1 of 1

Neighborhood Revitalization: Which Communities Aren’t Vital?

Rebecca Yeung^1,2, Aidan Khan^1,3

1. Tufts University, 2. Lakeside School, 3. The Blake School

Mass media’s significant reach can affect the public view of issues, simply through language choices. The significance of these choices can be seen in public perception of policy, as policy views may change solely based on its name (Goetz, 2008). Terms such as “revitalization” and “investment” are used by the media and general public to describe neighborhoods undergoing social and economic change. However, these terms often carry negative connotations for neighborhoods, implying a previous lack of life or value.

We wanted to find out which communities are being referred to in these ways, and whether race or class biases affect these language choices. To do so, we created a framework for a wide-scale project to identify which neighborhoods are referred to by these terms in newspapers, as well as their resident demographics. While creating materials and methods to be used in this project, we tested a small sample of newspaper articles to evaluate our framework and gather some results. We hypothesized that race and class bias would influence the results--with low-income communities of color most often described with negative connotations--and hope to create an effective framework for wide-scale research into this idea.

A method was developed with which to search newspaper websites and online archives for relevant articles, using keywords such as “neighborhood revitalization”.
A sample selection of newspapers was searched using said method to evaluate its effectiveness and obtain preliminary results.
Qualitative notes on each article were taken, with attention to tone and other indicators of bias.
Neighborhoods described by keywords were recorded and their racial and financial demographics were compared to municipal and national averages using census data.

This poster would not have been possible without the invaluable guidance of Professor Shomon Shamsuddin and the support of Sally Kim and James Michielini.

Our framework was shown to be usable for a wider project although not without flaws. Our early samples follow our hypothesis, showing that lower-income and especially communities of color are most frequently described with phrases with negative connotations.

The ideal next step would be to start this wide-scale project, so as to more accurately analyze results. Multiple variables could still be controlled, such as political bias of the newspaper itself. Along with these improvements, the use of a web scraper or other tool to automate data collection would increase the speed and scope of the project. Finally, researching the impact that these connotations have on the communities described by them.

Fig. 2. The Barry Farms neighborhood in relation to the rest of Washington D.C. (Google, n.d.) This neighborhood has significantly lower median income than the city average as well as a significantly greater Black population.

Fig. 1 The percent of the population whose race is White, Black, or Asian.. Pink represents the communities described by the keywords and grey represents the national average.

The median income of the communities described with our keywords is

64%

of the national median income.

Barry Farms median income: 17% of Washington DC median income

Barry Farms:

5% White

90% Black

3% Asian

Washington D.C.

43% White

45% Black

4% Asian

Major national and regional newspapers were assembled into a dataset including print circulation numbers and other indicators of readership for use in a widespread search
Election results from the past three presidential elections in metro areas were added to control for regional political bias.

Methods

Introduction

Results

Conclusion and Future Directions

Acknowledgement

Citations

Goetz, E. G. (2008). Words matter: The importance of issue framing and the case of affordable housing. Journal of the American Planning Association, 74(2), 222–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944360802010251

Google. (n.d.). [Google Maps Barry Farm]. Retrieved August 13, 2021, from https://goo.gl/maps/q6JP6atg3rTCko4h7