Online Event Archive Recorded: November 5, 2025
By mapping which census tracts low-income residents are leaving and where they’re resettling, Jennifer Newcomer has created a unique dataset that NDC uses to advocate for land use changes and community benefits agreements to take a regional approach to affordable housing. This unique model is replicable across communities and can offer a framework for how other organizations can take a data-driven approach to policy advocacy.
Speakers
Jonathan Cappelli, Executive Director, Neighborhood Development Collaborative
Lukas Hagen, Research and Policy Manager, Neighborhood Development Collaborative
Jennifer Newcomer, Principal, Community Insights
Greg Wilson, Senior Organizer, 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.
Wilson 0:07
Hey. My name is Greg Wilson. I’m a senior organizer for NCRC. This is a webinar that we are putting on for you all, called “Connecting Upzoning, Community Benefit Agreements and Intra-Urban Household Migration.” It’s a policy case study from the Metro Denver area. It is being presented by our member organization the NDC, the Neighborhood Development Collaborative. Next slide, I want to go over a little bit here about who we are at NCRC. We’re a 700-member organization. Folks that are like nonprofit leaders, CDCs, CDFIs, housing organizations, fair lending shops. We have a research department, we have a membership team, we have a policy department. I’m part of the organizing team, and today we’re going to have a webinar presented by one of our members that we think is of keen interest to all of you. Next slide, so just some housekeeping here. We don’t want you all to go crazy here, but we want to make sure that you enter in the chat to let us know who you are. But we also want you to be clear that you can put your Q and A in the Q and A chat box at the bottom, so just click that Q and A button. You could let your and just write your questions, and we’ll do our best to answer them. We have essential links and tags listed as well, and we think this is going to be a very edifying webinar. I know Jonathan Lucas and Jennifer have worked really hard on it, so what I’d like to be able to do is just let you know that this will probably last about 40-45 minutes, and then we’ll have a Q and A at the end. And we’ll have some other information should you care to join NCRC, we’ll provide you with a link as well as to how to do that. But let me take this moment in time to pass the baton off to Lucas from Neighborhood Development Collaborative.
Hagen 2:01
Excellent. Thanks, Greg and thank you all so much for coming.
Today, we’re going to discuss how voter registration data shows where displaced residents are going within municipalities, not just which neighborhoods they’re just getting displaced from, but also where they’re headed. How land use changes can help reduce displacement within communities, and how Community Benefit Agreements can mitigate displacement-impacts of large development projects. Oops, yeah, so we’re the Neighborhood Development Collaborative. My name is Lucas Hagen. I’m our policy and research manager. Like Greg said, we’re a 25 we’re a coalition of 25 mission-driven nonprofit affordable home builders on the front range, working across the housing continuum with our members, offering permanent supportive housing all the way through to affordable home ownership opportunities. With us today is my Jonathan Cappelli, our executive director will also be presenting later, as will Jennifer Newcomer, the principal at Community Insights, which supports mission-driven organizations through evidence-based research and data capacity building to better understand neighborhoods they work in to ensure the most vulnerable residents receive the support they need to live healthy and prosperous lives. Now, gentrification, displacement is something that has been in the news a lot, as you can see here. These are screen grabs from local publications throughout our Southwest region that Greg mentioned, and we see it in the data as well. It’s not just in the headlines. So there census tracts in Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, Phoenix and Denver all are all rising throughout the last 40 years, and this is something that has affected our most vulnerable residents in our Southwestern cities here. So this is what it looks like in Denver. Over the last 15 years, we’ve seen housing costs increase and outpace wages in many cases, and we especially saw this in the post-pandemic era. And this is what it’s done for our low-income renters, who are particularly vulnerable, as you can see in the bottom right here, renters earning less than 30% of the area median income face the greatest shortage, while the new market rate supply tends to come in at the higher income ranges. We see that publicly assisted housing is distributed across the way, and this is what we see as a result of that. So we can see that the housing cost burden for renters is increasing, or increased from 2000 to 2022 by almost 10 percentage points, and that is really affected the demographics of the Denver area negatively. And with that, I’m going to pass it off to Jennifer.
