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Today, we have for you a piece of news that you probably already knew just by looking around you: Parts of Denver are rapidly getting whiter!
So much so that Denver’s 80205 zip code managed to make it onto a list of the fastest-gentrifying neighborhoods in the country. Hooray!
The list, from the Washington, D.C.-based the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, ranks the country’s top 25 zip codes experiencing gentrification.
Denver’s 80205, which includes Five Points, Whittier, Cole, Clayton, Skyland and City Park, tied for eleventh on the list, behind some obvious and not-so-obvious parts of Brooklyn, Chicago, Austin, and D.C (and also Columbia, South Carolina, at number one, followed by Chattanooga, Tennessee). The Denver zip was tied with Atlanta and Charleston. Still, according to this list, Denver has gentrified faster than parts of Portland, Philadelphia, St. Paul and San Diego.
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By no means does this study provide a nuanced picture of neighborhood change. As the author notes, this list comes from some pretty simplistic number-crunching of Census data, which comes out every ten years, and he only looks at race (not class or income level changes). Looking at zip codes can also be a bit problematic, since those boundaries can change.
Still, 80205 has gotten quite a bit whiter, according to the data.
The report says that the white share of the population, referring to non-Hispanic Caucasians, went from 29.2 percent to 56.2 percent between 2000 and 2010.
It’s not the first time in recent years that folks have noticed shifting demographics in the gentrification direction.
And here’s some online evidence of Five Points’ gentrification, revolving around the question of “safety.” Shockingly, people disagree.
More from our Lists & Weirdness archive: “Photos: Ten favorite secrets on Buff Secret.”
