Online Event Archive Recorded: June 5, 2025
Over the past five decades, gentrification has fundamentally reshaped America’s urban neighborhoods, creating complex dynamics of revitalization and displacement. Our recently released comprehensive analysis, Displaced By Design, reveals that gentrification, once confined to small parts of some cities, is on the rise across many housing markets.
The human cost is staggering.
In gentrifying neighborhoods, populations typically decline for two decades before gentrification begins, followed by rapid demographic shifts. White, Asian and Hispanic populations grow while Black populations decrease. The process often involves developer-driven changes that prioritize profit over community preservation. Several factors drive this acceleration; housing supply shortages create scarcity and rising prices, construction costs push developers toward high-value projects, and social preferences have shifted from suburban to urban living, especially among young professionals seeking downtown amenities and cultural access.
The challenge lies in balancing revitalization benefits – improved infrastructure, services and economic opportunities – with preserving affordability and cultural identity. Gentrification can bring positive changes: better schools, increased safety, new businesses and rising property values for homeowners. However, these benefits disproportionately favor wealthier, often White newcomers while displacing lower-income residents and people of color.
Join NCRC’s Research team as they comb over the report’s key findings and discuss its implications, as well as potential solutions. Without intentional intervention, gentrification risks deepening inequality and erasing neighborhood cultural fabric. As urban America continues evolving, understanding these patterns becomes crucial for policymakers, community leaders and residents working to create inclusive neighborhoods that honor both revitalization and cultural preservation.
Speakers:
Jason Richardson, Senior Director of Research, NCRC
Bruce Mitchell, Principal Research, NCRC
Jad Edlebi, GIS Data Engineer, NCRC
Ralph Cyrus, Membership Engagement Specialist, NCRC
Transcript:
NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.
Richardson 0:01
Hi everybody. My name is Jason Richardson. I’m the Senior Director of Research here at National Community Reinvestment Coalition today. I’m being joined by our principal researcher, Dr Bruce Mitchell. We’re going to be talking about our latest report, Displacement by Design: 50 Years of Gentrification and Black Cultural Displacement. After this, we’re going to shift over and our GIS engineer Jad Edlebi is going to talk a little bit about the mapping application that goes along with this. And then we’re going to have time at the end for Q and A. I believe there should be at the bottom of your screen a little Q and A button. You can click on there put your question in, and somebody will try to get to it, either live or by typing in an answer. Some more information here about just what I just told you, and a little bit about NCRC. We are a coalition of over 700 member organizations across the country. My team works with these organizations, often to produce data and reports for members. We also do our own research. We have a team here that’s dedicated just to this job, and we split our time between our own research on topics like redlining and gentrification, racial wealth gap and segregation, but we also spend a whole lot of time talking to members, and I help members pull together data on their own communities and understand better what’s happening in their own neighborhoods. If you’re a member of NCRC, all you need to do is contact me and / or contact your organizer, and we can work with you and pull together the kind of data that you need, and do it pretty quickly. Bruce, I’m going to turn it over to you at this point. We’re going to talk a little bit about gentrification. But the question I always get, and what I think you’re going to start off with here, is, how in the world do you define it?
Mitchell 2:00
Right. Thank you so much, Jason. So gentrification, this is the third actual paper that we have done on the topic of gentrification. The first one we did was 2019 Shifting Neighborhoods, and in that one, we looked at gentrification between the year 2000 and 2013. Second one we did, we wanted to take a deep dive and look into the co-occurrence of gentrification and of the opportunity zones that were part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. We also were able to look at a more recent time-period. Now look at gentrification from 2013 to 2020. You know the interesting thing about that one, because there’s a lot of talk about opportunity zones now in the recent big, beautiful bill, right, that at that time, 69% of the gentrified areas that we had identified either overlapped with or were part of an Opportunity Zone. So there was this real co-occurrence between those two things, the topic which we may be looking at again in the future, but the present work, what we’re looking at here is gentrification over the long term. We’re looking at gentrification all the way from 1970 up through 2020, and then we’re looking at, well, how does that then coincide with racial displacement? You know what is happening to Black majority neighborhoods and also to the population levels in black neighborhoods throughout these years, where gentrification has occurred.
Richardson 3:37
Because what we’re looking for is not just economic investment, because that would be one thing, but gentrification is the investment coupled with displacement.
Mitchell 3:47
Yes, that’s right. Jason, so terms of gentrification, it’s really it’s a multiple-step process. First off, we identify which tracks in a city are eligible for gentrification. And for those, we look at areas with the lowest home value and the lowest household income to identify those. Then once we establish that eligibility at the beginning of a decade, we look and see at the end of the decade, what’s happened with those neighborhoods. Are they in the top in terms of growth of home values and also in the number of college-educated residents living in that area? So that’s that’s part of this process is establishing gentrification, but it’s mainly based upon, you know, economic right and income-related criteria. What we want to do is, we want to go a little bit further. So what we did was we introduced a validation technique into this where we’re looking at other data having to do with differences in occupations. How many more professionals and managerial people are living in that area? So. What’s been the change in demographics? You know, how has the racial component of that area changed? And also mortgage lending, how much mortgage lending is going on within that area? And we use these validation factors that look at metro areas and see, does it look like this metro area has this sort of displacement occurring, this racial displacement occurring within those areas. So this type of technique, it allowed us to track and look at changes all the way from 1970 up to 2020, and, you know, make some some really interesting findings about different metros and also about gentrification itself.
