To yuppify a place is to change it so that rich young professionals will want to live there — fix up the old buildings, open expensive restaurants and small design shops, raise the rents. You will most often meet it as the past participle used like an adjective: a yuppified neighbourhood, a yuppified old warehouse. The noun is yuppification. The word is nearly always disapproving. Whoever says it is standing with the people who lived there first — the ones who now cannot afford their own street, whose cheap noodle shop became a place selling ten-dollar toast. So it carries loss inside it, not improvement, even though on the surface it describes buildings getting nicer. That is the tension your students should feel: the same change is called "renewal" by the people making money and "yuppification" by the people leaving. There is a more common, more neutral word for the same process: gentrify, and gentrification. If a student wants to write about this in an essay, gentrify is the safer choice — it is the word used in newspapers and in academic writing. Yuppify is chattier, angrier, and, like yuppie itself, sounds a bit 1980s and 1990s. Grammatically it behaves like any -ify verb: yuppify, yuppifies, yuppified, yuppifying. It usually takes an object (a street, an area, a building), and often shows up in the passive: the whole district has been yuppified.

雅痞化（把老社區改造成迎合都會白領的樣子，帶批評意味；常說「仕紳化」gentrify）