Newcomer 4:59
Well, hello, everyone. And yeah, I’m sharing a little bit about how we’re taking on a little bit of a vaccine challenge around tracking household migration and specifically where households are landing. So if we think about house, neighborhood, household movement, we can think about this matrix along an economic spectrum on the y-axis and a movement spectrum on the x-axis. And in terms of what we’re talking about today to understand place dynamics, we’re going to be focusing on these bottom two quadrants and the specific research questions centering around where are households and neighborhoods of low economic opportunity moving to and introducing this idea around the receiving neighborhood, as specifically what we’re concerned about is what is the quality of the move that these households are making from their from the the neighborhood they’re leaving. Are they upgrading moves? Are they lateral moves, or are they downgrading moves from an economic mobility perspective? So in terms of this, this wrap-around concept of involuntary displacement, we can see that we have known quite a lot about what the state of gentrification research is. There’s a ton of it out there. However, we know far less about where people are moving to these receiving neighborhoods. There is some emerging research in this space, but it’s been difficult to get our hands around. And why these receiving neighborhoods? Why am I focusing on these areas that households are moving to? Well, we’ve had a lot of bleeding out of the places that are gentrifying and other areas, not just those areas gentrifying. The purpose is to target both engagement and resource allocation to be able to better understand those needs of the household, the vulnerable households, in a timely manner. And so how are we doing this? We’re lucky in Colorado to be able to have a pretty robust data source through voter registration records. It’s not the panacea. We recognize that, however, it is pretty robust in terms of the representation of household counts in general. And we can see back in time. We can look back even to 2012 and identify which households are moving, we can see, like in this little graphic, the same how the household A and B are in the same house over the period from 22 to 24 over household C moved. And so that’s just conceptually how we’re we’re looking and forming these data. To give you a big snapshot, because we can get very granular here very quickly. This is a picture of Denver. We’re looking at households that are leaving the city proper of Denver, and where are they going to? These are the top 10 cities in the metro area that received households from Denver between 2012 and 24. The darker areas are where more households were moving there. And you can see here Aurora and the east to the east of Denver was a big receiver of of households moving to the next image. We’re looking at this contextually around the share so like, what order of magnitude are those households moving into these municipalities as a percentage basis? So Aurora doesn’t even show up, if you can. You notice here, however, other areas – cities like Littleton and Golden – there was they were. Those household moves represent a larger percentage of their population base. And if we think back to Aurora, garnering the most households, we can start to see where those households were moving from, even within Denver, to get us a better sense of where, where those different neighborhoods were, are on the on the sort of economic profile and that sort of vulnerability to displacement. And thinking even more granularly, we can go into a case study that has been done. You can flip to the next slide – in a collection of neighborhoods in West Denver that have had the opportunity to support and looking at where households in those neighborhoods which which have been very much so at the crosshairs of gentrification and displacement, where are those households moving to in other parts of the city? And in this graphic, we can see that. So most of the households actually left the city altogether, but about four in 10 of those that remained landed in these 10 neighborhoods in. And specifically, half of those neighbor of those households went to the south, and that tying in with some past work we had looked at really is this validation from the community that a lot of that movement was to the south, was really trying to hold ties to their original neighborhoods. And as we think more deeply about the receiving neighborhoods, we’re thinking about now intersecting the access to opportunity and what’s the sort of economic mobility opportunity, when we start to overlay those, those receiving neighborhoods, with what’s that economic profile? So in the next map, we start to see these areas that are that are shaded that the darker shading orange here and the lighter shading orange are the bottom two quintiles of household income in the city, and those receiving neighborhoods where those households are moving to are definitely moving into locations that are lateral or subpar moves for them. And are those locations equipped with the kinds of supports to best stabilize those particular households. And that purple overlay is looking at the density of subsidized housing in those particular locations. So you can see how it is we start to layer in more information. Are we in a position to better support those neighborhoods, who are those households that are most vulnerable in these new neighborhoods?
So before handing it off, just this quick summary that you know, looking at voter registration data, we can start to get at this nuance of understanding the receiving neighborhoods and these areas that are churning, they might not even be necessarily experiencing gentrification and understanding how the quality of the move is into these receiving neighborhoods. And so knowing this, we feel that this is a pretty conservative effort or estimate and that the effort is obviously not not counting for anybody that is not registered, of course, and that even though the data is not perfect, we have a more timely source to be able to be more responsive, to be able to meet the need where it’s at.
So getting it back to you, Lucas.
Hagen 12:39
Thanks, Jennifer. So this has direct policy implications this research that Jennifer has done here, and that is, how can we use land use changes to prevent gentrification displacement? Now? How can we do so by leveraging missing middle housing, and by missing middle I mean by density form and building form and not income, and we’ll get into that again in a bit. So we know that the solution to displacement is income-stabilized housing. So this is income-restricted homes, affordable housing. We know that that is effective in keeping people where they are, because the housing is not part of the speculative market. However, it requires subsidies, and as I’m sure, I don’t have to explain to any of you all, there’s very little of that to go around, and we’re in a bit of a pinch as far as that goes.
