The Greater Manchester Gentrification Index

In recent years, there has been increased national attention on the dramatic changes to the urban fabric of Manchester. The city is, as the Financial Times put it last January, “in the middle of a violent binge of skyscraper building”.^[1] This summer, planning permission was approved for a 71-storey residential tower by local developer Renaker, which, at 213 metres, will be the tallest in Britain outside of London that is, until rival developer Salboy manages to secure permission for a 76-storey tower nearby.

Whereas many of the capital’s high-rises are office and commercial space, in Greater Manchester they are almost exclusively residential. In the last decade in particular, a build-to-rent boom has unfolded across the city’s core, financed by institutional capital, transforming the city forever.^[2] The impact of this is clear in the remarkable statistics of city centre population growth — from a few hundred people living there in the early 1980s to somewhere close to 100,000 today.^[3] The average age of all these new renters is 31.^[4]

Many commentators, in thrall to the spectacle, are celebratory, remarking on how Manchester has successfully reinvented itself after the apocalyptic devastation of deindustrialisation. The pillars of its economic strategy have been residential-led development seeking to leverage the output of Manchester’s two large universities — research, student numbers, a graduate retention pipeline — and the creative use of the local state to de-risk private investment. Alongside the stoking of a property boom was a failure to build social housing, with targets in Manchester set way below comparable cities, and in most cases not even met.^[5] This model of agglomeration in Manchester has been imitated in neighbouring boroughs of Greater Manchester, most notably in Salford.  

Manchester has come to be seen as a model city and its trajectory one to be emulated, not least in the eyes of the new government, whose Angela Rayner made her first official visit as Deputy Prime Minister to look around “Victoria North”, the huge, Far East Consortium-funded regeneration scheme in Collyhurst,^[6] a working-class neighbourhood to the city centre’s north east.^[7]  

Collyhurst is an ideal place to consider the contradictions at the heart of modern Manchester’s story, its long-standing residents now facing land-grabs and the demolition of their homes to make way for a new residential neighbourhood.^[8] The creation of a parallel new town of young renters in the city core has had additional, negative, effects — rent rises, displacement, demolition and gentrification for the city’s working class.  

The uneven nature of Greater Manchester’s development, the simultaneity of investor-driven build-to-rent growth alongside the ongoing effects of deindustrialisation and austerity, as well as the expansion and professionalisation of its private rented sector, mean that it might be said that the city is a prism through which we can better understand Britain’s national housing. This was the argument made in James Meek’s state-of-the-nation essay in the London Review of Books last summer, and that of my own book, The Rentier City.^[9]

Those who have argued for a more critical look at the effect that the glut of new builds in the city centre is having on the city have often been dismissed as lacking a data-driven analysis. The publication of this important research from Common Wealth therefore represents a key milestone in the critique of the “Manchester model” and is a crucial contribution to our critical understanding of the changes that have taken place in England’s second city over the last decade.  

The Gentrification Index

Gentrification is a process whereby the urban working class and poor are expelled from their districts and replaced by more affluent residents. Its drivers are structural — the policies and planning frameworks of the local state, and the tendency of capital to close rent gaps. It is, as the geographer Neil Smith put it, a “global urban strategy”.^[10] To live in a neighbourhood being gentrified is to experience rent rises, the destruction of community and ultimately displacement. Yet it is often something that is difficult to quantify and track. The development of this Gentrification Index is, therefore, an important tool in providing a statistical basis for analysing gentrification.

The Gentrification Index calculates a score for each of the Lower Super Output Areas in Greater Manchester, which are small neighbourhoods with approximately 1,500 residents on average. It takes five measures across the decade 2013-2023 — population churn, residential mobility and deprivation, changes in the proportion of BME residents, the average house price and the average annual wage — and combines them with different weightings applied to each measure. The resulting figure provides a quantitative representation of gentrification.

The weighting behind the Index was adapted from Adam Almeida’s report “Pushed to the Margins — a Quantitative Analysis of Gentrification in London in the 2010s” and adding in a new measure — change in annual wage — which acts as another proxy for the displacement of working-class communities not captured in residential mobility and deprivation.^[11] Jumps in annual wages over the ten-year period could suggest an influx of new residents who can pay the price of higher rents in new developments.

The data, broken down by ward, shows how the city centre boom has led to extreme gentrification pressure in the inner city. To take the top five wards, there are the two that constitute the city centre itself — Piccadilly and Deansgate at number one and three respectively — and then three that are immediately adjacent wards — Ordsall (in Salford), Ancoats and Beswick, and Hulme.  

In each of these three inner-city wards we can find variations of the core characteristics of the Manchester model of development. In Ordsall, it was the relocation of BBC North to Salford Quays in 2011-2012 and the concomitant growth in build-to-rent in the ward that lies behind its second-place position on the Index.  

