English 101, Fall 2013 Mrs.

Drawbond Essay 4: Research Paper Writing a persuasive essay involves trying to convince your reader of a certain point. For this essay you will incorporate outside research in order to strengthen your argument. In the article Studies: Gentrification a Boost for Everyone, Rick Hampson looks at the issue of gentrification, the buying and renovation of houses and stores in deteriorated urban neighborhoods by upper- or middle-income families or individuals, thus improving property values but often displacing low-income families and small businesses (dictionary.com). Hampson reveals that this is a complicated and emotional issue and provides evidence to show that gentrification helps residents of these areas and also hurts residents in gentrified areas. Prompt: After carefully reading Hampsons article and researching the topic of gentrification, write a persuasive research essay in which you either argue that gentrification is a positive process for neighborhoods and residents or that gentrification is ultimately harmful for neighborhoods and their residents. As part of this, you should include information from Hampsons article. This should be a full essay with multiple paragraphs, including an introductory paragraph and a concluding paragraph. The thesis should provide an overview of your argument about whether gentrification is generally beneficial or harmful for a community. The reader should be able to read this one sentence and know exactly what the essay will be about and what to expect. Remember that the thesis statement guides the rest of the essay. The rest of your essay will provide your argument for why gentrification is either beneficial or harmful. Your final draft must be typedno handwritten papers will be accepted for full credit. Your essay should be between about 1,000-1,200 words. Please write the word count at the end of your paper. The word count can be found at the bottom of the screen when you are typing in Microsoft Word. I will check to see that your composition is approximately 1,000 words. Your essay should be in correct MLA format, which includes using 12 point, Times New Roman font, double-spacing, one-inch margins all around, and correct MLA format heading and page numbering. There is more information about MLA format on the class website. You should use correct MLA style in-text citations and a Works Cited page to cite your sources. If you do not cite your sources, you are plagiarizing.

The sources cited inside of your essay must match the sources found in your Works Cited page. If you cite a source in your essay, it must appear in the Works Cited page. In the same way, only sources that you actually cite in your essay should be included in your Works Cited page. Do the best work you can! If you have questions or feel that you need help, you can see me during my office hours, which are listed on your syllabus.

Final Draft Due: Hybrid classes: Due Thursday, December 12th I will be in SSEC 125A from 10:15 am 12:15 pm to collect your Essay 4.
Characteristics of MLA format for a Word document: 1 inch margins all around; 12 point font; Times New Roman font Header with your last name and page number (ex: Smith 1) at the top right corner Heading with your name, my name, the class name, and date with the day month and year on the left side. Heres an example: John Smith Professor Drawbond English 21 1 March 2013 Double spaced everywhere Your title should be centered and the first letter of each word capitalized (except minor words such as of, the, and, and in) o Your title should NOT be: All caps In bold Bigger than the rest of the composition Underlined

Studies: Gentrification a boost for everyone By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY Everyone knows gentrification uproots the urban poor with higher rents, higher taxes and $4 lattes. It's the lament of community organizers, the theme of the 2004 film Barbershop 2 and the guilty assumption of the yuppies moving in. Carole Singleton lives in Harlem in New York City where she is a tenants rights activist in her community.

Eileen Blass, USA TODAY But everyone may be wrong, according to Lance Freeman, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University. In an article last month in Urban Affairs Review, Freeman reports the results of his national study of gentrification the movement of upscale (mostly white) settlers into rundown (mostly minority) neighborhoods. His conclusion: Gentrification drives comparatively few low-income residents from their homes. Although some are forced to move by rising costs, there isn't much more displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods than in non-gentrifying ones. In a separate study of New York City published last year, Freeman and a colleague concluded that living in a gentrifying neighborhood there actually made it less likely a poor resident would move a finding similar to that of a 2001 study of Boston by Duke University economist Jacob Vigdor.

