Geographers, sociologists, and psychologists have documented feelings of anxiety, loss, and alienation experienced by long-time residents of gentrifying urban neighborhoods. (See, for instance, Fullilove 2004; Lewicka 2011; González and Dawson 2018; Hyra 2015; Shaw and Hagemans 2015; cf. Schlichtman et al. 2017: 135–8). These psychological responses and associated complaints have also been given attention in some recent philosophical treatments of gentrification (Dawkins 2023: 266–9; van Leeuwen 2024; Sundstrom 2024: 94–100). Suddenly, and often with little warning, these residents report finding their sense of place and belonging has vanished, leaving them feeling estranged and frozen out of a new and unfamiliar environment. The dramatic transformation of Chelsea in New York City in the last several decades supplies a stark example of this phenomenon. Forty years ago, Chelsea was a mostly working-class district with scores of inexpensive storefront businesses such as “bodegas, lunch counters and delis, fishmongers and butchers, laundromats and convenience stores” (Navarro 2015). Part of the neighborhood was a Puerto Rican enclave with dozens of restaurants, barber shops, churches and so on that anchored the community. Today, most of these shops and gathering spots have disappeared, and the ones that remain are an endangered species. As of 2014, the median asking rent in the neighborhood was 3, 490 a month, and the average household income was about 140, 000, about five times higher (in real terms) than forty years earlier. Now that “the old Western Beef supermarket turned into the Apple store with the glass staircase, and the pizza place into an eyebrow salon, ” many of the longtime residents who remain report feeling “profound anxiety” and a sense of loss (Navarro 2015). This phenomenon is not unique to Chelsea or New York City. It involves broad and rapid change in the social practices and use of space that surround long-standing users of a neighborhood (driven by rising rents and demographic change). As mentioned, social scientists studying such changes have found widespread negative attitudes among continuing residents of such areas. In this paper, we want to take these attitudes seriously, and to offer a possible explanation, and potential vindication, of some of them. 1 One way to do so (a route that has been taken by some writers in the existing literature) is to focus on the loss of something valued, an object of attachment, directly and to argue that there are reasons of justice to protect people against (or to avoid provoking) such loss (Radin 1982, 1986; Dawkins 2023: 266–9; van Leeuwen 2024; see Sundstrom 2024: 94–100 for criticism of this view). While we do not reject this idea, here we take a different approach. We argue instead that feelings of estrangement among longstanding residents might in part be accounted for in terms of their marginalization in the relations among users of the area, produced in ways closely related to the local sociocultural changes associated with gentrification. The feelings of loss and alienation, we suggest, can be understood at least in part as the product of a loss of centrality or significance in neighborhood social relations. To make this case, we develop a familiar idea (that gentrification produces marginalization) present in the philosophical literature (Zimmer 2017: 61–4; Dawkins 2023: 275–6; Hoover 2023: 941–3; Lloyd 2025: 1257) but so far only discussed briefly and not yet theoretically developed. This paper aims to present an account of marginalization as a relational injustice, and to show how gentrification, in the right circumstances, might be its source. 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Guillery et al. (Fri,) studied this question.