Reading Comprehension — Passage 2
Questions 16–20 are based on the passage below.
Gentrification, the process by which an influx of wealthier residents transforms a historically lower-income neighborhood, is frequently framed in public discourse as an unambiguous story of displacement and loss, and there is substantial evidence supporting this framing: rising rents can force long-time residents to relocate, often to areas with fewer amenities and weaker social networks built over decades. Some housing researchers, however, caution against treating displacement as gentrification's only or even primary demographic effect. Longitudinal studies tracking specific households over time have found that outright displacement rates in gentrifying neighborhoods are, in many cases, no higher than in comparable non-gentrifying poor neighborhoods, where residents also move frequently due to eviction, housing quality, or economic hardship unrelated to neighborhood change. This finding does not mean gentrification is harmless; researchers taking this view generally still document real costs, including rising costs of living for those who remain, loss of neighborhood-specific cultural institutions, and psychological effects of watching one's community change around oneself even without being forced to leave physically. The disagreement, then, is less about whether gentrification causes harm than about which harms are most significant and how public policy resources should be allocated in response — a debate with direct consequences for whether municipal intervention should prioritize preventing displacement specifically or address a broader set of harms experienced by residents who remain in place.