New research suggests that gentrifying neighborhoods may be a boon to their longtime residents -- assuming they can manage to afford to stay there. Lance Freeman, director of the Urban Planning program at Columbia University, has launched a national study to calculate displacement -- how many lower-income people have been pushed out of their neighborhoods as higher-income people move in.

To his surprise he found that lower-income people in gentrifying neighborhoods actually tended to move less frequently than those living in neighborhoods that weren't gentrifying, and that the financial health of these residents seemed to be improving.

Freeman's study results were very similar to those of a recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland . . .

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