Richardson 5:45
Excellent. Let’s take a look at the next slide here.
Mitchell 5:48
And here, this is showing the map which Jad our data engineer. He’s going to go over this map a little bit later, but this shows kind of the extent of the country that we covered and cities that had kind of the most intensive levels of gentrification and displacement occurring within them. It’s largely these are cities right in the eastern and western seaboard, but also, you know, in many of the kind of middle Rust Belt type states, places like Texas, places like Florida, where you see this real intensity of gentrification that’s occurring these areas. But gentrification, all in all, it’s kind of rare over the past 50 years, so only 15% of urban neighborhoods show the indications of gentrification. But what this map does, it gives you an indication where it does occur. It’s occurring with a lot of intensity.
Richardson 6:39
Yeah. And one thing I want to note about the map here. Bruce and I are both geographers, so we’re used to this, but the map of the US often shows a cluster of things to the right of the you know, to the east of Mississippi. That doesn’t mean that gentrification is more common in the east than it is in the west. It just means there’s more cities and more people, right?
Mitchell 6:57
Yeah, just probably it’s driven by population, right? Right? And also the economic vibrancy, yeah, of different metro areas.
Richardson 7:04
Yeah, yeah. Let’s go to the next slide.
Mitchell 7:08
So, you know, I said that we also looked at this idea of different kinds of gentrification occurring, and it part of the paper. We looked at two different neighborhoods where gentrification had different types that occurred. We looked at Lafayette Park, or Lafayette Square neighborhood in St Louis, where gentrification takes kind of a different form there, and this is called rebound gentrification, where a neighborhood is actually being revitalized, and it’s a neighborhood that had a lot of architectural interest, but had, you know, fallen into disrepair over the decades, and then, starting in the 1970s, 1980s people started buying into that area, rehabilitating these houses and fixing them up. And you saw this real kind of economic change and enhancement to this neighborhood, and you have limited cultural displacement that took place, limited racial displacement taking place, and Lafayette Park. And this is contrasted with our own city here, which Washington, DC, right? Shea, Shea, yeah, she has arrived. So what this is, this is the U Street area of Washington, DC, historically Black community around Howard University, Howard Theater. And what’s occurred here is a very different kind of gentrification, very intensive developer-driven gentrification that oftentimes takes place with the cooperation coordination of city planning, where, in this sort of case, you had gentrification occurring with a real intensification and growth of population, but also this racial turnover, where this historically Black neighborhood made a turnover to become a majority White neighborhood. So this sort of gentrification that’s occurring, this is much more troublesome in the sense that you see a decay of affordability occurring there. It’s driving people who are renters out of that neighborhood. They’re not able to participate in the type of changes that gentrification brings the neighborhood. And then you see this kind of loss of history in the neighborhood, loss of Black history in the neighborhood, in this huge street example.
Richardson 9:25
And you remember our first report on gentrification, which was at this point, many years ago, Washington, DC was the most intensely gentrified city, and we heard from residents, you know, identifying all of the patterns that we’re talking about, and we’ve used that to refine our techniques at this point and become a lot more precise exactly, and measurement of displacement and other things.
Mitchell 9:45
Exactly. What are the advantages we have at NCRC? Is we have a large number base. We talk to a lot of people, so we’re able to kind of confirm some of these findings that we’re seeing with the data, personal experience, lived experience.
Richardson 9:57
If you came to our conference this year. We had a our display area at the conference called the research pavilion, with the map that you’re going to see in a little bit. And members were able to go and work with us and identify their areas. And we heard from them the stories about individual communities and saying they knew this neighborhood and this had happened, and they had torn down this building, and they built this one, and that’s great validation for us. But the point is, is it validates that what we’ve developed here can be a tool for locals to use, right local local groups to use, and then to for their own missions.
Mitchell 10:36
That’s right. So, you know, we talked a little bit about gentrification being somewhat rare 15% of urban neighborhoods of the past 50 years. But you know, this is really interesting, because what we found here is that over the decades, back in 1970, 1980 about 246 neighborhoods gentrified, Today in the last decade, 1,807 neighborhoods gentrified during that time-period. So it looks like this process is accelerating in many urban areas of the United States, where gentrification is becoming increasingly a factor. You know, I think a lot of this links in with the lack of affordability in housing. Yeah, and, and that lack of affordability is driving this kind of process. Also, people want to live closer transportation, closer urban areas and kind of experience that urban vibrancy and access to services.
Richardson
You know, I’m looking at the new mortgage data from last year, and there’s a lot of purchases going on in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods, but they’re overwhelmingly upper-income borrowers. Yes, that are buying in there, and I think this is part of what we’re seeing there.
Mitchell
Yeah, exactly.
Richardson
Yeah. So let’s take a look here the next one.
