It’s an old story, the stuff of urban legend and conventional wisdom: First come the artists, then come the yuppies. But is this really the case? Are artists the “shock troops” of gentrification?

A new paper in the journal Urban Studies takes a deep dive into the connection between arts and gentrification. The paper explores this connection at the ZIP-code level for 30 large metropolitan areas with populations of more than 2 million people. It looks at the years between 2000 and 2013, a period of…