One thing we do have in great abundance in the Denver Metro area is land. However, we’re not particularly good at using it, so if we were to use it more cleverly, we could get something out of this that helps prevent gentrification, displacement. So currently in the Denver Metro area, 92% of our land is reserved for single-unit homes, and most of those lots, single-unit home lots are two acres or greater. This increases the costs per home of each house by increasing the amount of land you need, and it limits the number of homes we can have within Denver, which creates a bottleneck in the housing market. So one potential solution is to diversify the kinds of housing types we have. So in the middle here in this graphic, you see that low-density multifamily housing takes the form of duplexes, fourplexes, courtyard cottages, town homes, etc, and this form of housing is the most cost-effective to build for affordable and market-rate providers, and can therefore support more affordable housing. However, in order to build more of it, we would likely need to upzone areas that are currently zoned as single-unit zone districts. And as you can see from these headlines here, this is not without controversy, and can lead to gentrification/displacement. So how do we manage these land use changes without making our the problems we’re currently facing even worse? What we do know is that cities with homogenous housing have higher rates of displacement and gentrification. And so if a city is largely comprised of single-unit homes, that city is more likely to come across these problems. We also know, as Greg Colburn explains in Homelessness, is a Housing Problem that housing markets with greater elasticity that are able to respond to increased housing demand are less likely to have home to our have lower rates of homelessness, which is tied to displacement as well. And we know that, like I mentioned in slide previously, low-density multi-unit homes are cheaper to build than single-unit or large multi-unit, high-density multi-unit buildings. So what does the research tell us about this? So we know that this new development tends to take place in areas where land prices are already rising or are likely to rise, and we know that so we know that developers are looking to capitalize on areas where there’s constrained housing stock. And we know that upzoning in low income areas doesn’t necessarily tend to attract systematic investment, but rather along the edges, as pointed out in point number three in the bottom left corner here, when we do see new market rate housing or new infill development in low income areas, we notice that it’s right around the edge, near adjacent higher Income environments which allows developers to capitalize on the low land values within low income neighborhoods, while simultaneously capitalizing on the higher-end amenities in nearby areas. And when that happens around or when development does take place in low-income areas in point number four here, it can spark an amenity effect, which draws increasing number of higher-income residents into low-income areas. So that is something we want to avoid when we increase and diversify our housing stock. What we’ve also seen in the research on this is that the negative effects of upzoning tend to diversify over time. So as a municipality diversifies its housing stock and creates that elasticity in the housing market that allows it to respond to increases in demand, we noticed that then eventually ends up preventing gentrification and displacement, and without the new housing, high-income residents will outbid whatever housing there is, regardless of whether or not there’s new developments. So this is what we saw in Denver, where you saw the population grow drastically over a short period of time in like 15 or 15 to 10 years ago, and that resulted in new residents bidding up whatever housing we did have in our city. So here’s a rather complicated flow chart of what can happen.
So in the center at the top here, what we see is that up when a municipality upzones, a neighborhood, its whole jurisdiction, or when there’s large infrastructure investments or large developments that can cause that can kick off three general responses. It can either create speculative investment in the impacted land in which investors purchase land and sit on it without developing it, or it can lead to increased housing construction in the area in question. It might also not trigger any market response, but considering how hot our real estate markets have been over the last two decades that outcome is fairly unlikely. So with speculative investments, or speculative investment, where investors sit on land without developing it can lead very directly to gentrification, displacement by waiting for the housing market to become even more constrained before developing it, and by increasing housing demand in an area through an amenity effect, where higher income residents move into an area. However, if there is new housing development, it can expand the housing supply and create competition among sellers and landlords for the existing buyers and renters, creating a market that favors more people. This can then lead to lower per unit property values and rents in the impacted area, and create more diverse neighborhoods on the very local level by diversifying the housing stock, and it can also lead to more housing offered in a regional level, and then thereby create more affordability region-wide. Considering that housing markets tend to cross the borders of municipalities, we know that creating more housing on a regional level that helps affordability there.
So here’s some policy recommendations that municipalities can implement to make sure that we end up on the right side of that chart and that we end up with the beneficial outcomes and avoid the negative ones of more gentrification and displacement. So key is pairing public infrastructure and investment with affordable housing. We know that when municipalities remove freeways and open up areas or access to other previously low-income areas or areas that were difficult to access, improve parks and other public amenities that that drives housing demand in those areas and can draw on higher income residents, and so we know that if municipalities do so, they should invest in affordable housing at the same time to prevent that from happening. By capping home sizes and preventing market-rate developers from building large homes, municipalities can steer the market-rate housing market toward more economical building forms. Municipalities should also apply zoning changes that allow a greater diversity of housing city-wide, rather than targeting or exempting specific neighborhoods. If the municipality does carve out certain areas from the policy change or drive the policy change toward different areas, the market demand that follows will end up being focused in those areas, and will therefore then increase demand for housing in those areas, disproportionately, potentially kicking off another cycle of displacement and gentrification. Municipalities can also support affordable housing development on the small, low-density, multifamily end of the scale by allowing slightly more affordable homes per lot than they would otherwise allow market-rate development. This gives market-rate developers an edge in acquiring property or acquiring properties, and creates more homes. A form-based zoning code is something else that municipalities can adopt, which effectively sets building bulk and massing parameters for zoning per lot, rather than limiting the number of homes you can build to a number that’s otherwise determined by Doing so, developers, both market-rate and affordable, are encouraged to find the to meet the market demand for that particular area. The other thing we really need to make sure we do when we make these kinds of policy changes is improve tenant protections. Tenants tend to be more vulnerable than homeowners and are more easily displaced through annual rent hikes when their rental contracts come up for renewal. And so improving their protections is key in preventing this displacement. The other thing we need to make sure we do is coordinate regionally and invest in housing preservation when we do so. LIHTC housing expires after 15 years, and municipalities would do well by preserving those affordability restrictions beyond those periods. Otherwise, municipalities should also make sure that they’re preserving their naturally occurring affordable housing, which exists on the open market but still supports vulnerable populations. And with that, I’ll pass it off to Jonathan. All right, and this is a quick summary that these land use changes if we structure them correctly, can reduce displacement without using public dollars. And it bears mentioning that displacement can happen with or without land use changes when housing supply and demand fall behind and become disconnected and proactively creating elasticity in the housing market, as Greg Colburn points out, can prevent displacements and the population should the population increase at a later time.
