A New Gentrification? A Case Study of the Russification of Brighton Beach, New York

Keith Brown Undergraduate Student

Elvin Wyly Professor

Department of Geograph y Rutgers University 54 Joyce Kilmer Avenue Piscataway NJ 08854-8054

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ABSTRACT

Gentrification is often equated with the residential and consumption preferences of young, white, native-born profession­als. The link between gentrification and "yuppies," however, does not seem ade­quate to capture the complexity oftrends currently underway in many city neigh­borhoods. In this paper, census data and fieldwork are utilized to develop a case study of Russian immigration and neigh­borhood revitalization in Brighton Beach, New York City. " Russification" has revi ­talized housing demand and retail activity by altering the class composition of the neighborhood, while also increasing in­equality and inducing displacement simi­lar to that observed in other gentrifying districts. Nevertheless, important cultural and policy-related factors distinguish immigrant-driven neighborhood change from more conventional forms of gentrification.

KEY WORDS: gentrification, immigration, land values, minorities, urban revitaliza ­tion, New York City.

INTRODUCTION

Years ago, the popular movie Brighton Beach Memoirs dramatized the lives of a middle class Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. The film's vivid images of neighborhood life presented an accurate portrayal of the place in the 1950s, when it was a solid middle-class Jewish com­munity. But in subsequent years white flight and suburbanization took their toll. Poverty and disinvestment spread throughout Brighton Beach and sur­rounding areas until the mid-1980's, when a resurgence of foreign immigra­tion brought waves of new arrivals to the United States. Russian immigrants poured into Brighton Beach, tightening the housing market and displacing poor residents. The influx dramatically trans­formed what had become a poor working­class area, and today Brighton Beach is anchored by a healthy commercial strip and a booming real estate market. Now the images of Brighton Beach Memoirs are distant urban history; for a cinematic

portrayal of the mixture of new Russians and working class African Americans, we would have to include titles such as Little Odessa, or Spike Lee's He Got Game.

The process that transformed Brighton Beach is gentrification. Gentrification is defined as " a process of neighborhood regeneration by relatively affluent incom­ers, who displace lower income groups and invest in the improvement of homes the quality of which has deteriorated. Such neighborhoods are usually acces­sible to the city center and comprise sub­stantial older dwellings" . . . (Johnston, 1994, p. 216) . Gentrification is an impor­tant urban process because it acts as a counter force to suburbanization, and re­verses the classical invasion-succession processes. Thus middle- and upper­middle class households displace lower­income families, as individuals or insti ­tutions invest money in neighborhoods that have been artificially devalued by metropolitan-wide forces of suburbani­zation and uneven development (Smith, 1996). Gentrification has attracted wide­spread attention from geographers and other social scientists, but until recently most studies have focused on the role of white, young, upwardly-mobile profes­sionals. Indeed, after Newsweek fa­mously crowned 1984 as "The Year of the Yuppie" (Newsweek, 1984), an ever­broader range of seemingly new eco­nomic, social, and political trends were linked to this hybrid category that was "a mixture of age, address, and class." (Eh­renreich, 1989, p. 196). Gentrification, in the eyes of both admirers and detractors, quickly became inseparable from the predilections of the yuppie. "Yuppifica­tion," however, does not seem adequate to describe the complex neighborhood change underway in new immigrant en­claves such as Brighton Beach .

This paper analyses how immigration shapes the gentrification process. Our purpose is to determine whether and how immigrant-driven gentrification differs from conventional processes of "yuppifi­cation ." We examine changes in the population and local businesses in Brigh­ton Beach since the 1980s and we con­trast these changes with trends docu-

mented in Park Slope and the Lower East Side, well -known areas of gentrification elsewhere in New York City (Lees and Bondi, 1995). We begin with a brief re­view of the geographical literature on gentrification, and then we turn to an ex­amination of demographic trends in Brooklyn and Brighton Beach.