Edlebi
On the list
Mitchell
We saw that had kind of how gentrification is accelerated right over the decades, what this shows is decade by decade, the ranking of the cities. And we use that validation type of technique that I discussed a little bit earlier to develop this ranking. You know, where in the 1970s, DC really had quite a bit of gentrification. It was number one, but again, it wasn’t as intensive as it is in subsequent decades. In fact, DC appears in those lists several times. It also appears in lists in the 2000s and 2010s as being number two in both of those eras. What’s really interesting during the 2000s you have Atlanta, DC, Portland, St, Louis, Austin, Texas, all appearing on the list. And some of these are, you know, come up again. 2010s DC, Austin, again comes up on that list. So most recently, this was a surprise to me, Nashville came up as a number one rank, followed by DC, San Francisco…
Richardson 12:43
Probably not a surprise to folks in Nashville, though,
Mitchell 12:47
And then Denver, right? Yeah, Denver has kind of the unique thing of appearing multiple times. I think, in every decade on this list, Denver has appeared in there. So gentrification has been really prolonged process occurring in Denver. Fascinating. And what this shows is, well, how have neighborhoods changed? And this chart, it shows neighborhoods that who was the majority in 1980 was it a majority Asian population or Black population, Hispanic population, or non-Hispanic White population, and then how that area changed by 2020, and you know what we find here with the majority Black areas, many of them, about half of them, remain majority Black, although we’ll see what happens in subsequent decades with those neighborhoods and whether they go towards a kind of resegregation. And about half of them transition to become either majority White or to have a racially mixed population in those areas. So that’s a really interesting finding, and the reason it is interesting is because there’s been a lot of debate about whether displacement is actually happening. A lot of researchers, researchers are using data, most when it comes to mind is a Federal Reserve study in Philadelphia, and you know, their study said that, you know, mobility patterns, the way people move into neighborhoods, really didn’t change much before gentrification and after gentrification. And I think this is this counters that, yeah, you know that we’re really finding that displacement is a factor in many neighborhoods and is a part of the gentrification process oftentimes.
Richardson 14:35
And one of the hard things with measuring displacement is that we can’t track individuals, right? So we use race because we can see clearly if the number of Black people, as well as the percentage of Black people in the community, falls, that’s really apparent. But we also acknowledge that there is intra-racial gentrification and displacement. The most common one I hear about is law. Angeles and Latinos, where wealthier Latinos displace lower-income Latinos, often who are from different places, originally, natural born versus immigrant that sort of thing. But so what we’re talking about here is the racialized displacement that we can observe in the data. But since we are measuring something that’s subjective, I always like to kind of remind folks that we are measuring what we can measure, but your local experience is, you know, we hope this matches that, but you may be seeing things on the ground that are happening more currently than we see here. So in this case, majority Black communities that remain majority Black, even through gentrification that is a many years long process displacement in some cases. So we may see these neighborhoods are on an arc to being something very different in the future. It’s just kind of a caveat.
Mitchell 15:54
That’s right. Neighborhood change can take decades to occur, so it’s unclear about what will happen to those neighbors. Another interesting thing here is that if you look at majority-White neighborhoods that gentrified, 972, of those remain majority White. So that’s showing the kind of economic component of gentrification in that case. So how many people has this impacted? And if you look at, you know, the number of people in the gentrifying neighborhoods and the shifts in population, you know, we find that overall, about half a million African Americans have been displaced, moved out of gentrifying neighborhoods, and you’ve seen some increase in the White population in those areas, some increase in Asian and also Hispanic population in those areas. But this sort of cultural displacement that we’re seeing with the Black community is something that is of great interest and problematic. And this then quantifies city by city the numbers of this change. In Washington, DC, right, 43 census tracts or neighborhoods right have been impacted since 1970 and that’s a change of about 54,000 non-Hispanic White people, But the loss of about 61,000 African Americans in those gentrifying neighborhoods. Some small increase in Asian and Hispanic population in those areas too.
Richardson 17:28
Why do you think? Why is it? It’s always black people being displaced? Well, we see increases, for example, in Hispanic or in Asian.
Mitchell 17:35
I think this may say something about maybe the intransigence of the racial wealth gap, the data and the difficulties of increasing income.
Richardson 17:48
Yeah, and the places that gentrify, the ones that are close to, you know, downtown and, you know, amenities and things like that that were often with victims of white flight.
Mitchell 17:56
Right, were often victims of white flight, the areas there may be some abandoned and I think we’ll see that maybe in some of the other slides. So here we’re contrasting these two forms of gentrification, rebound gentrification in Lafayette Square, that can limit neighborhoods and limit cultural displacement, as opposed to developer-driven gentrification, which has really become quite rampant in most recent decades, rapacious. And this is showing what I was talking about, this kind of population change, changing demographics in Lafayette Square, where from 1970 through 2020, you see, first off, you see this overall decline in population that stabilizes for two decades, and then you have a rebound occurring in the population in subsequent decades. And you don’t see this kind of racial transition taking place here. The Black population, part of that area, has remained pretty steady over the time-period. And then, and then U Street, the example of U Street, and what we see happening there, where you see this decline of population, you know, possibly indicating abandonment taking place. Population declining all the way through the year 2000. Gentrification occurring, starting to occur there in the 90s and the 2000s and then this rebound. But what you see is you don’t see the rebound for the Black population. The Black population continues its decline, and then you have a racial transition taking place in the decade after where a White population exceeds a Black population. So now this is the mapping application which we have available. And this mapping application, you can go to all of these cities within the United States, look up your community, see what’s happening in your community. And Jad Edlebi, he’s going to go ahead and do a demonstration of this really fantastic mapping application that you can use to explore these five decades of gentrification.
