I’m sure that US social scientists have examined rural gentrification, but I’m not up on current literature, so please link in the comments to any studies.
I did run across this Chinese paper (2022) by Lu, Rao and Duan, that had a brief literature review from the worldwide perspective.
British scholar Parsons first observed the phenomenon of rural gentrification in a study about British residents’ classes in rural areas. The rural gentrification mainly refers to the urban middle class migrating to rural settlements, for living and recreational space, thus causing the change in the rural social class structure, and leading to the shortage of rural housing and the relocation of indigenous people [15]. Gentrification is a gradual process mainly initiated and maintained by immigrants. These gentrifiers may be urban middle- and upper-class residents with rich capital, such as retirees and “urban elites” (national economic elites and cultural elites), who pursue rural pastoral life in order to “escape” from the city [16,17]. They may be artists looking for cheap accommodation near the countryside and are described as well-educated low-income people [6,11]. The motivations of these migrants in rural areas are different from those in urban centers, where, for example, the middle class is attracted by employment and undervalued housing, whereas rural migrants are attracted by specific rural amenities, especially those related to the natural environment. Parsons and other British scholars have shown that the “gentry” in rural gentrification is not limited to some specific middle-class people with high economic level and social class, and economic level and class composition are not the only criteria to identify the gentry group in rural areas. Diversified social groups with different purposes are likely to become the subjects of rural gentrification. As long as the cultural capital and economic levels of immigrants are higher than that of local residents, rural gentrification may occur [17].Rural gentrification is a complex process involving the migration of the urban middle class from cities to rural areas [18]. It has brought about four major changes: the transformation of rural class structure, the post-productive process of rural capital accumulation, changes in rural housing structure and the motivation of rural reform [19]. In the study of rural gentrification in Quebec, Guimond and Myriam also emphasized the complexity of rural gentrification at various levels, including social population, housing and economic impact, community and culture, material, environmental and political aspects [20]. Davidson and Lees point out that any form of contemporary gentrification should include: capital dominating the restructuring of the architectural environment, a large number of high- and middle-income newcomers, local residents’ displacement and landscape change. The restructuring of the architectural environment means that the built environment in rural areas is changed by the capital “reinvestment” of land owners, housing owners, investors, developers, etc., emphasizing ecological aesthetics and environmental governance [21]. The structure change of the rural population is the most outstanding impact of rural gentrification, involving the characteristics of the population moving from the city to the countryside. The aging of post-war baby boomers in the United States shows a strong willingness to move to rural life. It is estimated that 2.7 million baby boomers moved from cities to villages in the first 10 years of the 21st century [16]. Landscape can most intuitively describe the great changes in rural gentrification areas, such as the transformation of rural areas from primary production to consumption LED landscape, the changing housing tastes in rural areas and the rising real estate prices [22,23]. Displacement has always been an important result of gentrification, including population displacement, housing displacement and space displacement in rural areas [24]. In addition, rural gentrification also means injecting new classes and social structures into the destination, not only bringing better social capital and networks to the local community, but also triggering discussions on rural governance issues, such as local land use planning, environmental aesthetics and resource management [16,25].The cause and influence of gentrification in rural areas can be interpreted from the perspectives of consumption and production [26]. From the perspective of consumption, rural gentrification highlights the existence of a “new cultural class” in rural space consumption. It suggests that the core of the economic form in the process of rural gentrification is an experience economy and an aesthetic consumption. In the process it also emphasizes the experience of rural cultural connotation and the formation of specific cultural taste. [17,27]. The “idyll” in rural Britain and the soothing “Rocky Mountain” lifestyle in rural western America have attracted highly skilled urban labor, entrepreneurs and retirees [16,22,28]. From the perspective of production, it emphasizes the redistribution of capital and profits to interpret rural gentrification, not from the perspective of people. N. Smith put forward the theory of the “rent gap” (the difference between the potential value of land and the actual value of land) to explain gentrification [29]. With the decline of rural traditional agricultural productivity and the weakening of agricultural policy protection, rural landscape, rural space and rural built environment become less attractive to capital, and the potential value cannot be realized as actual monetary value, which objectively requires the emergence of more diversified rural economy and investment models [30]. Globalization is seen as one of the main drivers of rural gentrification because the middle and upper classes, the main components of urban-to-rural mobility, benefit from globalized capital accumulation and appreciation of land or property values. They allocate their assets to highly comfortable rural destinations. For example, the rural gentrification in remote and comfortable areas in the United States reflects the spatial positioning of surplus capital accumulated by high-wage urban occupations in the globalized service industry [31,32]. Clark believes that the two explanations are complementary [33].
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I’d also point out that both gentrification and tourism leads to a combined need for low-income workers. So there is a correlated need for new lower income workers to move in to meet that need. At the same time, housing prices go up. When you think about it, it’s surprising that communities are doing as well as they are.