COPA defeat takeaway #2: Concerns about displacement often exaggerated, unproven
At the 3.27 SJ Council committee meeting that rejected the Housing Dept’s COPA proposal, there was a lot of talk about how gentrification and development drive lower-income people away from their neighborhoods. But there was scant data to support those conclusions. In fact, according to BuildingSaltLake.com, two decades of research across the US shows that many common assumptions about the connections between displacement, gentrification, and new, high-density, high-rent development are just plain wrong.
What does the research say about displacement?
It’s unambiguous. Living in a gentrifying neighborhood doesn’t increase your chance of being displaced.
In a landmark study of gentrification of New York City in the 1990s, Columbia University researchers, using US census and locally rich data thanks to NYC government, found that mobility rates of people who were poorer were actually lower in gentrifying neighborhoods than in lower-income, non-gentrifying ones.
No study since has found that once a neighborhood is gentrifying, displacement increases.
Local experts concurred when asked by Building Salt Lake. “Displacement is more of a predictor of gentrification than a result,” Prof. Alessandro Rigolón, part of Thriving in Place, and faculty member in the U’s College of Architecture+Planning told us.
The areas that have the highest levels of evictions – what is called “hard displacement” – are the census tracts with the highest number of people in poverty and largest number of cheap rental units.
This national-level finding has been verified locally by researchers at the U. of Utah led by Prof. Ivis Garcia, one of the city’s U. of Utah faculty partners. Her team found evictions in Salt Lake County concentrated near the central business district and south along the State St. corridor – a geography marked by a preponderance of low-cost rental housing and lower-income populations.
Evictions are one form of displacement, but “soft displacement” is harder to measure. When a person or family is forced out of a neighborhood because of a rise in housing costs, or other economic pressures, good data is hard to collect.
They can’t be gleaned from census data or the yearly American Community Survey (ACS), both publicly available sources. As Prof. Garcia told us, richer data collecting about displacement, like resident surveys, are “very hard because the people who were displaced left so there’s no way to track them down.”
If done with affordable housing in the mix, it’s actually possible to create “counter-gentrification effects” as did Portland, OR with mandated affordable housing development around transit stations.
In response to negative comments about density, Prof. Rigolón told the audience at the students’ presentation at Glendale Middle School, “Not building housing is a formula for low income people to be displaced. Did you see the movie The Last Black Man in San Francisco?”
This article originally appeared in Building Salt Lake. Read the whole thing here.
This article is part of an Opp Now series on COPA defeat takeaways:
Roger Valdez, director at the Center for Housing Economics, explains that what SJ residents need the most is an abundance of new (hence more affordable) housing.
Building Salt Lake debunks common assumptions about the connections between displacement, gentrification, and new, high-density, high-rent development.
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Image by Stephen Rees