The relative importance of greening in attracting gentrifiers to urban Vancouver and suburban Calgary neighbourhoods

Green gentrification describes how greening neighbourhoods (e.g. by creating parks, community gardens, etc.) can result in higher-income households moving in and displacing/excluding marginalised residents. While some researchers assert that greening attracts higher-income households, this has rarely been empirically tested. Further, green gentrification research has focussed almost exclusively on greening attracting households to urban neighbourhoods, despite desire for more green space often being cited as motivating households to move to suburbs. Our study surveyed 104 households in gentrified downtown Vancouver and suburban Calgary neighbourhoods, to determine the relative importance of neighbourhood greenness and proximity to green space when they were deciding to move into new-build neighbourhoods. Our results indicate that green factors are of similar importance to non-green factors, such as safety, scenic views, ambience and, in Vancouver, proximity to entertainment and transit. Proximity to green space was more important than overall neighbourhood greenness. Residents in all neighbourhoods placed similar importance on green factors, although more importance was placed on private green space in the suburbs. These findings suggest that neighbourhood greenness and proximity to green space are not the only factors driving high-income households to move in and that green factors have played a similar role in motivating households to move to urban and suburban neighbourhoods. Thus, green-gentrification research needs to consider how preference for greened neighbourhoods intersects with other preferences/constraints to ultimately influence residential location choices. It also needs to widen the geography of green gentrification to understand how greening contributes to exclusion and displacement beyond dense city environments.