A new book from Washington University researchers examines how New York, London, and Seoul are all experiencing the same displacement dynamics driven by the same global capital forces — and what it will take to fight back
The Same Story in Three Languages
Walk through Crown Heights in Brooklyn, Brixton in South London, or the Mapo district of Seoul, and you will encounter variations of the same story: a working-class or lower-income neighborhood, long neglected by capital and public investment, suddenly becomes desirable. Prices rise. Long-term residents — disproportionately people of color, immigrants, and the poor — find themselves unable to stay. The physical fabric of the neighborhood changes. The cultural fabric follows. And the people who built the community, who held it together through the years when no one else wanted it, are scattered to peripheral neighborhoods where the cycle begins again. This is gentrification. And according to a new book published in late 2025 by researchers from Washington University in St. Louis, it is not a local anomaly or a product of any single city’s policy failures. It is an internationally reproduced urban condition, driven by the same global economic logics in every city it touches.
The Research: New York, London, Seoul
In “Urban Redevelopment and Neighborhood Gentrification in Global Contexts: But Where are the Poor to Live?” Carol Camp Yeakey, the Marshall S. Snow Professor of Arts and Sciences at Washington University, and her former students Ming Yin and Byung-Hoon Cheon examine how gentrification has unfolded in three prominent global cities since the 2007-09 financial crisis. The cities were chosen deliberately: New York, London, and Seoul are all major nodes in the global finance, insurance, and real estate economy, and all three have experienced rapid urbanization and globalization that has made housing affordability a defining political crisis of the current era. The authors found that despite radically different welfare systems, regulatory regimes, and political traditions, all three cities show the same underlying patterns: rising land values, displacement of low-income households, and policy frameworks that prioritize market-driven outcomes over equitable access to housing. Carol Camp Yeakey’s work at Washington University spans urban studies, public health, and education policy, and her interdisciplinary approach to gentrification research treats housing displacement as a public health crisis as much as an economic one.
Three Cities, Three Patterns
Each city in the study offers a distinct variant of the same underlying dynamic. Seoul experienced what the authors describe as the most compressed and intense form of gentrification: state-led redevelopment projects that reshaped entire districts within a single generation, creating a cityscape where residents still carry living memories of eviction and community destruction. The speed of Seoul’s transformation offers a cautionary tale about what can happen when government-backed capital investment operates without meaningful community participation or anti-displacement safeguards. London’s experience is characterized by what the researchers call “super-gentrification” or “hyper-gentrification” in its most recent phase — driven not by young professionals seeking affordable urban living but by global elites and transnational capital seeking real estate as an investment vehicle. The cascading effect is severe: middle-class gentrifiers from earlier waves are now being pushed outward as international capital arrives, and their relocation to peripheral neighborhoods drives up costs there, displacing the lower-income residents who had already been pushed once. New York’s pattern reflects what the authors describe as entrenched racialized displacement, legacy rent policies, and cyclical neighborhood reinvestment. The study found that university-led expansion serves as a primary gentrifier in New York — an often-overlooked mechanism by which academic institutions, pursuing their own growth agendas, displace surrounding communities. This pattern, the authors note, has precedents stretching back centuries to the expansion of Oxford University in England.
The Invisible Wounds of Displacement
One of the book’s most important contributions is its attention to what Camp Yeakey calls “root shock” — the emotional and psychological trauma inflicted on individuals and families who are forcibly displaced from communities where they have built their lives. The concept, originally developed by researcher Mindy Fullilove, describes the devastating stress response that follows the destruction of one’s home environment. Root shock affects mental health, physical health, employment stability, and educational outcomes for children. It is a public health crisis that rarely appears in housing policy discussions focused on unit counts and income thresholds. The researchers document that this trauma is not an unfortunate side effect of gentrification — it is a predictable, measurable consequence that policymakers choose to ignore when they approve development projects without anti-displacement protections. Public health research on root shock and community displacement has grown substantially in recent years, with findings that strengthen the case for treating anti-displacement policy as a health intervention as much as a housing one.
Who Really Loses
The book challenges a common framing of gentrification as a problem that affects only the very poor. The consequences, the researchers argue, ripple across the entire urban social structure. For middle-income families, gentrification means higher rents, reduced access to central locations, and intensified competition for school seats and transit access. Existing small businesses face escalating costs and shortened lease terms that make long-term planning impossible. Over time, community services — the bodegas, the churches, the childcare centers, the barbershops and beauty salons that serve a specific community — disappear as the customer base is displaced. Even relatively affluent residents eventually confront a more homogenized urban environment that has traded cultural diversity for upscale amenity. As co-author Byung-Hoon Cheon put it: “Gentrification reshapes who has access to opportunity, how labor markets function, how communities maintain cohesion and how cities retain historical continuity. It transforms urban environments in ways that ultimately affect everyone.”
Global Problems, Local Solutions — and Their Limits
The book concludes that local and national policy responses, however important, are insufficient to address a phenomenon driven by global capital flows. The market forces producing gentrification in Brooklyn are the same forces producing it in Brixton and in Seoul’s Mapo district. Coordinating a meaningful response requires international policy frameworks that treat housing as a human right rather than an investment vehicle — a position endorsed by the United Nations but rarely translated into binding national policy in the United States or the United Kingdom. For New York, the immediate implications are practical: community land trusts, deep affordability requirements, anti-speculation taxes on vacant lots and short-term rental conversions, and genuine community participation in land-use decisions. The Right to the City Alliance NYC organizes across housing, immigration, and environmental justice issues and has articulated a policy vision for NYC that addresses the structural roots of displacement rather than its symptoms. Under Mayor Mamdani, whose political formation is rooted in exactly this kind of structural analysis, New York has an opportunity to test whether a city government can actually bend the arc of gentrification. The researchers are not optimistic that any single city can do it alone. But they document communities in all three cities that are fighting back — and winning, at least locally, at least for now. That resistance, the book argues, is not naive. It is the only realistic response to a system that will not reform itself.
