Debunking pols' tacit assumptions about displacement
Image by Don DeBold
Many elected officials in SJ imagine indisputable links between gentrification, displacement, and new high-rent developments. Using 20 years of data, Building Salt Lake refutes the misconceptions with facts: gentrification doesn't increase one's likelihood of displacement, and gov't (not housing developers) often gentrifies neighborhoods by trying to attract high-taxpaying residents.
Shall we acknowledge it up front? The city is in the business of gentrification.
Both indirectly and directly, city policies create gentrification – defined as an area getting wealthier, whiter, and younger.
Government’s modus operandi of promoting growth is based in the logic that more tax revenue is always good. Where does that revenue come from? People and businesses able to spend in the local economy, boosting property and sales tax, licensing, permitting, fees and fines.
Those pressures are ever-present in Utah cities, where a state-mandated balanced-budget requirement keeps public officials from spending more than they take in.
Pro-gentrification policy direction is manifested in repeated city economic development strategies that aim to attract “high-paying jobs” in whatever era that might be. Today, it’s meds, eds, and tech professionals who Mayor Mendenhall hopes to entice to “Tech Lake City.”
Those higher-income people tend to be whiter than the general population, given its current patterns of income distribution. …
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.
This article originally appeared in Building Salt Lake. Read the whole thing here.
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