With that, I’ll pass it to Jonathan.
Cappelli 23:39
Thanks, Lucas. I’ve been instructed to ask everyone to please put your questions in the Q and A box, which is different from the chat. I saw a couple good questions coming through. One, I think for you, Luke, is about the pros and cons of the many effects on low-income folks. So good one to get to. But yes, please put them in the Q and A so we can make sure we see them all. So, as Luke was saying, you know, there’s, there’s positive impacts to increasing housing supply, on affordability, but we know that there’s other types of large investments that kind of don’t always have that positive effect, and that’s large infrastructure projects and public projects, etc. If it doesn’t have a housing component, then it does a little bit what Lucas was talking about with increasing amenities, without increasing supply, leading to a constraint in the market. So an emerging tool that we’ve been seeing across the country has been Community Benefit Agreements, and we’ve had a number of recent ones here in Denver. So I’m going to talk through some of those. Next slide, please. First, what is a community benefit agreement or CBA? So it’s a contract between the community representatives and a developer that outlines how that development can have a positive impact in the community based on kind of a democratic process where the community comes up with what its priorities are. And it’s a written, enforceable legal agreement that’s different from agreements that is made with the city. Let’s see. Sorry. I’m paying too much attention to the chat. I’ll just keep talking. Lots of good questions coming through. Okay, next slide please. So bit of a repeat here, but it’s a, there’s a sort of a quid pro quo, where the developer needs something, you know, whether it’s zoning or, you know, some sort of public decision, public funds, etc. And so in exchange for the community benefit agreement, you know, what does the developer get? They get the support of the community. It’s kind of an anti NIMBY approach, but only in exchange for good things, among which can be housing protections. Next slide, please. So to kind of visualize it, you know, if you think of how a city normally controls development, you have its community plans on the far left side of the triangle here, and think like comprehensive plans, etc. And then a development where, when a developer proposes something, it goes through a development review, there’s a development agreement, and then if they need it, a rezoning. And you know, those decisions are made in part of on whether or not it fits with, you know, pre-existing community plans. However, those plans are really land use specific, often, and they can’t control things like, yeah, you know, housing or small businesses, local employment, youth programs, kind of everything else that the development has a direct effect on. It’s often more of a land of a land use decision, and it can be difficult to directly address gentrification unless you have a bunch of laws in place that would regulate that, which a lot of places don’t. Denver didn’t really to the degree that was needed. So the community benefit agreement is a bilateral agreement. It’s not with the city necessarily. The city can be, can be party to, in some cases, but it’s just community and the developer to convey these other non-land use benefits. Next slide, please. And here’s sort of the timeline. You can imagine, the developer comes in with this concept plan, and then right after they show that, if it’s determined that a community benefit agreement is needed, then there’s this long negotiation process that happens kind of concurrently with them making their development plan. And then if everything works out, and the community agrees with the community benefit agreement, then you get community support around rezoning. If the developer doesn’t do what the community wants, or there’s not an agreement, then they don’t get that support, and you don’t get the development, you know, ideally.
So a couple examples for some large things that have happened in Denver, large projects and how Community Benefit Agreements work there. So we had this large golf course in Denver. It was 155 acres. It was abandoned, and it was protected under a conservation easement that ensured that it was would only ever be used for a golf course, essentially. But it was near a community rail, rail station, Denver’s biggest park, and so the developer proposed 6,000 homes, another park, and also space for a grocery store and other shopping amenities, just a ton of commercial development. But to get rid of that easement, they needed a city-wide vote to move forward. Next slide, please. Quick background about Park Hill. Those who are NCRC members will recognize some of these images. This is from their anti-displacement tool, a study that you can get on the website if you’re a member. Greg didn’t pay me to say that, but I think it’s a cool tool, and you can see around 2010 – so back in the 70s, it was a majority Black neighborhood, but over the last, you know, many decades, it’s been a slow decline – and then around 2010, a precipitous increase in the White population. So it’s still majority Black. Was one of the last few majority Black neighborhoods in Denver and and you can see in the red on the red side or the right side of the chart. Oh, interesting. Okay, all right. Sorry about that, guys. It’s. You can see the population loss of Black families over time. Next slide, please. So how is that? Sort of have other trends mapped onto that around 2010 looking at the left side of the chart, you can see this huge increase in home values from around $200,000 to over $400,000 and income started to increase as well along that time, with new population coming in and education, looking at the other chart, also increased significantly with people, folks with a four-year degree or more, as population increased. Next slide, please.
