GENTRIFICATION

noun (Lifestyle and Leisure) The conversion of something with humble origins (especially a housing area) into something respectable or middle-class; taking up-market. Etymology: Formed by adding the process suffix -ification to gentry; although in fact it is the professional middle class, rather than the gentry, who have taken over the working-class areas. History and Usage: Gentrification was first used by town planners in the early seventies to describe the migration of professional, middle-class people back into the inner cities; once there, they began renovating and altering to their own tastes what had been built as artisans' cottages and terraces for the workers originally brought to towns by the Industrial Revolution. As this process became more and more noticeable through the eighties and whole areas of large cities completely changed their character, gentrification moved out of the jargon of sociologists and planners and was widely used in the press, often with pejorative meaning. At this stage it also came to be applied to anything which could be moved up-market; in stock-market jargon, even to bonds. The associated verb is gentrify; the adjective to describe anything which has undergone this process is gentrified. Though the area...is being gentrified, the pub itself has not gone posh. Sunday Times 30 Jan. 1983, p. 16 Further down, the first signs of gentrification appear--a renovated colonial house, a vegetarian health food store, and an upmarket boutique. This is...the vanguard of the yuppie invasion. Courier-Mail (Brisbane) 6 July 1988, p. 9 His uncle's place had been gentrified on the outside, presumably to placate the new yuppie neighbors. Alice Walker Temple of My Familiar (1989), p. 29