Journal of Aging Research Table 1: Proﬁle of study participants (n = 30). La Petite-Patrie Lower NDG Total 12 5 7 0 3 3 1 3 2 0 5 7 7 1 1 2 3 9 3 1 1 4 2 6 12 30 11 19 1 4 11 5 6 3 12 5 13 15 6 3 4 12 14 16 5 6 9 9 12 30 4 Total participants Men Women 65–69 70–74 75–79 80–84 85–90 90+ Mother tongue French English Italian Highest level of education∗ Primary school (incomplete or complete) Some high school High school (completed) Postsecondary Socioeconomic status Low income# Current residents Owners Renters Renters living in HLM (public housing)∞ Former residents Years in neighbourhood $ Less than 30 years 30 to 39 years 50 years and over Total 18 6 12 1 1 8 4 3 1 12 0 6 8 5 2 2 9 5 13 4 5 5 7 6 18 ∗ No information for two participants, one in each neighbourhood. #For the study purposes, low-income participants are those receiving the guaranteed income supplement (GIS), which provides additional money to top oﬀ the Old Age Security Pension. The maximum annual income for a single person GIS recipient is $15,960 (Service Canada, Old Age Security Payment Rates, April-June 2011: http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/eng/isp/oas/oasrates.shtml). This deﬁnition is more stringent than Statistics Canada’s low-income cut-oﬀ of $22,229 before tax in 2009 for a single person living in a city of more than 100,000 inhabitants (Statistics Canada, Low Income Lines 2008-2009: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/75f0002m/2010005/tbl/tbl02-eng.htm). ∞HLM (Habitations a` loyer modique) are apartment complexes for low-to-modest income households, owned and managed by the public sector. Rent is set at 25% of household income and includes basic utilities. Tenants are selected from a waiting list according to needs-based criteria established by the provincial government. Those in our study are speciﬁcally for autonomous older adults. $Lowest value of years in neighbourhood is 9 years followed by 12 years; all others resided in neighbourhood over 15 years. neighbourhoods, and the NDG Senior Citizens Council). Our research assistants put up posters in businesses and distributed pamphlets and presented the project at various social events for older people. We encountered important challenges recruiting individuals displaced as a result of gentriﬁcation (this is a widespread problem in gentriﬁcation research [11]). Although we had partnered with a tenant advocacy organization in La Petite-Patrie that was willing to refer recently displaced clients, this strategy only generated one interview. In Lower NDG, the Senior Citizens Council had also hoped to refer recently displaced members but was unable to locate former residents who had maintained ties with the Council. Other prospective participants were ineligible or not interested for various reasons (e.g., did not meet age requirements, insuﬃcient length of residency, poor health). Attempts to recruit displaced individuals using the snowball method were also unfruitful. We also contacted several autonomous residences for older people in adjacent areas of Montre´al, but their administrators were not willing to participate in the study. In sum, in La Petite-Patrie we interviewed ﬁve displaced residents. In Lower NDG, we interviewed one long-term resident who had recently left.