Take a moment to imagine the kinds of people who live in a mixed-income neighborhood.

In your mind, do you envision kids of all backgrounds playing together in the local park? Rich and poor neighbors working together to throw block parties? Low-income and wealthy people chatting casually in the local coffee shop?

Sadly, many mixed-income neighborhoods do not work like this.

Rich and poor residents of mixed-income neighborhoods often avoid each other in local parks, schools, and eateries, and these lines of separation may be drawn more thickly when residents are doubly diverse in terms of race, sexuality, or recency in the neighborhood.

Even more, many privileged residents surveil their neighbors through the use of apps like Nextdoor, and they work to hasten gentrification so that their poorer neighbors are forced to leave.

In an article I recently published in Socius with co-authors Chris Hess, Ian Kennedy, and Kyle Crowder, I show how members of the real estate industry can contribute to this process.

Landlords, realtors, and others who advertise rental properties in mixed-income neighborhoods are disproportionately likely to mention that the advertised unit comes with a home security device. This finding is driven by mentions of home security methods such as door attendants, access control systems, and concierges—all of which are commonly found in upscale apartment buildings in gentrifying areas. To demonstrate our finding, we applied a combination of computational text analyses and regression-based methods to over one million Craigslist rental listings posted in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas in July and August of 2019.

By emphasizing home security when advertising rentals in income-diverse areas, real estate actors reinforce a message that mixed-income neighborhoods are places to be feared rather than embraced.

People frequently assume that someone is a criminal if they are in poverty. And in many of the neighborhoods we studied, income diversity continued to be associated with mentions of home security even after accounting for the local crime rate. Therefore, members of the real estate industry may have the capacity to shape home seekers’ perceptions of safety in mixed-income neighborhoods regardless of whether crimes are actually happening on the ground.

Even more, given that home security was mentioned in many ads for upscale apartment buildings, our findings suggest that members of the real estate industry may use home security as a signal to potential gentrifiers that they will be safe if they move into a neighborhood where poor people live.

The emphasis on home security, in fact, may be a key ingredient in how neighborhoods become gentrified. In mixed-income neighborhoods, a landlord may bring in a wealthy renter with the promise of home security, after which more wealthy renters move in until the neighborhood becomes homogeneously wealthy rather than income-diverse.

Our study was cross-sectional, meaning it was conducted at one point in time and unable to track trends in neighborhoods over time. The link between our findings and the gentrification of neighborhoods is consequently speculative. Our study also could not causally establish that potential renters take into consideration how frequently they see mentions of home security in ads in mixed-income neighborhoods.

Nevertheless, a growing number of studies highlight ways in which residents of diverse neighborhoods use home security to segregate themselves and police their poorer neighbors. Coupled with other actions taken by wealthy residents of mixed-income neighborhoods, such as marginalizing low-income parents’ concerns in schools and alienating low-income members of local civic groups, the emphasis that real estate advertisers place on home security in income-diverse neighborhoods can further divide rich and poor neighbors and facilitate neighborhood change.

There are lessons from my study for academics looking to connect the dots between income diversity, home security, and local communities. There are also lessons for practitioners looking to build stably mixed-income neighborhoods.

For academics, it is common to examine how members of the real estate industry use practices such as racial steering or the sorting of poor tenants into substandard housing to discourage diversity in neighborhoods. It is far rarer for academics to investigate the techniques that real estate actors use to persuade people to move into diverse neighborhoods. I hope my study inspires others to think through the dynamics that attract home seekers to move into rather than avoid diverse neighborhoods.

For practitioners, members of the real estate industry should reflect on the marketing strategies they use when selling or renting homes in mixed-income neighborhoods. Some real estate actors deliberately coopt local community organizations to encourage divisions within the community and undermine resistance to gentrification. Practices such as these may help turn an economic profit, but in terms of social costs, there is a heavy price to pay.

As suggested by scholars who examine stably racially integrated neighborhoods, income diversity can be maintained in communities that are willing to earmark funds to encourage it. Places that invest in homes of diverse sizes and densities are much more likely to attain stably income-diverse communities than are those places that use the heavy hand of zoning to keep poor people away.

As income inequality grows worse in cities and towns across the United States—not to mention the rest of the world—it is necessary to understand how neighborhoods become diverse and stay diverse.

Life’s no fun if the kids avoid each other at the park, the block party excludes many neighbors, and the patrons of the local coffee shop sip in silence. That’s not the way our communities should be.