Freeman and Vigdor say that although higher costs sometimes force poor residents to leave gentrifying neighborhoods, other changes more jobs, safer streets, better trash pickup encourage them to stay. But to others, gentrification remains a dirty word. "All you have to do is talk to people around here," says James Lewis, a tenant organizer in Harlem, New York's most famous black neighborhood. "Everybody with money is moving into Harlem, and the people who are here are being displaced." Even residents who have survived gentrification tend to believe it forces people out. Maria Marquez, 37, has slept on the sofa for 12 years to give her mother and son the two bedrooms in their apartment in Chicago's gentrifying Logan Square area. But eventually, she says, "we're gonna get kicked out. It's a matter of time." Kathe Newman, assistant professor of public policy at Rutgers University, argues that Freeman's research in New York understates the extent of displacement. But she says he has raised a good question: How, in the face of relentlessly higher living costs, do so many poor people stay put? A hot-button issue Gentrification has spawned emotional disputes in cities around the nation: In northwest Fort Lauderdale, where streets are named for the district's prominent old AfricanAmerican families, three of four new home buyers are white, according to a survey by the SunSentinel. City Commissioner Carlton Moore told the newspaper his largely black constituency fears displacement, even though he says it won't happen. In the predominantly Latino working class barrio of East Austin, the new Pedernales Lofts condominiums have raised adjacent land values more than 50% since 2003. Last fall, someone hung signs from power lines outside the lofts saying, "Stop gentrifying the East Side" and "Will U give jobs to longtime residents of this neighborhood?" In Charlotte, a City Council committee voted in December to remove language from a city planning department report that downplayed gentrification's threat to neighborhoods. Development could uproot some people, councilman John Tabor told the Charlotte Observer "If there are people in these neighborhoods who have to move because they can't afford their taxes, that's who I want to help," he said. In Boston's North End, the destruction of the noisy Central Artery elevated highway promises to attract younger, more affluent new residents and dilute the traditional Italian immigrant culture. In the two decades after World War II, government urban renewal schemes tore down whole neighborhoods and scattered residents. Gentrification, which appeared in the 1970s, was something else. Motivated by high gasoline prices, suburban sprawl and a new taste for old architecture, some middle class whites began moving into neighborhoods that had gone out of fashion a generation or two earlier.

Here's how it works: A dilapidated and depopulated but essentially attractive neighborhood solid housing stock, well laid-out streets, proximity to the city center is discovered by artists, graduate students and other bohemians. Block by block, the neighborhood changes. The newcomers fix up old buildings. Galleries and cafes open, and mom 'n' pop groceries close. City services improve. Finally, the bohemians are joined by lawyers, stockbrokers and dentists. Property values rise, followed by property taxes and rents. To some urban planners, gentrification is a solution to racial segregation, a shrinking tax base and other problems. To others, it is a problem: Poor blacks and Hispanics, who've held on through hard times and sometimes started the neighborhood's comeback, are ousted by their own success. Jose Sanchez, an urban planning expert at Long Island University in Brooklyn, says some changing neighborhoods stabilize with a mixture of people. But he says the poor and the bohemian pioneers can also be "washed out" by scheming landlords or government policies such as rezoning and urban renewal. The poor stay put Freeman and Vigdor say gentrification has gotten a bad rap. When they studied New York City and Boston, respectively, they found that poor and less educated residents of gentrifying neighborhoods actually moved less often than people in other neighborhoods 20% less in New York. For his national study published this year, Freeman found only a slight connection between gentrification and displacement. A poor resident's chances of being forced to move out of a gentrifying neighborhood are only 0.5% greater than in a non-gentrifying one. So how do some neighborhoods change so dramatically? Freeman says it's mostly the result of what he calls "succession": Poor people in gentrifying neighborhoods who move from their homes for whatever reason usually are replaced by people who have more income and education. Freeman and Vigdor say skeptics who view gentrification merely as " 'hood snatching" should remember three things: Many older neighborhoods have high turnover, whether they gentrify or not. Vigdor says that over five years, about half of all urban residents move. Such neighborhoods often have so much vacant or abandoned housing that there's no need to drive anyone out to accommodate people who want to move in. A quarter of the housing in one section of Boston's South End was vacant in 1970; the population had dropped by more than 50% over 20 years. Today, the population has increased more than 50%, and the vacancy rate is less than 2%. Rising housing costs in gentrifying districts may ensure that poor residents who do move leave the neighborhood, rather than settle elsewhere in it. Since their places usually are taken by more affluent, better educated people, the neighborhood's character and demographics change.

