Faith, race, and auto-gentrification: What Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities reveal about urban change

Scholarship on urban change has taken race, class, and culture as competing interpretations through which to explain socio-economic change in urban neighborhoods. However, the literature has focused less on religion as a structural factor shaping this change. This article addresses this gap by studying the spatial clustering of Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jews in London and New York—a group overlooked by urban scholars despite living near commonly studied sites of gentrification. Under the same structural forces of urban change, this “non-liberal” group actively works to secure space through political dealmaking and communal welfare networks which promote the interests of its members over those of outsiders. This account reveals how members benefit from the religious group’s strong internal welfare system and relationship with the state, despite also suffering from housing shortages and unaffordability. Bringing together literatures on race, class, religion, and housing, this article provides a new angle from which to examine how urban communities experience urban change in the gentrification nexus.