THEORIES OF GENTRIFICATION AND DEGENTRIFICATION

Gentrification is a prominent theme in urban geography, with literally hundreds of articles written on the subject since the 1970s (Smith and Herod, 1991). Histori ­cally, most of the literature emphasizes the demand-side aspects of the process. Johnson (1983), for example, identified six interdependent causal factors. The maturation of the post-World War II baby boom increased household formation rates, and intersected in growth in single, divorced, and childless households dur­ing the 1960s and 1970s. Rising construc­tion costs and inflation priced first-time homebuyers out ofthe suburban housing market. Simultaneous changes in the cul­ture at large led to a growing dissatisfac­tion with suburban living, even as rising fuel costs provided powerful incentives for people to choose homes closer to work. These trends reinforced the histori­cal appeal of cities, and offered attractive investment potential in selected urban neighborhoods. Finally, Johnson (1983) emphasized the importance of office con­struction in the downtown core for at­tracting residential gentrification; this trend accelerated greatly in the 1980s (see also Berry, 1985).

Subsequent research on gentrification added new insights on the complexity of the process, and fueled debates on the relative importance of different causal factors. Clark (1985) and others offered "stage" theories, in which neighborhood change begins with a few households in search of unique or historic homes in an environment where alternative lifestyles are tolerated. Within a few years, how­ever, succession accelerates as specula­tors recognize the profit potential of the neighborhood and as "do-it-yourself" renovators are replaced by middle-class

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families who regard their homes primar­ily as investments. This stage begins to displace lower-income residents in the area, as landlords are able to increase rents, lending institutions are more will ­ing to make loans to prospective buyers, and rental units are converted to condo­miniums or cooperative ownership. The third and final stage is marked by consol­idation: gentrifiers commonly seek his­toric district designation in order to en­hance property values and exclude unwanted land uses; local government often increases the quality of public ser­vices provided to the neighborhood; and middle-income residents (who initially displaced low-i ncome households) may themselves be displaced by wealthier newcomers.

Geographical research on gentrifica­tion expanded rapidly in the 1980s, as speculative downtown office construc­tion fueled the revival of neighborhoods in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, D.C, and other old cities that had suffered from the deindustrialization of the Northeast. The collapse of boom­ing property markets in the recession of the early 1990s, however, raised ques­tions about the continued significance of gentrification. Bou rne (1993) offered a perceptive critique of the gentrification literature, questioning the empirical mea­sures used to document the process as well as the significance for metropolitan income inequality. Based on a case study of neighborhoods in the Toronto metro­politan region, Bourne demonstrated that gentrification contributed relatively little to central-city income change, and was dwarfed by the upgrading of existing elite and middle class areas as well as the re­development of "greyfield " nonresiden­tialland . Moreover, Bourne (1993) argued that the postwar circumstances driving gentrification represented a unique his­torical event, and that the 1990s were wit­nessing a " post-gentrification era. "

GENTRIFICATION AND DEGENTRIFICATION IN NEW YORK CITY

Bourne's commentary inaugurated a spirited debate on the future of down­town redevelopment, neighborhood re-

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vitalization, and the broader prospects for central city housing markets (for example, Smith, 1996, pp. 210-211) . Bourne's analysis has been challenged by critics who argue that recessionary slumps are essential to the gentrification process, and in any event the long­running economic expansion revived scores of central -city housing markets and relegated the " degentrification" de­bate to the sidelines.

New York City provides an illuminating case study of the gentrification and de­gentrification debates. An overheated housing market was paralyzed in the wake of the 1987 stock market crash and the subsequent recession in the early 1990s, prompting sober re-evaluations of the city's recent adventures:

In some corners ofthe city, the experts say, gentrification may be remem­bered, along with junk bonds, stretch limousines, and television evangel­ism, as just another grand excess of the 1980s .... As the dust settles, we can see that the areas that underwent dramatic turnarounds had severe lim­itations. Rich people are simply not going to live next to public housing (Lueck, 1991, p. 1 [cited in Lees and Bondi, 1995.])

