This article presents the case for utilizing business directories in building commercial gentrification indexes as tools for research on neighborhood change. It reviews several existing methods of capturing retail change within the growing literature, codifies them as the boutique index, the food index, and the ethnic index, and discusses methodological issues that emerge in building them. A comparative case study of two Little Italies in NYC employs multiple indexes to reveal that the food index––rather than ethnic index––provided the key variable in understanding how consumption practices marked different trajectories of neighborhood change. Whereas the sociological literature on gentrification has primarily relied on socioeconomic indicators and housing data, changing retail landscapes have been understudied and measuring commercial gentrification remains a site–specific, ad–hoc endeavor. To overcome this gap, the article calls for methodological standardization across different sites to increase attention to the role of commercial spaces in accounts of gentrification.

中文翻译：

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商业高档化指数：使用商业名录在街道层面绘制城市变化图

本文介绍了利用商业目录构建商业高档化指数作为研究邻里变化的工具的案例。它回顾了在不断增长的文献中捕捉零售变化的几种现有方法，将它们编纂为精品指数、食品指数和种族指数，并讨论了在构建它们时出现的方法论问题。纽约市两个小意大利的比较案例研究使用多个指数揭示食品指数——而不是种族指数——提供了关键变量，以了解消费行为如何标记社区变化的不同轨迹。而关于绅士化的社会学文献主要依赖于社会经济指标和住房数据，不断变化的零售环境尚未得到充分研究，衡量商业高档化仍然是一项针对特定地点的临时工作。为了克服这一差距，文章呼吁在不同地点进行方法标准化，以增加对商业空间在高档化账户中的作用的关注。