Gentrification in Berlin: A Novel Conceptually Driven Quantitative Approach to Evaluating Anti-Displacement Legislation

As cities across the world have experienced urbanization over the past several decades, gentrification, and its accompanying social and economic tensions, has become one of the most prominent issues in geography literature. As affected citizens struggle to fight displacement and cities coordinate policy responses, the academic community has struggled to rigorously define and quantify gentrification despite the substantial attention paid in popular media to gentrification as an urban phenomenon (Preis et al, 2020). Policy responses have also been varied, with cities using a mix of rent controls, supply-side initiatives, and other regulatory measures to mitigate — and sometimes encourage —gentrification (Lees and Ley, 2008). Berlin has experienced dramatic gentrification over the past two decades, but policymakers have struggled to respond. In this paper, I evaluate the effectiveness of "Erhaltungsverordnungen", or preservation laws, an as-of-yet unexamined method of slowing gentrification. To do so, I develop a novel method of evaluating gentrification using Dangschat's (1988) invasion-succession model of gentrification and classify each LOR planning area in Berlin (n=448) bi-yearly from 2001 to 2019 as being in one of five stages of gentrification using demographic and real-estate valuation data. With this data, I use a multi-state survival analysis based on Therneau et al (2020) and a multiple-group time variable treatment effect difference-in-difference approach drawn from Callaway and Sant'Anna (2020) to evaluate preservation laws. I extend Callaway and Sant'Anna (2020) to evaluate the possibility of spillover effects according to Butts (2021). I find no indication of preservation legislation slowing gentrification and that further research is necessary because of the recency of the adoption of said legislation. Broadly, this paper represents an exploratory analysis into the possibility of more exactly measuring gentrification throughout its course and utilizing said data for policy interventions