Richardson 20:09
Okay, I’m going to stop sharing my screen now, and I’m going to try to respond to a couple of questions while Jad’s talking. And then afterwards, we’re going to come back and we’re going to do more Q and A so if you’ve got any questions now, please put them in the Q and A box for us, but listen to Jad and Jad take it away.
Edlebi 20:28
Thank you, Jason. Hi. I’m Jad Edlebi, the GIS data engineer at NCRC research, and we have this interactive map that accompanies our report, where you can find on ncrc.org/displacedbydesign, the interactive map can also be found at ncrc.org/gd. Let me go ahead and share my screen. One sec. There we go. All right. So this is the interactive map that we have accompanying the report. And right now we see all cities in the country, most of them at least, and major cities, minor cities. We basically included every metro and micropolitan area in the country in our study, and we also limited it to the central city-designated census tracts of those metro areas. So the figures that we see here are eligible tracts in light blue, and then the tracts within those eligible tracts that had gentrified. And in this case, we are seeing it for 1980. I’d like to also note that on the sidebar we could also see bar graphs that represent the number of gentrified census tracts over here by decade, and then also the population below it, as well as the home value, the median household income and the percent of those who have a four-year degree or higher. So let me go ahead and zoom into Washington DC, because I think it’s just the just the example to use for this report. And when looking at Washington DC, we start to see the census tracks that had gentrified already in by 1980. So to give some more context to this, these are census tracts that had already been eligible by 1970 meaning that they were below the 40th percentile in median home value as well as median household income within DC’s metro area. So neighborhoods such as Adams Morgan, Dupont Circle, Logan Circle, these areas were flagged within the eligibility and then also triggered the threshold by the end of the decade that they passed the 60th percentile in terms of education and home value. So when you click on each census tract, you can see the specific percentages and in statistics of that census track, including the same values that we saw before, already, you can see that there was an increase in home value from 1970 to 1980 where you see it almost double. In the case of income, you do see an increase as well. But education also increased quite a bit in that one. The good thing about this map is that you could also see this by decade. So this, this, uh, this timeline here is interactive. You’re able to kind of see how that expands over time, eastward, generally. So you’ll start to see neighborhoods like Shaw, Noma, parts of Northeast, a lot of different neighborhoods that had that were recently not considered eligible, now had been eligible and then did gentrify. So a neighborhood I’d like to also focus on is Shaw. This census tract in particular is where you saw the Shea that she has arrived photo. This particular census tract has undergone serious changes in the last 50 years, particularly between 20oo and 2010, where we saw the home value skyrocketing in the median from $211,000 all the way up to $722,000. That is almost that is more than three times the home value that it was just 10 years prior. The income also reflected this, where it was at $41,000 in 2000 and then more than doubled by 2010, at $106,000. So, this also shows an education where you start to see the sort of like the populace changing over time, where it was 15% of those with a four-year degree or higher, and then more than half now have a bachelor’s degree in that neighborhood. This can also be reflected by looking at who lives in that neighborhood, and this tab over here can switch the view to showing Black cultural displacements within each neighborhood. This graph shows, particularly the population broken down by race, how that has changed from 1970 to 2020. And over here, we have highlighted the decade, where this specific census tract had gentrified. And noting Bruce’s trend that he noted before, this switch happened just after that decade where you see White population increasing while Black populations decreased. So in this case, we saw by between 2000 and 2010 it was below 1,000 it crossed that threshold to 1,500 more than doubling that White population. And by 2020, and between 2010 and 2020, we were seeing a gradual loss in Black population. I’d also like to shift over to a particular example of where you see a really big increase in in white population post-gentrification. This area which some people, and actually all people in DC, would know as local, is Navy Yard. This is probably one of the more extreme notes where you did see a gradual decrease over time from 1970 but with an with a slight increase in Black population happening after 2010 however, that still coincided with a very major increase in White population from 1,500 to above 7,000. So this map is great in kind of showing those different trends and how that actually is impacted over time. You could also see how it’s shifted across the entire city using the timeline, just seeing how that has changed along side with gentrification shifting from 1980 to 2020. But that is the gist of it. For the tool itself. I’m more than willing to take any questions regarding the map or the data associated with it. I’m going to turn it back to Bruce and Jason.
Richardson 27:15
Thanks, Jad. Taking a look at the questions that are in queue, I think we’ve been trying to get to a few of the Q and A questions here. Why don’t we take a look through some more of them, though, and just kind of remember just reading some of the stuff in the chat, now.
Mitchell 27:32
I saw one question on here about the opportunity zones, and do we have any questions data on the opportunity zones currently? Well, the opportunity zones are of great interest to us, right? Because this is looks like it’s going to become one of the major forms of community development that the federal government is undertaking in its new budget. And the opportunity zones, there have been a lot of studies done at this point, studies by the National Bureau of Economic Research. And generally, what these studies have found is that the opportunity zones have not really done much to improve the conditions of people living in the low-income people living within. That there has been housing built oftentimes in opportunity zones, but it’s been market-rate housing which doesn’t improve the situation of affordability for people. So we’re very concerned about the Opportunity Zones, and that’s something that we will probably be looking at in the future, at this overlap between gentrified areas and Opportunity Zones. So please stay tuned for our research in that area.