And so what happened for the community benefit agreement? So because, you know, rezoning this really big green space had a lot of political headwinds, shall we say, the developer, the community, was able to get the developer, and this is a project that we’ve worked on, to get a lot of really positive community benefits. So 25% of those 6,000 units were going to be income-restricted. There was an anti-displacement fund that was established to support residents facing increasing property taxes within a half mile of the site. So, yeah, that one, I think, was, was really important, because, as you guys know, that’s part of what can maybe drive people to sell or to leave. You know, it can drive this involuntary displacement. There’s also money for a homeownership initiative to raise awareness about home ownership opportunities. A ton of money for economic development to identify local BIPOC and women-owned businesses and 10% of all commercial square footage would be dedicated as below-market commercial space for nonprofits and other community-serving uses. Also a grocery store and some art investments. You can see the top, though it was signed by the developer ended up being vetoed anyway by ballot initiative. So this is an interesting case where, on one hand, it shows that when there’s enough leverage, the community can get a large developer to agree to a ton of really positive things that can impact and mitigate displacement. On the other hand, you know, doesn’t always work out. So all this work, about 18 months of work, ended up not working out, because the city, in an initiative voted it down. But we still think is the interesting case about what sort of things, again, that you can secure from a developer with enough leverage, although it turns out the community didn’t have as much leverage as it thought it did. Next slide, please. So this one’s ball arena. This is another one that just finished last year. It’s located south of downtown. It used to be a Hispanic neighborhood that was kind of unfortunately wiped out during urban renewal. About 1,000 individuals were displaced, and over 250 businesses. And now it’s a sports area, and also there’s an amusement park there. The developer decided to redevelop it into also 6,000 homes at high, much higher density. You can see in the little image at the top there, how dense and a lot of commercial space in a park, but they needed a rezoning to move forward. Next slide, just looking at what this neighborhood was before and after, before urban renewal. So this was when there was businesses and residences in the neighborhood. Next slide, please. And this is what it looked like. I mean, actually, it’s kind of what it looks like today, since the development hasn’t happened. Parking lots took over all those neighborhoods, and as I said, a lot of people were displaced. Next slide, as an aerial view, the same thing before urban renewal, and next slide after urban renewal. So because of the history of the site. Folks were really, really interested in making sure that we didn’t sort of just repeat the patterns of the past and make sure this was community-serving and invited more people in to the neighborhood, as opposed to being continuing exclusion. And so these are the areas around the neighborhood. So as you can see, there’s not many, there weren’t any people living on the site, but the neighborhoods around the site have high populations, and you can kind of see over time how the White population declined a whole bunch, kind of during White flight and then increased. And I think it’s kind of interesting too, and this speaks a little bit to the supply issue that that Lucas was talking about, in the lower right chart you can see how the population, you know, went down from 3,000 and then went up to 3,500. It’s interesting to think how, over this period from the 70s till you know today, there’s only been a pretty marginal is relatively the same number of units. Is another way of looking at this, right, which kind of show when there’s high competition, or why there’s high competition for these units and how they can result in high costs if the supply never matches demand or does really increase over time. Next slide, aerial view of the development. Left side is current. Right side is planned. Next slide, so this one’s an actual success story. This CBA was signed, and you had 18% of all units dedicated to be income restricted. A million set aside for tenant eviction and down payment assistance and other renter supports in surrounding neighborhoods, 16 million for other community priorities via 1% fee that was put on the site. And in the interest of time, I won’t read through all these but just a ton of programs and funds allocated to address these community needs. This is about a 15-month negotiation process with the community, but ended up with a lot of really good benefits. Last one is one we’re currently working on, is the women’s soccer stadium in Denver. It’s called the Summit Football Club. It’s the site of a former rubber factory. It’s really polluted, difficult to access, and the redevelopment is a nine-acre redevelopment that needs rezoning and $70 million in public investment in order to pencil. So City Council here in Denver is requiring the team to create a community benefit agreement to make sure it doesn’t have a displacement effect on surrounding neighborhoods, which are some of these West Side neighborhoods that Jen was talking about earlier. Next slide, please. And what I mean is the West Side neighborhoods of Denver that you saw a lot of that gentrification and those arrows coming out of, right, as folks are going to other communities. This is just what the old factory looked like. Next slide, the stadium is planned. Next slide. So quick note, you know there’s CBAS if done well and it’s accepted by the community – oh, and by the way, the soccer club is still in negotiation, so we can’t really share any more details about it. Just want to let you guys know that something is happening. We’ll all find out December 15, if it gets passed – but there are challenges to the CBA approach. You know, there’s not much funding for it. And it’s also the case that NIMBY can easily, the community voice can easily get hijacked by NIMBY pressures. So, you know, folks who just don’t want any development period can come in. I development period can come in and then, you know, sort of stop development from happening, and kind of purport to represent the community voice for positive amenity, amenities and positive things. But the difference between advocating for good things for your community and advocating for no change, and so that can be difficult. And it’s also not much public guidance on what, when and how to apply CBAS in any jurisdiction. Does a one-acre site merit it? Is it? You know, 10 acres and above? What about a single building downtown? You know, arguably it’d be better to just pass really good policy at the city level that can regulate these kind of things and make sure that these negative effects, these big redevelopments, don’t happen. But in their absence, this can be a good tool that, again, is increasingly common across the country. At the end of these slides, there’s a list of some other recent CBAS from other cities and states that you’re welcome to peruse. Next slide.