Lees and Bondi (1995) analyze the sim­ilarities and contrasts between neighbor­hood change in two districts of New York City. In the Lower East Side the recession of the early 1970s led to a wave of forfei ­tures on tax-delinquent properties, and in desperation to return parcels to the tax rolls the city sold them at deep discounts. Simultaneously the city's rise as a global financial and investment center enhanced the attractiveness of the Lower East Side, only two miles north of the expanding fi ­nancial district. The result has been more than two decades of vigorous gentrifica­tion activity, beginning with a trickle of artists from nearby Greenwich Village and Soho. These first arrivals were sub­sequently threatened with displacement along with poorer residents when higher­income professionals began moving into new and renovated upscale units. The

speed with which the process took place in the context of a tight and polarized housing market was dramatized by a se­ries of uprisings in Tomkins Square Park in 1988, ignited by attempts to evict the homeless from a public space now sur­rounded by elite condos and co-ops (Smith, 1996).

Lees and Bondi 's (1995) second case study is Park Slope, originally a prosper­ous professional enclave that declined in the 1930s and became affordable to Irish and Italian-born working class families. A turnaround began in the early 1970s, and the area became increasingly attractive to managers and professionals commuting to Manhattan. In contrast to the Lower East Side, however, the process was slower and involved less severe instances of displacement. Moreover, single women and nontraditional households have played an important role in the neighborhood's revival. Lees and Bondi's (1995) study demonstrated the local spec­ificity of gentrification among different neighborhoods in the same city, echoing earlier arguments by Beauregard (1986, 1990).

This review of the gentrification liter­ature demonstrates the breadth of re­search on the subject. Nevertheless, de­bate persists on the importance of the process, where theory predicts it will oc­cur (and where it actually does), and who is responsible for it. Moreover, studies continue to define gentrification-usually implicitly-in terms of white, upper mid­dle class professionals. The literature, therefore, continues to emphasize the stereotype of the Wall Street " yuppie" while ignoring other complex demo­graphic changes that may be equally im­portant. For example, the dramatic re­vival of immigration streams into U.S. cities since the 1960s raises important questions on the role of new arrivals in processes of neighborhood change. We now turn to a case study of Brighton Beach to consider these issues.

A NEW GENTRIFICATION? THE CASE OF BRIGHTON BEACH

The round of neighborhood change that has transformed Brighton Beach con-

trasts sharply with that occurring in the trendy gentrified districts elsewhere in New York City. Yet many aspects of the area's recent history have been widely in­terpreted in the familiar language that dominated gentrification debates in the 1970s: new arrivals are " revitalizing " the housing market and retail base, "upgrad­ing " homes and businesses, and over time sustaining a general neighborhood "renaissance." And in parallel with gen­trification elsewhere, neighborhood revi­talization seems to have involved some displacement of low-income households.

Brighton Beach is situated on a barrier island at the southern edge of Brooklyn, abutting Coney Island on the west and Manhattan Beach to the east (Fig. 1). Ini­tially a string of small , middle-class sea­side resorts, the area boomed when rail connections across Brooklyn made it ac­cessible for day trips and short excur­sions. By the turn of the century Coney Island, once regarded as "a seaside ex­tension of New York's vice districts" (Homberger, 1994, p. 128) had become a family-oriented center with three large amusement parks. Manhattan Beach be­came an outpost of shorefront homes for Manhattan's upper classes. The entire peninsula was in its heyday when the subway reached Coney Island and the boardwalk opened in the 1920s: even in the Depression of the 1930s Coney Island attracted 16 million summer visitors (Homberger, 1994, p. 128). With contin­ued decentralization of New York City and the completion of regional highway net­works in the postwar era, however, south­ern Brooklyn became an outdated and pe­ripheral destination unable to compete with newer attractions farther east on Long Island and the Jersey Shore. A long period of commercial decline in the 1950s was punctuated by outmigration, deteri­oration of the housing stock, and the ac­tivities of the New York City Housing Au­thority. The peninsula received most of the public housing built in southern Brooklyn, with six projects completed be­tween 1966 and 1980 (Fig. 2) (Homberger, 1994, p. 164).