Richardson 28:41
How does the research – this is a good question from Jade Craig – how does the research measure Black cultural displacement, outside of physical displacement and reduction in number of Black residents. So this particular report doesn’t look too closely at that cultural displacement. We did a report several years ago with Dr. Sabiyha Prince, who’s an anthropologist here in DC and an anti-displacement specialist, and looked at the impact on Black cultural businesses in DC as gentrification took hold, both raising their rents and also pushing away a lot of the consumer base. And you know, the interesting thing I thought about gentrification is that often, and you see this in the U Street area of DC quite a bit. But they will, you know, the developers that will gentrify it will celebrate the black culture that was there. But they, you know, will they at the same time, they’ll be pushing out the Black residents that are there
Mitchell 29:40
Absolutely, so you see this change in the type of small businesses, decline in small businesses within that neighborhood, and it’s a real cultural transition that takes place where the services move away from the original population.
Richardson 29:56
Just going through the questions here. So if you want to put more in there, we’ve got quite a bit. The time for Q and A, how many of these gentrification issues are pre-planned? How can communities educate themselves to understand these plans, how they’re implemented, and understand how to prevent them from being approved in the local area? There are a couple of questions in here that kind of touched on this, and I want to address this is from Melinda Thomas, thank you very much. I’ve got some ideas, but I got a feeling you might want to…
Mitchell 30:24
Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, a couple of years back, we were talking with the DC city planning about this issue, and they were surprised by gentrification displacement, and which surprised us, because they were involved in the planning process, yes, and making this sort of situation occur. But yeah, it’s really critical that the community be involved, and community organizations be involved in the planning process. Oftentimes gentrification, it’s around redevelopment, it’s around transportation infrastructure, it’s around some sort of improvement within that city. And developers have a real clear voice in this, yeah, and oftentimes the communities do not, and this, it really requires that.
Richardson 31:25
Yeah, even at that point, and this was, this was so long ago. It was Jad’s first week with us, I recall. We went, we spoke to this group and the council members themselves were developers or real estate investors, and so their point of view was solely on the need for market-rate housing, and that that a supply would create less demand, that that you would provide more market-rate housing. And in some cases, maybe that’s true. However, in places like DC or other places which are hotbeds for gentrification, we don’t see that right? Investors will step in and buy up market-rate homes that homeowners aren’t willing to buy. And investors often come in with a lot deeper pockets in different ways, you know, and their motivations are different because their income on the property as opposed to just using it for housing. So I think that’s difficult. And I think the answer to all of these things is putting tools in the hands of local advocates who can then go to their local government. Because this is all stuff that’s bought out at the city, state or city, county and metro government development level, where you look at things like renter protections that allow renters to avoid displacement, requiring leases in some forms of rent control, or at least limits on how quickly rents can change or be used as a predatory measure to push people out. absolutely. You know, for development, you know development deals, you look at what is good for the incumbent population, not what is going to make the most money for for developers, right?
Mitchell 32:51
So affordable housing, that some provision for affordable housing to be built that are right of first refusal, or a new built property, newly built properties be given to tenants, and that the opportunity for people to have some form of assistance in purchasing a property. Those are all things that should be demanded when gentrification is taking place.
Richardson 33:18
Yeah, but I mean, this is one thing, and a shameless self-promotion here for us is that NCRc’s, you know, 700 some odd member groups. One of our key roles for them is in providing this kind of data at a very local level. Our team is here to do that, but we’ve also got organizing staff and other trainings that happen all the time that I think are great tools just to just give, give you something that you can walk into your city council meeting, your county commission discussions, and present them and say, Look this, you know, this new development will ultimately displace this many people. Right? What can we do to protect them? And defining something is as affordable is often more complicated than you think. You know, if a place is affordable, for example, in DC, as I recall, the median family income now is somewhere around $110-120,000 that means that a low- to moderate-income family, as HUD’s defining it, is a family making about $80,000 well, I mean, that’s a lot of money in a lot of places I mean. And the fact is that you have a lot of folks here that make well below that. So when you define affordable, who is it affordable to? And typically the levels they use are 8% of median income, 50% of median income, or 30% of median income. And so, you know, housing solutions have to take into account all of these people. Otherwise, you wind up with these, frankly, you wind up with, my opinion, these ugly, kind of developer-driven monstrosities that are vacant. Baltimore has got a great example. The community in Baltimore that’s been redone basically a ghost city.
Mitchell 35:03
Yeah, that’s Fort Covington. That’s an Opportunity Zone that was developed largely by Under Armor. This is a vast area in Baltimore that was completely redeveloped, and people just are not moving there. It’s like a ghost town.