So like I said, it can be a useful tool. Note, the developer needs to need something. You have to have leverage in order for them to agree to a CBA that can have all these positive benefits. And then, as I already said, it’s not really the best replacement for good land use policy, but it can be a good tool in combating displacement. Next slide and next slide. And so some of these things might seem a little these three sort of topics we squeeze in here, maybe a little disjointed, but the idea is, how can we look at gentrification differently? You know, it’s been happening now for 15-20, years, depending where you’re at, what are the outcomes of it? And how can we change policy to help people who have already left and are already going other places and meet them kind of where they are. In the absence of funding to prevent gentrification and address folks both where they’re going and where they’re coming from, you know, given the political climate, what sort of other tools can we use that we get to empower affordable housing developers and market rate developers to provide housing at levels that our communities actually need. And lastly, are there any sort of other tools out there that can kind of get, get in the way and kind of be bulwark against the displacement pressures from large investment projects that also are increasingly common in many of our downtowns, especially soccer state, not soccer state, but sports stadiums are popping up all across the country. So we saw these three things happening all at once, and wanted to kind of thread them together best we could and just share what our experience was. So stop there and see if there’s any questions. And I know there are. Thank you.
Wilson 41:23
Thank you, Jonathan. I think that was really helpful and really edifying, and you’re on time. You guys are professional. Well done. I was going to briefly go over some of the questions in the in the Q and A box. Lyn, Mr. Keeler has a pretty long one, but I’ll reach out to her post event, but I think she raises good points. Barbara vanker Hove asks, Please miss Lucas, this is for you. Please define elastic with respect to housing, housing supply. Thank you.
Hagen 41:55
Yeah, so a lot. Think about it. An elastic housing market is one that can respond to demand without cost increasing. So cities like Houston, it has a very elastic housing market, because they have, in effect, no zoning regulations, and so the city is able to build housing pretty much as the demand changes and increases. So that’s an example of elasticity. So basically, just the ability of the local housing market to respond to to demand.
Wilson 42:27
The next question here, from Emma, you mentioned that the area that has open land unused lots, how would that upzoning outcomes change in an area with little or no vacant land. The question is, how would it? How would it? How would up zoning outcomes change in an area with little to no vacant land?
Hagen 42:49
Little to no vacant land? So this could take a couple of forms, depending on how they how the municipality chooses to structure the up zoning. So it could lead to the subdivision of existing housing into smaller homes. So if the homes are very like old large homes, we have a neighborhood in Capitol Hill in Denver, they subdivided a lot of those up into smaller apartments. And then it could also, it could lead to more demolitions, to be perfectly honest. And that’s not an outcome, not necessarily a desirable outcome, or it could if the housing, if the existing housing, or the existing buildings are in poor shape, it could lead to those getting replaced by by newer buildings with more homes in them. That tends to be what we see in areas with like low available land.
Cappelli 43:40
But I just want to note that, although that can be seen, therefore, right? This, this is a fraught topic. People identify these land use changes with these scrapes, and therefore, with gentrification. But I think it’s interesting, you know, and a lot of what the research that Lucas has come up with shows is that, I mean, you guys are experiencing it. Gentrification is happening anyway. What’s happening is folks are buying those homes and redeveloping them into more expensive, single-family homes, right? So the idea is that, if this is happening, how to ensure that it increases affordability? And in our case, we have folks like Habitat for Humanity, our members and other organizations, CLTs, that are trying to figure out how to buy those properties and create denser, affordable home ownership opportunities, something you can’t do if it stays the same zoning,
Hagen 44:35
Yeah, if the housing market is really hot and the value of the house on a given piece of dirt becomes more than what somebody will pay to live in a house of that kind. They’ll just buy the property for the dirt, scrape the house and replace it with a bigger house, like Jonathan was saying.
Wilson 44:56
So Peter Cohen asked a couple questions. One is: he’d be interested to hear more about how adopting form-based zoning is not gentrification-inducing, at least as a policy on its own. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Hagen 45:11
Upzonings don’t necessarily cause gentrification or displacement. They can go hand in hand, but gentrification displacement can occur without upzoning. And that’s what we’ve seen in Denver over recent years, where we have had a constrained housing stock because we have so much single-unit homes, so many single-unit homes, that the housing market wasn’t able to accommodate the influx of new demand, and therefore
Cappelli 45:38
He’s talking about form-based, not just upzoning,
Hagen 45:41
Yes, I’ll get there. And then form-based basically, yeah, form-based just loosens it slightly and allows a greater allows more homes, allows the housing market to accommodate more homes in a slightly less intensive way. So if you upsell in a property very drastically, say, from like, you’re allowed one home previously, and then you convert go to a form based code, but you set this the the bulk and massing parameters so high that it can accommodate, like 10 to 15, then that’ll lead to gentrification, displacement, whereas if you just accommodate it, like change it slightly, and you do it municipality wide, it doesn’t necessarily change the the the interest of developers in individual properties, and can and therefore diffuses demand across the municipality more broadly. I hope that answers your question.
