Census tracts reveal less displacement in areas with new housing development
Progressive activists in San Jose often make the inaccurate claim that displacement is caused by new development. Recent data suggests that the solution to displacement isn't stopping new development; it's creating even more.
In a City Lab article from August 2018, Joe Cortright, director of City Observatory, analyses the effects of new housing development in areas concerned with displacement including lower-income areas in Washington, D.C. and Oakland. His research compares neighborhoods close in proximity to one another, yet only one of which has experienced notable development over a recent time period.
According to Cortright, “slowing or stopping new development, particularly new housing development...constricts the housing supply, drives up rents and fuels displacement.
“We’ve seen this time and again. A couple of months back, I profiled two Oakland neighborhoods, Uptown and Fruitvale. Both experienced almost identical increases in rents and home values as the Bay Area city boomed. But Fruitvale, which has built more housing has seen dramatically less demographic change, while Uptown, which has built almost no new housing, has seen its population shift.
“The same holds for two neighborhoods in Washington, D.C.’s 20003 zip code that includes Capitol Hill and Navy Yard. Historic Capitol Hill has organized to largely block most new development; the Navy Yard area (near the Washington Nationals ballpark) has seen thousands of new apartments built in the past decade. As Greater Greater Washington describes, the addition of new apartments has helped push down rents in the Navy Yard while rents in Capitol Hill continue to climb.”
Cortright’s evidence on Oakland’s neighborhoods stems from another article he published on City Observatory in the weeks preceding his City Lab article, where “as a quick look at Census data for the two tracts shows that since 2000, 554 units of new housing have been built in Fruitvale (Tract 4061), and just 56 in Uptown (Tract 4027).”
Aside from a larger increase in new housing development in Fruitvale compared to Uptown during this time period, “the white non-Hispanic share of the Uptown population increased from 3.7 percent to 27 percent; the white non-Hispanic share of the Fruitvale population decreased by four-tenths of one percentage point, from 11.9 percent to 11.5 percent.”
Additionally, “Fruitvale’s tract 4061 saw a net gain of more than 500 residents since 2000, while Uptown’s tract 4027 experienced a decline in population of more than 250 residents.”