Richardson 35:19
There’s a lot of great questions in the chat. There’s probably no way that I’m going to get to all of these today and but we do have quite a bit more time. I’m going to try my best, but I’m sure we’re going to post some links in the chat to both the slides, the recording and our email addresses, so we’re all pretty responsive on email. If you have questions about the mapping applications, Jad Edlebi is the lead on that. If you have questions about the report methodology, you’d want to talk to Dr Mitchell about that. And if you just want to tell us how you know, great the report is, I’m always happy to hear from that, but, but seriously, we’d love to hear more questions. So keep putting them in the Q, and A, and we’ll try our best to get through them here. And I think Jad put some stuff in the chat. Now, there’s a great, another good question from Belinda here, is there a way to stop investor groups from buying up so many properties that lower that lower incomes could buy? Yeah, that’s tough, right? Because so so you think of investors, and you think of the, you know, the big Wall Street firms and BlackRock, or whatever, coming in and buying up hundreds and hundreds of homes. Our best information that, and keep in mind, this data is often kind of difficult to come by because it’s, it’s at the county level, and not every county is accessible to this kind of data, but it looks like those, let’s just call them, large institutional investors, that they’re often concentrated in specific markets, Atlanta, Phoenix, Tampa, those cities have a bigger percentage of their investor purchases that seem to be going up, but most of the investors are just people like us who consider that we just came through a pandemic period where everybody who owned a home was able to refinance it to this generationally low 2% interest rate, and it creates an enormous amount of equity, and a lot of those folks are pulling that equity out and using it to buy other properties. And we see this in the mortgage data every year. We’re about to come out with a new series on mortgage market data, and I’m looking at the rise of investor loans. So investors often use cash, but, you know, a lot of investors may have cash that they use for a down payment, but they do mortgage the rest of the property. So that shows up in data as well. And I’m seeing counties that where the where investor purchases are 20 to 30% of the mortgages. Wow, that we’ve got. So, you know, that’s, you know, that’s a huge chunk, and it’s really hard to push back on that. And you know, if you’re concerned about investors, I would be looking at, again, local action, talking about tax rates on non-owner occupied purchases of single-family homes, and ongoing taxation on those homes, which could be, you know, increased to push those homes back onto the market for owner occupants to take over. If you change the math for investors, you can, you can, you can have some impact there, but also just helping, especially first time buyers who don’t have any equity to draw on from family or from from previous homes. You know that the mountain that closing costs now represent, since 2018 closing costs have almost doubled across the country, everywhere I’m looking. You know, coming up with $10,000 to close on a home is pretty tough for anybody, really these days, but I mean that in addition to a down payment, can be an insurmountable kind of kind of barrier. So yeah, there are a few, there are a few things, but I want to stress that right now, especially, I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of help coming from the Federal end of things, but I think there are a lot of options for local, state and regional governments that can step in and help, I hope.
Mitchell 39:24
That closing cost issue that you’re talking about there that combined with the rise in interest rates, really has a lot of downstream effects to it, in terms of families ability to accumulate wealth over the long term. So that’s a very problematic issue, and something that may have generational type repercussion.
Richardson 39:46
Yeah, okay, Laura, this question here. Laura niche has an interesting question about the the black population declines precede white population increases in the two examples. And this is this a broad trend you want…
Mitchell 40:00
Yeah, it is. We’re seeing it over and over again in these neighborhoods that were black majority that then transitioned to become another white majority type of a neighborhood. So this is a common pattern that we’re saying now I want to emphasize that we’ve kind of pinpointed two different kinds of gentrification occurring here. There might be others and combinations of this right, where you have initially small investors coming into an area doing some revitalization, buying into there, and then you have the developers come in, right and do a more wholesale change occurring in that area. So these are just two types of patterns we’ve identified. And that pattern where you see the overall population decline, decline in Black residents, that’s a very notable pattern with Black majority neighborhoods.
Richardson 40:54
Spin Phillips in here suggest, are you suggesting that new housing is the cause of displacement, or is the influx of new market rate housing a reflection of demand in an area that is that itself is leading to displacement? The new housing isn’t, isn’t as much of the issue. It’s what happens or what options are offered to the incumbent residents in lieu of that. So typically, what we see as a pattern of clearance, meaning that old housing is torn down or gotten rid of, and the replacement housing is much more expensive. So there is no option, for example, if you if you’ve lived in a small apartment for 20 years in a neighborhood that was not a great in great shape for a long period of that time, and all of a sudden something has happened. Maybe a new metro stop has opened nearby, or the port that was nearby is shutting down, and you got a beautiful waterfront park. So a disability has now become an amenity. You know, the home you live in, the home you’ve grown up in, you can still afford it. However, at a certain point you’re going to lose your ability to stay there. The rent will go up to the point the landlord pushes you out. Or what’s happening in a lot of areas is that large developers are coming in and buying up everything and kicking people out wholesale. And you know that there is, you know, there is always going to be some sort of destruction, we think to development, obviously, but it’s, it’s taking time, and considering what happens to the people who live there, and offering them the opportunities to enjoy the benefits of the investment in the community that they have lived in, and put time into building themselves right? It’s important.
Mitchell 42:37
And that scenario discuss there, where you have an area where developers buy in and wholesale redevelopment. The first time I saw that, I was living about a quarter of a mile away from a property in Alexandria. It’s close to Washington, DC, and there was a large apartment community there called Arno Valley that had been built during the Second World War as part of this kind of construction of housing as a population increase. And that was a largely Hispanic community. I think it was probably 80% Hispanic living there. And this is a place where Hispanic community could live, because many of them were service workers, you know, involved in different service occupations for the DC economy. Well, that property was bought wholesale and completely redeveloped, and every one of those people were driven out of that area. So you had about 1,000 people in that area that were just wholesale displaced as a result of that type of redevelopment that occurred. That was about the late 1990s.