Vigdor argues that hatred of gentrification is largely irrational: "We were angry when the middle class moved out of the city," he says. "Now we're angry when they move back." He asks whether Detroit, which in 50 years has lost half its population and most of its middle class, would not have been better off with gentrification than it has been without it. A housing shortage Gentrification is a symptom of a bigger problem: Metro areas don't create enough housing, Vigdor says. When prices in the suburbs get high enough, home buyers start looking at "undervalued" urban housing. If it's close to downtown and has some period charm, so much the better. But critics insist gentrification does real harm to real people. Lewis, the Harlem organizer, says he can't get statements from people who were forced out because he doesn't know where they went. A surprising number of poor people, however, manage to hold on. Some explanations: Homeownership. Homeowners face rising property taxes, but unlike renters they also stand to gain from rising values. Idida Perez, 46, complains that taxes and escrow payments on her twofamily house near Logan Square in Chicago have jumped $300 a month over the past few years. But the house, which she and her husband bought for $200,000 in 1990, is now worth $400,000. Rent control. Samuel Ragland, 82, pays $115 a month for his one-room rent-controlled apartment on fast-gentrifying West 120th Street in Harlem. His building is being converted into condos, but under New York law, his landlord can't move him out unless he's given a comparable apartment at a comparable rent in the same area. Government subsidies. Carole Singleton, 52, had to retire from her job as a hospital administrator after she got cancer. But she's been able to stay in Harlem because she pays only $300 of the $971 rent for her apartment; a federal housing subsidy covers the rest. Doubling (or tripling) up. After the rent on Ofelia Sanchez's one-bedroom apartment in the Logan Square area went from $500 to $600, she and her two kids moved into a three-bedroom with Sanchez's mother and her sister's family. The apartment houses 10 people. Sanchez and her son share a bed, and her daughter sleeps on the floor. But Sanchez won't move; she works as a tutor at the local elementary school, and her mother babysits while she takes classes at Chicago State University. "This is home," she says of the neighborhood where she's lived for 26 of her 27 years. "I don't know anyone anywhere else." Landlord-tenant understandings. In return for $595 monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment, tenant Maria Marquez rakes the leaves and shovels the front walk. She lays floor tile, repairs holes in the porch and changes light fixtures. It enables her, her son and her mother to stay in an area of Chicago where two-bedrooms rent for $1,000. More income devoted to rent. Poor New York households in gentrifying neighborhoods spent 61% of their income on housing, compared with 52% for the poor in non-gentrifying ones, Freeman found. Klare Allen, who is in her mid-40s, has been able to keep her three-bedroom apartment in Roxbury, a black neighborhood close to downtown Boston. But she has to pay $1,400 a month 75% of her monthly income.

Prayer. Alma Feliciano, 46, of Boston asked God for an affordable apartment that would allow her and her four children to stay in Roxbury and continue to attend her church, Holy Tabernacle. Her prayers were granted a unit in a federally subsidized complex. Otherwise, she says, she would have had to leave the city. One reason poor families make such heroic efforts to stay is because the quality of life is improving partly thanks to gentrification. In the Logan Square area, Marquez says, an influx of higher-income newcomers has coincided with what seems like more aggressive policing. "The gang bangers are not around as much, and you don't see the prostitutes on the corners like you used to," she says. Idida Perez hates the rising prices but admits, "There are a lot more small cafes owned by people from the neighborhood, and I am a big coffee drinker." And new businesses mean new jobs: Someone has to pour those lattes.

Essay 4: Research Paper Outline Paragraph 1: Introduction Start by discussing the topic of communities or gentrification in a general way _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ Start narrowing down what you are going to talk about and introduce the authors name and essay title. Also, briefly state what Hampson argues in his essay (you can use the wording of the prompt). _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ State your thesis statement. This should clearly state whether you feel gentrification is a positive process for communities or whether it is ultimately harmful for neighborhoods and residents. _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________

Paragraph 2: Body Paragraph

Start with a topic sentence that clearly states one reason why you feel gentrification is beneficial/harmful. o One reason why I feel that gentrification is beneficial/harmful for communities is _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ Give plenty of details to EXPLAIN this reason: o Information from the sources you found through your research o Information from Hampsons article o Examples that you have observed _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________

Paragraph 3: Body Paragraph Start with a topic sentence that clearly states a second reason why you feel gentrification is beneficial/harmful. o Another reason why I feel that gentrification is beneficial/harmful for communities is _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ Give plenty of details to EXPLAIN this reason: o Information from the sources you found through your research o Information from Hampsons article o Examples that you have observed

_____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ Paragraph 4: Body Paragraph Start with a topic sentence that clearly states a third reason why you feel gentrification is beneficial/harmful. o Gentrification is also beneficial/harmful for communities because _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ Give plenty of details to EXPLAIN this reason: o Information from the sources you found through your research o Information from Hampsons article o Examples that you have observed _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ Paragraph 5: Conclusion Remind the reader that you were responding to Hampsons article and the topic of gentrification _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________ Remind the reader what your position is (whether you feel gentrification is positive or negative for communities and residents). _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________ Conclude with some new insight about what communities and how they are affected by gentrification _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ ________________________________

*KEEP IN MIND*
Your essay should end with a Works Cited page You should cite your source EVERY TIME you use someone elses words or ideas You may have more than three body paragraphs You want to incorporate information from your sources (direct quotes and paraphrasing) into your own ideas about gentrification