The decline of Brighton Beach and Co­ney Island was both complex and symp-

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FIGURE 1. Census t ract boundaries in Brighton Beach, Coney Island, and Manhattan Beach .

tomatic of the familiar litany of ills plagu­ing other urban neighborhoods, and one should not oversimplify this history. Sharon Zukin (Zukin et al., 1998), for ex­ample, dates the area's decline much ear­lier than the postwar period- to the 1911 fire that destroyed Dreamland, one ofthe three beachfront amusement parks-and argues that an essential element of this downfall involved an uneasy tension in the class character of the place. The re­sort's heyday was based on expanding a middle-class resort to attract a broader audience of lower-class New Yorkers, and " the holiday practices of working-class culture-even at its most futuristic and commercial-tended to drive away other cultural images." (Zukin et al., 1998, p. 630) . The result was a powerful im­agery associating this part of Brooklyn with a working-class New York history that planners, political leaders, and entre­preneurs sought to replace as they mod­ernized the metropolis. Robert Moses de­clared the area " blighted" in 1939 and

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helped accelerate its decline by develop­ing Jones Beach further out on Long Is­land, and he oversaw the construction of the area's first public housing in the late 1950s. Even so, the area still retained a large middle-class Jewish population, and "during the 1950s, a number of pri­vate developers (including Fred C. Trump, father of Donald) used federal subsidies to build several thousand co-op apart­ments for middle-income families. " (Zu­kin et al., 1998, p. 632).

IMMIGRATION AND THE TRANSFORMATION

OF BRIGHTON BEACH

If the decline of Coney Island and Brighton Beach was a complex process, its revitalization has been no less inter­esting. Immigration played a key role. In the 1980s, New York received the largest influx of immigrants (854,000) since the closure of Ellis Island in 1924 (Siegel, 1997, p. 218) . Through most of the 1980s

FIGURE 2. Public housing in Coney Island.

immigration from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was extremely limited, with a selective flow of Soviet Jews coming to Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach. The recent dissolution of the Soviet Un­ion, however, propelled this flow from a trickle of an average 1,300 arrivals per year in 1982-89 to 13,300 per year in 1990- 94. Immigrants from the former Soviet Union, dominated by Ukrainians and urban Russians, now constitute the second-largest source of arrivals to New York City, behind only Dominicans (Ed­monson, 1997). Almost one in seven res­idents in Brighton Beach is a new arrival from Russia, and Russian-born persons comprise nearly two-thirds of the area's population.

The acceleration of immigration al­tered neighborhood ethnic and class composition and also drove a sweeping transformation of the area's residential landscape. These trends are evident in an analysis of population and housing char­acteristics in 1970, 1980, and 1990. Tables

1 and 2 present a set of common bench­marks used in gentrification research, charting trends in four census tracts atthe heart of Brighton Beach-one pair nes­tled between the boardwalk and the ele­vated rail line along the central commer­cial corridor of Brighton Beach Avenue, and the other pair to the north where re­tail and commercial uses give way to lower density housing. While the vintage of the decennial census hides the dra­matic changes under way since 1990, these statistics provide an important se­ries of historical snapshots ofthe links be­tween immigration and gentrification.

This analysis confirms a striking turn­around in Brighton Beach. Several indi­cators provide consistent evidence of revitalization driven by immigration. For­eign-born persons as a share of total population increased in all four census tracts (reaching two-thirds in two tracts). All of the tracts registered losses in av­erage, inflation-adjusted family income during the 1970s, fo llowed by vigorous

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TABLE 1 Population and Housing Characteristics North of Brighton Beach Avenue,

1970-1990.

Tract 362 Tract 364

1970 1980 1990 1970 1980 1990

Basic Demographic Indicators Total Population 3,325 3,601 3,528 2,702 2,069 1,667 Percent Non-Hispanic White 89.3 62.7 39.9 95.3 74.9 52.8 Percent Non-Hispanic Black 2.3 3.2 3.0 0.0 2.0 0.0 Percent Hispanic 8.3 24.2 29.7 4.3 14.5 28.1 Percent Foreign-Born 36.2 41.1 57.3 26.0 43.3 59.3 Poverty rate 23.2 33.3 23.7 10.8 17.9 22.7 Mean family income* 29,254 23,565 33,859 37,436 29,886 34,145

