雅思阅读 141: Eviction — Not Just a Gentrification Story（驱逐：不只是绅士化的故事）

改编由 Social Forces / Hepburn 等（2024）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://pshepburn.github.io/articles/hepburn_etal_2024.pdf

Reading Passage

A. In the popular imagination, gentrification and eviction are two sides of the same coin. Wealthy newcomers move into a neighbourhood, rents climb, and the long-term poor are pushed out by courts or by landlords who prefer higher-paying tenants. It is a morally vivid story, and it drives a great deal of urban policy. Yet when sociologists sat down to test the story against the largest dataset ever assembled on housing loss, they found something uncomfortable. Drawing on more than six million eviction court cases filed across seventy-two of the United States' largest metropolitan areas between 2000 and 2016, they concluded that the vast majority of evictions did not occur in gentrifying neighbourhoods at all. The places losing tenants to court were, overwhelmingly, low-income neighbourhoods that had not gentrified. The finding does not exonerate gentrification. It does suggest that the single most politically visible form of urban displacement may not be where most housing loss actually happens. The records themselves came from the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, which compiled and geocoded individual court cases from county and state systems across the country.

B. The numbers are worth pausing over. Across the study's sample, roughly one in seven census tracts — about thirteen per cent — gentrified over the sixteen-year window. Those gentrifying neighbourhoods accounted for almost exactly their share of the population and of evictions: about thirteen per cent of tracts, just under twelve per cent of eviction judgements. By contrast, nearly half of all tracts — forty-six per cent — were low-income from the start and did not gentrify by the end of the period, and those neighbourhoods absorbed more than three-fifths of all evictions. At the median tract, the annual eviction rate was about 3.5 per cent in poor non-gentrifying areas, compared with 2.7 per cent in gentrifying areas and 1.6 per cent in affluent ones. At the metropolitan level, the correlation between how much a city gentrified and how often it evicted tenants was close to zero. Cities that gentrified slowly did not, on this measure, evict less; cities that gentrified quickly did not evict more. Two of the cities with the very highest eviction rates — Richmond, Virginia, and Evansville, Indiana — were not among the most gentrifying, while fast-gentrifying places such as Tuscaloosa and Appleton recorded relatively low rates.

C. The longitudinal pattern cuts the other way still. When the researchers tracked tracts over time, they found that eviction rates did not spike in gentrifying neighbourhoods the way the popular story predicts. Such spikes did occur, but they were much rarer in gentrifying areas than in poor, non-gentrifying ones: roughly one in seven gentrifying tracts experienced a sharp jump, compared with nearly one in four low-income tracts. More strikingly, eviction rates fell over the study period in gentrifying neighbourhoods, and fell faster there than in otherwise similar low-income areas that had not changed. In two-thirds of the metropolitan areas studied, the median poor tract had a higher eviction rate than the median gentrifying tract by the end of the period. The implication is that gentrification, however disruptive it may be in other ways, is not the engine of formal eviction that campaign rhetoric assumes. The researchers checked their result using three different definitions of gentrification drawn from prior studies, and the pattern held under each of them.

D. Why should this be? Part of the answer is that gentrifying neighbourhoods, by definition, are attracting capital. Landlords who know their buildings are rising in value have less incentive to evict a long-standing tenant in order to chase a quick rent increase through the courts; they can wait, or they can renovate, or they can sell. Court-ordered eviction remains most attractive where a building's value is stagnant, where tenants are poor and where rents are so low that the landlord's main leverage is simply to remove whoever is there. In other words, the conditions that produce high eviction rates are the conditions of persistent neighbourhood poverty, not of neighbourhood change. This is a humbling finding for researchers and campaigners alike: the neighbourhoods that politicians photograph when they want to talk about displacement are, on the evidence, not where most forced removals are taking place. Eviction, on this reading, is not a temporary crisis that comes and goes with investment; it is a durable feature of concentrated poverty.

E. The authors are careful not to over-claim. Court records, they note, capture only formal, legal eviction. Informal or "off-the-books" removals, in which a tenant leaves without a court order, leave no paper trail; neither do the quieter forms of displacement that come from rising rents, closed corner shops, and the slow loss of a community. The study measures one, well-defined form of housing loss, and it finds that form concentrated in poor, stable — or, more accurately, stuck — neighbourhoods rather than in fashionable, changing ones. The policy implication is uncomfortable. Campaigning against gentrification may be morally satisfying and politically visible, but if the goal is to reduce the number of families put out of their homes, the evidence points elsewhere: toward the deep, durable disadvantage of neighbourhoods that capital has never bothered to gentrify at all. Racial composition sharpens the picture still further, with Black and Latinx neighbourhoods consistently carrying the highest eviction burdens regardless of whether they gentrify. The study's authors argue that this is the finding most likely to reshape policy: the visible, media-friendly image of gentrification is not the right frame for the much quieter, much more permanent crisis of poor, stuck neighbourhoods. More than six million individual cases sit behind the aggregate numbers, each representing a family that lost its home through a court process that most politicians never photograph. The study covers 72 of the largest metropolitan areas, drawn from a total of 200, and excludes duplicate filings and commercial evictions so that the figures reflect households rather than businesses.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. How the study was designed ii. The surprising arithmetic of eviction and gentrification iii. What the long-term data show iv. Why landlords in changing neighbourhoods avoid court eviction v. What the data can — and cannot — show vi. How courts decide eviction cases vii. The rise of Airbnb in American cities

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. What did the study find about where most evictions occurred? A. Mostly in newly gentrified neighbourhoods. B. Mostly in low-income neighbourhoods that had not gentrified. C. Mostly in wealthy neighbourhoods. D. Equally in every type of neighbourhood.

6. What was the correlation between a city's gentrification rate and its eviction rate? A. Strongly positive. B. Strongly negative. C. Close to zero. D. Impossible to measure.

7. How did eviction rates change in gentrifying neighbourhoods over time? A. They rose sharply. B. They fell, and fell faster than in comparable non-gentrifying poor areas. C. They stayed exactly constant. D. They doubled.

8. Why might landlords in gentrifying areas avoid court eviction? A. Because court costs are rising. B. Because they can profit from rising building values without removing long-term tenants. C. Because gentrifying areas have no courts. D. Because tenants in gentrifying areas never miss rent.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. The study analysed over six million eviction cases across 72 large US metropolitan areas.
10. Gentrifying neighbourhoods accounted for more than half of all evictions in the sample.
11. Eviction rates fell more over time in gentrifying neighbourhoods than in comparable poor non-gentrifying areas.
12. The study measured every form of displacement, including informal off-the-books removals.
13. Gentrifying neighbourhoods had a higher median eviction rate than wealthy tracts.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The authors caution that court records capture only (14) __________ eviction; quieter, informal forms of (15) __________ are not recorded.

答案与解析

← 上一篇 | 返回雅思焦点 | 下一篇 →