Wilson 46:45
We have another one from Michelle Neubauer, can you share how you calculated the property tax anti-displacement fund amount?
Cappelli 46:59
Sure. So the way – and this was few years back, so I might not remember the exact details – but it was property owners, homeowners, who earned a, you know, at a certain income range. I think we did 80% AMI, something like that, and looked at what the marginal cost for a certain number of homes within that buffer area with estimates of what the population of homeowners at that income level were, what that would be if it increased drastically. And there had to be some guessing done. And so the developer kind of put aside a certain amount of money, but committed to just covering whatever it was going to be. So there was actually no cap on that. The other fund, the million dollars for direct anti-displacement work, that was just the most that could be negotiated. And so so that that’s so there was the fund for the tax increment offsetting and then there was funding for directly helping renters with rental payments and things like that, to stop renter displacement. So yeah, one was calculated, and the other was just the most that the community could get.
Wilson 48:23
Okay, Lucas, you’re a popular man. We have a two-part question. This is from Dinah Arroyo, if we do 300 permanently affordable rental homes on three acres of land because of upzoning, are you saying that it is less desirable than doing 50 town-homes on the same three acres.
Hagen 48:45
No, I’m not arguing about against large developments like that at all. I’m saying that current, the way that our land use codes are currently set up is we steer development either towards single-unit homes or very large homes, but we don’t allow a lot in between, and so that middle ground, so like some low density multifamily homes, like 10 homes per building, that’s very cost-effective to build. And if we could allow more of that variety, we could get lower cost market rate housing and potentially lessen the make it easier for affordable home builders to build more cheaply, or to build housing that costs less to build across our city, and just kind of diversify what we have there. Okay?
Wilson 49:42
And the second part of that question from Diana was low income tax credits deals do not lose their affordability after year 15. Most instances, HFA and local jurisdictions have much longer affordable covenants. Denver now attached. Is 99 year deed restrictions. In our case, we use a 99-year ground with a low-income tax credit with developers. So that was the little qualifier there. I want to reach out to Jennifer Newcomer, Jennifer, you’ve heard some of the Q and A and you gave your presentation. Are there certain takeaways that you want people to hear and take away from this conversation about how you use data and what you think is the significance of what we’ve presented here, Jennifer?
Newcomer 50:30
Well, I think that at least in the opportunity I had to work with community based organizations who are organizing with residents, is having an ability to corroborate that lived experience with the hard data around who’s who’s had to and the really the volume of neighbors who’ve had to leave their neighborhoods, and how that, how that couches in to be able to substantiate advocacy around advocating for particular policies and resource allocations into into their neighborhoods, whether that’s the ones that are experiencing the dramatic changes that are quintessentially gentrifying, but also the ones that are these receiving neighborhoods that might be flying under the radar and hedging careful planning and support of those neighborhoods that we don’t want to get into a position where they’re at the crosshairs of all the power in the economy to gentrify. So just thinking creatively about how we can get at answering some of these questions that have been a little vexing to quantify the effect.
Wilson 51:52
Okay, and just real quick follow-up, what is your approach for housing and community development, for neighborhoods receiving people leaving gentrification areas. What’s your advice for them?
Newcomer 52:05
I mean, I think having being armed with the data, and being able to be armed with the stories and that lived experience, to be able to advocate for acknowledging that there, there’s not just like there’s not just an effect for those, those households that that had to be displaced, but that there’s there’s a larger cultural and social fabric that is at risk, especially with with neighborhoods that Have have enjoyed long, well, like historically long identity around around their their culture and their community, and at least with my research, is trying to better understand how the next generation is experiencing involuntary displacement in those new neighborhoods, and how that how That affects their sense of belonging, and what does that mean for them, as we’re making, you know, in a lot of these cases, what Jonathan pointed out around these major infrastructure investments, but also, you know, investments in are we keeping libraries open and these locations so.
Wilson 53:18
Good. And Jonathan, we have some quick questions about the Park Hill experience. How do you can you share a little bit about how CBA agreements are enforced, and then kind of a follow up question, why was the ballot initiative required for Park Hills changing this requirement a policy recommendation? So why did the whole city of Denver have to vote on something that was just going to affect Park Hill? If you could give a bit more context about that, John?