Education and Labor Market College Degree or more** 5.1 12.4 14.0 6.0 14.8 21 .2 Unemployment rate 8.2 11.3 16.6 5.8 9.7 14.6 Occupational compositon: Professional or Managerial 18.8 23.3 22.2 18.4 27.6 28.7 Sales 8.5 5.6 7.4 14.2 4.9 5.3 Administrative support 28.6 26.5 14.0 37.1 27.9 17.3 Skilled manual 27 .3 26.1 27.9 24.7 24.8 17.2 Unskilled manual 16.8 18.5 28.4 5.6 14.9 31 .6

Housing Market Total Housing Units 1,678 1,758 1,350 1,128 936 875 Homeownership rate 20.28 17.74 33.09 52.23 33.02 30.53 Vacancy rate 4.52 7.05 6.88 2.75 8.44 7.54 Median contract rent * 280 309 445 349 376 482

Notes: * Income and rent figures in constant 1990 dollars, adjusted with the CPI for the New York CMSA. **Universe is persons age 25 and over; for 1970 and 1980, share completing more than 15 years of education for 1990, share with bachelor's and/or grad./prof. degree.

(Source: Tobin, 1993)

increases in three tracts during the 1980s. Median inflation-adjusted rents increased in all four tracts, in one case advancing by a remarkable 44 percent during the 1980s. Educational upgrading is also ap­parent, but occupational shifts are more complex-with the most notable trend being a decline in mid-level administra­tive support along with simultaneous growth in low-status service workers and white-collar professionals.

Countervailing trends are also impor­tant, however. Note that even as income, rent levels, and educational profiles edged upward, so have measures of neighborhood distress. The poverty rate increased in all four tracts, reaching a

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staggering 39 percent in one. Unemploy­ment edged up in all tracts. Non-Hispanic blacks remain a very small proportion of residents, reflecting the extremely fine­grained geography of racial segregation between Brighton Beach and Coney Is­land. As one moves north from Brighton Beach Avenue, however, there are rising shares of Hispanic residents, many of them recent arrivals from Puerto Rico. Housing indicators are also mixed, with demolition and losses in some areas, rental construction elsewhere. Rising homeownership rates are associated with general upgrading of single and duplex units on some blocks, but closer to the boardwalk new condominium and co-op

TABLE 2 Population and Housing Characteristics South of Brighton Beach Avenue,

1970-1990.

Tract 360.01 Tract 360.02

1970 1980 1990 1970 1980 1990

Basic Demographic Indicators Total Population 3,109 3,078 3,555 4,146 3,847 3,951 Percent Non-Hispanic White 96.7 95.7 81 .4 98.7 94.5 95.8 Percent Non-Hispanic Black 0.0 0.9 0.5 0.0 0.2 1.8 Percent Hispanic 2.9 2.5 11 .6 1.1 5.1 1.6 Percent Foreign-Born 50.5 54.0 65.7 53.3 64.8 69.0 Poverty rate 19.3 20.8 29.2 17.6 18.2 38.9 Mean family income* 31,108 23,911 32,373 29,202 21,628 19,955

Education and Labor Market College Degree or more** 4.7 7.8 18.2 3.9 8.6 11 .9 Unemployment rate 8.5 9.6 12.7 8.0 8.1 14.4 Occupational composition: Professional or Managerial 19.0 22.4 28.5 17.5 18.7 21.8 Sales 12.8 14.6 10.4 11 .0 6.6 6.9 Administrative support 29.5 27 .0 13.3 39.3 26.3 18.8 Skilled manual 25.4 25.2 21 .4 27.8 27.0 23.4 Unskilled manual 13.2 10.8 26.4 4.4 21.4 29.2

Housing Market Total Housing Units 1,654 1,771 2,099 2,131 2,111 2,223 Homeownership rate 4.44 1.75 21 .27 7.16 4.56 2.9 Vacancy rate 0.6 0.39 4.57 1.12 0.33 2.42 Median contract rent* 349 422 461 327 347 410

Notes: * Income and rent figures in constant 1990 dollars, adjusted with the CPI for the New York CMSA. **Universe is persons age 25 and over; for 1970 and 1980, share completing more than 15 years of education for 1990, share with bachelor' s and/or grad./prof. degree.

