PhronesisWe apply the Displacement Framework to gentrification, formalizing community ground state S°_community as the configuration of a neighborhood constituting home for long-term residents — affordable housing, established social networks, cultural institutions, economic participation, and intergenerational community memory. Like racism (Paper #224), gentrification is externally imposed displacement: rising rents and demographic shift impose D(ξ_place) on existing residents not through any internal failure but through economic forces outside their body.
Nine formal propositions are derived covering: community ground state as multi-component equilibrium, gentrification as externally imposed D(ξ_place), place attachment (place identity, place dependence, social bonding) as S°_community components that are severed simultaneously, solastalgia applied to gentrification (grief for a place still physically present but transformed and unaffordable), the partial irreversibility of cultural eviction (community social infrastructure is geographically embedded and cannot be reconstructed in displacement), secondary displacement effects across education, health, economic, and mental health domains, the developer wrong attractor as self-reinforcing neighborhood-scale market dynamic, community land trusts as preventive landscape modification (removing land from speculative market permanently), and the right-to-return problem (physical return ≠ community return when social S° is destroyed).
The framework formally distinguishes managed community change from externally-imposed displacement.