Cappelli 53:47
Sure. I’ll try to be quick, because I, you know, it’s kind of idiosyncratic to Denver, and we were hoping to make this more general. So I didn’t want to go too far down. This could be a whole conversation just on this experience, but the short answer is that there was a very strong NIMBY component on one side of the golf course that was really rich families, essentially higher-income folks, and there was low-income folks on the other side. And those folks on the higher-income side knew that this development was happening, hated the idea of it affordable or not. It’s also interesting to note that half of that area of the golf course was going to remain a park. It would have been the third-largest park in Denver, so there was going to be green space too. Wasn’t just all development, but whatever. And so they ended up passing a running about initiative, saying that if you’re going to remove a conservation easement in Denver that you have to put it to a city-wide vote. And it was a bit of a bait and switch, because it wasn’t just like a green space conservation easement that the city of Denver was voting on, they were voting on a golf course easement, conservation easement and golf course easement were qualified or categorized as the same thing. So a lot of folks never feel a little bit tricked by the way that ballot initiative was worded. And so they were able to get that, get that on the ballot. And then folks were like, yeah, of course, developers should, you know, we don’t want them just putting parking lots all over parks became the chanting cry, and that’s what happened. Okay, as far as enforcing goes, yeah, I mean, it’s a legally binding contract, so it’s you can sue if the developer isn’t doing the best, or is it, you know, breaks some of the covenants they’ve agreed to. And you know, the best way to make sure that such an effort is well-resourced is to make sure that there’s a large community group that lives on, like a coalition of organizations after the signing of the CBA that can share potential costs, raise money together and collectively keep tabs on the CBA over time.
Wilson 56:01
So thank you, John, and we have more questions than we have time, unfortunately. If you look in the chat, we’ve provided a link for a survey that we would like you all to fill out if you’re interested in giving us feedback and have additional thoughts. With this slide here, you can see that we have additional events coming up with NCRC. Should you care on joining – there’s our link for our membership. And if you have questions about membership, there’s a link for that as well. We have a Just Economy Conference for NCRC coming up next spring, and you can follow us on social media. I’d like to give a big shout out, and thanks to Jonathan, Jennifer and Lucas for their time and their expertise. We’ve included their email addresses in the chat, and I think it’s in the next slide, Kaylee, but we really want to make sure that real quick, if each one of you has like 30 seconds of closing statement, Jennifer, let’s start with you with 30 seconds. What’s your advice to folks?
Newcomer 57:05
I guess you know, partnering with and unless you already have your in house expertise like partnering with organizations, to think creatively about utilization of existing data, to be able to get at answering the questions that are most important to your community,
Wilson 57:20
And you’ll be available if folks reach out to you to absolutely to handle their questions and Lucas, what’s your final comments? Please. Final comments.
Hagen 57:31
You caught me cold on this one. I just encourage you all to work with your local municipalities to improve land use. I think it’s a huge opportunity that we haven’t explored particularly deeply yet. Yeah, and there’s a lot of good research emerging on this so this is only the very beginning, and it’s only a very cursory look at it.
Wilson 57:51
And again, if people have questions, they can reach out to you.
Hagen
Correct email address is in the chat.
Wilson
Great. Jonathan, final thoughts?
Cappelli 57:57
Thanks. And I’ll just say something that I think speaks to a lot of what I saw in the chat and questions that we didn’t get time to answer. And as everyone said, we’re happy to talk offline to anyone who wants to. You know, this whole approach and angle was counterintuitive to us, right? We’re a nonprofit affordable housing group, and I personally, and each of the folks here have worked on anti-identification issues at the ground level before and it, you know, zoning and rezoning and and putting new development and often felt like the Boogeyman. And so it took a while for us to kind of, I mean, a lot of what I saw in the chat, you know, what I’ve seen is that only expensive duplexes get put on these places. And, you know, et cetera, et cetera. One thing to note is that one of Lucas’s key recommendations was making sure that the zoning happens everywhere. So in Denver, we had a pretty damaging policy that I think other communities have sort of done ad hoc, to which is the city divided everything into areas of change and areas of stability. Areas of change, they changed the zoning in order to improve the neighborhood, and those were often lower-income neighborhoods. Areas of stability were higher-income neighborhoods where everything was hunky dory, because those mansions should stay mansions, right when you give developers whether they’re affordable or market rate, only a few areas where they can, you know, build and increase density, then you’re going to have folks flock to those areas. So it’s really important to not do spot up zoning, and it’s important to, you know, do it more broadly and kind of share the load across the entire community. I could say more about CBAS, but no, we’re way out of time. So yeah, feel free to reach out, and thanks a lot for your time.
Wilson 59:48
Thanks a lot, Jonathan. I want to give a big shout out, and thank you to Haley Schneider, who helped all the machinations behind the scenes to make this happen and help with the slide deck. And this wouldn’t have happened without her, as well as the flexibility we got from Katie. Country to work on this project. Jennifer, Jonathan Lucas, thank you very much. And you all see the contact information. Feel free to reach out to Lucas, John and Jennifer and reach out to NCRC as well if you want the slide deck. But this is one of one of some other webinars that we’ll be having, and we hope you enjoyed it. Thank you very much.
Hagen 1:00:19
Thank you so much, Greg. We really appreciate the opportunity. We’ll see y’all.