Richardson 43:42
Yeah, a couple of good questions here. Robert Ford, and I think I saw somebody else asked this question as well. Where do displaced residents go? So that’s beyond the scope of our study. However, I’m familiar with a couple of that have looked at it. Do you want to go first?
Mitchell 43:57
Yeah, yeah. This is a really interesting question, where are people going? And the best data I’ve seen on that, and mapping application I’ve seen on that, it’s a University of Minnesota law school or law center mapping application, where they’re looking at the period from about 2000 to 2013 and they tracked the shift in low-income population. And if you look at Washington, DC, where you know we have the most information or most personal experience, you see just this real decline in low-income people living within the city boundaries. And where’s that population going to? They’re going to the inner ring suburbs. They’re going to areas like Prince George’s County, where the housing structure there it was built, you know, in the post war period, oftentimes that housing structure started to decline, some of its condition value, and you see those people being pushed out of the urban connection, going further and further out into surrounding areas.
Richardson 45:00
Yeah. I think one of the studies I read basically said they’re being displaced to places that are pretty much like where they’re coming from. So what’s the problem? And what they what they meant was that they’re they, you know, the people lived in an area that was poor and had low incomes and low property values, and as they got pushed out, they moved to another place nearby, where the incomes were low, the property values were low. And as I recall, that particular author took the point of view that that meant there was nothing bad happening. Well, what it meant was that the people who had lived in this neighborhood, now that it was getting investment, they were getting shut out and not allowed to take part and benefit from that investment. So and we’re talking about neighborhoods that are often not heavily owner-occupied. You know, these are often renters, so they don’t benefit at all from the rise in values. They instead, have to go through the disruption, the cost, the expense of relocating, and then they’re going to be in a place that is probably more crowded. Rents are still going up and there and there’s going to, you know, just further locks them out of becoming homeowners or building wealth or benefiting from the investment that we’re that we’re trying to achieve, right?
Mitchell
It puts them further out of the urban system, where transportation might be more difficult for them. They may have a disruption of their social connections, social networks, and that DC, you saw this a lot with public housing projects that had been wholesale redeveloped or yet this disruption of community. Dr, Prince, you mentioned earlier, Prince, she’s written quite a bit on this topic and how gentrification has disrupted those sorts of communities.
Richardson 46:37
There’s a few questions in here about specific methods and processes with the map. I’m going to defer to Jad on those if he wants to answer but, but and some of them are kind of niche, but I just want so I just want to encourage you to keep our emails and email us if you have any questions. You know, for example, about specific communities. Barb Vancouver asked, it’s interesting how it looks like the total population is smaller in the U Street area now than before, while the Navy yards population, yeah, so, and I’m not a Washingtonian, but I’ve been here a little over 10 years. And when I first moved here, our offices were near the U Street corridor, U Street, and then also, I remember the Navy yards area. What, what you got there was, you know, in a lot of ways, though, the U Street area was already pretty populated. There were already apartments. There was multi-family housing, whereas the Navy Yard area was more of a single-family or a lot of, you know, nothing area, yeah, industrial type locations,
Richardson 47:43
Right. And now, if you go down to the waterfront area, where the stadiums are around Navy yards, it’s just block after block of massive apartments that are full of people. And so, you know, yeah. So this plays out differently in different areas. You know, sometimes you see the there, you know, there’s always this period of abandonment that comes before displacement, but that period of abandonment can take decades, or it can take just a couple of years. You know, if a major employer disappears or a major disamenity, so like say, the factory, you know, the paper mill, or whatever, whatever it was that people didn’t want to live around. When that disappears all of a sudden, it can dramatically change, you know, the money that’s going to flow into that area. So you’ve got to look at every area you know somewhat uniquely and have a deep understanding of the background. So we’re the wrong people from honestly to ask questions about specific neighborhoods. We you know, the data we’re using is complicated and it’s large scale, but we can’t tell local stories with it. We can put data in the hands of our members and local groups and we hope that it’s helpful for you to tell the stories of those communities. But so I want to hesitate to like, like, suggest anything more about different, you know, specific neighborhoods. But I think the questions are great. Let’s take a look and see if we got anything else here. I think we’re about 1:52pm and I really appreciate everybody staying online. And these are a lot of really great questions. There’s too much coming into the chat for me to answer each one, though I think. As far as the map, this is not a static tool. It is interactive. But I think what you mean is we’ll be updating with new data. So that’s a complicated question. Jad, can explain a little bit about why that’s complicated with the ltdb not being updated.
Edlebi 49:51
Right. So in the in the map we’re using, we matched our census tracks with the longitudinal track database, which. Is, is a data set that was developed by Dr John Logan at Brown University, who basically took every decades census tract boundaries, which change every 10 years. He harmonized them to 2010 census tract boundaries. So we related to back to that data set for a lot of what we are using for this map, including the 2020 data, which we actually pushed back to 2010 using the LTD as well. So we’re mostly waiting on those data sources to sort of update as they go. We’re kind of at the will of that as well as census itself. So in terms of 2030 data, I would probably, yeah, I guess when it comes to census 2030 that’s probably when we would be looking at this again.
