Displacement 101

Navigating the Impact of Urban Development

Displacement comes in many forms. It can be direct, through the removal of existing housing, or indirect, through processes like gentrification.

Direct displacement directly forces residents out of their homes, through mechanisms like evictions, lease non-renewals, eminent domain, and other actions to remove residents from existing housing. Direct displacement isn’t always indicative of a larger neighborhood transformation. But, if these pressures occur alongside efforts at redevelopment and the arrival of affluent residents, they can play a significant role in the gentrification of a neighborhood.

Gentrification is a process in which a historically disinvested area experiences an influx of real estate investment and higher-income residents, causing an increase in property values and the displacement of earlier, usually poorer residents. The resulting demographic change happens not only in terms of income level, but also the cultural and racial make-up of the community.

Gentrification may look like:

Real estate speculation, house-flipping, and high-end development
Local landlords directly seeking more affluent tenants
Dramatic changes in land use (industry or storage becoming restaurants and commercial properties)
Increased investment in local amenities and services
Local businesses replaced by new ventures catering to a different clientele – often seeking higher-income customers or whitewashing neighborhood cultural history

Displacement doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Modern policy mistakes don’t just create contemporary harms, they replicate and exacerbate the discrimination and violence committed against communities of color throughout California’s history.

Redlining and Racial Covenants

In the late 1800s, affluent white neighborhoods and developments across the country began inserting “racial covenants” into property deeds. By the early 20th century, this racially restrictive language was widespread, legally prohibiting sale to religious minorities, ethnic minorities, and non-white – often specifically black – tenants and buyers. Even where non-white residents were not explicitly barred, widespread discrimination made it exponentially more difficult and expensive for families of color and other minority groups to access affluent housing and its benefits – clean air, good schools, proximity to green space, and more.

In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the GI Bill into law. This program offered government-backed mortgages to veterans, allowing many to purchase a home for their families that would have been impossible without this guaranteed loan. The intentional and violent injustice built into this policy has created some of the most malicious social, economic, environmental, and public health disparities we still reckon with today.

From the 1930s, the federal government initiated a program of “redlining”, explicitly labeling predominantly non-white neighborhoods as “risky” or “unfit for investment”. These demarcations were immediately underwritten into the government-backed mortgages offered through the GI Bill, preventing investment and homeownership opportunities along racial lines.

Two things happened next. One, white families living in redlined neighborhoods, who were not barred from homeownership by racial covenants elsewhere, left. This nation-wide phenomenon of “white flight” exacerbated race-based mistreatment of the remaining areas, including hyper-policing, environmental injustice, political disenfranchisement, and cycles of under-investment. Two, without the government-backed loans afforded to white neighborhoods, racial, ethnic, and religious minorities found it impossible to purchase homes. Where white families were able to begin creating generational wealth and putting down community roots, redlined neighborhoods remained trapped in cycles of poverty.

Through this lens, the distinctive risk of gentrification takes on new meaning. In white neighborhoods, where residents are far more likely to be homeowners, increases in property values create wealth for existing members of the community. These wealth increases turn into increased community investment (patronage to local businesses, involvement in local decision-making, and increased funding for schools, parks, etc.). In redlined, historically minority neighborhoods, residents are significantly less likely to own their homes, a direct product of 20th century housing injustice. When property values rise, community members do not see increases to their net worth – in contrast, these increases translate into rising rents, unaffordability, and displacement. Gentrification is a problem of historical, replicated, and exacerbated structural violence. Counteracting our housing crisis demands specific attention to prevent our policy from multiplying these injustices yet again.

California’s housing crisis is most acute for low and very-low income households, and priority should be given to accommodating the needs of these families first. The production of more housing – of any type – will not alone ensure affordability for most of California’s residents. In fact, housing projects themselves, and even increases in housing density, can drive indirect displacement and gentrification.
The construction of higher-end housing in lower-income communities can spur land speculation in the surrounding areas that increases property values, in turn displacing the existing, less affluent residents.

Increases in zoning density can directly and measurably raise property values as well. A raise in allowable density (often through changes in permitted floor-area ratios) can lead to a surge in property values as developers and landowners see greater profit-making potential in building more densely packed structures or commercial space with a greater immediate clientele.This surge in property values often attracts investment from outside the community, further driving up prices and making it increasingly difficult for long-time residents to afford to stay.

Local agencies may not directly control how much housing is built, but they do have control over where and what kind of housing they zone for and approve, and how their existing housing is protected.

Culver City

Consider an urban transition like Culver City is currently experiencing. As the urban center is rezoned for increased density, existing (lower-density) housing and commercial structures are redeveloped to capitalize on the new profit opportunities. As a result, the demographic makeup of the neighborhood is shifting, with lower-income residents being pushed out in favor of wealthier, often white newcomers. The profound economic and social impacts are evident in Culver City, including the displacement of longstanding communities, cultural erasure, and widening wealth disparities.

CEQA Review and Displacement

PCL believes indirect displacement and contribution to gentrification should be a consideration of CEQA review, particularly when the project is proposed in a predominantly low-income community of color, or communities otherwise identified by the state as Disadvantaged Communities (DACs).

While indirect displacement and gentrification can be caused by multiple converging socio-economic factors, and no one project can be found responsible for all the impacts of gentrification that are occurring in a community, we believe that a project can reasonably account for its contribution by measuring the project’s impact on housing demand in a given locality.

Once that impact on housing demand is identified, the corresponding proportionate risk of displacement can be measured by projecting the number of affected residents and the corresponding number of housing units needed for mitigation.

Implications for Smart Growth and VMT Smart growth isn’t just about buildings – it’s about people. As you can read in our VMT breakdown, California cannot meet its climate goals without curbing our single-occupancy automobile use – that means changing our land use patterns.

VMT, like every aspect of land use policy, is not blind to our state’s economic disparities. If available, low-income residents will use transit and active transportation options significantly more than those with greater economic means. Gentrification forces low-income communities to the urban periphery. This disastrous mechanism furthers sprawl, forces these low-wage workers to spend huge portions of their income on transportation, raises per-capita VMT, and continues to pump greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution into our air, all of which would be avoided by keeping communities intact.

Yet, in the places with increased investment in infill and transit-oriented development, we are also seeing gentrification and displacement of low-income communities at a rate faster than the data can capture, counteracting our climate and housing progress.

Displacement is the Achilles-heel of smart-growth policy.

Other Resources

Pushed Out: Displacement Today and Lasting Impacts – https://youtu.be/Zb4xATPMlLc
Gentrification Explained – https://youtu.be/V0zAvlmzDFc
Urban Displacement Project – https://www.urbandisplacement.org/about/what-are-gentrification-and-displacement/

Further, with the projected number of affected residents at risk of displacement identified, secondary environmental effects associated with that displacement can then be better analyzed. Trends of population migration for a given community can be used to project likely distances associated with relocation of these residents, and with that, the amount of increases to vehicle miles traveled (VMT) associated with that relocation, along with the greenhouse gas and air quality impacts corresponding with that increase of VMT. These impacts are all required to be mitigated under CEQA. If conducted correctly, these are sophisticated analyses, but they can, and should, be done.