In Ancoats and Beswick, the high score reflects the sustained twenty-year effort to transform the neighbourhood — beginning in the 2000s with the demolition of the Cardroom Estate and construction of the marina and “Chips Building” by Urban Splash, as part of New Labour’s New Deal for Communities, continued in the post-crash period by Manchester City Council’s joint-development vehicle with the Abu Dhabi United Group, the owners of Manchester City FC headed by the vice president of the UAE.^[12] The result today? By some accounts, “Europe’s most successful new neighbourhood”, but one where the simmering tensions between the new residents of the build-to-rent blocks and the old tenants and homeowners on the is never far from the surface.^[13]

In Hulme, the twin drivers of expanding city centre development into the Castlefield area of the ward, and the construction of Manchester Metropolitan University’s Birley Campus in 2014 in the heart of the neighbourhood. This sparked rent rises in the ward’s private rented sector, as landlords switched properties to target students, and a growth in controversial PBSA developments, reflected in the high score on the Index.^[14]

The high scores on the Gentrification Index by these three inner-city wards seem to confirm what anyone who has lived in these neighbourhoods for a long time understands intuitively: that the skyscrapers, and the development model they represent, have had the effect of driving gentrification across what had previously been affordable, working-class areas in the city.  

Examining the twenty wards with the highest scores, we can see how gentrification pressure, induced by rent gaps, radiates out from the central core. In Manchester, the wards Didsbury West, Whalley Range, Cheetham, Ardwick, and Clayton and Openshaw appear next; all representative of the end of affordability as landlords cash in on their proximity to the city centre, or their status as attractive suburbs for an affluent new population. In Salford, the next ward, at number six overall, is Irwell Riverside, home to main Salford University campus, and a glut of newbuild build-to-rent developments along Chapel Street. Next are the adjacent Broughton and Langworthy. Stockport’s Brinnington and Central makes an appearance, driven no doubt by the successful marketing by the Council of the town’s markets and underbanks — “the new Berlin” as local restaurateur and DJ, Luke Una, put it — leveraging in investors such as Manchester’s Capital & Centric into residential development next to its famous viaduct.^[15]  

Uneven Development in the Rentier City

The mean gentrification figures in the Index for each of the ten boroughs of Greater Manchester show the uneven development in the region. Manchester has neighbourhoods with the highest levels of gentrification yet has a mean gentrification score of 41.5, with neighbourhood (LSOA) scores ranging from 15.7 to 100. High scores (close to 100) mean that these neighbourhoods have seen changes in the five gentrification measures that are over and above the average for Greater Manchester. Only Manchester and Salford have neighbourhoods with scores higher than 60, which indicate high or severe gentrification. Ward level figures are more striking still. The twenty most gentrified wards dominated by Manchester (ten of the twenty) and Salford (seven of the twenty) with Rochdale and Stockport getting a look in — two Rochdale wards are in the top twenty, West Middleton and Balderstone and Kirkholt, and one Stockport ward, Brinnington and Central. The bottom 20 wards of Greater Manchester see the spatial pattern inversed. Here, it is wards in the peripheral boroughs that dominate: Oldham and Bolton have five each, Bury has four, Stockport, Rochdale and Trafford have two and Wigan has one. These low Gentrification Index scores suggest that these wards have seen a below average change in the five Gentrification Index measures. The pattern is clear — reflected too in the heatmaps of the individual measures in the methodology — the Gentrification Index demonstrates the highly centralised and concentrated model of uneven economic development.

Researchers at the University of Sheffield, whose analysis of the financial flows into the city’s property industry, have characterised the nature of Greater Manchester’s development as “centripetal” — that the centre has exerted a centripetal pull on  investment, technology and skills from surrounding towns, hollowing out their capacity.^[16] The low scores on the Index at the periphery reflect this analysis of the economic structure of the city. Agglomeration can be seen to cause gentrification at the urban core and disinvestment in the periphery.  

Beyond the Manchester Model?  

The “Manchester model”, which has become a much-praised paradigm that other cities have been encouraged to follow, contains critical flaws. The first is the increase in displacement pressures in the inner city that proceed from the build-to-rent boom in the city core. The second is the uneven nature of the development and tendency for investment and productivity to cluster at the core, while the peripheries, stricken by the ongoing effects of deindustrialisation and austerity, move backwards. Both these patterns show up in the Gentrification Index, and they alone should give us reason to doubt the unequivocal celebration of the “Manchester miracle”.

Ending the developer-led model of urban development which is predicated upon rentierism is an essential prerequisite to realising a just city. Council housing, good transport infrastructure that is not predicated on agglomerating economic activity in the city core, and a public planning system should be the key contours of our ambitions.^[17] For those of us who would want to see such a new reality come about, developing a critical understanding of the Manchester model is crucial, and this research represents an invaluable contribution to that effort.

To read more about the quantitative methodology underlying the Greater Manchester Gentrification Index, download the full pdf below.