Richardson 50:48
Excellent. All right, thanks. Chad Anthony Goodwin asked an interesting question here, is it possible to look at whether the neighborhoods being gentrified were previously redlined neighborhoods, I assume, majority-Black neighborhoods the 1970s and beyond were likely previously redlined, but wondering if you looked at it specifically. So, Anthony, you may not know this, but we have a lot of reports on redlining, and we do a lot of work around redlining and public health issues, but I’m going to turn this over to Dr Mitchell to give you a better answer.
Mitchell 51:17
Yeah, that’s right. So this issue of redlining that was done, you know, historically in oftentimes in Black neighborhoods. Yes, Jason discussed before how abandonment often proceeds gentrification, the situation abandonment also with redlining. Most of these were downtown core, tight neighborhoods in cities. So these are the areas because of the abandonment and the issue of them being down core neighborhoods that are the most vulnerable to gentrification within urban areas. We haven’t looked at it specifically to see what the overlap is of that. We haven’t, you know, done a count or quantitative analysis of that. But yes, I suspect there’s a very high correspondence between redlined areas and gentrifying areas, because, you know, abandonment of the area precedes this process, right?
Richardson 52:14
And redlining essentially assisted in that abandonment for many years.
Mitchell 52:19
Through disinvestment.
Richardson 52:22
Yeah, yes. Joy Doyle, you have a question here. Do you have any thoughts about the massive investments that are occurring in Ward 8 that’s in DC, particularly on the St Elizabeth Campus, majority Black homeowners. What would you what would you advise provide them to understand how their investments will be impacted? Start looking for I would advise you, first of all, to look for local organizations that are focused on anti-displacement strategies in the DC area. And if you contact NCRC, we can connect you with some of the members that we know of in the area. But the reason I’m saying that is that you know these things have to be really fought at the local level. And you can, first of all, I wouldn’t say that gentrification is happening slowly in Ward 8, in geo in the gentrification terms, I think it’s been happening pretty quickly. And as you start seeing more connectivity to the main DC job areas, you know, I think you’re already seeing in Ward 7 the growth of gentrification. You can look on our map and see that, and there was another question in here about HBCUs, and I kind of want to lump these in together a little bit. Gentrification, often, it can cluster around anchor institutions of some type. And an anchor institution can be a large employer, a university campus, transit lines often draw in that kind of investment at all. So, so, you know, there’s a lot of these things that you can kind of see coming in. Tax parcel data that tracks daily. It can track the sales of properties in the area, looking at, are they, you know, being sold to individuals or people. These are all kind of data-intense efforts that happen at the local level. We can help members with some of these things, though, but that kind of might give you a little bit finer granularity to the data than what our report can provide, because while our report is national in scope and it covers a 40-year time period, we’re using data that is, by necessity, a few years old, is it census data, large part so, and mortgage data, but, but if you want to get something that’s a little more current, there are local sources to do that with. We see here.
Mitchell 54:38
You know, the type of gentrification is taking place in DC. It’s really taking place over kind of a long trajectory, and the type of you know results you see in a place like Ward 8, oftentimes, this has been a years-long planning process in many of these areas that have, you know, for these things that to occur. Oftentimes proceeded by clearance, like that stadium area, where you have just a wholesale clearance area and then the redevelopment.
Richardson 55:06
Well, look, I just realized, Bruce, we are almost at time. I wanted to see if Ralph Cyrus is on from our membership team to pop on for a second and talk about NCRC membership. Ralph, are you there? Oh, I guess not. Sorry about that, guys. Now, you know, I wasn’t able to get to a lot of the questions here, but I think we shared in the chat with our contact information. You’re more than welcome to shoot email to the whole team ask your question. We’d love to talk to you and hear back from you. If you’re a member of NCRC, remember, you can always contact my team and we can make an appointment to chat. I see Ralph is on now, Ralph, did you want to talk a little bit? Okay, there he is.
Cyrus 56:00
Everyone. It’s a pleasure to to get to get to chat with y’all. I was listening as a viewer like everyone else. So happy to listen, if anybody is interested, and following up with this report, learning about how to, how to utilize this project at the local level. What you know, learn a little bit more about this, the research tailored to them or their area specifically. Feel free to reach out to to the to the membership team at membership@ncrc.org and also connect with your fellow, fellow member organizations. Since DC was a very highlighted focus of this report, if you’re interested in and connecting with other DC members, we have quite a bit of folks who are who are working at addressing this phenomenon at different levels. I think. And off the top of my head, I’m thinking about Pennsylvania Avenue Baptist Church that just does a lot of support services for for people in Ward 8. We feel free to reach out to the membership team at membership@ncrc.org we can, we can work to inform you about your other members. If you want to, you know, try to connect through email or phone calls. We can set up meetings as well. Yes, and like, what jad’s going to mention is, you know, we always want to get feedback on how we can provide better, better information, a better way to provide information with you, to try to ensure that what we’re putting out is something you’re looking for. So feel free to definitely fill out that survey as well.
Richardson 57:49
And remember everybody, we are having a summit this year, in March, in September, in Nashville, the site of the most intense gentrification in the last 10 years that we found.
Mitchell 57:59
That’s right.
Richardson 58:01
Jad will be there showing off the fancy maps and everything. So it should be a good time. We are actually a little bit over-time right now, so I want to thank everybody for their participation and showing up. This has been a great experience. And thank you all very much for your questions. Have a very nice day. Thank you. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