Take a moment to imagine the kinds of people who live in a mixed-income neighborhood.

In your mind, do you envision kids of all backgrounds playing together in the local park? Rich and poor neighbors working together to throw block parties? Low-income and wealthy people chatting casually in the local coffee shop?

Sadly, many mixed-income neighborhoods do not work like this.

Rich and poor residents of mixed-income neighborhoods often avoid each other in local parks, schools, and eateries, and these lines of separation may be drawn more thickly when residents are doubly diverse in terms of race, sexuality, or recency in the neighborhood.

Even more, many privileged residents surveil their neighbors through the use of apps like Nextdoor, and they work to hasten gentrification so that their poorer neighbors are forced to leave.

In an article we recently published in Socius, we show how members of the real estate industry can contribute to this process.

Landlords, realtors, and others who advertise rental properties in mixed-income neighborhoods are disproportionately likely to mention that the advertised unit comes with a home security device. This finding is driven by mentions of home security methods such as door attendants, access control systems, and concierges—all of which are commonly found in upscale apartment buildings in gentrifying areas. To demonstrate our finding, we applied a combination of computational text analyses and regression-based methods to over one million Craigslist rental listings posted in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas in July and August of 2019.

By emphasizing home security when advertising rentals in income-diverse areas, real estate actors reinforce a message that mixed-income neighborhoods are places to be feared rather than embraced.

People frequently assume that someone is a criminal if they are in poverty. And in many of the neighborhoods we studied, income diversity continued to be associated with mentions of home security even after accounting for the local crime rate. Therefore, members of the real estate industry may have the capacity to shape home seekers’ perceptions of safety in mixed-income neighborhoods regardless of whether crimes are actually happening on the ground.

Even more, given that home security was mentioned in many ads for upscale apartment buildings, our findings suggest that members of the real estate industry may use home security as a signal to potential gentrifiers that they will be safe if they move into a neighborhood where poor people live.

The emphasis on home security, in fact, may be a key ingredient in how neighborhoods become gentrified. In mixed-income neighborhoods, a landlord may bring in a wealthy renter with the promise of home security, after which more wealthy renters move in until the neighborhood becomes homogeneously wealthy rather than income-diverse.

Our study was cross-sectional, meaning it was conducted at one point in time and unable to track trends in neighborhoods over time. The link between our findings and the gentrification of neighborhoods is consequently speculative. Our study also could not causally establish that potential renters take into consideration how frequently they see mentions of home security in ads in mixed-income neighborhoods.

Nevertheless, a growing number of studies highlight ways in which residents of diverse neighborhoods use home security to segregate themselves and police their poorer neighbors. Coupled with other actions taken by wealthy residents of mixed-income neighborhoods, such as marginalizing low-income parents’ concerns in schools and alienating low-income members of local civic groups, the emphasis that real estate advertisers place on home security in income-diverse neighborhoods can further divide rich and poor neighbors and facilitate neighborhood change.

There are lessons from our study for academics looking to connect the dots between income diversity, home security, and local communities. There are also lessons for practitioners looking to build stably mixed-income neighborhoods.

For academics, it is common to examine how members of the real estate industry use practices such as racial steering or the sorting of poor tenants into substandard housing to discourage diversity in neighborhoods. It is far rarer for academics to investigate the techniques that real estate actors use to persuade people to move into diverse neighborhoods. We hope our study inspires others to think through the dynamics that attract home seekers to move into rather than avoid diverse neighborhoods.

For practitioners, members of the real estate industry should reflect on the marketing strategies they use when selling or renting homes in mixed-income neighborhoods. Some real estate actors deliberately coopt local community organizations to encourage divisions within the community and undermine resistance to gentrification. Practices such as these may help turn an economic profit, but in terms of social costs, there is a heavy price to pay.

As suggested by scholars who examine stably racially integrated neighborhoods, income diversity can be maintained in communities that are willing to earmark funds to encourage it. Places that invest in homes of diverse sizes and densities are much more likely to attain stably income-diverse communities than are those places that use the heavy hand of zoning to keep poor people away.

As income inequality grows worse in cities and towns across the United States—not to mention the rest of the world—it is necessary to understand how neighborhoods become diverse and stay diverse.

Life’s no fun if the kids avoid each other at the park, the block party excludes many neighbors, and the patrons of the local coffee shop sip in silence. That’s not the way our communities should be.

Mahesh Somashekhar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. You can follow Mahesh on Twitter @msomashe