How to Use gentrify in a Sentence

gentrify

verb
  • As the neighborhood became gentrified, the people who had lived there for many years could no longer afford it.
  • Guggenheim and his creative team just decide to gentrify the Glades and then move on.
    — Clarkisha Kent, The Root, 11 Sep. 2017
  • As these urban cities gentrify, what happens to the people who have been pushed out and evicted?
    — Brian Davids, HollywoodReporter, 18 Aug. 2025
  • City officials have denied that the shooting was the product of a push to gentrify.
    — Barnini Chakraborty, Fox News, 15 Sep. 2020
  • How can neighborhoods gentrify without erasing their heart and voice?
    — Anthony Alvarez, The Conversation, 6 June 2023
  • If those efforts fail, the government can tear down housing units to gentrify the neighborhood.
    — Robert Petkoff Krish Seenivasan Quinton Kamara, New York Times, 24 Feb. 2025
  • With prices sure to rise, will the Corktowners who have outlasted the bad times now be forced out by gentrifying forces?
    — John Gallagher, Detroit Free Press, 9 July 2018
  • The family has always been on the front lines of gentrifying Brooklyn.
    — Elizabeth Greenwood, New York Times, 12 Apr. 2018
  • Long Island City was quickly gentrifying before the new tax law.
    — Bernard Condon, The Seattle Times, 13 Nov. 2018
  • Her goal was to gentrify him sufficiently to win him a scholarship to Harvard.
    — Louis Menand, The New Yorker, 21 Apr. 2017
  • Some accuse the family of gentrifying the town, or treating it like a kind of feudal society.
    — Jessica Mathews, Fortune, 3 Apr. 2026
  • On the other hand, the liberal affluent class might decide to look for another city to gentrify.
    — Fortune, 22 Jan. 2018
  • The blocks surrounding Brewnuts have been quickly gentrifying with lots of new restaurants and funky boutiques.
    — Larry Olmsted, USA TODAY, 12 Oct. 2017
  • But light technicians, grips and actors won’t be the first to gentrify the area, where cement mixers continue to queue at concrete plants.
    — New York Times, 4 Dec. 2020
  • Scroll through the gallery above to see where the fastest-gentrifying ZIP codes are in America.
    — William Axford, Houston Chronicle, 6 Mar. 2018
  • Neighbors are suspicious of school district plans for the building, which include ending high school programs there, just as the area starts to gentrify.
    — Aubrey Nagle, Philly.com, 4 June 2018
  • That’s one of the highest in the nation and a driving force behind a wide range of new food choices being offered in a rapidly gentrifying city.
    — Courtland Milloy, Washington Post, 19 Sep. 2017
  • But when a group of young developers arrives hoping to gentrify the town, Leatherface begins his killing spree yet again.
    — Keith Langston, PEOPLE, 25 Oct. 2025
  • In extreme cases, digital nomads can gentrify an area to the extent that locals can no longer afford to live in it—or even feel welcome to do so.
    — Diana Hubbell, Condé Nast Traveler, 14 June 2021
  • As with so many aspects of the housing crisis, the crunch for seniors is most obvious in gentrifying neighborhoods.
    — Los Angeles Times, 29 Aug. 2019
  • The patrons are a mix of people from the neighborhood of Pendleton, which seems to be pretty rapidly gentrifying.
    — Polly Campbell, Cincinnati.com, 26 Apr. 2018
  • Such urban history lives not in the buildings, but in the individuals who lived it and have since been displaced by gentrifying forces.
    — Hilary Lewis, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 Sep. 2019
  • Gentrifying neighborhoods—whether deep in Brooklyn or on a hillside of Rio de Janeiro—are where those forces clash.
    — Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek, 21 May 2017
  • That's because owners from elsewhere are more likely to own properties in gentrifying areas and raise the rents, Hahn says.
    — Megan Stringer, Axios, 10 Dec. 2024
  • As Miami continues to grow and gentrify, her work ensures that equity and wellness grow with it.
    — Miami Herald, 20 Nov. 2025
  • Terrell-Paige, who is black, said black residents have been ignored and underserved in the rapidly gentrifying city.
    — Carma Hassan and Darran Simon, CNN, 18 Dec. 2019
  • American cities are looking more and more European these days, as the rich gentrify the downtowns and the poor are banished to the outer suburbs.
    — Jonah Goldberg Tribune News Service (tns), Star Tribune, 27 Oct. 2020
  • The city of Naples, Keeys said, has worked to gentrify the area in recent years but has not built a sea wall that could provide more protection during hurricanes.
    — Nicquel Terry Ellis, CNN, 5 Oct. 2022
  • The law has helped generations of New York’s broke-ish creative class stay put in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods over the decades.
    — Clio Chang, Curbed, 2 Dec. 2025
  • And to women such as Stephanie, a single mom who supports her two young daughters dancing, who are caught in the middle of a proxy battle for the gentrifying city’s future.
    — Cara Kelly, USA TODAY, 23 Dec. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'gentrify.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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