(Source: Tobin, 1993)

construction is adding many new units at the upper end of the market. The boom­ing national and regional economy has accelerated development in the 1990s. In a particularly striking image, the site of the Brighton Beach Baths is now being re­developed for an 850-unit condominium complex (Harris, 1999).

These trends are consistent with a wid­ening social polarization of Brighton Beach. There does not appear to be a full ­scale gentrification with sufficient mo­mentum to transform the class character of the place entirely. Indeed, the varied status and educational profile of new Rus­sian arrivals-some are refugees, others are highly educated professionals-

maintains a considerable diversity in the local population. The magnitude of con­tinued immigration flow complicates any attempt to identify a stable equilibrium. Moreover, the classical ecological pro­cesses of spatial assimilation seem to be at work with a vengeance. Manhattan Beach, long a wealthy Jewish enclave, is now seeing a wave of new construction sites for Russians moving out of Brighton Beach, leading one journalist to dub the place "the Scarsdale of Russian New York." (Yardley, 1998). The selective out­migration from Brighton Beach thus makes the place more dynamic and more complex than gentrified districts that manage to attain-and keep-a position

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at the top of a particular housing submar­ket (see Smith, 1996; cf. Berry, 1985).

CHANGES IN THE COMMERCIAL LANDSCAPE

As neighborhood demographics changed, so did the businesses in the area (Fig . 3). Not surprisingly, the popular press has drawn attention to the restau ­rants and clubs of Brighton Beach. A food critic for the New York Daily News dubbed the area the " Russo-Baltic-Scardi food belt, " with glowing reviews of such estab­lishments as Cafe St. Petersburg and A Taste of Russia (Purdy, 1996). Scores of similar accounts in the local press pro­vide impressionistic evidence of com­mercial change. To gain a more system­atic understanding of these trends, interviews were conducted with staff at a total of 36 commercial establishments along Brighton Beach Avenue, the main retail corridor. Where possible, proprie­tors or senior managers were interviewed in order to determine whether and how the current business differed from previ -

ous activities at that location. Most of the establishments included in this sample have been at their present location for 12 to 15 years. Of the 36 establishments studied, 33 had been in Brighton Beach since the latter half of the 1980's; 10 es­tablishments opened in a single year, 1986. Three (a 99 cents store, a flea mar­ket, and a second-hand clothing store) had been in their present locations prior to 1985.

The survey revealed substantial evi­dence of commercial revitalization. Ofthe three dozen businesses surveyed, eight replaced vacant storefronts, while an ad­ditional seven replaced discount stores; one store replaced a bail bondsman, while another replaced a pawn shop. The establishments serve a cross-section of the residents, and reflect the evolving de­mography ofthe local population: current businesses include fur stores, specialized clothing stores, Russian restaurants, pharmacies, food markets, and night clubs. Two-thirds of the managers em­phasized that vacancies in the area had

FIGURE 3. The Boardwalk in Brighton Beach.

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made it inexpensive to establish a busi­ness in their location. As in many other cities the succession of the small busi­ness class replaced older Jewish entre­preneurs, many of whom had established a foothold in Brighton Beach in the 1930s and 1940s, with younger Russian-born proprietors serving a growing immigrant population. Several Russian gourmet food stores have replaced Kosher delis. There has also been a shift from general­purpose stores to more specialized shops serving a well -developed and growing lo­cal market, such as the replacement of discount clothing stores with fur and leather shops. Finally, this commercial re­vitalization seems to have driven at least some displacement. One resident inter­viewed, who has lived in Brighton Beach since 1961 , observed thatthe upper floors of many older commercial buildings along Brighton Beach Avenue had been rented as apartments, primarily to Puerto Rican residents. By the middle of the 1980s, however, many buildings had been purchased by Russian-born entre­preneurs who converted the upper floors to office uses (Zimmerman, 1998).

