than gentrification. Furthermore, nobody would practically tell you that San Telmo is gentrified; while it's quite historic and, in my opinion, quite beautiful, by all accounts  [[miami to mumbai|it is still a rather rough place to live relative to many parts of the city]] For some messy code with some other interactive charts, [my notebook is here](https://observablehq.com/@luciyer/palermadness).