To my dear friends in Capital Federal,

Stop telling me my barrio is gentrified. Stop telling me your barrio is gentrifying. Just stop, you sound stupid.

Best wishes.

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 horrific gentrification.

Gentrificatrix

Relative property prices (per square meter) across neighborhoods, 2001 - 2016. Puerto Madero removed from analysis.

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.

Let's look at the distance between those two lines, holding the citywide number constant.

San Telmo

Villa Crespo

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 it is still a rather rough place to live, relative to other parts of the city.

For some messy code with some other interactive charts, my notebook is here.