Changes in the residential and com­mercial landscapes of Brighton Beach paint a picture of dynamism. While many trends bear close resemblance to gentri­fication processes described in the vast geographical literature on the subject, other changes suggest a more ambigu­ous interpretation. On the one hand, the influx of Russians into Brighton Beach has sustained a rebound in housing de­mand, increased average incomes, and upgraded the occupational and educa­tional profile of the neighborhood. The new population has, in turn, supported a revival of retail demand. These processes appear to have begun pushing much of the housing stock out of the reach of low­income residents, although it is virtually impossible to obtain geographically­specific data that would measure dis­placement (Smith, 1996). On the other hand, some indicators point to important contrasts with gentrification processes that play out in inner-city areas that be­come attractive to native-born white pro­fessionals. Poverty and unemployment

have increased even as revitalization has proceeded, and the diversity of immi­grant flows has produced a correspond­ing diversity and dynamism in the local housing market.

CONCLUSIONS

The 1980s were widely regarded, by critics and admirers alike, as the decade of the yuppie. Gentrification came to be seen as an important geographical ex­pression of the demographic trends, income inequality, and consumption choices epitomized by young, usually white urban professionals. The 1990s, however, lack a corresponding single im­age to capture the essence of socio­cultural urban change. Perhaps the dis­appearance of the yuppie is appropriate: the 1980s were, in many respects, the twi­light of an era in which many urban is­sues could be understood in dichoto­mous, black-white terms. In gentrification research, this era was characterized by a concern that poor, native-born African Americans were being displaced by white yuppies.

A decade later, neighborhood change has grown exceedingly complex with the revival of immigration into American cit­ies. This study confirms that immigration has the potential to revitalize distressed neighborhoods: Brighton Beach has en­joyed an influx of new arrivals, many of them well-educated professionals and entrepreneurs able to establish them­selves in New York's dynamic economy. Buoyant retail and housing demand have followed .

Yet the Russification of Brighton Beach is extremely complex. In a pattern similar to that observed in some other gentrify­ing neighborhoods, poverty and unem­ployment have increased even as other indicators (income, occupation and edu­cational attainment) edged upward. Three additional factors distinguish immigrant-driven neighborhood change from conventional processes studied in most of the gentrification literature. First, immigrant-driven neighborhood dynam­ics are determined by a distinct set of mechanisms at the national and global scales. Conventional, "yuppie-driven"

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t

gentrification may be explained in terms of the standard processes of housing de­mand or landlord and developer specu­lation. Immigration entails additional fac­tors related to the varied selectivity of migrants, the importance of chain migra­tion, and the family reunification provi­sions of U.S. immigration code. Second, there are important contrasts between immigrants' origins and the conditions of urban life in American cities. Educational and occupational credentials from other countries are often not recognized in the U.S. labor market, forcing many profes­sionals to pursue entrepreneurial alter­natives. Family- and gender-related is­sues also matter. Foner (1998) describes the varied experiences of Jewish emigre women from the former Soviet Union. While many confront the usual barriers of juggling paid employment with unpaid domestic responsibilities, others are more fortunate. For women whose hus­bands earn enough to allow them to stay at home, coming to the U.S. frees them from their triple roles of wife, mother, and worker. Third and finally, issues of social and cultural identity are crucial in immi­grant neighborhoods, distinguishing these areas from trendy gentrified dis­tricts where consumption is often the de­fining social mark. On the one hand, the Russian community in Brighton Beach is in many respects bounded and self­defined by shared history, culture, and language-a fact that explains many of the tensions that emerge when upwardly mobile Russians seek out new homes in Manhattan Beach. On the other hand, this identity lends greater visibility to pro­cesses that would otherwise remain hid­den in the fluid complexity of the neigh­borhood economy. In the popular press, the favorable image of the Russian as en­trepreneur is often obscured by sensa­tionalist fascination with the mysterious aura of the Russian Mafia and the pur­ported role of Brighton Beach in the un­derground economy. Ultimately, the Rus­sification of Brighton Beach represents a new and complex path of neighborhood change, a hybrid between classical "invasion-succession" processes and the dynamics of contemporary gentrification.

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In light of accelerated immigration into American cities, this process deserves further study by geographers.

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